What's Needed Most (4)
"……Huh?"
The cold mask Fidelina had been wearing shattered, leaving a utterly dumbfounded expression in its place. Her lips flapped a few times before she finally managed to force out the words.
"This kid is honestly hilarious. You really thought you could win us over with a line like that—"
"Are you that confident?"
"Vice Tower Master!"
She shrieked and whipped her head toward him, but he reproached her instead.
"Elder Fidelina. Oscar Crucian came to me as a mage of the White Tower to receive formal approval for an investment proposal. Even if you are the elder in charge of the Tower's finances, your conduct just now was far too rude."
"……I apologize."
Oscar gave a small nod as he listened to the exchange between the two.
So that was why she seemed so desperate to tear into him. She was the finance elder.
Well, fair enough. Honestly, I can't even blame her.
The young Oscar had been drawing research funds for over two years without producing a single decent result.
Worse, he'd recently embezzled that funding to buy illegal potions. It was no wonder she'd had it up to here with him.
"Let me ask you again. Are you truly confident you can produce a cure for the Cadena flu?"
"……Looking through my records, I found that I've received 723,000 vels in research funding over the past several years, across seventeen disbursements."
Considering that an ordinary farmer's annual income was roughly 20,000 vels after taxes, it was an enormous sum.
In a word, the White Tower had made an almost recklessly bold investment.
And that was probably because they'd hoped the boy once called a genius would someday give something back.
"I believe the time has come to repay that support—not just with gratitude, but with results."
"……"
"You asked whether I was confident, didn't you?"
Oscar nodded, unflinching.
"I have certainty. So invest in me."
"……That is quite the confidence. Unfortunately, however, the White Tower is in no position to spare funds for a venture of that scale."
Fidelina chimed in from the side, arms crossed.
"Come next month, we won't even have enough to pay the activity stipends for the mages out working in the field."
"……"
"And on top of that, 25,000 vels squandered on illegal elixirs…… Hoo. Never mind. What's the point of saying it."
Oscar had known things were bad, but he hadn't realized they were scrambling to cover next month's expenses.
If I'd started this even a few days later, the Tower would've gone under.
Even as a cold sweat ran down his back, the Vice Tower Master, deep in thought, drew a single envelope from a drawer. Maxim's face stiffened the moment he saw it.
"Vice Tower Master, that money is……"
Hush.
The Vice Tower Master raised a finger to his lips and spoke.
"I can invest my personal savings in Oscar instead. But before that, there is one thing I absolutely must confirm."
His eyes fixed on Oscar with an incomparable gravity. That gaze, steeped in a subtle aura of wisdom, gleamed as though it would tolerate not the slightest lie.
"Do you have a reason to be certain that the flu outbreak in Vince Territory is Cadena?"
"……"
If he failed to give a satisfying answer here, the investment would sail right out of reach.
Oscar did not panic. He answered calmly.
"I concluded it was the Cadena flu based on a single reason."
"I'd like to hear it."
"Then might I ask you to take a look at the newspaper I brought?"
At those words, the eyes of all three turned to the paper.
"If you turn to page two, there should be a piece about Archbishop Baldwin."
Sure enough, the relevant article was there once the page turned.
[Archbishop Baldwin of the El Terra Order abruptly revises his itinerary in Shilin Territory, a stop along his pilgrimage. He is expected to bestow blessing prayers for up to one month.]
The Vice Tower Master nodded slowly as he read the article.
"Mm. I'm already aware of this. But what does it have to do with the Cadena flu?"
"Isn't it strange that a man of archbishop's rank would linger in Shilin for a whole month?"
It was Elder Fidelina who picked up on his words.
"And here I thought it was something serious. An archbishop staying a month in Shilin mid-pilgrimage is hardly unusual."
"That was true in the past. Because the only places they ever lingered for a month were the great cities."
One of only seven archbishops on the entire continent, the men of the Order were anything but incorruptible.
They were, if anything, more money-hungry than any merchant alive.
They were all vying for the seat of Cardinal, second only to the Pope, and that campaign demanded staggering sums of election money.
"Since it's just us, let me speak plainly. The reason they stay a full month in every great city along their pilgrimage is to meet with nobles and merchants and collect tribute. But what about Shilin?"
"……"
Three pairs of lips fell silent at the question.
With the White Tower's fall, Shilin—the territory under its rule—had seen its wealthy residents wither to nothing.
In other words, even if he stayed a month, there was almost no tribute to be squeezed out.
Having clearly caught the strangeness of it, Maxim spoke up.
"Now that you mention it, that's true. But according to the article, isn't he staying to bestow blessing prayers?"
"Which is exactly what makes it stranger. An archbishop bestowing those exorbitantly expensive blessing prayers on land that produces no money?"
Oscar let out a small, dismissive chuckle, then drew a map of the continent from inside his coat and spread it across the desk.
"As you know, the El Terra Order's pilgrimage route is fixed. After Shilin comes Moske, then Melburn and Greenwell. And the city that comes after those is……"
"……Vince."
Fidelina and Maxim, both staring at the map, said it in unison.
Oscar nodded.
