The Unwanted Undead Adventurer: Volume 5 Read online

  “I don’t know, what?”

  “He summoned a fire dragon that burned the whole region to the ground.”

  The horrific conclusion turned Alize’s face pale. The possibility that her magic circle could have similar results must have scared her.

  “Well, this is just an old story we used to tell each other. Nothing so devastating will happen. Conra was bad at magic circles, but he was still an incredible mage with an immense quantity of mana. They say that’s why his mistake was so catastrophic. Your mistakes might summon a little slime we could just stomp on, at the worst. That or it could make a loud sound or a weak explosion that wouldn’t do any damage. You don’t need to worry about it. I’ll take care of anything that happens,” Lorraine said, putting Alize at ease.

  ◆◇◆◇◆

  Even the process of pouring mana into the bronze board gave Alize a hard time. The object was different, but it was much the same as sending mana into the brush. That she would have difficulties with both was to be expected. It was the opposite case for me. Applying mana to weapons, brushes, or bronze boards was all identical, meaning my decade of experience putting a sliver of mana in my weapon at all times made this job simple.

  I almost felt bad for Alize, but it’s not like this came easy to me either. What she was attempting to accomplish in one day was something I worked at for years. If anything, it was unfair her skills were beginning to take shape so soon. Everything worked out when you had talent, but maybe my severe lack of talent was the real problem. Or maybe this was normal. I didn’t know.

  “All right, now place your magic crystal on the bronze board,” Lorraine instructed after we finished painting our magic circles. “I shortened the process in my demonstration to save time, but it’s too soon for you two to attempt that. You’ll use the basic method and simply set the magic crystal on the board. Eventually, it will naturally absorb the magic circle.”

  Lorraine had done something to get the work over with right away, but it sounded like a difficult technique. I was interested in trying it, but Lorraine said it was too soon for us, so I doubted I could pull it off. I decided to accept taking the normal route with Alize.

  If I were in a rush to learn alchemy, that would be another story, but I was a swordsman. Mastery of multiple skills could be convenient, but I wasn’t so sure about alchemy. It wasn’t a skill set that could get quick results for an adventurer. The ability to produce high-quality medicine on your own was valuable to be sure, but I learned how to make medicine from the medicine woman in my hometown, albeit somewhat weaker medicine than that of an alchemist. If I found myself in real trouble beyond that, I could also access divinity.

  I followed Lorraine’s instructions and placed the magic crystal on the bronze board. The dried ink of the magic circle appeared to peel off and get sucked inside. It happened in an instant for Lorraine, a flash of light and it was over, so I didn’t get the chance to watch this part. It was an unusual sight now that I could see it in motion, but not too extraordinary. Lorraine nodded as she watched, implying the wand production was going smoothly so far. About ten minutes later, the final piece of the magic circle entered the magic crystal.

  “All right, that’s enough. Check to see if your magic circles entered properly,” Lorraine suggested. We couldn’t wait to look already, so right as Lorraine closed her mouth, we grabbed our crystals and peeked inside.

  “Oh, I did it! It worked, Professor Lorraine!” Alize yelled. It sounded like hers turned out well.

  “Let me see,” Lorraine said and took the magic crystal so she could look inside. “Yes, it came out nicely. The magic circle is a little warped, but that shouldn’t be an issue. A job well done for your first time, Alize.” With that compliment, Lorraine rubbed her head.

  She shifted the discussion toward me. “So what about yours?”

  “Well, uh...” I stammered. I didn’t want to admit I felt ashamed, but I did. I could have sworn I followed Lorraine’s directions though.

  Lorraine looked at my odd behavior and furrowed her brow. “Rentt, what’s with you?” she asked as she approached me, snatched my crystal, held it over her head, and peered inside.

  “Can’t you do anything normally? You know this is weird, right?” she asked and gave the magic crystal back.

