“Good idea. It’ll be hard right away, but take your time and try to understand this magic circle. And you already know this, but don’t forget to make sure your drawing doesn’t catch anyone else’s eye.”
He even added kind advice. It felt like someone was tugging the back of my head. The moment the thought occurred to me that he might be testing me, motivation bubbled up. It seemed like His Highness expected I wouldn’t be able to properly transfer this necklace onto paper. This was a chance to raise my own value.
“Then shall we do our work too? As you can see, I haven’t recovered yet, so it’s hard for me to write a letter myself. My hand won’t take strength, you see. Philip, I’ll need you to take dictation.”
While signing off on documents he’d left sitting—using the very hand that supposedly had no strength—His Highness dictated a letter to be sent to the king. Philip began writing down His Highness’s words like a wind-up doll, and the king’s spy stood there in a deferential posture with his head bowed, like a toy that had run out of batteries.
I took my seat at the tea table as well and lowered my head. The necklace, reflecting light brilliantly as if it were emitting its own, was waiting for me.
An antique diamond. Perfect condition. And on top of that, high-level magic. I had to draw this.
They called it a drawing, but in practice, it was reverse engineering. I had to mark the placement and grade of the stones precisely. And that obsessive magic circle made of accent stones—perfectly, without error. I couldn’t flex creativity here, but that only made it more fun.
I established the overall outline, then rendered the cutting angles and facet counts in detail. It was simple polishing because it was a piece from before the brilliant cut existed, but the craftsmanship itself must have been the best of its era.
Still, there were limits to what I could do with the naked eye. I needed a standard 10x loupe. Treasures were treasures because of their details.
The moment I hit that limit, my concentration cracked. When I lifted my head, His Highness had already finished reading the letter to the king and was looking at me.
“Do you have a magic item that can magnify things?”
“Wait.”
“Do you keep something like that in the study too?”
“Every so often, an adventurous person shows up and tries to forge documents.”
“Oh, wow.”
At my little condolence for the reckless, His Highness agreed with a low laugh. Even though the one who sent the spy was the king—and that spy was standing right there—it felt oddly like the two of us were a paired set of villains. While I was having that strange feeling, His Highness’s hand appeared in front of me again.
Resting on his palm was a loupe that looked extremely old-fashioned.
“Do you know how to use it?”
“How do I use it?”
“This part is the eyepiece.”
Even when I put it on, my view didn’t change. Because the glass quality was crude, it actually looked blurrier.
“Am I using it correctly?”
“You have to press this part.”
His Highness spoke in a voice that revived his mischief and pressed a certain section of the loupe.
I felt mana flow. The next moment, the world on my right side grew so large it made me dizzy.
“…Is this magic too?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.”
This strange world—where crude glass could be “fixed” with magic—was still unfamiliar to me.
“Finished?”
I set down my pen and sighed. As I rolled my stiff wrist to loosen it, His Highness asked as if he’d been waiting.
“Yes. Could you check whether there are any incorrect parts?”
His Highness smiled faintly. That gentle-looking face seemed to be saying there was no way there wouldn’t be something wrong. Well. We’d see.
I flicked my eyes over my employer as he looked down at the drawing, then turned my gaze forward. The king’s spy, who had to return with His Highness’s reply and the necklace, was still maintaining a deferential posture with both hands gathered in front and his head bowed.
“That man’s going to hurt.”
Fancy-color diamonds in melee size had a far wider range of grading than I’d expected. Even what looked colorless actually carried the faintest tint, creating a natural overall gradation. Using the main stone—D color, as close to colorless as you could get—as the standard, I marked the color grade for each stone one by one, from the palest tones to the deepest. Meaning, I’d invested no small amount of time. And for that entire time, the spy had been frozen like a statue.
“For someone whose spying got exposed, it’s a generous punishment.”
At His Highness’s words, I nodded. It was true.
Now the words I was about to say would make the spy stand there like a statue even longer, but that was his own doing.
“An abnormal phenomenon was observed in the central diamond.”
I handed the necklace and the loupe to His Highness.
“With the naked eye, nothing is visible, but if you use the loupe, you can observe a black stain moving inside at a fixed interval.”
At first glance, the main stone had seemed to be FL—flawless, the top grade with no inclusions and no external flaws. But when I checked again, a black stain rippled. It shouldn’t have been possible. A moving stain inside a diamond—the hardest mineral. If I didn’t know about magic, I would’ve thought I’d developed floaters. And for an appraiser and a cutter alike, eye trouble was fatal.
His Highness’s eyes, which had been scanning my drawing, narrowed slightly. I passed him the loupe and the necklace. The moment His Highness put the loupe on, I began counting in my head. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Finally, a quiet scoff leaked out between His Highness’s lips. Thank goodness my employer had patience.
“This is what happens when you handle a treasure you can’t manage.”
