by Hiro Ainana
Once I’d finished the last batch, I set up the Transmutation Tablet and other equipment, then called Ine over.
“Sit here, please. Can you use a normal Transmutation Tablet?”
“Yeah, I can.”
“All right then, I’ll prepare the ingredients and charge it with magic, so you try operating the Transmutation Tablet.”
“Okay.”
The potion we made with red grade-1 elixir didn’t reach High Quality.
But, when we used grade-3 elixir instead, we made High Quality potions even when we made five at a time.
The reason I used this roundabout method was so that Ine’s name would be listed as the creator of the potions. When I used “Analyze” to check, it had worked just as I’d hoped.
Since I’d set my name to blank, even if the process resulted in a joint signature, only Ine’s name should be left.
This took a little extra time, but I wanted to minimize the possibility of anyone finding fault with the results.
After a bit of trial and error, I worked out exactly how to record Ine’s name as the creator with as little work as possible to reduce the amount of time it took.
I’d been able to speed up the process pretty well, but after about twenty rounds of transmutation, Ine’s magic was running low.
I had provided most of the magic, but the final process had to be done with Ine’s magic.
“M-my magic… is, um…”
“Drink this, then.”
“Oh, but, um, that’s gonna be bi—Ow!”
As Ine stammered reluctantly, trying to dodge the potion, the puffbird on her head started pecking her forehead again.
She begrudgingly brought the liquid to her lips, but she gulped it down once she noticed the sweet taste. I could tell she must have really liked it—she turned the vial upside down and whacked it a few times to get every last drop.
“Is your magic fully restored?”
“Y-yeah. That was, um, really yummy.”
“All right, let’s keep going.”
I took the vial out of Ine’s reluctant hands, and we went back to work.
I had been depositing the completed potions in Storage, but Ine didn’t seem to trust the process, so I filled an empty beaker with water out of Storage to reassure her and poured it into a nearby cask.
“E-e-excuse me, Masterrr?”
As Ine finished forty rounds of transmutation, Arisa, Lulu, and Nana returned with baskets full of herbs.
For some reason, Arisa was upset.
“Welcome back, Arisa.”
“Thanks— Wait, no!” she bellowed as she pointed at Ine, who was sitting on my lap.
Alarmed by the other girl’s threatening behavior, Ine leaned into me—which just made Arisa angrier, creating a vicious cycle.
“Please stop, Arisa. You shouldn’t scare a small child like that.”
“Master, we have returned, I report.”
Lulu embraced Arisa gently, trying to calm her. From behind them, Nana gave her report.
“Calm down. This is the only way we can both use the Transmutation Tablet.”
“Why are you doing it together?!”
I tried to explain the situation to an unconvinced Arisa.
There’s no reason to get mad at me for letting a little kid sit on my lap. Tama and Mia do it all the time.
Arisa reluctantly calmed down after my explanation, so we resumed our alchemy.
Once I had the three girls store their bounty in the Garage Bag, I let them rest for a bit.
I couldn’t discern much from Nana’s expression, but Arisa and Lulu were clearly exhausted.
Ine looked tired, too, but she had to keep working a little longer. Just ten more times.
After their break, I had Lulu and Nana continue the glazing and put Arisa in charge of the fuel for the kiln.
Up until now, I’d been taking care of the fire myself in between alchemy sessions. I was pretty worn out, too.
By the time the beastfolk girls and Mia came back, we’d completed all fifty rounds of transmutation.
We’d met with failure four times and insufficient quality six times, but I had factored into my plan the possibility of a few failures.
“Let’s take a little break. I’ll call Arisa over, so Lulu and Nana, please make some snacks. You can use whatever you’d like from the Garage Bag for ingredients.”
After giving instructions to Nana and Lulu, I went to check the status of the kiln with Arisa and summon her over to the group.
Along the way, I stowed the glazed vials and tools in my pocket dimension.
“How’s it look in there?”
“Just a bit longer, I think.”
Checking inside the kiln, I responded to Arisa’s question.
I didn’t know if it was because of the success of the initial heating, the special glaze, or Mia’s drying magic, but whatever the reason, the vials were coming along even faster than I’d expected.
Checking the clock in my menu, I saw that only two and a half hours had passed.
“We still have two hours until sunset, so it looks like we’re gonna make—”
“Don’t say it!”
Arisa forcibly interrupted me by clamping a small hand over my mouth.
“Honestly! Why would you try to go and jinx us like that?!”
Fair enough. Whenever a character says “We’re going to make it!” trouble is pretty much guaranteed.
Just to be sure, I marked the aide and the small-time crook on my map so I could keep an eye out for any attempts to sabotage us.
“You read too many books,” I told Arisa with what I hoped was a confident grin.
She still looked apprehensive, so I held her hand while we walked back to the village square.
Once we finished off the snacks, everyone except for Ine, Arisa, and me headed into the hills to gather mushrooms and wild plants. Mia had spotted a lot of them on their way back earlier.
