Someone had slipped a fairly lethal poison into the soup I tasted.
When Resina learned that, her mana raged like a summer storm. Every attendant except me had rolled back their eyes and wet themselves. I hadn’t checked, but the effects had probably spread throughout the entire estate.
Hmm… Had Resina’s mana already caused more harm than the poison itself?
“How dare they… poison… my Crow…”
“Calm down, Resina. Look, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me. I’m all right.”
“Really? Then will you marry me?”
Listen, Resina. Conversations have a natural flow, and relationships have stages. I thought you needed to learn a little more about both.
Yes, please stop drawing your short blade so casually. Threatening people like that wasn’t right. Surely you wanted a sustainable relationship too. Now, put that back in its sheath.
“Ugh!”
“Don’t ‘ugh’ me. No one can enter the room while your mana is running wild. You’re a good girl, so you can put your mana away properly, can’t you?”
Why did her intelligence drop so dramatically whenever I was involved?
I stroked her head for several minutes as though performing a ritual to soothe a restless spirit. With her eyes slightly glazed, Resina reluctantly withdrew her mana.
Mr. Serge, who had apparently been waiting outside, entered with a pale face.
“Young miss. Did something happen?”
“You’re late.”
“Yes, ma’am. My apologies.”
Mr. Serge bent at the waist and bowed his head.
Between Resina, the boss’s granddaughter, and Mr. Serge, his sworn younger brother, Resina apparently held the overwhelmingly higher position. The difference in their mana was equally vast. Mr. Serge’s mana was around High grade, but Resina stood somewhere near the very top even among Special grades.
If I was going to live in this estate, I needed a firmer grasp of these hierarchies and relationships. No one would explain them properly, though.
“There was poison in my breakfast soup.”
“Yes, ma’am. The food taster was… Crow. How’s your body?”
“I’m fine. But it would be lethal if an ordinary person ate it, so I think you should stop everyone’s breakfast and inspect the food. The poison came from monkshood, a poisonous herb that’s relatively easy to cultivate. Can I leave the response and investigation to you, Mr. Serge?”
At my words, Mr. Serge nodded and took the tray from the table.
My knowledge of alchemy might have allowed me to help, but this wasn’t a situation where someone who didn’t even belong to the organization should push himself forward. Handing the entire response over to him was probably the right choice.
Silence descended on the room after he left.
“I’m glad none of the poison reached your mouth, Resina. For now, I need to wake the other attendants.”
“Yes. Have all of them bathed.”
“All right. They’ve got all kinds of things leaking from every opening in their bodies, so they’re in quite a state… I’ll need to clean the room too. Could you wait somewhere else? I’ll finish quickly.”
I began waking my white-eyed coworkers one by one.
If I used my subspace magic at full strength, I could have cleaned the room in an instant. But I didn’t want to use it too spectacularly where others could see, so I deliberately held back and cleaned everything at a brisk but reasonable pace.
The one good thing to come out of this incident was that many of the people who had treated me coldly suddenly reversed course and became kind.
Perhaps they wouldn’t click their tongues at me anymore. Apparently, someone who could withstand Resina’s intimidation was rarer than I’d thought.
◆ ◆ ◆
The chief alchemist’s workshop stood within the estate grounds. Astonishingly, a narrow, hidden passage inside it led directly to the boss’s chambers.
There was a locked door along the way, so it wasn’t as though anyone could pass freely at any time.
“…Isn’t it a problem to let an outsider like me learn this kind of confidential information? I have no intention of spreading it around or abusing it, but still.”
Magic existed in this world. Prying into another person’s abilities was a serious breach of etiquette, but there might be someone whose magic could draw out memories.
In my opinion, they needed to handle sensitive information more carefully.
As usual, I approached the boss’s bed.
Various diagnostic devices stood haphazardly around him. I wanted to monitor things like the concentration of magical elements in his blood at all times. I had made every one of those devices myself.
“Oh, there you are, Crow.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Not a problem in the world. In fact, I’m healthier than I was before they poisoned me. I’m so bored I might go invade another family’s turf! Gahaha!”
Coming from him, that didn’t sound like a joke.
As I thought that, the boss flared his mana.
“Come on, surely it’s been long enough for me to drink some liquor?”
“No, it hasn’t… I explained this yesterday too. Until your mana organ recovers a little more, you can’t spare enough mana for your liver. Shortening your own life is your choice, but the Cineraria Family isn’t in a position where its boss can die with peace of mind, is it? You aren’t a child, so don’t trouble everyone around you by throwing a tantrum.”
“Heh heh heh… What are you, my mother?”
Well, he behaved like a naughty child. This old man.
The treatment followed its usual course. I used magic tools to quantify the condition of his body, then broke down the results and explained them one by one. I made small adjustments to the path toward full recovery based on his current state and considered any necessary changes to his medicines and meals. I repeated that process almost every day.