After taking the loupe off, His Highness looked positively refreshed. As if he’d unraveled the secret tied to a legendary necklace.
Our employer was definitely not meek or gentle. He looked downright delighted that the king had just gotten served something nasty.
“Could you explain it to me as well?”
“A black stain means the gemstone has been contaminated. It happens when a stone has been exposed for a long time to mana that isn’t suitable for it, or when it absorbs mana beyond its capacity. The most common cause is an inexperienced handler.”
His Highness’s kind explanation even had a rhythm to it.
I turned my gaze to the spy, who was still holding the same posture. He couldn’t express his will, as if he only recognized His Highness’s orders, but maybe the load on his body couldn’t be helped—his shoulders were trembling faintly.
The amount of mana the necklace demanded was beyond anything I could even estimate. Setting aside the magic embedded in it, the gemstone value alone would come out to an astronomical figure. There was no way a spy with such weak pheromones could handle it at will.
The one contaminating the necklace was the king.
“Hearing that my cousin ‘pulled it off’ seems to have made my elder brother impatient. Then again, his ears were dull, so I’m sure he wanted to see clearly.”
It was a remark loaded with meaning. An heir had been born to a royal who held succession rights, and the king had belatedly confirmed the fact and apparently flown into a rage. He also seemed anxious about whether even His Highness—who possessed powerful pheromones—might now face a variable.
“So you heard the news before the king did.”
What surprised me most was that my employer, who lived in seclusion, had learned the news before the king.
Even if His Highness possessed powerful pheromones, he could never become king, and yet I felt certain that even if a time came when he was politically disadvantaged, he wouldn’t just sit there and take it.
“My lord Duke.”
“What.”
“From now on, I’ll work even harder.”
To be honest, going forward, I probably wasn’t going to get fired unless something truly extreme happened. If I said it out loud, it would sound insolent, just like His Highness said—but the fact that I’d secured a firm position in this manor didn’t change. Facts were facts.
That didn’t mean I could ever think it was fine to work lazily. My firm position ultimately stemmed from my rare constitution. Sure, I had the skill to produce a precise reverse-engineering drawing of a royal treasure, and I could make good coffee—but those weren’t the most important reasons.
Rare didn’t mean unique. It meant someone else with a constitution like mine could appear. If His Highness needed a Beta unaffected by pheromones, there might come a day he chose someone else instead of me.
No matter how low the probability, if it happened to me, it became one hundred percent. If I didn’t want to lose my job, I had to work harder going forward. And of course, I trusted that hard work would come with a hefty allowance.
“Seriously. You’re an insolent attendant.”
My employer met my gaze of conviction, shook his head as if he was dumbfounded, and crooked a finger to summon the spy. Maybe it was my imagination, but the spy shuffled forward with stiff steps like a rat that had been caught. He received the necklace His Highness tossed back at him as if it were precious, then put it on again around his neck.
“Please keep that drawing, my lord Duke.”
There was a limit to how much I, a mere attendant, could conceal a drawing of a national treasure.
Without saying anything in particular, His Highness looked down at the drawing I’d made. Soon it went into a desk drawer, and then I heard the click of the drawer locking.
Meaning—there was nothing to criticize in my drawing after all.
The corner of my mouth rose on its own. Seeing my smiling face, His Highness looked at me like he couldn’t believe it.
※
“Ignis.”
With the ignition word meaning fire, a ball of flame rose above His Highness’s palm. I couldn’t hide my uneasy expression at the absurd sight.
“Since you can handle the ruby in your port skillfully, starting with fire magic is best. Recall the sensation from when you poured mana into the ruby. Think of it as applying heat to the air above your palm. It’s a fire you summoned, so it can’t harm you. So don’t be scared—why are you making that face?”
My knowledge of science was extremely narrow. The only things I properly knew were related to gemstones: their constituent elements, the conditions of their formation, hardness, that sort of thing. I’d only heard the word thermodynamics. But even someone like me knew that red flames meant a lower temperature and blue flames meant a higher one. Welding tools were something I’d used often.
And above His Highness’s palm—where he was showing me magic as a “demonstration”—a vivid blue flame was roaring up. The light was so intense that covering my eyes with my hand wasn’t enough—I had to turn my head away. I had no choice. It was stronger than a welding arc.
“Ah. I overdid it.”
Only then did His Highness cancel the spell. I finally opened my eyes, but the afterimage still made the world swim. That strange fire—or was it light magic?—right in front of my face, plus the chandelier on the ceiling reflecting it, made it worse.
“Is it okay to practice magic here?”
The place His Highness had brought me to teach me magic was the banquet hall.
“It’s wide, and it’s the only empty place.”
The homeowner’s answer was simple and clear. It sounded like there would never be a banquet held here. If anything, it was as if he’d found a proper use for a wide space.