“All right… For starters, let’s move this mountain of reference material,” Leticiel murmured, staring at the piles of papers and books she had crammed into her research room. Classes had ended for the day, and she was back in the sorcery research building. Mirandalette had plans today and had needed to hurry home, so their after-class sorcery practice had been canceled.
There were three rooms in Leticiel’s research lab, one of which she used as her main research room. But because she had been too lazy to organize her materials lately, it was getting to the point where she could barely walk through it.
“Hmm… With this much stuff, I might have to make two trips even using subspace sorcery,” she mumbled while stuffing her subspace with materials. Subspaces didn’t allow an unlimited number of items, plus there was the issue of a weight limit which she had run into while moving out of the duke’s manor. She had accumulated so many research materials that she couldn’t carry them all at once.
After stuffing her subspace to the very brink, Leticiel took her things to the library on the first floor. She would continue to store the things that she didn’t want third parties seeing—such as her modified formulas—in her own research room, but everything else would take up less space if she carried it all to the library.
Storing her modified formulas in her subspace would be the best way to keep them safe, but unfortunately, it was impossible to perform a teleportation spell while one had an expanded subspace. There hadn’t been a problem when she moved into her new manor because she had gone by carriage, but she wouldn’t be able to teleport home if she kept her formulas in the subspace. Instead, she carefully kept them locked up in her research room. This was yet another drawback of subspace magic.
“Oh?” Just as she’d finished carrying all of her materials into the library, Leticiel opened the door to the hallway and caught sight of a familiar face in the entryway.
“Ah, hello, Miss Drossell. I’m sorry to intrude.” A young man with naturally curly, ash-blond hair gave her an apologetic look.
“Erm, we met at the duke’s manor the other day, didn’t we?”
“Yes. I am Tuvalu Lut Village.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you. But why are you here?”
“Um, His Majesty asked me to deliver these materials to you,” Tuvalu replied, carefully peeking out from behind the aforementioned stack so that they would not fall, only half of his face visible.
“May I take a look?”
“Oh! Yes, of course.”
Leticiel took one page from the pile Tuvalu was holding and skimmed through it. It described the system for activating sorcery, but all of the information was fragmentary and a conclusion hadn’t been reached on how to actually cast it.
Wait, so sorcery still exists?! She’d never seen a document that described it so thoroughly in this era, when the knowledge of sorcery was supposedly lost. Her surprise that there were even people studying it in a world where magic was more common overwhelmed her excitement.
“Um, where did you get these documents?” she asked.
“Huh? Oh, these are research materials from my clan,” Tuvalu replied, matter-of-fact. Leticiel’s eyes widened.
“Research? You’re researching sorcery?”
“Yes. We have been doing so under the king’s orders. But there’s a total lack of materials, so we haven’t been able to make much progress…”
“I see.”
Tuvalu went on to explain that it had been a decade since Oswald had commanded the Village clan, his family, to study sorcery. An entire family studying for ten years and still not being able to understand how to cast sorcery just proved how few materials related to sorcery there were in this era.
Perhaps tired after holding the mountain of papers for so long, Tuvalu placed them on a nearby chair. Carrying them all by himself would surely be difficult, so Leticiel took half from him.
“Tuvalu, you mentioned a clan earlier. What clan is that?” Leticiel asked while opening the door to the library.
“Ah, you mean the Clan of Seekers?” Tuvalu scratched his cheek, smiling wryly.
Leticiel had never heard of the clan before. “Probably,” she said. “What is the clan like? Are they devoted only to researching sorcery?”
“No, I don’t think so. Though we call ourselves a clan, we’re scattered across the continent at the moment, and we all work on different things.” Shaking his head slightly, Tuvalu placed the materials he’d been holding on a bookshelf. Once his hands were free, he showed his left hand to Leticiel.
“What is that?” she asked.
“The emblem of our clan.” Although faint, she could see a bird was carved into Tuvalu’s left palm, its wings spread and in mid-flight. “But since the Clan of Seekers isn’t well-known, many citizens in the city go their whole lives without learning about the meaning behind our emblem.”