  I looked inside and saw a somewhat odd magic circle. I knew I had painted it on the bronze board with Lorraine’s ink and it had entered the crystal. It should have been like when Lorraine did it, where the circle remained the same color once inside, but my crystal contained a magic circle that had a blotchy yellow and green pattern. It was honestly not a pleasant color.

  “It’s not pretty, I’ll say that,” I muttered.

  “That’s not the problem, but these things happen on occasion. If you have peculiar mana or a divine spirit’s blessing, strange magic circles can appear in your magic tools. In your case, I think we know what the cause was,” she claimed.

  I knew what she was suggesting. I had divinity and the blessing of some divine spirit. My mana might have also been unusual due to my undead nature. Rather, after this, it was safe to say here was something off about my mana. I wondered if it was even possible for me to perform alchemy correctly.

  I began to feel depressed. “This is bad, isn’t it?” I asked Lorraine.

  “No. It’s a rare phenomenon, but it happens. Some people are born with abnormal mana, and there’s no shortage of those with divine blessings. But any wand you make is going to have irregular properties. As long as you’re prepared for that, there won’t be a problem,” she assured me.

  That made it sound like there would still be a problem, but I could at least learn alchemy. That was good enough, but I didn’t know what these irregular properties would be. That was the next question, but it couldn’t be answered until the wand was finished.

  “Show me your crystal,” Alize asked while I was thinking, so I looked to Lorraine. I wanted to see if showing her something so bizarre would be bad for her education, but Lorraine nodded, so I handed the crystal to Alize.

  “Wow, it’s beautiful. Mine is an ordinary black magic circle. I’m kind of jealous,” she said innocently.

  It helped to hear that, though. I was keenly aware of how abnormal I was, but when even this simple thing came out wrong, it saddened me a bit. It was the type of depression I could get over in a couple days, but this was still a wretched, desolate reminder I wasn’t human. My lack of need for much sleep and my ability to recover from small wounds in a few seconds made me feel the same way.

  But what Alize said blew those feelings away. What a wonderful disciple she was. I didn’t know who was encouraging who. These thoughts occupied the depths of my heart as we continued making our wands. All that remained was the wand itself.

  ◆◇◆◇◆

  “Now it’s time to shape your wands and combine them with your crystals. You’re already mostly done, to be honest, but this is no way for a wand to look,” Lorraine said.

  “What does that mean?” Alize asked, cocking her head.

  “Oh, magic catalysts are perfectly usable with nothing but a magic crystal. But attaching a grip makes the mana easier to control, not to mention it raises your mana amplification rate, so it’s not just a matter of appearances, actually,” Lorraine answered.

  She went on to explain the reasons for grips further. “The wands we’re making today won’t work much differently than if you simply used a magic crystal, but more advanced catalysts will add other elements to the grip. For example, you can put materials inside or use multiple magic crystals that resonate with each other, among other things. The grip is like the foundation that holds your catalyst,” she explained.

  If a grip wasn’t necessary, then magic crystals were able to function as catalysts by themselves. But grips could enhance magic catalysts. That raised some questions.

  “Then are rings worse magic catalysts than wands and staffs?” Alize was quick to ask.

  Setting multiple magic crystals on a ring
would be a challenge. It was the logical conclusion, but Lorraine countered this.

  “No, not necessarily. Well, wands and staffs are easier to make, but you can put multiple magic crystals on rings too. The ones you’re using are big enough it would be difficult, but monsters drop all kinds of magic crystals. Some are small enough that several could fit on a ring. If you use those, there’s no issue.”

  “But couldn’t you place a ton of small crystals on a staff, then?” Alize questioned.

  “That’s true, but there’s a limit to how many magic crystals a catalyst can hold, regardless of the amount of space. Most use one, but you can use two if you’re good. A quality piece of work might use three, and some unbelievably powerful ones use four. You can find catalysts with even more than that in some labyrinths. A Legendary-class artisan could surpass these limits, but most alchemists can only reach three no matter how hard they try. If you can make a stable catalyst with four crystals, that’s a skill you could make a living on. Want to try it?”

