“It’s finally! Done…! Hee-hee!”
Myfila puffed with pride as she thrust out a vial full of some sort of dubious bright-red liquid. The glass test tube seemed to be capped by some sort of mystery meat. Several short hypodermic needles stuck out from the bit of flesh, and apparently, the liquid inside could be poured out by stabbing the flesh topper.
Cyril and I had been waiting for Myfila in one of the five parallel open-air hallways that ran midway between two of the large Academy buildings.
“You’re already showin’ us some ungodly thing at this early hour… Wait, is that what you talked about yesterday…?”
“Stop that, Myfila. That looks filthy. Throw it away.”
After the genius girl had overslept her first morning lecture by a long shot, she seemed in a much better mood than usual when she’d come to the open hallway. She was rarely one to show emotions on her face. I leaned my back against the corridor wall, which came up to my chest, as I took one of the vials with the liquid and black-and-red flesh. “What’s it made of?” I asked with a chagrined smile.
The moment I held the vial up, I sensed magic in the red liquid.
“This isn’t dragon’s lifeblood, is it?”
I looked over at Myfila, and she grinned proudly at me as she stuck her chest out and put her hands on her hips. “It’s a tonic. You’ll need magic in reserve to mobilize Pandora for a long time.”
I didn’t even hesitate to blurt out, “Are you an idiot?”
Then I kept going, “Dragon’s blood is toxic. Even if I could replenish my magic with this, I’d still croak.”
Then again, if that was common sense to me, it’d be a problem that a genius like Myfila would have already anticipated. “Don’t worry. You won’t die,” she insisted, with a huge, very smug grin on her face.
“Dragon’s blood normally kills people because their white blood cells keep proliferating and consume a person from inside. But if you stop the cells from multiplying, you won’t die. You’ll just feel sick.”
“Still sounds unreasonable. Even if you decreased their ability to proliferate by two hundred whatever units, they still wouldn’t be completely inactive.”
“I extracted the peptic juices of the dracogestion tree and mixed it in.”
“The what? Isn’t that the rare tree from Great Schulnov Forest?” I said, and Myfila gave a big nod in the affirmative. She knocked together her two fists in front of her chest.
“Its peptic juices don’t break apart the white blood cells, but it does prevent hematopoietic stem cells from forming into them.”
“And that’s really benign to humans? What happens to human blood cells, then?”
“It actually used to be prized as a salve for venomous snake bites in the past. Also, I already tried the tonic after I finished it, and I just felt a little feverish.”
Cyril and I both spat out at the same time. Neither of us had been expecting Myfila to use her own body as a test subject. “What do you think you’re doing, ya nitwit?!” Obviously, both of us were panicked by that.
Cyril picked Myfila up in his arms almost as fast as a beast.
“This is an actual nightmare, Myfila. Did you really inject dragon’s blood into yourself…?” Cyril said.
He found the needle marks on her slender neck, which stuck out of her baggy robes. After that, he checked every inch of her to make sure there wasn’t anything wrong. Finally, feeling that her face was just as soft and springy as usual was what seemed to have decided it for him that she was fine.
She didn’t seem to enjoy the attention, but she also didn’t stop him.
“If you want to test it out again, at least ask Feil to do it instead,” Cyril said.
“Ya couldn’t convince me to do that for a million gants,” I said, but internally, I remembered the night before.
Why hadn’t I noticed the injection marks on her neck when she’d come into my room? And why hadn’t I asked her more about why she had a fever? And why had our normally mascot-like Myfila come on to me like that? I shouldn’t have just been reading a spellbook without a care in the world back then.
“Hey, Myfila, next time you try somethin’ dangerous, at least do it when other people are around. Ya could’ve even beaten me or Cyril awake if you wanted to.”
“Uh-huh. Okay.”
“Haah… You don’t seem like you’re takin’ this too seriously… Please, Myfila. Cyril and I care about ya way more than you think.”
