How to Survive as the Second Son of a Mage Family - Chapter 606

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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How to Survive as the Second Son of a Magic Noble Family (606)

Leonard looked at me with surprised eyes, then opened his mouth with a smile, perhaps thinking that I was simply startled but actually had no real problems.

“Have you arrived, Your Highness?”

“…Huh?”

“I was going to say that, but you’re in terrible condition. What’s the principle behind it?”

“What is.”

I’m so confused that I keep asking what everything is. Right now, the fact that he was going to say “Your Highness” might be because he calls family members of lower rank than himself “Your Highness”… I don’t know. It might not be, but I’m constantly trying to shift my thoughts somehow. If I don’t focus on what’s in front of me, the image of people turned into tools keeps coming to mind. Taking dead people out of the ground and bringing them back to life at will for their prosperity—how is that different from the condemnable nature of murder? It was no different from making a cow raised for money bear a new calf. It’s treating them like golden eggs from a goose. They know that the goose, the strange coffin and the priest’s sorcery, are most precious. They won’t cut open the goose’s belly. The bones that rested long ago will be seized by descendants’ hands, rise up, and be treated as golden eggs. Gold to be sold to others to fill the goose owner’s belly—people are being treated as stone lumps. People were commodities.

What kind of goldmine must this world look like to them? Just dig the ground and gold comes out, pick up any skeleton, put it in a coffin, chant a spell, and out comes a living person. Like a vending machine. Thus the fact that those skeletons were once people is completely forgotten, and they only feel joy, saying things like “You saw it, didn’t you?” Right now a child is looking for his mother before my eyes, yet to Rohan, the child isn’t a person. He’s an object. What I knew only vaguely as knowledge being reproduced before my eyes today, what I had passed over abstractly in the past now invading with clear and detailed vision, is an experience no different from sharp seawater particles each covering and passing over my entire body. Thinking of the number of people who died once more at the hands of those steeped in greed for decades makes the future look bleak. Thinking that they don’t even know they’re living while dying, disgracing their senile selves without even knowing they should have died long ago, like the elderly Gelda Asman and Pleroma Gelda Asman, makes my stomach twist and I can’t avoid nausea…

Leonard closed the documents, got up from his seat, and wiped my face with a handkerchief.

“When did this sweat appear?”

“Why is that.”

Leonard waited for a moment until my composure returned, then spoke each word deeply and deliberately.

“Your body had disappeared, so how did you sweat during that time?”

I leaned against the armrest and exhaled. Ah, now I really feel like I’ve come to where I should be. I couldn’t help but laugh bitterly. Where did the emotion go? Is this the time to argue about when I sweated?

But I needed Leonard’s dry comment like this. Although he’s the most upright friend who knows how to express emotions most sincerely, that’s one thing, and anyway he’s been like this since I first met him after coming here, and that was comfortable for me. He might not know it, but he’s in no position to call me emotionless. Ulrike is the only emotionally overflowing friend, and the rest are all cold-hearted in our team, so what’s there to argue about…

“It feels like I’ve returned to last year.”

Getting out of that French chaos feels much better. Even while chuckling at the emotionless words and muttering like that, Leonard checks my pulse with an unimpressed face. Well, while I spent several weeks inside there, it’s only been a day or two since he last saw me, so he probably doesn’t care what his friend is saying right now. His interest is elsewhere at the moment.

Leonard placed his hand under my chin to check my pulse, then moved his hand toward my cervical spine. Rosalie’s magic formula came to mind and mana surged up, making Leonard look at me with a questioning face. When I shrugged and pretended not to know, he didn’t ask further and felt around inside my shirt. The fabric, that is. As he literally ruffled through my hair, I became increasingly bewildered and looked at him with a “what are you doing” expression. Leonard rubbed and brushed his fingers while muttering.

“It’s not freshly wet. You were already sweating while you were gone—do you know the reason?”

A thought flashes through my mind. Come to think of it, “cold sweat entered my eyes and blurred my vision.” There should have been some time for my mind to produce sweat, but I just returned to this body moments ago. That’s Leonard for you. Not letting anything pass by and analyzing everything keenly is just like him. With two people knowing the information, topics I would have only thought about and passed over when busy are now circulating with vitality.

“If you know, tell me.”

Leonard opened my mouth like a dentist, then closed it back like fitting blocks, and this time flipped my eyelids. I can predict what he’s thinking. My mouth and eyes aren’t dried up, so my salivary and tear glands never stopped—then how was that possible? He’s probably thinking something like that.

“Typical doctor’s family…”

I muttered and continued.

“I think it’s strange too. Don’t try to reassemble my jaw and ask me first.”