  I would have called that unreasonable, but I strove for goals that seemed absurd from an outside perspective, so I wasn’t one to talk. Alize seemed to have the same impression, but she was curious about something.

  “Professor Lorraine, how many crystals can you use when you make catalysts?”

  “Me? It’s a secret. I can use at least three though, I’ll tell you that much.”

  That seemed to imply she could make one with four crystals, too, but she didn’t confirm either way. Knowing Lorraine, she would have said this whether she could do better than three or not.

  Alize was about to ask something else, but Lorraine interrupted with, “Come on, let’s get back to work. Making the grip isn’t easy, so you’ll have to focus.” Alize never got to ask her question, but she seemed content enough. From her perspective, Lorraine was an amazing woman, so whether she could use three or four crystals wouldn’t change much in her eyes. I saw Lorraine the same way.

  At Lorraine’s urging, I went back to my shrub ent wood. The wood was in the same state as when I collected it, so it was more or less a log.

  “Pour mana into the surface,” Lorraine said. “Then control the mana to only peel off that part and continue until you reach the proper size. You’re working with fairly large materials, so you can make plenty of mistakes. Just try it.”

  Alize and I nodded and got to work. As expected, I had no trouble peeling away only what was necessary. Alize struggled, sometimes chopping off small slivers, sometimes cutting in a curved line, and sometimes removing nothing but bark. But in the end, she still managed to shave off only what was necessary. As impressive as ever.

  “All right, now to shape your wood into a wand. This is basically the same. Use mana to compress and round the wood. But you’re likely to fail the first attempt, Alize, so start by practicing on the pieces of wood you cut off. Once you get used to it, you can try the real deal. Okay?” Lorraine asked. Alize nodded.

  I looked at Lorraine to see if I should do the same. Her expression implied that I ought to decide for myself. I was quick to finish everything thus far, so she made Alize her priority instead. It was the right decision. I preferred to try things for myself anyway.

  I heard how to do it, so that just left some trial and error. The problem was I needed the material I had just stripped down, so I carved some excess wood of the same size and used that to practice shaping a wand. I tried a few approaches. It felt somewhat like playing with clay. I could practice by making more than just a wand, so I used my mana to shape something else.

  “Hey, look at this. Pretty good, eh?” I said to Alize and Lorraine. They looked at my handiwork with shock.

  “Rentt, nice work. I had a rough enough time just making a wand,” Alize said, holding a piece of wood shaped into a wand. Apparently she managed.

  “Even I couldn’t do that. Maybe you could sell these if you picked different models,” Lorraine remarked.

  Lorraine and Alize’s eyes were glued to wooden figures of the two of them. I even had them pose. Lorraine was holding a staff and casting magic in a cool fashion. Alize was kneeling and praying to god as if she were at the Church of the Eastern Sky. She was pure and solemn. I was satisfied with how they came out.

  “Take this lesson seriously. I’m confiscating these,” Lorraine said and took them away. “Alize, you can have this one.” She handed Alize the one modeled after her.

  I was miffed about that because of all the work I put into them, but I couldn’t complain after I ignored the assigned work during a class. I could have pointed out that this was a form of practice and relevant to the work at hand, but Lorraine would only see it as fooling around. If I could do this, I should have gone ahead and made the wand, as far as she was concerned. And she was absolutely right. I did screw around a bit. I felt bad about it, so I quickly shaped the wand.

  “What next?” I asked brightly. Lorraine gave me an appalled look, but she soon got over it.

  “Fine, this is the final step: combining your crystal with your wand. Do your best. You’re almost there.”

  ◆◇◆◇◆

  “Put them together like I demonstrated. I shouldn’t have to explain this part,” Lorraine said.

