NBFTR 08

Chapter 8

Airy swallowed hard before speaking.

“Of course, I can’t read every magic circle there is. So you shouldn’t put your complete faith in my judgment.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Good. From what I can tell, this seems to be a hidden treasury belonging to the Grand Duke’s family. As for the pig… Ah, Pepper—I have no idea how he managed to move around without leaving a trace, but there are extremely sophisticated security spells here that have never been breached.”

“Pepper really does have an impressive talent.”

“Exactly. If someone could open every door without leaving a trace, they’d be an incredible thief even if they were human. He certainly has the makings of a master thief.”

“Airy…”

“I’m joking.”

She quickly continued.

“And that exit has magic of the same level on it. Only qualified people can come and go, and the defensive measures are more than sufficient. Would you like to see?”

The door was fitted with even more densely packed mana stones than the basement door. The spell formula extended beyond the door itself and all the way across the doorway, drawn with astonishing delicacy despite its enormous scale.

Airy became certain of her conclusion.

“I think this is both a treasury and a bomb shelter. If that’s the case, wouldn’t the treasury contain treasures appropriate for a situation like this? There must definitely be mana stones among them. We’ll have to see what else is inside.”

“Right. Do you think you can deactivate the magic?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t even know how yet, and I’d rather avoid wasting our resources unnecessarily. There are a few things I want to check first, too. Pepper!”

The man flinched at the sudden call.

Airy suppressed a laugh and shouted.

“I was only joking earlier! There’s something I need your help with. Will you come out? If you do, I’ll keep giving you mana from now on!”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course I am. I’m not saying I’ll let you eat mana stones forever, though.”

Monsters must contain mana too, don’t they?

Airy wasn’t sure how well they would survive in the outside world, but if they could eventually figure out how to extract mana from monsters, Pepper would more than deserve to live an immortal life as a spirit beast.

Laertes, who had more or less figured out what Airy was thinking, held his breath for a moment and hardened his expression.

Then he slowly crossed the hall and began helping Airy.

“Pepper! I promise you! I won’t hurt you! Let’s become companions!”

“Are you serious?”

Airy asked the exact same question with a half-smile.

The man gave an embarrassed smile and nodded.

“We’re not raising a pig for food. If we’re going to keep him, we need to give him a role.”

“Young Master, you really did grow up to be a wise man. You have no idea how proud I am.”

Laertes hurriedly cut her off before she could continue with something along the lines of, If the nanny could hear you…

“It’s thanks to you. And it looks like Pepper has come out.”

“Where?”

At the entrance to the familiar sauna-like room stood a frightened pig, its fur glowing faintly.

Airy had no idea how he had gotten out, but she suppressed both her suspicion and curiosity and put on a benevolent smile.

“Let’s have a little talk.”

“Squeak.”

Despite the pig’s wariness, Airy did not lose her smile.

Lowering herself as if soothing a puppy, she stretched both hands toward the floor.

“Pepper White, from now on, I’ll do my best to treat you as our equal.”

“Squeee…”

“Hmm… We can raise you into the finest pig in the world. You already are, of course, but I mean a pig so magnificent that history itself will remember you.”

No matter how intelligent a pig might be, it was still an easy creature to understand.

The pink ears that had been folded down like tiny gloves hanging from a line suddenly perked up.

Even Airy, whose throat had grown painfully dry from being deprived of her transmigrator’s benefits, couldn’t remain unaffected when the small, adorable creature raised its ears.

She let out a soft laugh and beckoned to the pig.

“Pepper. You really are cute. What I said earlier was more than rude, wasn’t it? It must have scared you. I’m sorry.”

She carefully chose her next words.

“From now on…”

“I’ll do my best to treat you with respect.”

“Squeak! Squeee!”

Pepper chattered something, but at least he didn’t seem to be picking a fight with her.

Airy decided she needed to put him even more at ease.

She cautiously reached out and touched the area near his rump.

Pepper let out a sharp Pwe! and immediately hid behind Laertes.

Airy theatrically admired the fur her fingertips had brushed against.

“As expected. Your fur really is as fine and beautiful as it looks. It feels much softer than my hair.”

That part was true.

The warm texture was soft enough to win Laertes’s heart in an instant.

“Young Master. Don’t you think Pepper’s tail is adorable? I had no idea pigs could wag their tails this much.”

“…Yes. It is.”

“Look. Don’t his eyes look almost human? When he smiles, they curve into little teardrop shapes like this.”

“They do.”

“And the white fur across his snout is adorable, too. I remember so clearly when he was born, and now you’re saying he’s already a respectable twelve-year-old? There really can’t have been another pig like him in all of history.”

Airy piled lie upon lie without even bothering to moisten her lips first.

Laertes let out a quiet chuckle.

“That’s right. He could be written into the history books even now.”

“Of course, that’s assuming there are still any humans left capable of conducting research on a sparkling spirit-beast pig.”

Having delivered her sophisticated joke, Airy laughed heartily.

“Hahahaha!”

A half-beat later, Laertes joined in.

“Ahahaha!”

And the pig…

Pepper’s little lips twitched as though he were about to laugh along with them.

Then he stopped himself.

Airy clearly saw the corners of his mouth curl upward.

It was a dramatic reconciliation.

In that beautiful moment, however, there was one unfortunate fact about Pepper White.

Unfortunately, Airy Aster had not completely abandoned her fixation on their fateful encounter.

She simply could not stop evaluating the pig’s worth.

That was an unavoidable part of Airy Aster’s personality.

Pepper White, the spirit-beast pig, had not accumulated enough experience with humans to see through the complicated depths of a human heart.

Fortunately for Pepper, there was one human man who cared deeply about Airy.

Laertes Joe Salisbury had already begun to vaguely sense what was lurking in the depths of her mind.