“I see…”
Leticiel felt like she’d seen it somewhere before. She got the feeling that there was someone with a similar emblem in her homeland of Regenerose. She wasn’t familiar with the name Clan of Seekers, but it had likely been given to the family later on. “Is there a special meaning to the emblem?” she asked.
“I’m not sure, but…there’s a legend that says the Clan of Seekers descended from spirits. Some people believe it’s proof of that.”
“Oh, is that so?”
“Well, it’s just a legend. The spirits have already gone extinct, so it’s just a rumor,” Tuvalu chatted, but something he said made Leticiel doubt her hearing.
What did he just say? “Um… Hold on. The spirits…are extinct?” Leticiel was in disbelief. As far as she could remember, the spirits were a race that were much more powerful and lived far longer than humans. It was hard to believe that they’d die off so easily.
Tuvalu seemed confused by her question. “Yes, it’s said that they’ve been extinct for hundreds of years already. Nowadays, they’re the stuff of fairy tales.”
“Oh…” Leticiel still struggled to come to terms with the fact, but she didn’t ask any further questions. Spirits hadn’t been very involved with the human race even a thousand years ago, but even so, they would sometimes come into the humans’ land to play. Whether or not they were truly obsolete, there was no way of finding out since she didn’t know where they were. Moving on, she said, “By the way, the headmaster said that a new member would be coming today. Was he referring to you?”
“Yes! His Majesty has ordered me to assist you in your research, Miss Drossell!” Tuvalu suddenly straightened, but his voice quivered somewhat. Was he that nervous?
“You don’t need to act so stiff. We’re going to be researching together from now on, so let’s get along.”
“Y-Yes!”
“Did you have to come a long way to arrive here? I’ll bring you some tea, so please wait a moment.”
Leticiel quickly made tea in the kitchen, which was already stocked, and they sat on the sofas in the hall, chatting amicably for a while.
Tuvalu was the second son of Viscount Village. Along with his parents, he had an older brother and a grandfather on his father’s side. However, his older brother had been adopted by another aristocrat’s family, so he currently lived with just his parents and grandfather. But when he entered the academy, he had moved into the student dorms, so he usually only exchanged letters with his family and saw them on long vacations.
“Tuvalu, have you always known about sorcery?”
“Yes. My family has passed down materials about it for generations, so I’ve always been vaguely aware of its existence and theories. Like how it uses something called aether and that aether and magical power repel each other. But that’s about it.”
“I see.”
“I’ve tried experiments through trial and error to see if I could use it myself, but since I don’t have much magical power, it didn’t work very well.”
Tuvalu didn’t seem upset with that at all. On the contrary, his eyes were shining. “I did my research using old documents and materials that have been passed down in my clan for generations,” he added.
“You have documents like that? Would it be possible to view them?”
“Yes, of course! I’ll bring them next time, so please teach me more about sorcery!”
Leticiel stared at Tuvalu, who sounded excited and was happily beaming. His eyes were filled with pure anticipation, curiosity, and passion. I think…he and I will get along well!
She could see that they had a common ground in their love for research. She hadn’t had any friends with whom she could share her sorcery research with even in her previous life, so it was a refreshing discovery.
“Still, are current international relations so unstable that His Majesty is going so far as to try and revive a power that went completely extinct at one point?” Leticiel murmured to herself after taking a sip of her warm tea. Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t paid much attention to what was going on in the continent. She had basic knowledge of each country, but she didn’t know much more than that.
“Yes, you could say that things are out of sorts in the continent of Astoria at the moment.” Tuvalu placed his teacup on the saucer, the porcelain colliding with a resounding clink. “The greatest cause is the war that occurred eleven years ago when the Lapis Nation used a strange power. Every country is wary of that unknown force.”
“A strange power…”
Eleven years ago, war had broken out between the kingdom of Platina and the Lapis Nation over the remote northern region of Sphylia, which had belonged to Platina at the time. It became known as the Sphylia War.
Both sides fought on the battlefield for a short period of only six months, but in the end, it was a major victory for the Lapis Nation. Realizing that they were outmatched, Platina had stopped the spread of war by ceding the region of Sphylia to the Lapis Nation.
“What was the power that the Lapis Nation used like?”
Oswald had also briefly mentioned the Lapis Nation’s power during her audience with him, but she hadn’t been able to ask about its characteristics or effects.