Arisa’s muscles were in too much pain for her to move, and Ine was exhausted from the transmutation work.
Mostly out of curiosity, I had Arisa drink a potion to cure her muscle pain, but she declared that she was tired of hiking and rested on the blanket with Ine.
I had run out of magic recovery items and was in the middle of making more.
I tried brewing numbing and laughing gas agents with the “numbing mushrooms” and “laughing mushrooms” growing near the kiln. The method for creating the former was recorded in the textbook, while the latter was a recipe from Trazayuya’s documents.
In Trazayuya’s journal, he noted that these had been very handy in fighting off bandits who’d broken into his home while he was staying in Labyrinth City.
I finished the whole process in about ten minutes, then cleaned up the tools.
An uninvited guest had appeared on our radar—the small-time crook. Nearly fifty men were accompanying him, too.
I told the two girls about it and instructed them to hide…
“Inenimaana, Arisa, get on the panther and go hide in the mountains. You should be safe as long as you bring the living armors with you.”
“W-wait, I want to fight with you!”
“Y-yeah, me too! My guys are really strong, too. They’ll beat ’em up just like before!”
But they were champing at the bit to help me fight them off.
Since brute force had failed earlier, I figured our opponents probably had some other plan in mind.
I wanted to put out the fire so they wouldn’t find the kiln, but it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you could just switch off, so there wasn’t much I could do.
I tasked Arisa and Ine with hiding the carriage in the foothills.
In the meantime, I searched for a way to conceal or disguise the kiln somehow, but they’d probably found us out because of the smoke coming out of the chimney anyway.
Instead of crudely attempting to hide the vials, I elected to draw our petty villain’s attention toward something else.
I tho
ught a corrupt guy like him would probably be more interested in an easy source of cash, like some of the completed magic potions.
I made a few preparations and left to meet the small-time crook and his crew.
“I came ’cos I heard there were some suspicious folk in Uke Village… The commoner brats and the witch’s apprentice, huh?”
He rudely greeted me exactly the way you’d expect for a crook like him.
Thirty-some armed men waited on standby behind him. Two of them were hanging back by the road out of the village, and the rest had surrounded the village in the woods.
The reason they hadn’t just attacked was probably the two living armors and the panther-type constructor.
Arisa looked calm, but Ine, no more mature than any other child her age, was clearly panicked.
“I can’t imagine why you’d consider us ‘suspicious.’ We simply came to do our alchemy in an uninhabited area so the smell wouldn’t bother others in the city.”
As I spoke, I pointed at the small cask nearby.
The cask contained our failed alchemic results and water to dilute them.
“Is that so? Well, that’s a lovely attitude and no mistake, but I’m afraid you can’t just go around using the village’s equipment without permission. In fact, there’ve been complaints from the villagers about some suspicious characters wrecking the place.”
A shabbily dressed, timid-looking man emerged from behind the crook. The man’s affiliation was listed as the name of the ruined village, so they really had found a former inhabitant and dragged him along.
“If you are the acting representative of this village, could I pay you directly? How much would you like for compensation?”
Ignoring the crook, I addressed the villager directly.
“Actually, I’m afraid this village is under the management of Sedum City now. That means I’m the one in charge. Let’s see here—perhaps I should confiscate this freshly made batch of medicine as a fine for the disturbance?”
With that, the crook smugly reached for the cask.
“Aah! B-but that’s…”
Thinking the cask contained the real potions, Ine cried out desperately.
Great, he took the bait.
My face remained impassive as far as I could tell, but the crook’s own intuition must have alerted him, as he stopped reaching for the decoy.
“Hey, check in that nearby shed! There should be more than just one cask.”
I reacted with the best display of chagrin I could muster.
“F-found ’em! They were hidden under a dirty old mat!”
The man’s minions emerged from the nearby shed triumphantly, carrying a few more casks on their shoulders.
“Hmph, three casks, eh? Should be about right,” the crook muttered quietly.
Looks like he fell for it.
Just as I started to relax… Ine jumped forward.
“Waaaah! Mr. Satou, they’re going to take ’em all… Gab, Rob, go get ’em!”
As the two living armors sprang into action on Ine’s command, the underlings immediately scattered like a bunch of baby spiders.
Damn. My “fool your allies to fool your enemies” strategy backfired.
“H-hey! If these things lay a hand on me, it’s off to prison with you!”
The spineless crook backed away, still keeping a firm hold on the barrel.
I grabbed the two living armors and held them back. We’d have some problems, in more ways than one, if we injured this guy.
“Calm down, Inenimaana. We’ll be in trouble if we harm him.”
“Th-that’s right! I’m a close friend of the viceroy’s aide, remember!”
Flaunting someone else’s power, huh? This guy really is a stereotypical villain.
The moment a sigh left my mouth, I heard an explosion and some men screaming from somewhere in the foothills. It sounded just like the backfiring engines I’d seen on TV.
Then I saw dark smoke rising from the other side of the trees.