"Exactly. According to the Order's doctrine, a pilgrim may remain up to one month in any territory visited along the route. He had already lingered a full month in Nox, the territory he visited before arriving at Shilin. If I'm not mistaken, he'll stay another month in Moske, his next destination, and then yet another month each in Melburn and Greenwell. Why on earth would he do that?"
Tap, tap. Oscar knocked lightly on Vince Territory on the map, like a gentle rap on a door.
"Doesn't it look like a man doing everything in his power to postpone his arrival here?"
"……!"
If an unavoidable accident or misfortune struck during a pilgrimage, the Order interpreted it as incurring the wrath of the Earth Mother Goddess.
And naturally, no one who had earned their god's fury could ascend to a higher office.
For an archbishop eyeing the cardinal's seat, that amounted to a death sentence.
"I see. So you're saying Archbishop Baldwin already confirmed that the flu spreading in Vince Territory is Cadena, and is now buying time until it settles down?"
"That is, at least, how I read it."
At those words, the way they looked at Oscar changed entirely.
"……Well, for a theory mage, your analysis is tolerably sharp. It's still nothing more than a hypothesis, mind you."
Even Fidelina, who despised him, had been forced to concede.
Having finished laying out his case, Oscar looked at the Vice Tower Master.
"Hmmmm."
The man, silent all this while, nodded slowly.
"I believe I understand now, Oscar, why you think the flu in Vince is Cadena."
"Meaning?"
"We invest. Though all I have on hand is 30,000 vels—can you manage to produce the cure with that much?"
"30,000 vels……"
Oscar closed his eyes and pondered with all his might.
Even if I handle every step of the process myself and spend it all on materials alone……
Not enough. Nowhere near enough.
That sum would barely cover enough cure for five hundred people.
"……Hoo."
At last, Oscar let out a long sigh and opened his eyes.
"No way around it, then. We go to Plan B."
"Plan B?"
"You had a contingency prepared?"
"Explain it in detail. And if you say anything absurd, I'll kick you clean out of your chair, so choose your words carefully."
Oscar looked each of the three in the eye in turn, then answered.
"As it happens, we are not the ones suffering most from the Cadena flu right now."
Tap, tap. This time his finger came down on the words Archbishop Baldwin in the newspaper article.
"The urgent party pays. I'll use the money you give me, Vice Tower Master, to produce a sample—and use that sample to strike a deal with the archbishop and pull the investment money out of him."
"The urgent party pays…… Haha. Now that I hear it, it really is so."
The Vice Tower Master let out a gentle laugh and nodded.
"Proceed, then."
"Yes. Then I'd be grateful if you could procure the materials I need. First of all……"
After rattling off the list of required materials, Oscar bowed his head.
"I'll go get the Potion Workshop ready, so please send the materials there."
Once he finished speaking and left the room, Fidelina broke the silence.
"Maxim, what do you think? Do you really believe that boy can make a cure?"
"……At the very least, he's not the type to lie."
"You trust people far too easily. I was a fool for even asking. And you, Vice Tower Master? What do you think?"
"Hmm."
With an enigmatic smile, the Vice Tower Master rose slowly from his seat and walked to the window. Looking up at a flock of birds wheeling across the clear sky, he spoke.
"There was once a bird so resplendent that every power in the world coveted it."
"……"
At this sudden drift into metaphor, the two fell quiet and listened.
"But when it came to light that the bird had fallen terribly ill, that attention evaporated as if it had all been a lie."
They both realized this was the story of Oscar.
"It must have been a terrible shock for a bird so young. The very people who had whispered such sweet words to it, who had smiled at it so warmly, turned cold overnight. Wounded by it all, the bird shut itself inside a tattered cage—no longer singing, no longer flying. As though it had given up on everything. At such a tender age, no less."
Grip.
The Vice Tower Master's wrinkled hands tightened around the windowsill of their own accord.
"……And yet now that the bird has finally begun to beat its wings, how could I not hope?"
The people of the world had spoken with one voice: that bird was finished.
That it would never sing again, never take flight again.
Oscar. Show them. Show the ones who said it, and the ones who wished for it—show them all, plainly.
Just how loudly that bird could sing.
And just how high it could soar.
No one knows where the Cadena flu first originated.
Some say the demons who crossed the Red Mountains spread it. Others whisper that it leaked from a secret imperial laboratory.
One thing alone was certain: it was an extraordinarily lethal virus.
"A mortality rate of three percent."
Some might say that. Diseases with death rates above thirty percent abound—so what's so dangerous about that?
But the terror of the Cadena flu lay in its exceptional speed of transmission.
If my memory serves……
After the first Cadena flu patient in recorded history was identified, the virus took a mere four days to swallow a city of fifty thousand.
It was that absurd infectiousness that led the imperial family to classify it as a Class B Hazard—a disaster.
"Hm……"
Oscar arrived at the Potion Workshop on the 37th floor and surveyed its interior.
Someone had evidently kept it maintained—there was no dust—but it seemed no work had been done here in a very long time. He opened the cabinets one by one, here and there, and nodded.
Filthy, sure, but the equipment's all intact. More than enough to make potions with.
The production method was already in his head, and the tools were in fine shape.
The materials for the cure would be arriving before long, which meant there was exactly one thing left for him to do right now.
"Let's warm up these hands, shall we."