The Incubus Who Controls Water #1
The Incubus Who Controls Water #1
Rebecca had been planning to bring me the ointment all along.
I only realized now why she'd rushed off right after the party disbanded.
I stood there holding the ointment, feeling oddly touched.
I'd assumed she was just some narrow-minded woman who got angry over trivial things.
But here she was, actually looking out for a party member's injuries.
"Could've told me before you left, you know? That you were going to get ointment."
"Why would I say anything? For all I knew, it might not even work on blisters. It's nothing impressive anyway. I just remembered I had some leftover, that's all."
I watched Rebecca act completely unfazed, a smirk tugging at my lips.
"You went to the clinic and asked about it yourself, didn't you? Even just going that far seems pretty impressive to me."
"Urk."
"Anyway, I'll put it to good use. Thanks to you, the pain should fade. It's been stinging nonstop."
"Do whatever you want."
Rebecca waved her hands in dismissal, turned her back, and walked away.
After going a fair distance, she glanced back over her shoulder, and the moment our eyes met, she whipped her head forward again and vanished with swift footsteps.
Watching her go, I couldn't stop a warm smile from spreading across my face.
'Wahoo! Blister-healing ointment, getto da ze~.'
I hoisted the stick of ointment skyward like a trophy. Rebecca's leftover ointment. The moment that fact registered, its value instantly doubled in my mind. If possible, I planned to keep the empty container rather than throw it away.
I went back to my inn room and hurriedly rubbed the ointment into my palm.
The moment the cool cream covered the blister, the stabbing pain seemed to melt away.
Right after applying it, I went straight to sleep.
As a rule, it's always best to sleep after applying medicine.
*
When I woke up in the morning, I discovered that the stinging in my palm had gone almost completely numb.
The ointment Rebecca gave me had clearly worked on the blister.
Yoen-su's clinic had a reputation for being a damn rip-off, but at least they handled proper medicine.
'I can probably take it easy for a day or two. My wallet's fat now too.'
Thanks to the reward Lili gave me for completing the quest, my coin pouch was stuffed. One silver and sixty copper was a sum an incubus adventurer could hardly ever get his hands on.
Since I had plenty of money, there was no need to grind myself to dust working.
Starting today, I decided I'd skip the Adventurer's Guild and rest for a few days.
Basically, a self-declared break.
Rebecca and I hadn't agreed on anything beforehand, but if she wanted to take a quest, she'd come find me. I'd hammered home that a fixed party moves together.
She wouldn't ditch me and go to the guild alone, right?
Trusting Rebecca, I holed up in my inn room starting that morning.
I lazed around in bed like a bum, then suddenly had a thought and opened a book.
The magic book I'd bought from the mysterious old man.
"Hm?"
As I flipped through it, I realized that the phenomenon from a while ago had happened again.
New content had been added to the book.
Illustrations and text had appeared on what had originally been blank pages. They looked as naturally embedded as if they'd been there from the start.
The location was right on the page after the section that contained the Water magic.
What kind of magic had shown up this time?
Scanning the new content from the beginning, I felt a sense of déjà vu.
The illustration printed on the page wasn't unfamiliar at all.
It was clearly the same as before — an image of a robed practitioner.
I mean, the huge water droplet hovering above the practitioner's palm.
I'd definitely seen this droplet somewhere.
In the very illustration explaining the Water magic.
'The pictures connect... to the scenes I saw before.'
My hunch was dead on.
Last time, the book had cut off at the scene where the practitioner created the giant water droplet. But the illustrations that had just appeared were now showing me what came next.
What the practitioner intended to do now that the droplet was made —.
I had no idea there'd be more to it.
And this isn't even a novel.
I focused and began reading the newly updated book.
Weirdly enough, this time the illustration didn't have a plain white background. The robed practitioner was walking along a trail, the water droplet beside them.
The practitioner formed a hand seal while walking.
Performing hand seals while moving was a high-difficulty maneuver, but the practitioner worked their fingers smoothly without any apparent trouble.
The unmistakable scent of a true veteran wafted from the mobile pose.
Where are you going?
No... that's not it.
I need to focus on the shape of the hand seal.
I'm not reading a picture book for fun.
Even though the background made the practitioner's figure smaller, there was no problem making out the hand shapes.
Because that part in particular was rendered with excessive detail.
After bending their fingers into various forms,
the practitioner finally pressed their palms together as if offering a prayer.
In that instant, something mysterious happened.
The water droplet the practitioner had conjured earlier began to quiver. The massive droplet, the size of a human torso, trembled in midair like a living creature.
Whoosh!
At the same time, the practitioner made several gestures toward it. Each time they gestured, the droplet changed shape accordingly. From the form of a long sword to a large wild dog or a winged bird.
Further on, the shapes grew more complex.
By the end, the practitioner was even depicting a dragon with the water droplet. They even rendered the breath blasting from its mouth, which gave me chills. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to call it water-droplet art.
I stared at the illustrations in the book, completely mesmerized.
'I'm supposed to be able to do all this?'
The illustrations ended after showcasing the various water droplet forms. After finishing reading the written commentary as well, I felt irrepressible excitement.
A magic that manipulates the shape of water.
It looked way more useful than creating a mana sphere.
Water magic seemed like it could be applied in all sorts of ways beyond just combat.
Water, after all, forms a massive part of people's daily lives.
"Liquid."
I recited the name of the magic printed in the book.
Liquid Magic: the magic that manipulates water.
Just as the illustrations showed, using Liquid Magic required a target body of water to work with first. I did exactly what the practitioner had done and used Water to conjure a droplet.
"Water."
