Chapter 29: Outside the Blanket Is Dangerous
That day, Sienel Mirsa couldn’t fall asleep, so she went out for a walk at night.
Her house was tucked away in one corner of the Verite Barony. Her two disciples, Al and Jin, had made it in a flurry. They called in laborers, laid magic over the work, and built it in no time.
At first, she had thought, I’m only staying briefly, why go this far… but now she felt it had been the right decision to have a house prepared. A fairly spacious, fairly cozy home.
Sienel looked at the house for a moment, then set off with no particular destination.
And then, before she knew it, she found herself lingering near the baron’s castle.
A castle sunk into darkness.
Yet, strangely, only the garden side was lit.
‘Fairy light? But it’s the Night of Mana right now…?’
These days, with all sorts of resonance arrays being installed in the baron’s castle, sometimes you could even see fairies, spirits, or yōkai even on the Night of Mana… Still, that light was too much.
There was no way there could be that many fairies on the Night of Mana.
Drawn as if pulled, Sienel Mirsa approached the garden, and soon received a tremendous shock.
“What… is this? This is… aren’t these Song Chrysanthemums from the Fairy Realm?”
Chrysanthemum flowers blooming all across the garden in neat, plump clusters, giving off a faint, gentle glow.
Those multicolored petals turned the garden into another world.
Song Chrysanthemums.
You might think, If you can summon fairies, what’s a mere Fairy Realm plant?
But her extraordinarily sensitive mana perception grasped instinctively that this was not that kind of thing.
“This is… not summoning, but transfer…!”
Carefully, she reached her hand toward a single Song Chrysanthemum.
Her hand trembled.
“How… how could something like this…?”
Transfer.
It was an event that had happened only a handful of times in the history of magic.
Like the occasional miracle of an angel, or the descent of a demon… an exceedingly rare occurrence.
Not something you could aim for and accomplish, but a miracle that happened only when coincidence piled upon coincidence.
And yet a transfer like that had occurred, of all places, in the castle’s garden, and in such abundance?
Could this really be coincidence?
“…That wasn’t all. This isn’t something you can do just because you know precisely what the center of the world is. This is… perhaps Perseta. His magic has already moved toward a deeper truth beyond even that…”
As Sienel muttered to herself, her gaze grew deeper, and deeper.
**
The next morning.
Baron Plian was dizzy.
“Look! What we made is a lightweight cart! As for how to use it…!”
When he woke up and tried to attend to his duties as usual, he sensed the domain was noisier than ever today, so he went outside.
And what he saw—
Dozens of mages had come out into the plaza in front of the castle and were hammering away, making things.
“No, this side needs to be wider. Mm. This part would be better reinforced.”
“Yes!”
Carpenters and all kinds of craftsmen from the village had been called out too, making things together with the mages.
The mages who had already finished making something would teach the domain folk how to use it, then hand it out.
“Now, now. This is a barrel that automatically kneads large quantities of bread dough. Put flour and the proper amount of water and such in here, and by the power of the earth spirit, it’ll make bread dough on its own! Whether it’s cookie dough, pie dough, you can set that freely too!”
“Huuuh!”
“What an incredible thing!”
The one surrounded by cheering domain folk right now was Marquis Zenon de Black, head of the kingdom’s foremost mage noble house.
And over there, professors from the Imperial Academy, said to have arrogance reaching the heavens, were explaining a cart that moved without anyone speaking, and a method of farming that used it to plow up the land.
And here, the headmaster of the Imperial Academy was also hammering away at something. The crown princess of the magic kingdom Vishena was also hammering away at something.
And he saw it.
As if supervising, watching them and issuing instructions here and there—his eldest son, Perseta Verite.
Baron Plian stared blankly at the scene, then fled back into the castle in a panic.
He returned to his bedroom and pulled the blanket over his head.
“Outside the blanket is dangerous…”
My son.
What in the world are you doing to those precious people!
He wanted to shout that… but he couldn’t even bring himself to push through those precious people, so he had no choice but to cover himself with a blanket like this.
I don’t know.
I don’t know anything.
Outside the blanket is dangerous, and
I’m dizzy, but—
“Still, my eldest son… he’s amazing.”
Baron Plian tasted a complicated satisfaction.
**
Bianca Ash.
She, who had once danced with Perseta at a party in the past, was still at the forum.
With each test, she earned decent grades around A- to B0, and kept surviving.
And now, she had accepted her defeat.
‘So that’s why… Bardente-nim threw everything away and settled down in the Verite Barony.’
She was twenty-seven.
It had been thirty years since Bardente entered seclusion.
Though she had never once seen the great archmage Bardente in person, still, in her heart at least—alone, even so—she had lived thinking of him as her master.
Even the reason she grew her dream of becoming a mage had been like that.
From childhood, as she encountered the various magical tools and magical toys Bardente left behind, she naturally came to yearn for magic.
As she grew a little, she read the introductory texts Bardente left behind and soaked in the profundity of magic.
As she grew more, she read all kinds of spellbooks Bardente left behind and became intoxicated with the vast breadth and depth of those distant thoughts.
And so, Perseta Verite had been her lifelong hated rival.
‘If only I had been born earlier!’
Then she would have become Bardente-nim’s foremost disciple—she was sure of it.
Magical talent. Other conditions. She believed she held an overwhelming advantage.
Especially as she watched Perseta’s seclusion not end, she had even held a cold sneer in her heart.
Because of a dullard like him! To lose my chance to become Bardente-nim’s disciple…
Because she had that resentment, when she heard Perseta had broken his seclusion and returned, she moved faster than anyone.
