Nngh. I let out a groan and barely managed to sit up. I did mana breathing because it really felt like I was going to die, but I was also worried I’d be told to cast magic again.
“Let’s stop here for today.”
Haa.
When I heard the prince’s voice, I was genuinely relieved. I knew more than enough that he was an excellent teacher, but from the side taking it, it couldn’t help but feel brutal. And it made me doubt my talent, too—considering it took a full year just to get to the point where I wouldn’t lose consciousness.
“Then I’ll be going now. Have a comfortable night.”
When he lets me off nicely, I should run—no, go back—fast.
“Yeah. Thanks to you, I’ll have a comfortable night tonight.”
It was praise for the fact that, today, he hadn’t had to give me any emergency treatment.
Praise, right. Over the last year, my employer had gotten a bit more slick with his words. Maybe I contributed to his growth, or maybe he evolved on his own.
I came out after closing the doors to the banquet hall, the one that had never once held a banquet. Unlike me, who could collapse into bed immediately after being worked to the limit, the prince doesn’t look like he’ll return to his bedroom.
There’s no sign his insomnia is improving. If he couldn’t reduce fatigue through mana breathing, he would have collapsed at any time. After I sincerely attended to him—cutting down on caffeine and making him get thirty minutes of sunlight a day—the frequency of his headaches went down a little, but they still hadn’t disappeared.
Maybe it’s a backlash from being born with such strong pheromones.
The prince’s rut is approaching.
After leaving the banquet hall, his footsteps won’t head to the bedroom, but to his study.
Because a time is coming when he’ll be forced to stop doing everything, he’s been staying up all night working. During the day, the meetings never stop.
Recently, the overwhelming majority of guests invited to his study have been jewelers. The prince was buying up massive quantities of Melly diamonds.
The value of a single Melly diamond isn’t all that great. Even so, the jewelers were desperate to comply with the prince’s demands. Partly because the quantity he demanded was so large, but merchants had other schemes in mind.
I raised my wrist to gauge the time. Yeah, my wrist.
The reason the jewelers’ eyes were bloodshot was this wristwatch.
One of the prince’s other positions is Duke of Wesel. In Wesel, he owned vast wheat fields, forests, and mines. The previous monarch had been the queen—his grandmother. It was land his father had passed down to him: the queen’s son, the crown prince who never became king, and then the man who became a deposed crown prince in the end because he married a devoted omega as a second marriage, dying before the long-lived queen did.
He wasn’t a feudal lord with military and judicial authority like the Middle Ages—he was a landowner—but it was land where the prince could exert tremendous influence. Even if he couldn’t go down there often because of the king’s pressure.
Since I came here, the prince had visited Wesel exactly once. Which means I’d only been there once, too.
It was far from the capital, no different from the fishing village where I first opened my eyes, but the city’s scale and prosperity couldn’t even be compared to that barren fishing village.
Wheat farming was the main source of income, but it was also a place with many tourists who came to see the beautiful lake and the crystal mines.
There, I saw a product that was extremely useful and had huge growth potential.
“Seems too big for you to use yourself, doesn’t it?”
In a shop displaying various crystal crafts, I found it.
I hadn’t gotten the storm growth of thirty centimeters every six months, but I was still growing steadily, and my hands were growing along with me. Now that I’d completely grown out of those childlike maple-leaf hands, it was something I had to grip so hard my grasp felt like it would split open. Something that vibrated with extreme regularity.
It was an adult product made of crystal.
“This is seriously huge.”
When I got so excited, the prince’s eyebrow twitched. Ignoring his reaction, which was not positive at all, I bought up every type of adult product in that store.
Not with my money, but with the prince’s.
“I know you’re not planning to use it yourself, but do you really think this is useful?”
When the prince asked, holding the biggest and thickest one in his hand, I shook my head. Honestly, it was extremely grotesque. Unrealistic, too. But I felt like I’d seen an object that grotesque and unrealistic in size before. Even if it had been in a chaotic moment. That big and ominous thing—if it wasn’t the prince’s hand, then there…
No. I shook my head even harder.
Anyway, that one was a fail.
“That’s not it. The movement is too irregular. Well, the maker probably made it with that intention, so to the maker it might be an excellent result, but it’s not what I’m trying to find.”