A shimmering water droplet soon popped out of thin air.
As expected, probably due to insufficient practice, I couldn't reproduce the giant droplet size I'd seen in the illustrations. But compared to the first time I'd cast it, the droplet I created had gotten noticeably bulkier.
'Is it because my mana increased...?'
I figured it was thanks to the mana I'd gained from Rebecca.
Until now, I'd been so focused on practicing my mana sphere that I'd neglected training Water magic.
My increased magic power must have naturally enlarged the droplets as well.
Since there was no real way to pinpoint the cause,
I had no choice but to be satisfied with that reasoning.
I stared at the illustration and began mimicking the hand seal.
The hand seal for Liquid Magic wasn't entirely unfamiliar — its shape closely resembled the Water magic seal.
It felt like they'd just added a few more flourishes to the hand motions.
'Easy to remember. At this rate I'll have it memorized in no time.'
After some time passed, I could form the hand seal without looking at the book.
Once I repeated the hand-seal formation to death, a response came before long.
The water droplet floating before me began to faintly quiver.
Did it work?
At first, I was thrilled that the droplet reacted.
According to the text in the book, causing the water to vibrate was proof you'd taken the first step in Liquid Magic.
But the moment I tried to seriously change the water's shape, I ran into difficulty.
Slosh, slosh.
The sound of liquid sloshing rang out.
It was the moment I focused my mind on the droplet.
In my mind, I tried to stretch the droplet into a long shape.
The instant I pictured the image, the droplet elongated exactly as I intended.
But that's where the problem occurred.
'Huh...? The water's dripping onto the floor?'
The moment I altered the droplet's shape, a small amount of water trickled off it.
It was as if I'd exerted too much force and shaved part of the droplet away.
This hadn't happened in the illustrations at all.
Should I call this water loss?
Water loss.
It's not the muscle loss that muscleheads suffer from, but water loss had come for me.
Every time I manipulated the water, the droplet eroded away and vanished.
And as a bonus, the spilled water naturally soaked the inn floor.
"Ah—."
The water loss happened every single time I tried to alter its shape.
Halfway through, all the water I'd created would disappear entirely, to the point where I had to cast Water magic from scratch again.
Obviously, I couldn't fully concentrate on manipulating the water.
Having to cast Water magic too meant double the effort.
If I kept training like this, it was gonna take forever to learn the spell.
I realized this was terribly inefficient training, but no clever solution came to mind.
After repeating this slog all morning, hunger finally hit me, and I decided to eat lunch.
I figured filling my stomach was the top priority for now.
Don't Koreans say that people live on the strength of their rice?*
Of course, right now I was an incubus from another world.
"Mister Brown, food, please."
"Hey, get yourself down to the dining hall already. I was just about to clear everything away."
I went downstairs to the dining hall and asked the innkeeper for a meal. The innkeeper's name was Brown.
A man with thick body hair — arms, chest, everywhere — his defining characteristic.
I filled my stomach with the soup Brown ladled into a bowl for me.
'I really wish I could find an easier way to practice manipulating water.'
It happened while I was slowly spooning up the bland, tasteless soup.
Suddenly, a thought flickered through my head.
"Soup..."
When you think about it, isn't the soup I'm eating also a liquid?
From a broader perspective, couldn't this also be classified as water?
A thick, viscous water mixed with cooking ingredients.
If Liquid Magic was a spell for manipulating water, then logically it should be able to manipulate soup too.
'Wanna give it a shot?'
Come to think of it, the book never said anywhere that the water absolutely had to be prepared via Water magic.
Maybe I could use other liquids for training without having to create them myself.
With hopeful anticipation, I formed the hand seal.
"Liquid."
In that instant, the bowl holding the soup shuddered.
The thick soup began flowing upward against gravity according to my will.
A pillar of soup rose above the bowl.
There was no one here to smack me on the back for playing with my food.
I freely cast Liquid Magic on the soup to my heart's content.
Water loss still happened with the soup, but it wasn't a problem at all.
Because the shaved-off soup simply dropped right back into the bowl. I could just manipulate the fallen soup and lift it again.
As long as the bowl was there to catch it, the problem of water loss was practically solved.
"I see."
Manipulating the soup made me realize two things.
One: there's no issue using Liquid Magic on external water sources. Two: any liquid that gets shaved away can be re-controlled as much as necessary.
If that was the case, an excellent training method naturally came to mind.
"Mister Brown."
"Hm? What is it?"
I stopped manipulating the soup and spoke to him.
Brown, who'd been dozing in his rocking chair, coincidentally hadn't seen any of my magic at all.
Not that I was planning to show him anyway.
The sight of thick soup geysering upward was seriously grotesque.
He might even mistake it for a slime monster appearing and raise a panic.
With a perfectly casual expression, I opened my mouth.
"Do you happen to have a spare tub at the inn? One big enough for a kid to climb in and take a bath."
"A tub? I've got a spare one lying around in the storeroom. But what're you asking about a tub for?"
"There's something I need a tub for. Just lend it to me for a few days. I'll use it neatly and give it back."
"Something you need a tub for...? Well, whatever. As long as you don't smash it up, I don't mind. Just make sure you return it once you're done."
I'd been a lodger at this inn for two years.
Since there was trust between us, Brown readily lent me the tub.
A little while later, I took the wooden tub from Brown, went to the well near the inn, and drew water.
I filled the tub until it was practically overflowing, then carried it back to my room.
"Water park grand opening—!"
I practiced Liquid Magic using the water in the tub.
With water loss no longer holding me back, nothing stood in my way anymore.
And as it happened, the very next day,
something came up where I could put Liquid Magic to very good use.