To see Perseta with her own eyes and judge.
That was why she even attended a social party, trying to learn who he was.
But now…
Now…
‘I lost. Completely…’
Receiving his teachings and hearing the evaluations of her assignments she had worked hard on and the test papers she had solved with effort, she could know for certain.
Perseta’s greatness did not stop at merely inheriting grand knowledge from Bardente.
Perseta who had fully internalized it as his own… and perhaps advanced it even further.
His words were always concise, yet they struck the core.
That great insight and application. And quick wit.
Bianca Ash had no choice but to acknowledge defeat.
‘But I can’t just be pushed aside and end like this…!’
So she clenched her teeth even harder.
Though in class she was always pushed back by the Sage, and pushed back by Salinelle, so she only ever got those so-so upper-tier scores… still, she didn’t want to give up.
She wanted to display her talent and ideas to the fullest and surprise Perseta.
She wanted, somehow, to prove that she too was a being worthy of learning from Bardente-nim.
‘This is the beginning…!’
She looked at the enormous windmill.
The project to “magify” the Verite domain, begun at Perseta’s direction.
Perseta had said:
Use everything you have learned so far and directly create things that help in everyday life. With your own hands, try to surpass the glory of the Great Age of Magic.
So. That was what she intended to do.
Alone, she carried out a tremendous project.
Ah.
It wasn’t completely alone.
“Heh heh heh. Now, I adjusted the windmill blades. Miss Ash, you should devote your strength to the essential spell composition.”
“Thank you, Headmaster.”
The Imperial Academy headmaster, Ignachio, helped her whenever he could.
So that she could focus wholly on conceiving and implementing the core idea, he took on and helped with other chores of comparatively lesser importance.
Bianca Ash accepted that help naturally, grateful for it.
But to the other professors of the Imperial Academy, that scene made no sense at all.
“Headmaster. Why are you paying that student so much attention?”
In the end, one professor who couldn’t hold it in any longer asked.
He asked with his eyes. You’re not usually that gentle, are you?
To that, Headmaster Ignachio only shook his head and answered like this.
“It’s nice that you can be ignorant.”
And with a sigh, Ignachio went back to his own work.
The professors could only tilt their heads and follow after him.
And so, everywhere, thud thud, clack clack—magic is being made.
A small rural domain, the Verite Barony, is being covered in magic.
Ranya, the crown princess of Vishena.
She watched all of it in awe.
She had come to this forum and learned and mastered much magic, but when she spread it out and used it like this, the feeling was different.
It felt like she was seeing the return of the Great Age of Magic.
‘When this forum ends, and the mages here return to their hometowns… how will this world change?’
She couldn’t imagine it.
The only thing she was sure of—
Everything would be different from before.
‘Perhaps the future that will open before us…’
Not the Great Age of Magic.
But an Age of Miracles.
It might end up being called by such a name.
Ranya, the crown princess of Vishena, suddenly felt deeply grateful that she was together with this historic moment.
And the one person who made all of this happen—her benefactor, her teacher, Perseta Verite, who taught great magic without holding anything back. The gaze with which she looked at him grew thickly deeper.
**
Perseta, in the middle of the night, walked alone around the barony.
Because the process of searching out the mages’ works, which had covered the domain in magic, and giving his own evaluations one by one, was more fun than he expected.
“Wow… this is a really good idea.”
A windmill standing tall on the Altazad plains. That windmill would turn forever due to a spiral wind, a wind of the Phantasm Realm.
With that tremendous power as its base, it could grind huge amounts of grain all at once, and even then the surplus power would be converted into driving force, making it easy to solve even spinning thread and turning the spinning wheel.
A highly efficient power device combined with a well-designed machine device and magical methods—creating an excellent thing that would spare countless hands of labor.
“Who made this… Bianca Ash. I told you she’s not ordinary.”
Perseta smiled as he saw the name written in one corner of the windmill.
Then another structure caught his eye.
This one was overwhelming in scale.
“A Garden of Spirits. The idea isn’t so much special as it is orthodox… and above all, the scale is astonishing.”
It was the work of Ranya, crown princess of the magic kingdom Vishena.
More precisely, a joint project where Ranya drafted the plan and drew in many mages to accomplish it.
Not only the solid magical skill needed to build such a large structure, but also the leadership to coordinate many mages and bring the work to completion stood out.
“This is fun.”
A smile kept spreading at the corner of Perseta’s mouth.
Though the level of the mages still wasn’t much different from babies who had only just started to toddle, compared to him…
Still, seeing their efforts to accomplish something with those clumsy steps, and their shining ideas, sometimes made him admire them, and sometimes even gave him inspiration.
As Perseta continued his night walk in a good mood, he suddenly stopped in place.
He looked quietly up at the sky, then said,
“A guest has arrived.”
And with those words—
Pa sa sa sa…
White, shining feathers scattered, and several dozen people descended around Perseta.
All of them wore robes with a pure white base and gold ornamentation and had pulled their hoods low to hide their faces.
But Perseta recognized them.
“Are you the Saintess and the theologians?”
At that, the small-statured saintess, Shara Elif, raised a white sword and answered.
“Great sinner Perseta Verite. I have come to judge you.”
As Perseta opened his mouth to reply, a voice cut in, interrupting the timing.
“How dare you speak of judging him?”
Step.
From the darkness, an old man holding a staff emerged.
Two young men and women followed behind him.
The Sage, Sienel Mirsa, and her disciples, Al and Jin.
The Saintess and the Sage.
The summit of the world of faith and the summit of the world of magic swept over each other with blade-like gazes.
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