Yes.

Pepper was a sow.

For several days after that, Airy had Pepper, who could freely enter every room, raid the four treasure vaults.

The first vault contained mana stones that had been completely drained.

The second contained various accessories designed to assist with mana recovery and replenishment, all of which had also been emptied.

There were still plenty of intact items—enough that Pepper could have eaten for another twelve years and still had some left over.

The problem was that Pepper had started with the most precious and valuable ones.

When they discovered the mana-replenishing mana stones said to be exceptionally rare…

Even Airy nearly lost her reason for a moment.

Simply holding one in her hand was enough to draw in mana from the surrounding air.

Calling it a treasure was nowhere near enough.

It was the treasure among treasures.

Still, they managed to salvage one piece about the size of a small pebble.

Its effect was too weak to be of much use to Laertes—less effective than simply allowing his mana to recover naturally—but it was just enough to be somewhat useful to Airy.

Airy painfully accepted that this must be what narrative convenience looked like in a novel.

Pepper couldn’t even lift his head for a while.

Belatedly, Airy comforted him by saying that if she had been able to drain the mana herself, she probably would have done exactly the same thing.

Laertes agreed.

The third treasure vault produced considerably better results.

It was filled with artifacts.

Perhaps Pepper had sensed that these were things he shouldn’t touch, because even the mana stones used as decorations were still completely charged.

When several sturdy, magnificent-looking wands appeared, Airy began seriously wondering, from her transmigrator’s perspective, whether Laertes really wasn’t the protagonist of this novel.

“How do things like this just come pouring out the moment a wand breaks? Isn’t this basically the golden axe and silver axe story?”

There was one reason Airy was certain that she wasn’t the protagonist.

She had no use for wands.

Just activating one consumed nearly all the mana in her body.

With a bleeding heart, Airy slipped one pen-shaped artifact into her clothes.

Its tip was unusually thick, suggesting it was designed for drawing magic circles. Yet it could draw smoothly on both the ground and paper without damaging either surface.

And it consumed almost no mana while being used.

The two of them decided to sort the remaining artifacts by type and value and store them in one corner, saving them for the day they could finally go outside.

Pepper also promised not to covet those.

The fourth treasure vault, however, was beyond even Pepper—the greatest thief born from the Grand Duke’s family.

Airy spent several days studying the complicated formulas of its magic circle before finally shaking her head.

“I think there’s something blocking access from the inside as well. From what I can tell, all I can see are things like high-level locking magic and access restrictions. If that’s all it is, I think Pepper should be able to break through it.”

Airy didn’t know how mana awakening worked in animals, but she was beginning to suspect that Pepper’s magical talent lay somewhere along those lines.

Otherwise, there was simply no explaining how he had entered this bomb shelter without leaving even the slightest trace.

Laertes generally agreed with her assessment and didn’t press her for explanations on most matters.

He had another problem of his own.

Laertes considered himself a half-baked mage.

If Airy, who envied the sheer storm of mana within him, had heard him say that, she would have jumped out of her skin.

He had been only nine years old when the great calamity of the monster invasion occurred.

Ordinarily, a Salisbury would begin higher education around the age of ten. Until then, children simply studied basic preparatory mathematics and trained their mana control.

That was because the study of magic was built upon an enormous body of knowledge about the natural world.

Algebra.

Natural sciences.

An understanding of everything that existed in the world.

Not every magical genius was naturally gifted at mathematics and science from childhood.

Laertes, however, never received that higher education.

He was thrown directly onto the battlefield and survived by using whatever magic he could.

Of course, four intermediate-level mages had remained around the boy who might become the last Salisbury.

They did everything they could to teach Laertes.

The problem was that they were not professional educators, and they could no longer vividly remember the introductory subjects of magical studies at every level.

Those had been desperate years.

Laertes had been young and kind. Even when he didn’t understand something, he pretended that he did.

Then he would simply overwhelm the problem with his enormous reserves of mana and hurry to fulfill whatever role was needed of him.

And so, despite being born with an overflowing amount of magical power, he had never learned the magical theories necessary to give that power concrete form.

Having vaguely noticed these circumstances, Airy asked,

“Young Master. I’m sorry if this is an impolite question, but what class is your mana circle?”

“…Ah. I’ve never had it formally measured, but according to one of the mages who stayed with me until I was nineteen, I’m around Class Three.”

“Wow…”

It was established academic theory that the size of a mana circle was also influenced by genetics, so Airy had expected something like this to some degree.

But Laertes’s answer was almost absurd.

A mage who had never received proper education was already Class Three.

As one learned theory and reorganized the mana within one’s body, it was possible to rise by one or two classes.

Laertes was already at a high class, so in his case it would probably amount to only one additional class at most.

A person’s total mana capacity was expressed in classes.

Then, based on how precisely they could manipulate that mana by combining it with theory, and whether they could perform high-level magic, their professional ability was evaluated separately by rank.

Normally, a Class Two mage could become a First-Rank Mage through nothing more than a reasonable amount of effort.

“You know I’m terrible when it comes to using mana. I probably won’t be much different from you.”

“How can you say that? I’m a Class Nine, Rank Nine mage.”

“If you take your knowledge of magical theory into account, it’s completely different. Even when I look at something like that, all I can recognize is that it’s a magic circle. I’m basically illiterate.”

Airy expressed the absurdity of her life with a sigh.

There was nothing she could say to refute him.

Nor did she have any words with which to comfort him.

All she could do was be satisfied with doing what she was capable of.

Once upon a time, Airy had swept through Seongbuk District as a private tutor specializing in the Korean CSAT’s Mathematical Area A and Science Inquiry subjects.

Now, she began spinning the pen between her index fingers.