Chapter 60
He glanced around once, then stepped closer to Edith.
Lowering his voice, he said quietly,
“Everyone knows magicians are obsessed with research… but that guy takes it to another level.”
Edith frowned. The only stories she knew about him were from after he had become famous — from the future.
Just how bad could it have been?
“It’d take all day to describe his antics…”
Unease began to creep up her spine.
Suddenly, the magician looked up at the sky with a wistful expression and said,
“Both of Your Highnesses must be quite familiar with magic stones.”
Magic stones — the Empire’s fundamental resource and the basis of all magical practice.
At the abrupt change of topic, Denok raised an eyebrow.
“One day, that guy said this to me,” the magician continued.
“He thought mining magic stones was a waste of time and resources. Said it would be far simpler to gather natural mana and… tried to create artificial magic stones.”
If he had succeeded, that would have been a monumental breakthrough.
Edith leaned forward without realizing it.
The magician laughed, continuing,
“So the idiot set up a mana-gathering device right in the middle of the street. Imagine it — this is the district of magicians, isn’t it?”
Wait… no way—
“Every bit of mana around here got sucked into that thing, and the entire area experienced a mana blackout.”
Meaning—
“All the workshops running experiments lost their mana at once.”
Edith noticed the magician’s smile — one that hinted at personal experience, as though he had been there himself.
“We all had to start our experiments from scratch. Ahahahaha!”
Denok and Edith exchanged a silent look.
“Of course, he was brilliant,” the magician went on. “Even though the device couldn’t store mana, he did succeed in drawing it from the environment.”
He nodded, as though giving reluctant respect to Arvel.
“Oh right, that wasn’t the only thing.”
What now?
The magician’s face lit up with excitement, like a fish tossed back into water. Edith couldn’t bring herself to stop him — he looked like someone finally venting a long-held story.
“So, when he realized he couldn’t create artificial magic stones, he decided instead to enhance the existing ones.”
“Enhance them? That sounds interesting.”
It was indeed a fascinating concept — if one could improve the quality of ordinary magic stones and sell them, their value would skyrocket.
But the magician only grinned at Edith’s intrigued tone.
“Yes, if he’d succeeded… it would have been amazing.”
Then he lifted a hand and pointed to a nearby flowerbed.
“If only that lunatic hadn’t planted the magic stones there and started watering them.”
…What? Watering them?
Edith blinked, stunned by the absurdity.
Denok looked equally speechless.
“Planted them? Magic stones?”
Their disbelief made the magician chuckle with satisfaction.
“He said it was ‘special mana-infused water’ or something like that. Anyway, he planted them in the flowerbed outside my workshop and sat there for days, watering them.”
The magician recalled the sight —
Arvel, sitting serenely before a mound of dirt with magic stones buried beneath, gently pouring water over it with a watering can.
Edith’s expression grew complicated.
Was this really the man she was looking for?
Could it be someone with the same name?
He seemed completely different from the Arvel she knew.
“I guess I’ll find out when I meet him.”
Hiding her tangled thoughts, Edith asked,
“So… where exactly is this Arvel’s workshop?”
A short while later, following the magician’s directions, Edith and Denok set out.
It turned out the workshop was much farther in — tucked away at the end of a narrow, secluded alley.
“He used to have a big workshop downtown,” the magician had said. “His master was a famous man, you see. But after his master died and Arvel inherited the place, he kept causing accidents… eventually, he got pushed to the outskirts.”
For such a renowned magician to have been treated like that in the past… What state is he in now? Could he even be persuaded to join us?
Edith walked on heavily.
Meanwhile, beside her, Denok felt a strange discomfort.
Why was Edith so eager to find this Arvel?
When he heard the earlier stories of Arvel’s erratic behavior, Denok had concluded that the man was too unstable to keep close.
But Edith had ignored the magician’s warning not to meet him.
And something about that—
“Doesn’t it make you angry?”
“They call you that, even though you never hurt anyone — you just suffered alone…”
He remembered her defending him during the festival, when merchants had whispered rumors about him.
Perhaps… because of her gentle heart—
Why did his chest tighten suddenly, heat surging inside him?
An impulsive urge rose — to grab her arm, to stop her from going further.
A nervous fear that she might drift away from him.
Unable to hold it back, Denok blurted out,
“Do you… know this Arvel?”
“Huh? No, not at all!”
Edith turned to him, surprised, then hesitated before adding,
“I’ve never been here before. I just… got curious about the research he was doing.”
Research, huh… That made sense.
After all, she’d lived her whole life in the Sertia estate — there was no way she’d know some reclusive magician hidden in an alley.
The irritation in his chest eased a little.
Besides, the “mana circuit design” Arvel had been researching was something even Denok found intriguing —
an attempt to alter the existing spell structure of magic stones to create new mana circuits. Risky, but full of potential.
Though I doubt it’s actually possible…
As he was thinking that, they turned down a dark alley — and there it was.
Just as the magician had said, a small workshop stood at the end, with a dim sign glowing in violet letters: “Arvel.”
Edith’s face brightened as she approached the door.
But before she could even knock, a loud crash erupted from inside — BANG! CRASH! — followed by a billow of blue smoke leaking through the cracks of the door.
Is this place even safe?
Edith instinctively stepped back, and Denok immediately moved in front of her.
The noise grew louder, closer.
“It might be dangerous. We should back away—”
Denok began to retreat cautiously when—
BANG!
The door burst open, releasing a torrent of blue smoke like a waterfall.
Thick fumes swallowed their vision.
Edith coughed violently.
“Cough—! Cough! Denok, are you okay?”
He raised his hand and dispersed the smoke with a burst of mana.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, thanks to you…”
As the two checked on each other—
“Ahh… failed again… cough, cough!”
A gloomy voice echoed through the haze.
When the smoke finally began to clear,
a slender man appeared — crouched in front of a strange contraption, shoulders slumped.
That man was Arvel.