  “Wait a second. You used mana to shift the tip of the wand around the crystal and hold it in place, I got that much, but what were those sparks about?” I interjected.

  Lorraine laughed. “Well, good question. I was only kidding,” she replied. “That part is important. I did everything at once during the demonstration, but combining your crystal and wand has a number of steps. You’ll do that after this. First, you need to send a line through the wand.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Alize asked.

  “Just what it sounds like. You create a path for mana to run through your wand. Mana can actually pass through regardless, but this makes it more efficient. This involves uniting the numerous winding mana paths that already exist in your wand into a single large, straight passage.”

  I understood what she was saying for the most part, but I had no idea how to do it. Alize must have felt the same way because she looked puzzled.

  “How does that work?” she asked.

  “It’s rather abstract, but when you actually try it, you’ll see it’s not that hard. It’s similar to how you shaped the wand. Start from the bottom of the wand, then slowly send you mana upward, focusing on the way it flows,” she instructed.

  Alize and I obeyed. I felt the mana separate as it ascended through the wand. Like water flowing through numerous branching paths, it traveled in different directions. I saw what Lorraine meant by this being inefficient. Alize seemed to understand as well.

  “Are these the lines?” she asked Lorraine.

  “Yes, but as I’m sure you’ve noticed, simply shaping your material into a wand caused the lines to stretch out and curve at random. If you make a wand like this, it won’t be much better than a stick. We avoid that by taking those chaotic lines and straightening them out. This is done the same way you shaped the wand, by having your mana flow from one end of the wand to the other as you move the lines together. Can you do it?”

  I didn’t know if I could, but now I knew the method. Alize and I nodded and got to work, finding that Lorraine was right in that it was mostly identical to the previous step. The act of moving lines that were hidden inside the wand seemed to raise the difficulty to a degree, but it involved largely the same kind of work. The difference was the lines in the wand all went in different directions. It felt like scooping every bit of scum from the surface of some soup.

  That said, I enjoyed simple, repetitive work. When I was still human, I would go to the Labyrinth of the Moon’s Reflection every day to hunt the same monsters until I tired myself out. This work was tolerable, and even fun, but Alize looked frustrated. She was young, so that was typical.

  “Are you getting fed up?” Lorraine asked, startling Alize.

  “Oh, no, um...” she stammered with shame. Lorraine laughed at her.


  “I know how you feel from the first time I made a wand. I even threw my wand right at my teacher’s face,” Lorraine said, sharing a shocking memory.

  “At their face, really?” Alize murmured, doubting she could ever do the same.

  “Well, that’s how tedious the work was, but it has a strong influence on the quality of your wand. Be patient and do the best you can.”

  “Okay!” Alize answered with energy and returned to work. This time she kept calm and immersed herself in the task.

  I, on the other hand, was wondering something after that bit of encouragement.

  “So what did that teacher do after that?” I asked Lorraine.

  “Went into a furious rage. It was so terrifying I’d rather not remember it,” she whispered in my ear. Then she shuddered.

  I wondered what kind of teacher could make Lorraine say that, but much like me, Lorraine didn’t talk about her history from before she came to Maalt. I decided not to ask more questions. After that, Alize and I finished forming our lines.

  “All right, good,” Lorraine said after sending mana through our wands to check them. “You both did well for your first time. Alize, you straightened your lines as instructed, and Rentt, you’re always so good at detailed work that it’s sickening. There’s no room for criticism.”

  “Let me see Rentt’s wand!” Alize demanded out of curiosity. She borrowed my wand and sent mana through it. “Wow, what the? It’s nothing like mine,” she said with an astounded look.

  “Well, it may feel that way, but don’t let it get you down,” Lorraine said to cheer her up. “You should have known from those wood figures he made that Rentt is abnormally dexterous. I can’t do anything like that either. Even forming lines this meticulously is a challenge.”

  “It’s hard for you too, Professor?” Alize said with shock.