“Uh-huh. I know that,” she said again.
Cyril and I could only share a look and let out long sighs, then we somehow composed ourselves again.
“Sorry. She came all the way to my room yesterday, and I didn’t even notice.”
“How could you have? Nobody would have guessed that she injected herself with dragon’s blood.”
Then the two of us stared at Myfila as she just stood in the corridor, and we both sighed deeply again.
“Still, dragon’s blood, huh? That’s pretty ridiculous.”
“Yeah, I don’t want to admit it…but honestly, this is revolutionary.”
“Heh-heh! I know!”
Magic tonics already existed, but they put a large burden on the consumer and also had little effect for the costs. But considering dragon’s blood was basically almost pure magic, being able to inject it straight into your veins meant that it’d probably be incomparable to the current products on the market.
I held up the eerie test tube again. The summons festival had lax rules compared with the ranking matches at the Academy. I was pretty sure there were idiots who brought in artifacts that were practically national treasures in past festivals, so a homemade tonic was nothing. But that line of thought also frightened me a little. That was just how far people were willing to go to win in this world.
“…Must’ve cost a lot,” I said.
“Don’t worry. I knew you’d never try it out if it did, so I only used odds and ends I had around to make it.”
“But why else would you use dracogestion-tree peptic juices?”
“For the temporal lizard rearing. It’s perfect for melting off their old skin when they’re molting.”
“…An’ what’s the maximum dose?”
“In theory, four per day. But you should limit it to two. If you get a nosebleed, that’s a warning sign.”
“I see. Seems good, then.”
Then I flipped around. I set both my arms and my chin on the edge of the hallway wall and looked over at the students walking down the next corridor as I murmured quietly to myself, “Can’t even find Torrenoxion, and the festival just keeps gettin’ closer.”
“Didn’t you inquire at the royal library for it? How did that go?” Cyril asked me as he gave Myfila a piggyback ride on his shoulders.
I gave him a wry grin and poked at the enigmatic piece of flesh stoppering the test tube. “They sent me a polite reply sayin’ they haven’t got it.” When I saw a procession of girls appear at the end of the corridor as I absentmindedly watched it, my eyebrows went up.
“Far as I know, there might only be ten copies in the world—and they might be owned privately. Might need to go out on a long journey to find the legendary rare spellbook.”
The girls were Sasha Shidoh Zultania’s first-year devotees.
Then again, she sure didn’t look like some rigid royal accompanied by her respectful retinue… She and the girls around her were all smiling. It seemed like they were chatting up a storm while heading to their next lecture.
Suddenly, Sasha, who’d almost been heading up the group, noticed me in the corridor next to theirs.
Uh.
She gave me a quick wink.
The girls talking with her hadn’t seen it, so the only ones who’d witnessed the princess’s little bit of mischief were me, Cyril, and Myfila.
Cyril, who was quick to pick up on things, asked me, “Did anything happen between you and Sasha?”
All I said was “I dunno.” Then I changed the subject. “We’ve got two weeks till the summons festival. I gotta finally consider what’ll happen if I need to give up on findin’ the Torrenoxion…” I let out a heavy sigh.
“What do you mean you expect Sasha to win?! Huh?!”
We looked around when we heard the sudden shout and found a fight developing in the corridor right below us.
“I got the key! The key to doom that’ll make sure nobody can stand against me!”
It was Bernhart Hadcheck, yelling at the top of his lungs to the point where his voice was on the verge of cracking. The guy had grabbed onto the lapels of one of his cronies. The other henchmen were standing around like they had no idea what to do about Bernhart’s outburst.
“I’m gonna win at the summons festival! I’m the only name you pip-squeaks should mention when it comes to that!”
I raised my face and gave Cyril and Myfila a bold grin.
“Seems like everybody’s desperate to win the li’l festival.”
Then I handed the magical tonic Myfila had made back to her.
I planned to head back out that that day before work to run around Raddermark, continuing my search for the Torrenoxion.