The morning after sending Eveline back.
[Wake up. Someone has come to see you outside.]
“Five minutes…… just five more minutes…….”
[Do not test my patience. Get up at once. The energy rising from below is quite a sight.]
At Eleanor’s low rebuke, I forced my eyes open.
If a 10th-rank mage was calling the energy “quite a sight,” it meant this was no ordinary situation.
‘What on earth is going on……?’
Even half-asleep, I snapped awake.
Sure enough.
A cautious knock came from beyond the door.
“Teacher Lihan, His Grace the Duke requests your presence.”
Cassian, already?
Seeing as he was calling for me first thing in the morning, it seemed the matter was fairly urgent.
I roughly put on clothes that passed for formal and followed the maid.
[It appears he intends to head toward the place where my spiritual energy lies dormant. The flow of mana in the corridor is strangely distorted in that direction.]
“There aren’t any traps, are there?”
[Nothing has caught my senses yet, but there is no harm in being careful. That man’s eyes have already strayed far beyond those of an ordinary seeker.]
***
The place I arrived at was not the duke’s office.
It was a separate laboratory located in the deepest part of the mansion.
Does this man not sleep?
What has he been working so hard on since the crack of dawn?
Dozens of magical formulae floated in midair, emitting an eerie light.
“I was quite discourteous yesterday. As an apology, I thought I would show you a small part of the research I am pouring my efforts into.”
This is supposed to be an apology, right?
I stepped forward to examine the formulae.
“……Let me take a look first.”
“This is it.”
The magic circle Cassian pointed to was intricate.
However, the mana was circling at a specific point, unable to pass the critical threshold.
‘Hmm…….’
It wasn’t a particularly difficult problem.
He was treating mana as if it were simply a single particle.
That was why a bottleneck was occurring.
According to quantum mechanics, everything in the world is both a particle and a wave at the same time.
The same applied to mana.
In other words, this problem required taking mana’s wave form into account.
[Lihan, the flow of the third mana axis there is twisted. He is not trying to let mana flow, but only forcibly confining it, so of course the efficiency has hit rock bottom.]
As expected of the 10th rank.
Even without knowledge of physics, she seemed to have instinctively grasped the essence of it.
The problem was that I couldn’t use alien language like quantum mechanics with Cassian……
“Your Grace, I think it would be better not to forcibly compress the mana at this point into a single path. Mana sometimes has a tendency to exist in several places simultaneously.”
“……Exist in several places simultaneously?”
Cassian asked, frowning.
I pointed to the center of the technique and continued explaining.
“You’re treating energy as one fixed entity and only suppressing it, so it collides with itself and dissipates. Don’t decide on a single path for it. Open it so it can pass through several routes at once. Rather than suppressing it, let it flow while overlapping with its own shadows.”
Cassian mulled over my words for a moment.
Then, half in doubt, he modified the technique at the point I had indicated.
At that instant, the violently surging mana began to flow as if a dam had burst.
Perfect operation.
Cassian’s expression changed in an instant.
A thin, unsettling smile appeared on his lips.
“……Ha. Truly.”
He let out a hollow laugh.
“To think you would end months of my worries with just a brief glance. You really are an interesting man, Teacher.”
Cassian’s gaze slid stickily over my entire body.
“I had intended to test you, but when you overcome it this easily, I am the one left embarrassed.”
Cassian lightly snapped his fingers and cut off the surrounding noise.
In the perfect silence, he asked in a low voice.
“Teacher Lihan. Are you…… a vessel sturdy enough to hold a secret?”
What a duke-like way to ask if I could keep my mouth shut.
Well, the answer was already decided.
I had steeled myself from the moment I came here.
“Probably—”
But before I could even open my mouth.
Cassian’s hand reached toward the vicinity of my heart.
Throb—!
An unpleasant sensation swept through my body, as if my heart had been bound with sharp wire.
What the hell was this all of a sudden?
This felt seriously bad.
‘……Senior. Am I fucked?’
[It is a kind of constraint. The moment you try to utter something you must not divulge, your heart will burst.]
No, fuck!
Who casts something first without even asking properly?
Does being a duke let him do anything?
“In truth, you have no right to refuse. I have found the key to resolving my troubles, so how could I simply let you leave?”
This guy was seriously unbelievable.
But Eleanor snorted as if it were laughable.
[What a paltry threat. Do not worry, Lihan. Removing a curse of this level is child’s play for me.]