“Can I look at the wound?”

He’s asking me, but he’s not really the type of doctor who asks. If I said no, he’d stare holes through me—he wasn’t the type to give up. Since I had no particular reason to refuse, I opened my shirt and unwrapped the bandage over the wound. Leonard washed his hands, came back, and observed the wound while stroking his chin. He cast a spell.

“Hey, that’s good. Do it all day. I’ll heal quickly and be able to run around.”

“I’d like to do that too, but you keep disappearing?”

He had a remarkable ability to leave me speechless. Since he clearly spoke without deep regret, Leonard was lost in thought with calm eyes, then pressed the red area next to the wound with his index finger.

“…Ah.”

I can see my abdominal muscles spasming. I frowned and looked at him. What are you doing? He observed the reaction like a real doctor—or perhaps like a scientist—and asked.

“How much does it hurt?”

“Just moderately painful, I guess. Not severe.”

“I know you’re indifferent to pain, but… answer more precisely.”

Leonard placed his hand on the suture site. Seeing the color drain from my face, he shrugged and pressed the wound with the same intensity. I narrowed my brow.

“Ugh…! Mmm.”

“How is it now?”

“I can’t kick this away either, how frustrating. Are you doing this to tell me not to be more active?”

“No. I hope you heal quickly. If we know the ability, I think the priority should be understanding the principle first to see how we can utilize it, rather than just leaving it alone.”

Leonard cast healing magic once more and wrapped the bandage again. I snatched the shirt buttons from him, fastened them roughly and quickly, and nodded.

“That sounds like you. Do you have any good methods?”

It’s the right thing to say, but does he think I’ve just been covering it up until now? Unless I’m omniscient, if the system doesn’t tell me even when I try to find out, I can’t know either. Still, since there are more people now, we can at least theorize together.

Leonard rested his chin on his hand and said.

“You’re healing fast. First, how long were you there?”

“I slept carelessly so I need to count the days. Combined, it would be about ten days.”

“It’s not the amount of recovery for ten days. Your recovery rate is twice as fast as others, so in ten days you should have healed much more than this.”

“Then what state am I in now?”

“It looks like you rested for three or four days.”

At those words, I narrowed my eyes and tilted my head.

“It hasn’t even been three or four days since I disappeared.”

“Right. That’s why I’m asking. What’s the mechanism? Did you go to another world in those same clothes? I don’t think so. The clothes you wore in that other world surely weren’t casual shirt attire like this, but the clothes you were wearing until just now didn’t follow you here. In other words, your body didn’t go to 1851 but was isolated somewhere else. Then what about your time and condition during isolation? You said there’s a time difference, so I thought time flowed according to 1851 while you were gone, but…”

Leonard pointed to my stomach.

“It’s not ten days’ worth of recovery. Instead, it looks exactly like you rested for three or four days, as if you didn’t slow down the healing speed by eating or making small body movements… When you use your ability, your 1898 body falls into another space and in 1851, a truly different body of you appears.”

Leonard, having finished speaking, looked at me with a relaxed face and smiled. He nodded his chin at me.

“Now tell me.”

“You know well despite me hardly telling you anything. Yes, as you theorized, this body doesn’t go there as is. I’m certain. Instead, I receive a body unique to that place… Which point in time that body represents varies each time, and as I already said, it seems I receive a body matching my age. And I don’t know how I was sweating cold sweat either.”

“Where does that body come from? It’s not the current you aging and getting younger. It’s a duplicated you that changes. Does the same ‘you’ exist as a spare in every world?”

“Well said. I’m also in the middle of investigating that problem.”

At my words about investigating, Leonard raised an eyebrow to show his willingness to listen. I first gestured with my hand. Leonard brought paper and pen with mana. I wrote down the Ancient Document Research Society and French nobility in order.

“We need to investigate. The entire French nobility is in a loose conspiracy relationship. Noailles, and Rohan, and even the commoner families Laplace and Blanchet—investigate them all. Especially Lucien Noailles and Marie Noailles. They were all a group trying to restore the Bourbons. Investigate what path they’ve taken until now when Orleans is in power, and organize what position they’re in now. And.”

“Are you ordering me as HfS Chief Editor?”

“Something like that, Your Highness. You’re perceptive. Or should I go out now and give orders to my subordinates?”

“No.”

Leonard smiled with his eyes and bowed his head.

“It looks like I won’t even break even. If you go out, His Majesty the King will be curious about what you investigated with his blood. Since you probably don’t plan to tell His Majesty… that you were in mortal danger at the hands of the young King, stay here for now.”

