WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: LilGuyBlastoise
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ I Made Magic Easier by Changing the Formula ◈
Chapter 3: A Secret Found in an Abandoned Doodle
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“Hans, take this.”
Near the end of the meal, Father placed a silver coin on the table.
It was half the repair fee he had received from the Valderk household’s butler.
“I haven’t properly given you any pocket money all this time. Buy some meat with your friends, or get a book you like. You saved us earlier, after all.”
Father looked much more at ease.
It was probably because he was free from the pressure of that one gold coin.
“Thank you, Father. I’ll use it well.”
Of course, I had no intention of spending this money on meat.
Deep in a drawer in my room sat an old tin can.
Inside was every coin I had diligently saved while working as a library assistant.
[Western Continent Trading Company, 40 Common Shares]
I had started with ten silver a year ago. Now I had forty silver.
It was an investment based on information I had picked up while overhearing nobles at the library.
‘The war will end soon.’
If my analysis was correct, these bargain-priced shares would rise at least tenfold.
‘Normally, I should invest this silver there, too.’
But I had a more urgent use for it now.
An investment for magical research.
“Father, can I use the basement starting this evening? My things have piled up, and the attic is getting cramped.”
“The basement? It hasn’t been used in a long time, so it must be quite dirty.”
“That’s fine. I’ll clean it up myself.”
The attic had a window. If I experimented at night, there was a chance the light would leak out.
The basement, on the other hand, was a perfectly private room.
It was ideal for my secret laboratory.
“Fine. Use it as you wish. Just watch out for bugs and rats.”
Permission granted.
With a light step, I left the house and headed to work at the library.
‘That bastard isn’t here today.’
Felix, the spoiled young master who always seemed desperate to tear me apart whenever we met.
‘Days when Felix isn’t at the library are peaceful.’
I dusted between the shelves as usual.
My hands moved slowly, but my eyes moved quickly.
Then I found two newly arrived books.
“Introduction to Second-Tier Levitation”
“Third-Tier Spell Formula Reinforcement Theory”
‘While pretending to dust...’
Flutter...
I quickly flipped through the pages once, then returned the books to their places.
That was enough.
Two new spellbooks had been added to the shelves in my mind.
I worked myself ragged, and before I knew it, it was time to leave.
‘There’s somewhere I need to stop before going home today.’
An alley on the outskirts of Rowen, thick with acrid smoke and the smell of iron.
Unidentified parts, rusty farm tools, and broken equipment were piled up like mountains.
I made my way through them to an old man’s stall beneath a worn tent.
“Oh! Hans. What brings you here today?”
The one-eyed old man puffed on a pipe as he greeted me.
“Grandpa, can I look through that pile of stones in the corner?”
The place I pointed to held dull, gray stones stuffed into a wooden crate.
Depleted mana crystals.
They were waste products, empty shells after all their mana had been used.
“That? It’s trash that isn’t even good for firewood. What do you want with it?”
“I want to use it as decoration.”
“Help yourself.”
“Thank you.”
Page 342 of “Mana Crystal Mineralogy,” a specialized book that had been gathering dust in a corner of the library.
[Some mana crystals cannot release 100% of their mana, leaving residue inside. This is called mana sediment. It is difficult to distinguish with the naked eye, but when light is refracted through the crystal, a faint red deposit can be seen...]
‘Let’s see if that’s true.’
I picked up a stone and held it to the sunlight.
‘This one is completely empty. Rejected.’
I tossed it aside and picked up another.
I examined dozens in quick succession.
They all looked like identical gray stones, but I could see subtle differences.
‘Found one.’
When I angled the light across it, I saw a faint red speck like a drop of blood at its center.
‘This one isn’t used up. It’s clogged.’
That was how I picked out ten depleted mana crystals with mana residue still inside.
“Grandpa, I’ll take these. One copper each means ten copper, right?”
One hundred copper was worth one silver coin.
“Ten copper, my foot! Just take them. Think of it as clearing out my trash.”
Yes! I had made ten copper.
