Chapter 41
Chapter 41
Behind me, a maid came chasing after me in alarm.
"My lady, you're getting dirt on your shoes!"
Honestly, when you went around looking at all sorts of crops in the territory, getting dirt on yourself was unavoidable.
The maids accepted this fact with lamentation. That was because they had realized that otherwise, they would not get to eat potatoes.
But it seemed they could not bear to watch dirt get on my shoes in front of other nobles.
"Brisa? Is there something you want to see? What should we look at?"
Alpheus, who had come up to me in the meantime, picked me up in his arms.
I spoke slowly.
"I think it would be good to dig up some of the soil. Is there a shovel nearby?"
"Wouldn't there be one at that farmhouse over there? Just a moment!"
Alpheus quickly set me back down where I had been and ran off like the wind.
It was the kind of thing he could have ordered a subordinate to do, but Alpheus still wasn't used to delegating tasks like that. Worse, whenever I suggested something, he'd gotten into the habit of doing it himself.
'This is my fault.'
I thought bitterly.
'I should have taught him that a marquess must not personally go fetch a shovel just because his little sister muttered that she needed one.'
Even though I had taught him how to handle about a hundred situations, it was still not enough.
A leader who took the initiative would have been popular in a mercenary company, but a marquess who ran off to find a shovel was the sort who got cursed at.
The maid looked away with an expression that said, 'Well, he's not our young lady,' while Wendy looked as though she had no idea what was wrong.
Only Gilav let out a quiet laugh with an expression that said he understood. He, too, had clearly heard the rumors about Alpheus, who had suddenly become the Marquess of Sears.
Soon after, Alpheus came back with a shovel.
"Whew, the owners weren't around! Just in case, I left a coin behind. I did well, right? I mean, it could be a precious shovel with some kind of story behind it, couldn't it?"
I could guarantee that Alpheus was the only noble here who had ever actually seen a coin.
Gilav's mouth fell open with a face that said, 'You carry coins around with you?'
Alpheus shouted cheerfully.
"Now then, I'll dig!"
At this point, it would have been even more ridiculous for me to step in and tell Wendy to dig up the ground.
Alpheus scooped up a shovelful of soil.
As Leopold and Gilav murmured, 'What is he doing...,' Baron Forman raised his hand firmly.
"Watch and see."
Baron Forman gave a chilling warning.
"Trust the young lady."
It was just as Gilav frowned and began to retort, 'What?'
I reached out and touched the soil Alpheus had scooped up without hesitation. It was just as I had expected.
I immediately turned my head and spoke to Gilav.
"First of all, monsters aren't what caused the tomatoes to end up like this."
"Huh?"
"Come here and touch it."
"......The soil? Me? What if there are microorganisms in that soil that will infiltrate my body?"
Gilav was horrified.
"Move aside, then."
At that, Leopold walked right up and touched the soil in the shovel.
He was silent for a moment, then spoke.
"It's cold."
"Right. It's cold. Even though it's midsummer right now."
The soil was extremely cold. It was almost like a block of ice.
I looked at Gilav and spoke.
"Tomatoes are a crop that is very sensitive to soil temperature. Even if the air temperature is warm, if the roots get cold, physiological disorders set in right away. The ground here is extremely cold right now."
Gilav had issued an evacuation order the moment he heard that the tomatoes had changed color. So the farmers had clearly had no time to examine them carefully.
If it had been farmers who had been tending the tomatoes all along, they might have looked them over this way and that and noticed that it was cold damage.
But because people kept approaching it only as a monster problem, no one had even thought to look at the condition of the tomatoes themselves.
And of course, the western knights, including Leopold, had no knowledge of crops at all.
"Isn't that an even bigger problem?"
Gilav was hopping mad.
"Why would the ground turn cold overnight in midsummer? Huh? That's way too strange!"
"Right, it is strange."
I nodded readily.
"And fortunately, there was one strange phenomenon."
Gilav was still throwing a fit.