Apparently, doctors and apothecaries in this world generally gave their patients very little detailed explanation. I understood the desire to keep knowledge secret, but that was bound to become a headache later.
I was merely an amateur who had dabbled in alchemy, which made me even less courageous about deciding a treatment plan without consulting the patient. Admittedly, doctors in my previous world had explained many things to me, so that image influenced me heavily.
As I worked, Chief Medical Officer Medis watched and nodded repeatedly.
“Crow, your treatment is very convincing.”
“That’s not something you should say to a ten-year-old back-alley doctor.”
“Hehehe… If you belittle yourself, you make my worth—when I could do even less than you—seem like rubbish. Couldn’t you at least accept praise honestly?”
I hesitated briefly, then nodded. It was true that I was an unlicensed doctor, but it was equally true that the boss’s condition had improved.
“I’ve learned a lot from you too, Medis.”
“Have you?”
“Yeah. I was missing a lot of fundamental medical knowledge. And I never imagined magic that controls insects could be so useful for treatment.”
I’d had many opportunities to observe his insect-control magic, and it impressed me time after time. I couldn’t imitate it.
He treated wounds by covering them with slugs raised on medicine, sent ants into the digestive tract to carry remedies, and controlled wasps that injected drugs. Yes, it looked grotesque, but it was extraordinarily effective.
“You’ve taught me a great deal, Medis. Not only the knowledge found in books, but how to combine it with my own magic and apply it in the field… It gave me a lot to think about. I realized how much of an amateur I am at medicine. I need to study more.”
“Hehehe. Still, you may eventually reproduce everything my insect-control magic does with magic tools. I feel as though you’ve thoroughly stolen my thunder as chief medical officer. What am I going to do with you?”
The boss looked equally amused, joining Medis’s quiet laughter.
“Heh heh heh. That’s right… Only a short while ago, I’d prepared myself for the end of my life. But it appears death missed its chance. Following your instructions made my health improve before my eyes… Now I’ve completely lost the will to die.”
Good. I wouldn’t have slept well if I’d simply let my friend’s grandfather die.
Incidentally, this world had no medical licenses. Instead, alchemist qualifications were divided into grades and required difficult examinations.
Alchemists possessed knowledge across a broad range of fields, including medicine, pharmacology, science, and engineering. Many were employed by nobles or wealthy people as doctors and apothecaries. Some became smiths, magic-tool artisans, or scholars, but all of them were well-paid elites.
Naturally, at ten years old, I wasn’t even eligible to sit an alchemist’s examination. If I remembered correctly, the minimum age for the Low-Rank Alchemist test was twelve. I didn’t currently intend to obtain a qualification anyway. All I wanted was my slow life.
As I thought about that, the boss gave a faint smile.
“By the way, Crow. Are you planning to become Resina’s husband?”
“Resina seems to think so. But I’ve never wanted to rise through the underworld. My dream is to live a slow life on the frontier… How did things turn out like this?”
“Gahaha! That’s life.”
The boss was certainly enjoying himself.
“This is excellent, excellent indeed. The current candidates for next underboss have all been rather uninspiring. Resina is by far the most outstanding member of the organization’s younger generation, but the Cineraria Family has no precedent for making a woman its heir… Yet she’s brought home a fine husband. I could entrust both my granddaughter and the family to you.”
“Hmm? I have a terrible feeling about this.”
“If you were the kind of man who got cold feet before my mana and simpered that I should drink as much as I wanted, I’d never entrust my granddaughter to you. But Crow, you have the nerve to shrug off even my mana and Resina’s. You don’t cower before authority, and your abilities are excellent. For someone so young, I think you show remarkable promise. Above all else, Resina seems extremely fond of you.”
Wait, wait. Given the direction of this conversation, I didn’t need such a glowing evaluation.
“—Crow. I nominate you as a candidate for the next underboss.”
Now was your chance to reconsider. No, really.
“Once I recover, I plan to smoke out the traitors and burn them to ash. Then, when the time is right… I don’t know how many years it’ll take, but I intend to hand the boss’s seat over to my son. When that happens, stand beside Resina as the organization’s number two—as the underboss who will succeed my son as boss. You have my nomination.”
“Um… Don’t you think that’s going a little far?”
“Heh heh heh. You’re still only a candidate. Whether you actually become the next underboss depends on what you accomplish from here, and there are other candidates. But everyone in this estate has now learned in their bones what happens if we take you away from Resina. We can’t have her rampaging with that absurd amount of mana. And you’re the only person, before or since, capable of holding that shrew’s reins.”
The boss burst into another hearty fit of laughter.
Well now, this was troublesome. Was it time to tuck my tail between my legs and flee to the frontier? But we still hadn’t identified the mastermind. If nothing else, I wanted to prevent Resina from being poisoned to death.
Hmm. What was I going to do?