His insight is quite remarkable. Well, they are his parents, so that’s natural. I looked at Leonard quietly and said.

“I’m afraid of your twenties.”

“Why?”

I’ve seen things… and read things. Hildegart Wittelsbach would have been quite satisfied that her child was her spitting image. Don’t many people want to see children who resemble them?

“Why indeed—you won’t speak like you do now, and you won’t act like you do now.”

“That’s not true.”

“Right, it wouldn’t be.”

I nodded at his stubbornness. Leonard of this place would be different. In fact, the people of that world and the people of this world had to be considered different people. Many things had divided the lives of two places.

This wasn’t the time for such thoughts—I had to tell him what I saw last.

“You need to know, so I’ll tell you. I saw bones becoming people there.”

“What?”

“A person from the Rohan family there put skeletons in coffins and called a priest to cast sorcery. Then the skeletons disappeared completely and only people remained. People fully dressed in clothes too.”

Then Leonard fixed his gaze on one spot, lost in thought, and said.

“Pleroma wasn’t around at that time either, but Terminus Yukairya was able to revive people first… More than that.”

I nodded and waited for his words.

“This is your situation.”

Similar. He noticed too.

The body exchange problem has to be traced back to the research of the Duke of Osterreicheste I met in Giessen. What kind of space was that Giessen space? What did the Duke of Osterreicheste and Ainsiedel say about that space? Before that, what about Riechthofen’s body that we investigated during the Penthalon period?

There’s something that runs through them all. Nothing operates separately. Like the words I heard when I woke up in the first extra chapter, everything in the world is connected. We had to climb from the end of each thread to the center, and only by climbing to the center would it finally end. This arduous fight against the cult that seems like it will never end would finally end then. What about my 777 days? I closed my eyes. The terminal life had to end there too. At least it had to end in the not-too-distant days from then.

We’ve gathered much so far, but the incidents are tangled and we can’t get our bearings. A person standing in a forest cannot survey the overall shape of the forest. We need to untangle the tangled things and weave them together to climb up, and once we do that, it’s over. But how do we climb up? How many more thread ends do we need to gather here? How many more do we need to gather to weave a ladder? We had to worry about that.

And now one more strand has come into my hands. The coffin that switches people.

What made me reflexively have to jump out was, first, because of disgust and anguish. Calling forth a life like hitting a vending machine and then not taking responsibility. That disgusts me to the point where I can no longer stay in that place.

And second, because I cannot dismiss this problem with an unperceptive mind. The coffin that revives people—this was more important than the likes of Lucien Noailles and Marie Noailles. It was a topic to be handled more delicately than Rosalie Blanchet’s ridiculous cervical attack. That can be dealt with by physical confrontation.

But this topic is central. If done well, we can weave the scattered strings together. At least several strands can be done that way. I wanted to gain momentum and extend branches to other places. By doing so, if we can prevent Pleroma, who is now holding their breath with plans gone awry, and Terminus Yukairya, who is struggling not to lose to Germany like this while trying to gain the upper hand, from dragging more lives to death, I could accomplish and complete the duty I came here for once. No one told me that the role of Luca should prevent crimes beyond the crime of being murdered, but I feel it strongly. If I could do it, I had to accomplish it.

Penthalon and Riechthofen’s body investigated during Penthalon, and the Duke of Osterreicheste’s theory, the space in Giessen. There was a common theme running through these incidents. What was it?

Representatively, it would be the B-world. I think that while I’m in the extra chapter, my body is exchanged leaving behind ‘some kind of center.’ Since this body doesn’t cross over to the extra chapter. As Riechthofen said, the bodies of two worlds are exchanged, and we can’t know what happens to my body during the exchange. The important thing is that my body didn’t remain in the A-world. That means there’s a spare me in the B-world.

Back to resurrection. How is resurrection fundamentally accomplished?

Terminus Yukairya’s resurrection looks exactly like ‘switching’ people between worlds.

“…So I have to go again. Leo, let’s do an experiment while I’m gone.”

He seems to know what experiment I’m trying to do. Leonard tilted his head down slightly and raised the corner of his mouth.

“Put medicine on my stomach. I need to see how much it decreases.”

As if we were on the same wavelength, Leonard smiled at me and quickly left the room. With nothing to do, I pulled over the documents he was investigating with mana. “Physicist August Biermann’s World Divergence Theory,” “Operating Principles of Mental Magic—Centered on Laplace’s Determinism.”