"What? Why is that fortunate? Are you talking nonsense because this isn't your territory?"
"It's fortunate because we have as many clues as possible. Of course, I won't ask whether I really have to explain even this much. Even at the academy, you were the kind of student who learned exactly one thing when taught one thing."
I pointed at the Warp and explained.
"The Warp malfunctioned. Warps are heavily influenced by mana fields...... which means the mana field around here is extremely abnormal."
"Hm?"
"What could make a mana field abnormal overnight, and also make the ground cold?"
"Mana stones."
Leopold's answer came faster than Gilav's.
"As expected."
I shrugged.
"A student who learns one thing and grasps two really is different."
"You have no eye for talent, Brisa."
Leopold retorted indifferently.
"When I learn one thing, I know about three. Watch carefully."
He signaled to his knights.
"Dig up the ground, focusing on the places where the tomato color is especially strange. Mana stones should be buried there."
Following his order, the knights went to the empty farmhouses and brought back shovels. After that, they began digging up the ground.
Watching this, Alpheus kept wearing an expression that said something was bothering him. Then he declared that he would go leave a coin at each farmhouse.
"What if it's a shovel someone swore to use exactly a hundred times in their whole life!"
The literary youth had a remarkable imagination.
"Or someone's precious keepsake, or, well, something carrying irreplaceable memories......."
"Then just leave a silver coin behind."
"That won't do. We're having a hard enough time making a living ourselves."
Fortunately, the literary youth was also good at compromising with reality.
Leopold and Gilav were watching him side by side.
Alpheus might not have known it, but the boys were obviously evaluating his every move.
The newly emerged heir from one of the Founding Five Houses.
The young man who would represent Sears from now on.
'Wow.'
I sighed inwardly.
'We're doomed.'
I had done my best to teach him the etiquette for visiting a residence, but I had not expected him to be confronted with a situation like this.
I had never imagined he would suddenly drop right into a field.
I shook my head and muttered.
"Passing Alpheus off as a born aristocrat despite his upbringing is impossible now."
At that, the maid whispered.
"My lady...... that was originally impossible....... If you truly wanted that, then your dream was far too grand, my lady......."
The Alpheus who had fallen into darkness in the original novel had actually been somewhat decent.
Because he had not turned dark, his self-esteem was still overflowing, which made curing his protagonist syndrome very difficult.
"Ah, it's real! It's a mana stone!"
Soon the knights began pulling up blue stones on the tips of their shovels.
"It's a mana stone!"
"Congratulations, Gilav."
I shrugged at Gilav.
"You found this many of those rare mana stones. If you sell them to the Magic Tower, they'll fetch quite a bit of money."
"Huh? Uh......."
Gilav had a somewhat dazed expression.
In contrast to how worked up he'd been earlier, his eyes darted around in bewilderment.
"B-but why in a single day...... how did the tomato field become a mana stone field in a single day? Is that even possible?"
"Would it be possible? It's not as if mana stones have seeds that scatter like dandelions."
I shrugged.
"Someone buried them here and fled. They're all processed stones."
At that, Gilav's eyes widened as if he had realized something.
"Aha! Not knowing that tomatoes are a crop sensitive to cold damage?"
"No."
I pointed out firmly.
"Not knowing how prone you are to overreacting."
It was true that the tomatoes had wilted somewhat, but they had not turned completely green...... it was the sort of thing one could have brushed off, thinking they had simply been hit by frost.
But Gilav, who was timid to begin with, had judged it to be a state of extreme emergency the moment he heard the report.
"Wh-who? Who in the world buried them and ran?"
"You know that while the Magic Tower suspended the Warp, black mages operated Illegal Warps, right?"
Leopold spoke with his arms crossed.
"They were trying to move via an Illegal Warp, but when the Magic Tower restored the Warp unexpectedly quickly, they got stranded. So it seems they buried them in a nearby field for the time being. If they left them without burying them, the cold would spread through the air and they would be discovered right away."