FootballGod
Just how long had I wandered around, map in hand, searching for a candy shop? At long last, I found a store that actually sold the stuff.
They told me to pick up honey candy here, so this must be the place...
Honestly speaking, I don't like candy. You could say I'm not much of a sweets person in general. Back when I was a beggar, I'd never been sentimental about food, either — if there was something to eat, I ate it; if not, I starved. Simple as that.
With those thoughts in mind, I stepped into the shop, keeping my magic primed just in case. I'd let my guard down at the general store earlier and ended up with a hand swollen bright red, after all.
Creeeak—
The moment I carefully pushed open the candy shop's door, an overwhelmingly sweet aroma drifted at me from every corner of the room — the kind of smell that proved beyond doubt this really was a candy shop. Breathing in that sugary air, I greeted the shopkeeper.
"Hello there."
"Welcome, welcome!"
The man who rose to greet me was a rather portly fellow with a face you could only describe as likable. Chuckling to myself, I asked,
"Do you happen to have honey candy?"
"Ah, of course. I've got everything except what I don't have."
"Then I'll take some honey candy, please."
"Honey candy runs 1 gold for ten. How many would you like?"
"...1 gold for ten?"
"That's right."
My head spun for a moment. One gold for ten pieces — didn't that mean each candy was worth something like ten thousand won? But the more I thought about it, the less outrageous it seemed. Sugar was a precious commodity in this world. Sure, you could obtain it if you went looking, but that didn't mean you could just burn through it carelessly.
So thinking, I bought a hundred pieces of honey candy.
"Thank you kindly! Do come again."
"Will do."
With the honey candy tucked carefully into my bag, I checked what remained of my money. Twenty-six gold left. Spending all of it was out of the question — well, I could if I wanted to, but that would sit a little heavy on my conscience, if I was being honest.
I pushed open the shop door and started walking around the neighborhood at a leisurely pace. A stroll like this always put me in a better mood. I was enjoying the feeling when, in the distance, I spotted a pack of neighborhood kids kicking a ball around. I paused to watch for a bit.
"You've got to slip that pass in there. What are you doing, hoarding the ball like that?"
Football hadn't existed in this otherworld originally. But as people crossed over from the other side, football came with them — along with everything else under the sun. The simplest way to put it was that the Middle Ages and South Korea had been mashed together. The Travelers who arrived here built every kind of facility imaginable for their own convenience, and in their wake, this otherworld changed beyond recognition.
The Travelers — that was the catch-all name for the people who'd come over from Korea. What really mattered was that one of them had formed a connection with a high noble. Saved the noble's life, located a gold vein nearby, that sort of thing. Thanks to that, this otherworld had absorbed Earth's strange culture without a hitch — cherry-picking the best parts and grafting them on. And the result was the football match I was watching right now.
Which brought my thoughts, inevitably, back to what had happened in the dead of night.
"Ugh... that exam is going to be brutal."
I'd gotten cocky, tinkering with magic research in the middle of the night, and earned myself a proper scolding from Silvia. Sighing from the depths of my soul, I found a spot to sit down, unwrapped a honey candy, and popped it into my mouth. It was a massive splurge for me, but Silvia had never said I couldn't eat one, so it had to be fine. The moment the wrapper came off and the candy hit my tongue, a staggering wave of sweetness flooded my entire mouth.
"Way too sweet."
It was the kind of sweetness that could rot your teeth on the spot. Closest thing I could compare it to was tanghulu — the candied fruit skewers that had spread across the whole empire by now. Still savoring the taste, I got up from my seat and headed back to the mansion.
"I'm back."
I figured Silvia probably wouldn't even hear me, so I just called it out the moment I walked in — and there she was, standing right in front of the door. She held out her hand, like a parent waiting for the errand money.
"Ah, here you go."
There was no reason not to hand it over, so I placed the pouch of herbs, candy, and change onto her open palm. Silvia immediately untied the pouch and inspected its contents. Then she broke into a satisfied grin.
"Ah, good work. Go get some studying done, then. I'll be doing research."
Apparently the honey candy had put her in an excellent mood — she'd already slipped one into her mouth the moment the pouch hit her hand, no doubt thinking I hadn't noticed. Of course, I'd seen the whole thing. I was willing to bet she'd march straight up to her lab and inhale the rest of the bag.
With that thought, I climbed up to my own room and opened Fundamentals of Magic, Volume 2.
"Hmm, so I was right."
Basic spells like Barrier were covered in the second volume. No idea why they weren't in the first — I suppose whoever wrote these books had their reasons. So thinking, I deployed a formula in the middle of my room. Practicing magic in the corner of your own bedroom made you feel oddly like you needed to cover both eyes, somehow. Chuckling at myself, I channeled mana into the Barrier formula — and a shimmering barrier formed around me.
"So this is basic magic."
But surely this wasn't the end of the line. Barrier magic, like everything else, presumably climbed to ever higher tiers. What I knew was something called Mana Shield — and according to what I'd read, that level of spell couldn't be cast just by feeding mana into a formula. You had to actually understand the formula itself.
...Doesn't really seem that hard, though.
Granted, that level and the level of the book in my hands were worlds apart, but understanding a formula didn't strike me as particularly difficult. More like something I could wing and still get right, if that made sense. I kept that observation to myself, of course. It would just sound like bragging — and if I ran my mouth and then failed to back it up, nothing would be more humiliating.
So thinking, I connected to the Gallery.
You could post all sorts of things to the Gallery — photos included. Uploading a picture was simple: you framed the shot in your mind, focused for five seconds, and whatever you were looking at was captured and uploaded, just like that. You could attach a caption to the post, too. Because of that, plenty of forum-dwellers used the Gallery as their personal diary. Couldn't blame them, really. But if the diary-to-content ratio climbed too high, someone would step in and crack down. Who that someone was, nobody knew. Some omniscient, omnipotent being, probably.
Browsing the popular posts, I murmured, "Anything worth reading?"
Tons of stuff got posted to the Gallery, yet only a tiny fraction ever made it to the front page. People's upvotes were stingy, I supposed. So thinking, I scrolled through the top posts.
"...Of all things, a football stadium. At this rate they'll start club teams by region and hold leagues next."
It was genuinely absurd. This was not the Middle Ages I'd imagined. Something was warping, little by little, into something strange. Part of me wondered whether any of this was right. And yet... it wasn't developing in a bad direction, so I let it slide.
So thinking, I gave one more post a careful look.
"...So she needed test subjects, apparently."
No way an Archmage would do anything that actually benefited other people out of the goodness of her heart. She only did it because it profited her, too. Still, there was nothing to complain about — it helped everyone. With that thought, I wrote up a post of my own.
I'd asked because I genuinely wanted to know. And then, a short while later—
Negative comments came flooding in.