The Kind Grad Student Who Reads Papers For Me
The kind graduate student who had sprinted down the stairs asked, “So you want me to organize everything you’re telling me right now, just like you did earlier?”
Her hair was a mess and her eyes looked sunken, as if she’d been practicing magic a little too aggressively. I couldn’t help but worry.
“You were rescued only a few hours ago. Don’t push yourself too hard.” She still couldn’t handle cup ramen and had to be careful about what she ate.
“I… I just wanted to help……”
“Then listen carefully and summarize this for me.”
I began explaining the information that had flooded into my head moments ago—attributes, elemental forces, essences, and all the rest. As I kept recalling details, concepts like particle adhesion force and angles started pouring out. I’m a liberal arts major, damn it!
But she only tilted her head slightly before calmly writing everything down.
“You must be really good at studying.”
“Ah, um… No, not really……”
It was oddly entertaining how her face turned red every time I praised her. To think someone this talented had been boiling ramen at a PC bang. Was this how professors felt when they found a promising grad student?
“So, to put it simply, here’s what it boils down to. First, you need to match the exact temperature required for the mana elemental reaction. Second, you must control your mana with precision to avoid triggering unnecessary reactions.”
“When you say it like that, it sounds easy.”
She jotted down the required temperature conditions and the precise points where mana needed to be injected on a sticky note, then handed it to me.
“Honestly, I don’t even understand what any of this means. I just summarized it……”
Magic engineering had the word “engineering” slapped on it, so it made sense, but alchemy was strangely theory-heavy. According to public opinion, it was tied with white magic for the highest difficulty.
What the hell is white magic anyway? It sounded both difficult and lame. Since my enemies were all zombies, I’d have to learn it eventually, but I was already dreading it.
I wondered why each magic system had such huge differences and why they were all divided so meticulously. My curiosity was piqued, but honestly, as long as it worked, that was enough. Any theoretical problems could be solved by my kind graduate student who read papers for me.
I gave the hesitant girl a thumbs-up and sent her back upstairs.
Now then. All I had to do was place the mana core and iron together, match the temperature written on the note, and channel mana through it. This part I was confident about.
Hiss—
“Forty-six degrees, forty-seven, forty-nine point two. Any higher would be dangerous……”
Using elemental magic seemed to have given me a strange new sense. Just like earlier, I could somehow feel the temperature of objects heated by this magic through my fingertips. I had never done alchemy, chemistry experiments, or even much cooking before.
“And……”
Once I maintained the proper temperature for a while, the materials entered a strange half-liquid, half-gaseous state and began floating up in fluffy clumps.
Manipulating mana was becoming familiar now. I alternated between steel-attribute particles and regular mana particles to trigger the reaction.
The fluffy, tangled mass began to compress again, transforming into a luxurious metal lump that gave off a faint white glow.
“Oh, it worked.”
Mana-infused Iron. It sparkled brilliantly under the light, almost like a gem. It reminded me of mithril from games. For some reason the transformed iron was slightly lighter than before, which was actually a problem.
If I were making armor or weapons, lighter weight would be an advantage. But I needed to reach a specific weight.
So I have to make two hundred kilograms of this……? For someone who had to meet a weight quota, the reduced mass was a drawback.
Producing a lot of it was just tedious grinding, and I could keep making more iron while recovering mana. The real issue was that I was almost out of mana cores in the tower.
I hoped the golems would return soon. I wondered if their farming was going well.
Mana Detection.
I activated it on a whim. Unit 1 had already finished farming and was returning from far away, while Unit 2 was diligently fighting zombies in front of the phone store. It looked like she was smashing their heads with something like a steel shield. As expected, my kid fights well.
Guess I’ll just grind alchemy until Unit 1 gets back.
After that, I spent the time throwing iron and mana cores into the sink, lighting fires, and synthesizing until Unit 1 returned.
Time passed, the sun reached its apex and began setting in the west, and white iron lumps gradually piled up in the corner of the room.
“I have returned.”
Unit 1 was back.
“Perfect timing. I was running out of mana cores.”
What poured out of Unit 1’s bag was nearly a hundred mana cores, along with several types of fresh, unspoiled fruit and a large quantity of various processed foods.
