[Yakumo: There should be something, right? There’s already a spell that makes flowers bloom… Oh! Sister Shu, can you get me some flowers from plants that eventually produce fruit? I’ll see whether Frieren’s spell can reproduce them.]
[Shu: That would be a tremendous help. If the plants it creates can eventually bear fruit, then truly… truly… perhaps you might even qualify for the title of Shennong.]
[Furina: Me too, me too! I have Romaritime Flowers, Lumidouce Bells, Rainbow Roses, and Lakelight Lilies!]
[Furina: Wait. Those are all pretty common over here anyway. There’s no reason I specifically need to send them to you, is there?]
[Yakumo: Exactly. Once you learn the spell yourself, Fufu, you can just grow them yourself.]
[Yakumo: But if possible, send me one sample of each anyway. I remember Frieren saying that once you’ve seen a flower before, you can reproduce it using the spell that creates a field of flowers.]
[Furina: No problem! I’ll have someone collect some immediately!]
[Yakumo: Eriri doesn’t seem to be around, so she can just read the chat history later. I’ll ask Frieren how to use the flower-field spell.]
Yakumo might never have seen the flowers of those different worlds, but he had certainly seen flowers on Earth.
He couldn’t name many of them.
But he remembered what they looked like.
That should be enough to reproduce them using the spell.
“If this magic had existed in my original world, how many endangered plants could it have saved?”
Yakumo couldn’t help sighing in amazement.
“You want to learn the spell that creates a field of flowers?”
“Why?”
Frieren didn’t refuse.
She was simply surprised that this was the first proper spell Yakumo wanted to learn.
“How should I put it…”
Yakumo thought carefully before answering.
“I already have offensive magic.”
“Learning more attack spells right now wouldn’t help me that much.”
“But the flower-field spell is something I genuinely need at this stage.”
Yakumo didn’t think Frieren was someone who gossiped or casually revealed other people’s secrets.
Even so, the chat group’s existence wasn’t something he could casually explain.
“There are people I want to help.”
“This spell might be useful to them.”
That was the best vague explanation Yakumo could offer.
If the flower-field spell truly worked the way he hoped, then perhaps creating endless fields of rice across the land wouldn’t be impossible.
“Oh?”
Frieren stared at Yakumo as though confirming whether he was telling the truth.
“That’s a rather unusual way of thinking for someone from this era.”
“But if you really want to learn it, I don’t mind teaching you.”
Frieren rummaged through one of her boxes and pulled out a scroll.
She handed it to Yakumo.
“Here.”
“This is the spell.”
“Thank you very much!”
Yakumo happily accepted it.
Then he immediately disappeared into the small partitioned-off area beside them and began studying.
“Then what about lunch…?”
Frieren helplessly reached out toward him.
Yakumo had already vanished into the room without showing the slightest intention of answering.
Frieren looked at the bread beside her.
She picked up a loaf and knocked on it.
The bread had been sitting outside for two days and had become rather dry.
When Frieren tapped it with her finger—
Knock.
Knock.
“Is bread really supposed to make that sound?”
Frieren rummaged through the food cabinet.
After searching for quite a while, all she managed to find was a single slice of ham.
Everything else consisted of raw vegetables.
And not even the sort that tasted particularly good raw.
“Maybe I’ll just eat bread today.”
Frieren dejectedly took a bite.
Then she thumped her not-particularly-prominent chest.
As expected, dry bread was somewhat difficult to swallow.
Yakumo spent two full days learning the spell.
During that time, even he survived mostly on preserved food.
Unlike Frieren, however, the members of the chat group occasionally sent him prepared dishes.
So his situation wasn’t particularly difficult.
Frieren, meanwhile, spent two days chewing dry bread.
While Yakumo researched, she occasionally tried reheating and stewing ingredients to eat with it.
But after several days of eating all kinds of meals prepared by Yakumo, her own stews suddenly tasted somewhat disappointing.
“So this is what it feels like to wait for someone else while they’re researching magic?”
Frieren had never experienced this before.
The human she’d spent the most time with had been her teacher, Flamme.
But both of them were mages.
Back then, whenever either of them became absorbed in research, neither cared about how much time passed.
Now Frieren didn’t have anything she particularly wanted to research herself.
For once, she was the person waiting for someone else’s research to finish.
And somehow…
It felt different.
“What exactly is different?”
“I used to spend time alone all the time, but I never felt like this.”
Frieren leaned against the outside of the treehouse and looked up at the sky.
Whether she ever reached an answer was unclear.
Grrrrr…
It wasn’t particularly loud.
But Frieren’s expression immediately became almost aggrieved.
Her lips pursed into a catlike shape.
Her entire body seemed to lose even more energy.
“Do I really have to go all the way to the nearest town just to eat?”
“No…”
“It’s so far…”
“Please finish researching a little faster…”
Frieren stood up and shuffled toward the table, preparing to eat the rather unappetizing stew.
“Hm?”
Before she reached it, Frieren suddenly noticed something growing near her feet.
“Is this… a flower?”
Small plants with four leaves rapidly spread around her feet.
Frieren bent down and pulled one from the ground.
There weren’t any flowers on it.
“Ah…”
“I failed.”
Yakumo walked out looking dejected.
“Don’t be discouraged.”
“Researching magic never goes perfectly.”
“At least you managed to make something grow.”
Frieren rolled the plant’s stem between her index finger and thumb.
“This is clover, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“I was trying to reverse-engineer the flower-field spell and see if I could create a weed-removal spell.”
“But, well…”
“You can see the result.”
Yakumo shrugged helplessly.
“A weed-removal spell…”
Frieren laughed.
“That’s quite imaginative.”
She hadn’t expected Yakumo’s experiment to produce something like this.
“So instead, you created a spell that grows weeds?”
“That’s interesting.”
“Can you teach me this one?”
Perhaps those two days of waiting hadn’t been meaningless after all.
“Sure.”
“I already wrote it down.”
Yakumo handed her a sheet covered in writing.
“This is wonderful.”
“Keeping you around really was the right decision.”
Frieren accepted the paper.
“Then what about the spell that creates a field of flowers?”
“How did that go?”
“That one worked.”
A wand appeared in Yakumo’s hand.
The next instant, carnations began blooming in a circle around him, spreading steadily outward.
They were the flowers he’d seen most often before transmigrating.
So when he instinctively chose a flower to reproduce, carnations were the first thing that came to mind.
Yakumo didn’t know whether carnations existed in this world.
But perhaps…
They were rather suitable flowers to give Frieren.