The conversation caused my focus to snap. Without thinking, I looked up and asked, “Did you say magic?”
“Uhhh, yes. We had a warlock in our country. He was really handy to have around.”
“The dungeonstorms took him, too. He was quite the tightfisted old man, but things do feel a bit lonelier without him.”
The former Romans nodded gravely to one another. Hearing them talk so naturally about the existence of magic had me at a loss. That’s right… This world has to have magic. Mizuho had said as much from the beginning. I wondered if Million Dungeon had anything like magic-based technology or magic-based infrastructure. The innkeeper, the smith, the ex-mercenary—they all seemed like they would be plenty used to handling fire, but if they’d gotten accustomed to such convenience, it made sense that nobody could start one.
Even so… Magic? That was an entirely unknown field to me. It was scary, not knowing what it was, the threat it posed, or how easy it was to wield. I’d have to make sure of those once things calmed down.
“Just to make sure, nobody else here can use magic, right? Nobody who could use a flame spell to solve this problem I’ve been working on this whole time?”
Everyone shook their heads.
“Of course not—if we could, we’d have done it already.”
“Wouldn’t have much trouble if we could only find a whiteheat star, though…”
I had no idea what that was, but it hardly mattered. As it stood, I was the best hope of getting a blaze going. I collected myself and resumed my work.
Finally, after several attempts with a scrap of cotton, a red point the size of a pinprick formed on it. It slowly expanded its crimson territory to its surroundings. I held up the tinder, then gave a puff, causing the oxygen-induced spark to grow larger and burst into a fire.
Surprised shouts of joy erupted around me.
I laid the remaining combustibles on the scorched floor—the bird feathers, vegetable scraps, and what have you—and placed the tiny, burning bit on top of it. I blew on it carefully, and the fire grew steadily larger.
Next, I inserted the soot-smeared scrap of cloth from before and blew on it some more. Seeing the edge of the cloth catch, I got up. A flame the size of an open palm had sprouted.
“Good. We’ll make this bigger, little by little. If anyone has anything burnable, please bring it here.”
More jubilant cries rang out, these ones louder than the last.
I understood why they were happy, but the tough part was yet to come.
Most of the people who had failed to start the fire stooped down to maintain it. Lighting something was easy with the right equipment. Sustaining it, however, required a constant supply of fuel.
The three elements of fire were heat, fuel, and oxygen. Adding fuel caused a heat-induced flame to grow. As it spread, you couldn’t let the oxygen supply run out. This was the tricky bit. Fire suffocated without air circulation. Yet if the wind was too strong, it burned more quickly, exhausted its fuel, and died. Fire truly was a delicate thing.
People formed a pile of the sorts of burnables I had requested.
There was a length of rope from the executioner. Frayed and fuzzing, part of it was hanging by a single strand, so it wasn’t usable as a tether anymore. I could straighten that out, starting from the end.
There was also a translucent clump of resin—the donator said it was for covering the strings of instruments, much like pine resin. It could be employed as an accelerant.
Someone handed me a hardened piece of white animal fat. I was told it had been taken from an animal called a sawboar. It was lard, essentially. I asked about it, and as expected, it was originally for eating; we could probably use it better as a nutritional supplement instead of burning it.
There was a dried plant vine that supposedly had been a bloodsucking kudzu vine in life. These people evidently used them for a number of things. The basket from before must have been woven out of this stuff.
No sooner had I spotted a slightly older man with a striking hair color approach than he suddenly pulled off his whole head of hair and handed it to me, leaving me in shock. It was actually a sort of plant. He wasn’t making any display of eccentricity; his original hair color had also been green, according to him. He looked distraught, so I made sure it was really all right to burn, but his resolve seemed firm, and I received his offering gratefully.
Out of all the combustibles I’d mentioned, I was surprised there was no paper. Even just a single book would have been pretty useful as kindling in the initial phase, but it seemed that the material was pretty valuable in this world. What few I managed to obtain were deeds to land or buildings written on parchment in ink. They weren’t worth anything absent a country.
On the other hand, a surprising number of people had gunpowder. Altogether, it still didn’t amount to much, but when I inquired about it, I discovered that guns existed in this world! Not only that, but bombs and cannons, too, and they were commonly used in wars. Less deadly weapons also saw regular use, such as firecrackers to drive away dangerous fauna. I was glad I asked. I’d been wondering about it after learning they had matches. The possibility of getting shot was a significant, course-altering difference.
My knowledge of this world expanded in several directions just by looking at the items gathered here, and it was all fascinating. Still, it only brought me about 50 percent of the way to accomplishing the more important goal: getting fuel.
The burnable stuff used at the beginning, when trying to make the fire grow from the tinder, was called kindling. Thankfully, it seemed we’d have enough to go on. I fed a rolled-up, crumpled piece of parchment into the flame, followed by the torn-up climbing plant, the fraying rope, then the bloodsucking kudzu vine, going from small items to larger ones. I threw in the basket after taking it apart at that point, too. It was among the objects I’d recovered from the empire’s remains.
With that, the flame was now roaring. I could see the faces of those watching nearby brighten. The light and warmth of fire were a symbol of civilization. As long as you could get one going, people would find a way to survive.
“I think there were pots and pans in the things I brought. Can a few of you go to the river and fill them with water? Filter out the sand and debris using a cloth. We’re boiling it anyway, so you don’t need to get the water perfectly pure,” I said.
The refugees began moving energetically.
“Also, I’d like some stones we can put around this fire. Could you find dry ones and bring them here? The more, the better. Get enough that we’ll have extra.”
Then I began to prepare the primary fuel, the stuff that was larger than kindling. Unfortunately, this was the most scarce. At the moment, all we had were the chair legs I’d chopped and some wooden-plank scraps. It was nowhere near enough. If we needed more, we’d have to start burning clothes for real this time, but I didn’t like the idea very much. There was a chance it wouldn’t be enough, and the flame would die anyway.
To maintain the blaze as much as possible, I smeared the resin on a plank scrap and put it in. The fire roared with life in response.
Phew…
I leaned back against a pillar and exhaled.
This was the most we could do for the moment. Now we just had to maintain the flame while conserving fuel.
There was still no end to our worries—but the first step, at least, was complete.