“There’s fruit?”
“I stopped by a rather large convenience store. They had a fresh corner that sold fruit.”
At the very bottom of the bag were various articles of clothing.
“I did not know what Master and your disciple might prefer, so I brought every type of summer clothing. The display shelves and store floor were destroyed, but the warehouse was intact.”
There were cotton t-shirts that fit me, blouses, sweatshirts, cardigans, jeans, and tracksuits. There were also several outfits for Dayeon on the fourth floor, plus a huge pile of clean women’s underwear.
I feel a little guilty, but……
It was still better than tightening men’s trunks with a waist string to the limit. I changed out of my uncomfortable clothes first and into one of the hoodies that had been farmed. T-shirt, hoodie, and jeans really were the best.
Seeing “Children’s Size” written on the packaging tag made me strangely angry. The fact that it fit my body perfectly made me even angrier.
“This pisses me off……”
It was almost dinner time, so once Unit 2 arrived we could all eat together. I’d give her the clothes then too.
The golems could finish a meal in one second by swapping mana cores into their chest compartments, but today we had taken down dangerous zombies and recruited a new survivor. From a self-congratulatory standpoint, it felt right to celebrate a little.
And after eating, I should sleep early.
I had been through way too much since dawn, so I was genuinely exhausted. Normally I would have laughed and said my sleep schedule was finally normalizing if I felt tired this early, but I no longer had the luxury of making such jokes.
“I have arrived as well!”
While I was organizing the items Unit 1 had farmed with a somewhat gloomy feeling, Unit 2 burst through the door. She had brought several power banks that still had some charge, earphones, cables, and other phone accessories.
Along with various tools, bolts, nuts, and other parts. The large shopping bag in her hand even contained interior materials like cement, silicone, and paint.
“Why did you bring these……”
“They might be useful later. I brought everything I could.”
She probably couldn’t have fought zombies aggressively while carrying all that, so she had brought fewer mana cores than Unit 1. Still, after gathering the ones rolling around in the shopping bag, there were about fifty.
“Good work.”
If I had the golems take turns hunting zombies while I slept, they might collect almost five hundred by the time I woke up. Then I could complete the promotion conditions with just a bit of finishing work tomorrow morning.
But I could worry about that later.
“Let’s eat first.”
I called Dayeon down from the fourth floor. When she came down, she was looking at me with a gloomy expression.
“Magic isn’t working well……”
It seemed practice hadn’t gone very successfully. It really wasn’t as easy as it looked.
“It’s fine. Just organizing the alchemy theory for me today was already a huge help.”
I set out oranges and bananas from the convenience store, white porridge, more convenience store porridge, chicken breast packs for balanced nutrition, and some greens on the table.
I also picked out clothes from the ones the golems had brought that seemed to match her size and handed them over.
“Start with the porridge, and if it sits well, try the rest. These are clothes for you.”
“Th-thank you……”
Beside us, the golems were charging by inserting mana cores into the cores on their chests. I ate similarly, sticking to porridge and fruit. I could boil ramen now, but eating something like that next to a sick person felt too inconsiderate.
The meat and fresh foods would spoil quickly in the coming heat, so we needed to eat them soon.
Once I raise the Magic Tower’s rank and upgrade multi-element magic, I should be able to use ice and lightning too.
As we continued eating, I told her about the magic we might learn in the future. Lightning-attribute magic could revive the refrigerator, and ice-attribute magic would let us preserve food for a long time.
Though wildly shooting lightning bolts into the fridge might cause a fire if the voltage didn’t match. I’d think about that when the time came.
While chewing on the greens and talking, the surroundings had already grown dark. My full stomach combined with my existing exhaustion made sleepiness crash over me.
“Golems, take turns hunting and stand guard. Dayeon, if anything happens while I’m sleeping, message me immediately.”
“Yes!”
“Understood. If a problem arises, we will definitely wake you this time.”
“Hopefully there won’t be any problems.”
I sent Dayeon back up and lay down on the bed.
I was going to check the radio……
There were many things I had planned to do, but the moment I changed into the newly farmed pajamas and lay down, my mind went blank. I just wanted to sleep.
In the end, I fell asleep less than five minutes after lying down. The long and eventful day came to a close.