They visited the church just after lunch, so it wasn’t terribly late by the time Seiichirou got home. He wondered if Aresh was back yet.
“Welcome home, Mr. Seiichirou.” Valtom the butler had come to the door to greet him.
“Thanks. I’m back,” Seiichirou replied.
The ever-sensible vassal figured out what Seiichirou was thinking just by his gaze.
“If you are looking for Aresh, he has not yet returned.”
“Oh? Um… I see.” Seiichirou’s first impulse was to deny his intentions—it was embarrassing, after all, for someone else to see right through him. However, since he wasn’t hurting anyone by inquiring about Aresh, he decided to just come clean and ask the most knowledgeable person in the room. “Do you know when he will return?”
“It is hard to say… He sent a message saying that he will be staying with his family for the foreseeable future.”
“Excuse me?!” Seiichirou couldn’t help but exclaim at this unexpected answer.
So Aresh went back to his family the day after they had a fight, and now he was staying there for “the foreseeable future”? Was he an actual child?!
And here I was thinking about him while I was on the job…
Okay, that part was all Seiichirou’s doing and had nothing to do with Aresh. He was pretty much fooling himself there.
Seiichirou collected his thoughts and took a deep breath.
If Aresh went to his parents’ house after they had a fight, then the logical thing for Seiichirou to do was pay him a visit and apologize, but that probably wasn’t how it worked here. It would be strange for a commoner and otherworlder like himself to visit a marquess out of the blue. And besides, Aresh was an adult. He wouldn’t dump all the emotional labor onto Seiichirou so he could sort out his feelings alone.
He is a little…no, very childish in some ways, but…
Seiichirou knew that Aresh was generally considerate of Seiichirou’s place in noble society. He could trust that.
Which left one thing for Seiichirou to do.
“Very well, I understand. Please inform me when you know when he will return.”
“But of course.”
He had a mountain of tasks ahead of him. Tomorrow they would be visiting the Sorcery Department again, and although he didn’t foresee another abrupt schedule change, he had to stay on his toes. He had to plot his next course while Zoltan and Qusta handled the touring and explanations.
Seiichirou had somewhere he needed to be before that tour, so he decided to rest early.
Having a lot of work meant that he didn’t have to deal with intrusive thoughts.
Seiichirou arrived at the palace early the next morning. The tour with the Egorovans would start after the Light Hour, but Seiichirou showed up at the Wood Hour, two hours before. Although he was curious about how things were going at the Accounting Department, he had another destination in mind.
He was walking down a corridor with a high ceiling. Although one could see a magnificent garden through the humongous wood-framed windows, the sight barely even registered to Seiichirou. He simply made a beeline for the first floor of the west wing, which was near the main tower.
More often than not, he was dragged to this place without volition or consciousness, but he still knew exactly where it was.
“Excuse me, is the director here?” he asked the white-coated members of the Medical Bureau.
They led him into one of the back areas: Ciro’s personal operating room and study. As always, every inch of the high walls was crammed with books. Seiichirou wondered if the people who had a checkup here ever had something to say about it.
“Huh? Kondo?! Did you hear about it from Aresh? It’s not done yet!” Ciro Quellbus, a man with gold-green glasses and dirty blond hair, took one look at Seiichirou before gaping in shock.
“What do you mean, ‘It’s not done yet’?” Seiichirou responded, puzzled by the man’s choice of words.
“Huh? Aresh didn’t tell you about the medicine? What did you come here for, then?”
Seiichirou wanted to ask about his theory: Did living in a region rich with magic and magicules increase a person’s magical power?
But that all felt very much beside the point after that weird conversation opening.
“I came to ask your thoughts about something, but what’s this about medicine? Does it have something to do with Aresh?”
“Oh, now I’ve done it. Aresh is going to bite my head off.”
Seiichirou was just guessing here, but it sounded like Ciro had let something slip that Aresh had asked him to do in secret. Now he couldn’t just let the man off the hook. When Seiichirou repeated his question, Ciro talked easily. Perhaps he wasn’t so afraid of Aresh after all.
“He asked me to make a cure for magic-sickness and poisoning.”
“Magic poisoning, you say?” Seiichirou wondered if it was for him.
Most inhabitants of this world had innate magicule tolerance, likely because of exposure since birth. This invalidated the need for a medicinal cure for magicule poisoning. The same thing went for magic-sickness.
But Seiichirou’s level of magic resistance was only just barely good enough for everyday activities, even if it had improved by leaps and bounds since his arrival. He couldn’t consume magicule-heavy indulgences, nor could he approach magic-dense areas with ease. Although Aresh’s barrier allowed him to enter the church and Sorcery Department without issue, he would probably break out into a fever without it.
“He said that although he can normally take care of you, he can’t when he’s on military duty and whatnot.”