… It was coming from the direction of the kiln.
“I knew it. You’ve been using the kilns without permission, too, eh?”
“O-oh no… If the kiln’s broken, we’ll never finish the vials in time! Wh-what are we going to do…?”
Arisa dropped to one knee in despair.
Ine, on the other hand, collapsed in instantaneous exhaustion without saying a word.
“Well, you’d better get outta here soon. I’ll let you off for the day in exchange for these three casks.”
With a nasty, sadistic smirk, the small-time villain cackled triumphantly as he strode away toward Sedum City with the casks.
There was only one chime—ninety minutes—left until the sunset deadline.
Once I’d confirmed on the radar that the men were gone, we visited the destroyed kiln we’d been using. There was a large hole in it, and it was completely ruined.
Based on the state of the kiln itself, I doubted the men who’d broken it had escaped unscathed, but since there were no bodies, their comrades must have carried them away.
The fire hadn’t spread, either. Mercifully, there were no highly flammable trees close by. I suppose they cut down the nearby trees in the area when they first built the kiln.
“They’re all broken… It’s no use. There’s no way we can try again, right…?”
“Yeah, I doubt we can use this kiln again,” Arisa muttered as she looked at the flaming furnace, and I nodded.
But Arisa wasn’t ready to give up and stared into the kiln.
“… Huh? These shards here…”
Arisa turned to me, and I grinned.
I could move things into Storage from up to ten feet away, even if I wasn’t touching them.
That’s right. I had removed the vials from the kiln without touching them or being scorched by the flames.
Then, since I figured they could suspect something if I left it at that, I replaced them with other vessels. There were plenty of faulty clay containers lying around nearby, so it was easy to gather enough.
Keeping the part about Storage to myself, I explained the rest to Arisa.
When I told her the vials were safe, she exclaimed indignantly that I hadn’t needed to keep it from her, too, but I just listened complacently.
After all, Arisa’s genuine despair had probably helped deceive the crook.
… But there was still a problem.
The temperature of the vials—I checked Storage and found that the firing itself was done, but when I took one out, it immediately cracked because of the rapid temperature change. I guess a flimsy vial like this wasn’t built to handle such a rapid change in temperature.
Since objects placed in Storage retained their state from the moment they were stored, the vials were still piping hot.
There had to be some way I could gradually cool them…
Should I fix the kiln and make another fire to get the temperature back up and then gradually lower it?
No, that would be cutting it too close time-wise.
Plus, if the temporary repairs on the kiln suddenly failed and the kiln collapsed on the vials, there’d be no coming back from that.
Come on, there has to be something…
Some convenient method where I can gradually lower the temperature without taking them out of Storage…
Repairing the kiln might be the only way.
Well, this is useless.
This phrase suddenly popped back into my head.
Why would I be rubbing salt in my own wounds right now? What good does that thought— Wait. When was that memory from?
It’s clearly just an inferior version of Storage. If I take things out, it exposes the contents to outside air, too, so it won’t be any good for heat insulation.
… Now I remembered.
That was back when I was comparing the Item Box and Storage.
Yep, the Item Box was terrible for heat insulation—meaning that the state of objects inside it changed over time. And air
didn’t flow in or out unless you actively removed something.
In which case…!
I moved one of the hot vials from Storage into the Item Box.
Then I opened the Item Box, starting to take out the vial, and immediately canceled it. A warm wind blew from where the black hole of the Item Box had been.
When I moved the vial back to Storage, I saw that its temperature had dropped ever so slightly.
Great! This will work perfectly.
By using the Blow spell to circulate hot air in the Item Box for about twenty minutes, I cooled down the vials.
When Liza and the others returned to investigate the commotion, we got ready to depart.
“By Jove, let’s go back to that rascal and the silver-haired jerk and make them cry uncle!”
At Arisa’s somewhat anachronistic turn of phrase, the rest of the younger kids cheered enthusiastically.
…“By Jove”? What time period is she from, anyway?
As Ine drove the jostling carriage, I checked the time and the map.
Perfect. Looks like we’ll make it just in time.
The bag over my shoulder rattled with each step.
We’d made it all the way to the city hall without anyone challenging us.
“You’ve got some nerve showing your faces here! Thanks a lot for giving me some watered-down potions, huh?! I made a real good fool of myself thanks to you!”
Obstructing the entrance, the crook derided us at a slightly higher pitch than usual.
I took a step forward to keep Arisa and Ine safe behind my back.
“What do you mean? Those potions should still work to treat minor injuries.”
I nonchalantly warded off the crook’s accusations. Besides, I never said those casks contained potions in the first place.
Noticing the big sack I was carrying, the triumph returned to the crook’s face.
“You think you’re gonna fool us with some more watered-down potions, huh?”
What a persistent moron. Clearly this guy gets his kicks bullying people.
“Or did you just mix some grass into the water to make it actually look like a potion this time?”
The man tossed back his head and laughed in a manner befitting a common buffoon.