Cheering inwardly, I slipped the depleted mana crystals into my pocket.
* * *
After dinner, I went down to the fabric shop’s basement.
I placed my things on the workbench.
Ten depleted mana crystals.
I secured the one that seemed in the best condition in a clamp.
‘My mana is extremely limited. The problem is that I collapse from exhaustion after using magic once.’
So I needed to extract mana from these depleted crystals and consume it in place of my own.
They would serve as an external mana source.
‘Slowly, as slowly as possible...’
I concentrated mana into the hand holding an awl and inserted it into a crack in the spent crystal.
I needed to break apart the residue blocking it.
Tick. T-tick.
A tiny sound rang out.
If I lost control of my strength, the stone would shatter.
Thirty minutes later.
Hummm...
The gray stone trembled faintly.
A weak thread of light, barely visible, emerged.
‘It’s too weak.’
Its output was not even one-tenth that of a proper mana crystal.
‘Let’s connect a few of them in a circuit.’
I linked three depleted mana crystals in series.
Whoosh!
That produced mana output equal to about one candle flame.
‘It worked.’
It was still nowhere near enough for combat magic requiring powerful output.
‘But I can keep a first-tier everyday spell running continuously.’
The fact that I could experiment while using almost none of my own mana made this a tremendous success.
Rustle!
I dumped scraps of cloth onto the workbench.
They were white cotton pieces the size of handkerchiefs. The centers were black with soaked-in oil, while the edges were completely frayed.
‘This will become... new.’
I placed my hand over the cloth and drew in the mana flowing from the depleted crystals.
‘Trace Erasure won’t be enough for this grime. It needs cleaning.’
Tss.
Mend the tears and remove the grime.
[First-Tier Composite Formula: Tear Mending + Grime Cleansing]
Hum! Hummm!
The depleted mana crystals trembled as they released mana.
The frayed threads along the cloth’s edges began to move on their own, knotting together and pulling taut.
Then the oily grime broke apart under the mana’s vibrations and scattered into the air.
‘It worked. Success!’
The ragged cloth turned into a milky-white handkerchief.
It had a soft sheen.
When I smelled it, the musty odor was gone, replaced by a fresh scent.
It was practically new cloth now.
At a market stall, I could get at least three copper for it, perhaps five if I was lucky.
“I can make a decent amount of money this way.”
Excited, I worked through the night.
I restored a total of thirty pieces of cloth.
Unfortunately, the depleted mana crystals lost their light completely and crumbled apart.
‘What? It’s morning already.’
I had not slept at all, but seeing the thirty finished pieces of cloth filled me with pride.
‘It can’t be helped. I need to get to work quickly.’
* * *
Rowen Third Library.
Hallway outside the Second Reading Room.
“Damn it! Why do the calculations keep going wrong? My formula is perfect! So why? Why? These damned variables!”
A booming shout shattered the library’s silence.
Professor Kael, known as the Flame Maniac, stormed into the hallway in a flutter of red robes and hurled the stack of parchments onto the floor.
“Throw all of this away! I don’t even want to look at it!”
Dale, the professor’s assistant, rushed out behind Professor Kael and gathered the papers with a pale face.
“Professor! Please calm down. Isn’t this the draft of the Chain Explosion formula you have been researching night after night since last month? You can’t throw it away!”
“What draft? The mana array keeps backflowing on the third line! It’s nothing but worthless garbage!”
Professor Kael panted furiously and drove a staff into the floor with a thud.
“Get it out of my sight. Take it straight to the annex incinerator! I’m ashamed in case anyone sees it, so burn it all until not even a pinch of ash remains!”
Bang!
The professor’s office door shut.
Only silence and scattered papers remained in the hallway.
“Th-this...!”
Dale looked close to tears while collecting the papers scattered across the floor.
They were notes Professor Kael had scrawled in haste whenever his research hit a wall.
Doodles packed with equations, drawings ruined by splattered ink.
“Haah... This is driving me crazy. Do I really have to burn all of it?”
That was when I quietly approached.