Familiar names. I never told him, but his choice is excellent. I suppressed the goosebumps rising to my shoulders and turned through both documents page by page. Traditionally, papers should be read with the most concentration on the introduction and the rest skimmed… that’s not the best, but many lazy and time-pressed people do that. It’s obviously best for scholars confident in their papers to have everything read, and while I’m not unsympathetic to such authors’ troubles, as a modern person I only read the introduction. The world divergence theory was similar to the multiverse theory I know, but from a 21st-century person’s perspective, it was a theory with more religious elements added. God is a being who has condensed all space-time within His existence, where the concepts of future, past, and present are not valid, and God did not give humans the ability to handle time because it should be His power alone—so it says. It says that if humans had that ability, the world would go wrong. Such religious reasoning appears because it’s magic science after all. Since I think our world cannot be perfectly explained by multiverse theory, I really had to read only the introduction and close it.

I opened the second paper. Operating Principles of Mental Magic—Leonard was probably looking at this paper to research the strange phenomena I showed during the Bavaria Pleroma diocese annihilation operation and the confusion this fire caused in Ulrike’s mind. It was a paper developed from the perspective that the caster of mental manipulation magic has god-like power. Mathematician Laplace argues that everything is predetermined by physical laws. Laplace’s demon is a being that knows these predetermined things. From this perspective, there’s a scholar who argues that humans have no free will, and humans are beings who are only swept along by ‘things already decided’ as decided.

They say that those who use mental magic perform a kind of Laplace’s demon role. This needs to be observed more carefully. As I was thinking this, Leonard returned. I looked at the glass bottle in his hand and the liquid inside and asked.

“What is this?”

“Medicinal leeches?”

“I thought it would be mechanical… You’re going to attach this to my flesh?”

“It’s not really leeches, so bear with it.”

He attached something like a jelly made of mana to the wound. It’s a slightly greenish medicine, as if mixed with other drugs.

“Seeing how your clothes go with you, this should be able to follow too. Once all the healing mana inside is absorbed, you’ll feel much better for walking.”

It feels strangely familiar. It seems like his blood that was already transfused into my body is circulating, and the mana dissolved in the blood is quickly organizing the wounds, and I’m getting a similar feeling from my stomach.

“Whose healing mana is this… Is it yours?”

“Yes. You need to get better quickly.”

“I feel like I made you tired when you were working.”

“Not at all? I can just drink an elixir.”

He raised his eyebrows with a face that showed genuine concern. After meeting friends with peculiar personalities and coming back to meet a friend who’s been properly socialized so uprightly, I can really feel his well-cultivated character and I’m much more satisfied… Leonard smiled and said.

“Go and come back quickly. Go get better faster and come back.”

From those words, I overlap his image of saying we should get better quickly and spar. It’s déjà vu. I asked with a smile.

“Get better quickly to do what.”

“Something you’ll like.”

Leonard said that without changing his expression at all. What could that be. When I stayed still, holding back laughter instead of going, Leonard folded my fingers and counted from three. I asked with a chuckle.

“Since you counted to three, do I have to go now?”

“Yes. That’s the rule.”

Since when. I tried to pat the shoulder of Leonard, who was rarely smiling mischievously. Leonard smiled and said quietly.

“Stay strong.”

* * *

Much better. I became able to face Rohan with much more composed reasoning.

“Are you alright?”

“Of course.”

In the dark dome-shaped basement, as soon as I opened my eyes, I thanked Rohan who was supporting my back. Enter through the narrow entrance… I gradually touched his memories while withdrawing my magic. Lord Rohan had his eyes wide open when I collapsed, but now he’s back to how he was before. Rohan glanced at my relaxed face and legs that had lost their balance and said.

“It must have been quite a shocking sight, Lord Noayu…”

I smiled and grabbed his shoulder. Then I shook my head.

“It’s because of what happened in Germany, so you don’t need to worry about it. There was some physical exhaustion from a disturbance that was resolved well.”

“Ah, yes. You’re fine now, right?”

“As you can see, yes.”

I slowly walked toward the coffin and turned halfway back toward him. The child is looking at us in terror, dressed in strange clothes. Rohan waited for my answer and said with a somewhat proud face.

“How is it?”

“It’s very much like you, Lord Rohan.”

I said while looking down at the coffin.

“That coffin has quite excellent abilities.”

More so than the priest. I think the coffin is the key – how is my reasoning?

Rohan said with satisfaction.

“You know well.”

The priest is just a decoy. I smiled with Lucien’s smile. If you offer this to Henri or the Bourbon core, your position becoming secure is a predetermined matter. So I’m thinking.

Are you the one who will hold the head of House of Orléans in 1898?

In other words, are you the leader of Terminus Yukairya?

I asked Rohan with a good-natured face.

“The reason for not reporting to superiors?”

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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