“I still don’t know what kind of interesting thing you’re trying to find, but I do know there’ll be an interesting rumor starting tomorrow.”
“Uh, rumors are not okay. Could you use a little influence, Duke?”
“It had better be a truly interesting case. If not, the amount that gets billed to you will be considerable.”
That was a genuinely terrifying threat. If I hadn’t been confident I could find something interesting, I would’ve put what I was holding down immediately.
But I was confident, so I could withstand the prince’s threat. His flowerlike smile was truly scary, but I decided to think of it as the price of borrowing the prince’s power when I was nothing but an attendant.
Among the many items, each with different sizes and vibration cycles, it took a bit of time to find what I really wanted. I had to find one that vibrated perfectly regularly.
“This one.”
Unfortunately, what I was looking for was that very biggest and most ominous one. It was also the first thing I checked. I just hadn’t realized it had a separate mode that produced regular vibration.
Worried the prince’s expression might twist into something ominous too, I quickly added,
“This is a clock.”
“What?”
“More precisely, it will become a component of a clock. Instead of a complicated mechanical device, a vibrating crystal fragment will tell one second. There’s no need to wind it every day. The parts will be drastically reduced, so the error in time will be very small. There will be fewer breakdowns, too. And in the empty space, besides simply telling time, we could add other functions.”
“Certainly… interesting.”
In the past, my father’s jewelry shop—like jewelers back then—had also doubled as a watch shop. I grew up seeing as many watches as jewels. When I stopped wearing the watch with the world’s most famous mouse character on it, my father also shut down the watch side of the business.
When I was young, it wasn’t rare to see my father repairing watches, either. Thanks to that, I have memories of seeing the insides of a watch.
Something packed tight with mechanical parts, and something containing a motor and semiconductors. To me, watches could be divided into those two types.
The watches of this era were, naturally, the former: mechanical watches. The kind that move with weights or a mainspring. In the twenty-first century, those are watches only luxury brands make.
In contrast, the watches commonly seen in Korea were mostly the latter: quartz watches, whether they had digital displays or analog hands.
The key component of a quartz watch is crystal.
It uses the property of crystal that, when voltage is applied to both ends, it vibrates at a constant frequency. You need voltage—that is, a battery—but in this world, there’s magic. You also need a simple semiconductor to measure the crystal’s frequency and move a motor once per second, but magic can solve that, too. What mattered here wasn’t the level of technological development, but a shift in perception.
Unlike on Earth, where even a high-end quartz watch requires a battery replacement once a year, here a single Melly diamond would be enough to make a watch run for a lifetime. Compared to the hassle of winding it every day and resetting the time, it was a massive advantage. Convenience was the reason quartz watches swept the market the moment they appeared. On Earth, mechanical watches became expensive luxury goods, but here I thought quartz watches could even steal that market, too. The boundary between flagship and entry-level watches wasn’t even properly divided here yet.
It was a shame I hadn’t thought of it before seeing a crystal dildo.
“So all you need is a simple magic circle that converts the crystal’s movement into the movement of the second hand. You could overwhelm watchmakers in output.”
Once he had a trigger that let him shift his thinking, the prince expanded the scale in an instant. He tracked down the mages who made crystal adult products and persuaded them. The moment he promised stable, large income, all of them became the prince’s loyal magic-circle makers. He found watchmakers who’d been undervalued and were struggling to stay afloat and absorbed them, and he brought leather workshops and metal workshops into his fold.
In Wesel, crystal adult products disappeared without a trace. Complaints were directed at the prince, but he didn’t care.
“The statement is getting longer and longer.”
As the list of workshops being absorbed grew longer, the prince had looked at me, smiled, and said that. It sent a chill down my spine.
“I’m not the one who blew it up this far. I only provided the idea a little—just a small part.”
There was nothing for me to meddle in when it came to the watchmaking process. I only got involved with the crystal oscillator, and even then I only provided the idea.
Other than that, I only said things like: make it light up so you can see the time in the dark, add a perpetual calendar, show day and night, it would be nice if you could add waterproofing, and you should make a children’s version separately, not just men’s and women’s.
“And you’re the one who contributed most to driving the price of this watch through the ceiling, aren’t you?”
On the prince’s raised wrist was a watch with a black strap and a black face—an otherwise plain design that could have been monotonous—finished in lavish style with a bezel decorated by 128 Melly diamonds.