As for Lacey, she rubbed the smoothened interior of the coconut and smiled with pleasure. “Thanks, you two. I didn’t have exactly the right container, and it felt like it wouldn’t be proper to use a pot.” It was unclear what Lacey meant.
The three of them sat under the shade of a tree with rustling leaves. Lacey set the coconut shell on the ground and slid her palm over it. An abundance of water instantly formed, filling up the shell.
It was understandable that Allen would be so surprised that he forgot to breathe, but to Lacey, something this minor was a cinch. It was enough to make Dana question her own common sense.
Crafting a formula to generate water out of nothing and memorizing it would be so taxing that it’d be simpler to just go and draw water like normal. Magic really comes to her as easy as breathing. Dana gave a small sigh. Being around Lacey makes me doubt my senses.
“Now here comes the real test.” Lacey plopped something into the shell.
Whatever it was drifted down into the water, and ripples formed on the surface around it. Then the water quivered with soft waves. After some time—not very long—as they watched the choppy surface of the water, they noticed that it was giving off a gentle steam.
“The water’s boiling...!” Allen suddenly realized and gulped.
Lacey had just put in a rock. That was all. Dana and Allen watched dumbfounded as piping hot steam rose up.
“H-How? All you did was put in a rock... Oh, now I get it, it was a volcanic stone. Sheesh, you gave me a heart attack there.” Allen had been leaning forward, but now gave his astonished face a small slap and sighed in relief. Volcanic stones were a type of mana stone that were full of heat.
“Whew,” Allen breathed as he wiped the sweat off his forehead. But Lacey had an uneasy look on her face. When she saw this expression, Dana realized something.
“That’s not it, Allen. It would take a much larger chunk to boil water with a volcanic stone.”
Bigger mana stones were more powerful. Volcanic stones were basically stones imbued with fire magic. They would grow smaller as they radiated heat and eventually end up as cinders and vanish. They had an opposite essence from glacial stones, but behaved similarly.
The mana stone that Lacey had immersed in the coconut shell wasn’t large at all. It was only about the size of two thumbs put together—nowhere near strong enough to boil water.
In magical terms, water and fire were conflicting elements. Instead of spending all the effort to boil water with magic, it would be faster to just bring over kindling and boil water in a pot. Even Dana, who had only dabbled a little in magic, knew that. A mage as skilled as Lacey could make up for the elemental disadvantage with sheer technique, but she hadn’t used magic—just a mana stone.
“It’s the same method as exterminating slimes.”
“Slimes...? Oh, I get it! That’s what you did!”
“I don’t get it at all...” Allen was still confused. “Hrmmm...”
Lacey put water in the other shell half that had been put aside and demonstrated it again.
“Slimes are very weak monsters with almost no power to speak of, but conversely, our attacks barely work against them. Adventurers of old tested all kinds of methods against them. One of those methods was casting a spell on the slimes that would rapidly oscillate water. They found out that doing this would make the slimes disappear for some reason. So nowadays, oscillation magic is the standard method of exterminating slimes.”
Lacey stroked the water’s surface with her fingers. The water vibrated even more fiercely than before and disappeared in a flash.
“It’s actually because slimes are almost the same as water, so raising their temperature to the max through oscillation makes them evaporate. It’s possible to do this with fire magic as well, but it’s just more magically efficient to vibrate existing water than to create flames that don’t already exist.”
“I’d hate to be one of those slimes...” Allen had a point, but fighting monsters was historically tied to human development. Humans and monsters were inextricably linked together.
“I considered making an artifact akin to a magic stove burner to boil water, but fetching water and boiling it with fire would be too much hassle before bed, right? And putting it inside would be a fire hazard, so that limits where you’d be able to put it. I thought that maybe just putting in water and tossing in a magic stone like this would be simple enough.”
Lacey then pointed at the inside of the coconut shell and gave a shy smile. “Although I don’t have many containers here, so we had to start with making that.”
It all seemed so obvious when Lacey explained it, but Dana knew she could never have come up with this. She quietly exhaled and exchanged looks with Allen, who had a similar expression on his face. The freckled boy was making a strained smile halfway between exasperation and astonishment. He probably felt the same way as Dana.
Neither of them would ever be able to be as good as Lacey or think up an idea as clever as this.
Dana had the wrong idea about Lacey this whole time. She had thought that while she was a hard worker, she also just had a tremendous amount of natural talent as a mage. However, her true essence was different. Lacey was undeniably a genius, but not just in regards to magic. That was just one facet of her potential.
Given the opportunity, Lacey could meld a wide range of knowledge to invent something new.
Even if the individual bits of expertise were nothing special, she could draw upon the vast knowledge within her like a book and combine it. She was better than anyone else at this.
The time she’d spent on their quest, her dedication to magic, and her extensive reading experience all shaped Lacey into who she was. And in the future, Lacey would come to be involved with many more people. As she experienced more things, her field of knowledge would grow even broader. Though Lacey herself didn’t realize it, she had already taken her first steps on the way.
How would she change in the time to come?
Dana simply lamented that she couldn’t observe Lacey’s evolution up close. The girl was as skinny as a twig and constantly nervous, but she was kind. Thinking of her pulled at Dana’s heartstrings.
While she was busy steadying her breathing, Allen and Lacey talked about the temperature of the hot water in the coconut shell. Dana hurriedly wiped the corner of her eye with her fingertips.
“Say, can I give it a feel too? Yeah, I think maybe it should be a little warmer.”
“Really? I think it’d be best to have it at body temperature. And if it’s too hot, you’ll get scalded.”
“I think about this temperature is fine too,” Allen agreed.