“Assistant, would you like some help?”
“Oh? Hans.”
Dale’s face brightened.
The perfect person to dump this troublesome task on had appeared.
“Yes, good timing. The professor is making a fuss about burning them immediately. Can you handle it? I’m swamped with an academic society report right now.”
“Of course. I’ll take care of it neatly.”
I promptly accepted the basket full of papers.
“Be careful. It may look like meaningless scribbling to you, but these are the professor’s research materials. If they leak outside, it will be a disaster, so burn every last sheet.”
“Don’t worry. It’s not like this is my first time.”
Dale gave a small laugh.
The expression clearly said, what good would it do even if an ignorant commoner looked at them?
“I’ll be going, then.”
On the way to the incinerator, I discreetly scanned the papers in the basket.
“...!”
Dale had been right.
To ordinary people, even ordinary mages, this would look like the scribbling of a madman.
The handwriting crawled like worms, while unidentifiable symbols and numbers ran wild across the pages.
Every word was written in code.
Professor Kael was famous for being suspicious, so the professor always used a unique cipher in research notes.
Even Assistant Dale had never dared try to peek at the contents.
There was no point, since Dale would not understand it even after reading it.
‘This looks like the pattern I compared against an ancient-language translation last year.’
I could see it.
Every cryptography book in the library and Professor Kael’s past cipher patterns were already stored in my mind.
‘What kind of magic is this now?’
The incinerator’s flames roared brightly.
After confirming that no one was nearby, I tossed the papers into the fire one by one.
Fwoosh.
Before the first page burned away, my eyes raced across it.
[Fifth-Tier: Chain Explosion, Failure Record]
‘Is the issue with the core overheating? It looks like the cooling formula was built in series instead of parallel...’
This was fifth-tier magic.
High-level magic far beyond anything I could imitate at my current level.
And it was incomplete.
Still, I memorized it.
‘Just knowing why it failed will be valuable study later.’
The second page was a crumpled note that had been shoved into a corner.
[Basic Spell Formula Experiment: Flame Barrier, Stabilized Version]
‘Huh?’
My eyes widened.
This was not a failed formula.
While researching fifth-tier magic, Professor Kael had checked a lower fourth-tier formula that served as its foundation and jotted down this note.
It was only scribbling to the professor because it was too easy, but this fourth-tier magic was knowledge beyond my dreams.
I had memorized every spellbook up to the third tier while organizing the library.
But the library had no fourth-tier spellbooks.
‘As expected of fourth-tier magic... The formula is unbelievably beautiful.’
Others would not know, since it was written in code, but I could see the blueprint of a perfect magic circle.
It was an improved formula that used 20% less mana than the Flame Barrier in standard textbooks while increasing its strength by 1.5 times.
It would take several hundred gold to learn this.
Yet I was placing it in the library of my mind for free.
[Fourth-Tier: Catalyst Mixture Ratios for Amplifying Mana Crystal Efficiency]
I did not forget to transfer the other contents into my mind as well.
‘Today is really my lucky day.’
Then, just as I picked up the last bundle of papers, I saw it.
At the corner of a parchment was a cipher note written in cursive rather than as a magic formula.
It read like a diary entry Professor Kael had written to vent frustration after the research would not go well.
[...Everyone thinks the war will end, but think again! The Western Fleet will be annihilated... <omitted>... Ships made from White Cedar will never withstand the acidic mist. They will all melt away. Unless they use absurdly sturdy Black Ironwood, this operation is doomed to fail. Where in the world does that acidic mist come from...?]
My hand froze as I was about to throw the paper in.
‘Acidic mist?’
I had vaguely heard that it sometimes appeared in the western waters.
Even Professor Kael seemed not to know why it formed.
But that was not the important part right now.
‘The war will not end? Then my shares will plummet...’
In an instant, I saw everything in a new light.
‘Wait... This isn’t a crisis.’
The corner of my mouth rose on its own.
‘It’s an enormous opportunity.’
This was no time to stand around.
I needed to go to the exchange immediately.
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