‘……That’s true, right? I’m trusting you, okay?’
Whew. I barely managed to steady my trembling breath.
My life was clearly in danger, yet strangely enough, my mind grew calm.
I knew very well just how cruel Cassian was in the novel.
But I was a physicist.
What had the pioneers of Earth’s past been like?
They had exposed their bare bodies to radiation.
They had watched nuclear bombs explode from only a few kilometers away.
Madmen who gladly placed their own lives on the experimentation table if it meant seeing the end of knowledge.
If Einstein had been here.
He would surely have said with shining eyes:
‘Even if it kills me—go.’
“My mouth will be far sturdier than Your Grace’s secret vault.”
At my answer, Cassian seemed satisfied and took the lead.
“Follow me.”
There was no turning back now.
***
I followed Cassian deep underground.
The farther down the stairs we went, the heavier the density of the air became.
[……It is just as it was. A thousand years have passed, and yet this arrangement has not changed.]
Eleanor’s voice was lower than usual.
It held a distant, wistful tone, as though she were recalling an ancient past.
“You’ve been here before?”
[How could I not know this place? Look, Lihan. Look at the arrangement of the mana conductors covering that wall. The design method my disciple devised while staying up night after night has been passed down without even a hair’s breadth of error. To have preserved it so neatly through a thousand years…….]
Wherever Eleanor’s gaze lingered, blue mana softly rippled.
[Estal. I said I failed in raising my children, but at the very least, they inherited the family’s pride splendidly. They may have forgotten the magic I taught, but they did not forget the order I left behind.]
Suddenly, I thought of Cooper, the protagonist of the film Interstellar.
The sight of him sobbing as he looked at his daughter, who had grown old after he had crossed only about fifty years.
Eleanor had crossed a span twenty times longer than that all alone.
Everyone she had known had turned to dust and vanished.
What would it feel like to be greeted only by the cold stones and formulae they had left behind?
‘Living a long time isn’t always a good thing.’
Without saying a word, I scanned the formulae on the walls.
At last, we arrived at the end of the basement.
There stood one enormous door.
“This is the Estal family’s treasury.”
Cassian came to a stop.
“There are no locks, nor any mechanical devices. Only several layers of seals handed down through the generations guard this door. However, even I have been unable to undo the final two seals.”
He slowly turned and stared at me.
6th-rank mana filled the narrow corridor.
It was murderous.
“With your alien perspective, Teacher, can you read the formula of this answerless sentence?”
It sounded like a proposal.
But this was clearly a test.
The problem was that I was a complete layman when it came to sealing arts.
I could try converting it into physical terms and interpreting it.
But even I couldn’t guarantee how long that would take.
At times like this, I needed Senior to step in.
Suppressing my tension, I called out to Eleanor.
‘Senior, can you analyze this? What exactly is the structure here?’
“…….”
There was no answer.
Eleanor, who had always chattered nonstop and offered advice, fell silent as if it were a lie.
‘Where did she go?’
This was the first time she had been this completely silent since I had been connected to her.
“What do you think, Teacher Lihan? Have you figured anything out?”
Cassian’s voice dropped another level lower.
He was glaring at me as if he might kill me.
No, if it was this man, he really might kill me!
‘Fuck. Where did you go!’
Instinctive fear stimulated my brain.
I couldn’t just keep waiting for Eleanor now.
If I didn’t do something, I would really die.
I swallowed hard and took one step closer to the door.
“……I’ll examine it from a little closer.”
Why did Eleanor have to shut up at this decisive moment?
She could at least have said something before leaving. What was I supposed to do?
“Whew……”
Swallowing dryly, I carefully reached out toward the door.
It was the moment my fingertips were about to touch the geometric patterns engraved on the surface.
Clack―!
A crisp metallic sound rang through the entire basement.
The ring of mana maintaining one of the two seals came undone as weakly as if it had never existed.
“……!”
Cassian’s eyes filled with shock.
A seal that no family head for hundreds of years, not even Cassian of the 6th rank, had been able to make so much as budge.
And yet it had reacted to a single finger from some nameless researcher?
“How…… Just what did you do?”
Cassian’s voice trembled.
The pressure that had been weighing down on me had, at some point, transformed into something close to awe.
The problem was me.
‘I don’t know either, so please don’t ask me.’
Because even I couldn’t understand this situation at all.