WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ Surviving in the Magic Academy

Chapter 3

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During that time, I learned a great many things. The land that had been my entire world until then was only a tiny part of the world as a whole.

This endless, sprawling land was one giant island. A very small piece of land clinging to the edge of the continent. A harsh place with few resources, one nobody cared enough to covet.

The moment I learned how vast the world was, greed stirred in me. I wanted to go out into that world. I began to think this cramped place did not suit me.

There was only one way to leave the island, though. This island was close to the continent, but it was still cut off by the open sea. I had to board the airship that came once every twenty years.

Swimming or setting out by boat was unthinkable.

The sea was home to all kinds of bizarre things, and it was full of creatures that treated people as food. Even Nanny’s husband had supposedly been dragged away by some unknown sea creature and vanished.

“Of course, I could cross it.”

Ojo said that with the magic items and magical power he had, he could fly across the sea easily enough. Then he chuckled and said that even if I worked my whole life, it would be hard for me to reach his realm.

That was not something I could do. I asked around to see if there were any other methods, but I could not find one.

In the end, it had to be the airship. Ojo told me its boarding pass cost around five thousand gold coins.

Five thousand gold coins? It was an amount I had never even imagined. I had heard that the clan earned about five hundred gold coins in a year. Then was that ten years of the clan’s income? It was a sum beyond imagination.

“You should still leave this place. Maybe you might even be able to go to university.”

Ojo said that when he saw me stamping my feet in frustration. University. That was also the reason I wanted so badly to get off this island. If not for that, I would not have had to agonize over this.

The gateway for all mages.

A vast world of magic that had existed since the distant past, even before the Empire was founded. A place where the archmage who founded it and the countless mages who received his teachings existed. When I first heard about it, curiosity kept me awake all night.

“I graduated from the university too. It took me about a hundred years to finish the basic course.”

Ojo gazed somewhere far away, as if reminiscing about those days. A hundred years. For me, not even twenty yet, that was a length of time I could hardly imagine. I asked in surprise.

“Is it that difficult?”

“I can’t speak in detail because it’s forbidden to tell outsiders about the university.”

Ojo tapped his own wrist. Was that some kind of contract too?

“Still, a hundred years is fairly fast. Some mages fail to finish it before they die of old age. And entering the university itself isn’t something to take lightly. Only a handful can even get in, let alone graduate.”

The dream of this university that I heard from Ojo made my chest swell. University, huh. A place of learning that any outstanding mage could enter. A world with freedom from concerns over one’s origins, where only skill mattered.

My heart was already headed for the university. My body, unfortunately, was stuck on this island. In the end, it was money. There were about five years left before the airship came. Five thousand gold coins. Where was I supposed to earn that much money? Forget five years, I was not even sure I could earn it all by the time the next airship came twenty-five years later.

Money. Earning it was the most important thing.

As I racked my brain, memories of my past life suddenly came to mind.

Among the many moments that surfaced faintly like dreams, I was controlling a drone, a flying insect. No, calling it a flying insect had become too much of a habit. Recently, while looking through my memories, I realized it was a kind of puppet.

Anyway, I had been controlling that flying steel puppet. What if I made something like that? I had not remembered my entire past life yet, but the vivid memory of killing someone with that steel puppet had left a deep impression on my mind.

And I also had a feeling that it was possible. When I had learned ordinary magic, I had never felt certain. Magic that handled fire or water never had much power. Ojo had even told me I had no talent for it.

Yet the moment I thought I wanted to make puppets, I naturally felt certain I could do it. Ojo said this kind of instinct was exactly the talent needed to learn magic. Then did that mean I had talent for puppets?

I immediately made a few puppets out of blocks of wood and tried controlling them.

A drone-like form was out of the question for now. I made wooden puppets that resembled people, and when I granted magical power to their joints, they stood up and began to move.

But puppets that simply had magical power infused into them could move easily, only to break before long.

Next, I drew magical power out in the form of threads. Like controlling a puppet with strings. This method was definitely convenient. The problem was that it was fairly difficult to control.

The most efficient method I found through this trial and error was to give the puppet a tree of its own. Should I call it a mana heart?

Based on the form of the tree that existed inside my body, I gave that same shape to the puppet.

It took about three years to achieve this result. It was crude, but at my level, it was a model I had developed with all the effort I could muster.

I took this puppet and went to Ojo. Ojo examined the puppet carefully, then burst into laughter.

“Oh, you were born with good talent. I’m glad you found magic that suits you. When it comes to handling puppets, talent matters a great deal.”

Then Ojo breathed magical power into the puppet. The puppet took one or two steps before collapsing. Was it broken? I panicked and checked the puppet, but nothing was wrong with it.

“I have no talent for handling puppets. Someone who doesn’t know the sensation can’t move one, no matter how good the puppet is.”

Ojo seemed to find the puppet fairly interesting and fiddled with it here and there. Then he took a scroll from his robe.

When Ojo placed a hand on his forehead and let magical power flow, a long thread flowed out along his hand. My eyes widened at the strange sight.

When he placed the thread on the scroll, the thread turned into letters and melted into it. The letters made of magical power shimmered faintly, as if they might vanish at any moment.

“If you put this to your forehead, you’ll be able to see the memories I drew out. I put what I know about puppets in there, so it should be useful.”

Ojo handed me the scroll. I carefully accepted it and brought it to my forehead. The letters left the scroll and were sucked into my head. It felt as if I had become Ojo as I wandered through those memories.

There was all kinds of miscellaneous knowledge inside. Simple methods for making puppets, magic effective for puppets, materials used in puppets, ways to fight puppets, the price of puppets, and so on. It was as if memories had been extracted through a keyword, with things related to puppets scattered around carelessly.

My head throbbed as I examined and organized them one by one. Just as Ojo had said, he did not seem interested in puppets, so only shallow knowledge existed there. Even so, some of it was quite useful.

The information about mana hearts was one example. I had made mine based on the tree, but perhaps because it was my own private design, there were inefficient parts. Until now, I had not even thought it was inefficient, but I found that there were more parts to fix than I expected.

The basic puppet blueprints contained inside made that possible. They were different from the method I had created, but they were still good reference material. Like that, there were a few pieces of knowledge that seemed useless at first but gained value when they met my own problems. If I had agonized over it alone, I might not have learned them even after ten years.

Delighted, I bowed my head to Ojo. Ojo nodded and smiled.

Another five years passed like that. Before I knew it, I was twenty-three.

It was the tenth year since I began learning magic from Ojo. Ten years was a very long period in my life, but it was also not enough time to learn both puppets and magic.

The airship did come, but I had no money, so all I could do was stare at it longingly. I could not sneak aboard either. Mages who looked stronger than me were standing guard and checking the area around the airship. The moment I got close, they glared so fiercely that I did not dare approach. And so the airship left, and I had to wait another twenty years.

As soon as the ten years of teaching ended, Ojo went into his workshop. After that, I had a few questions and visited his workshop, but he did not let me hear even a single word. As Ojo had said when he first began teaching me, the contract was complete.

When I announced to the clan that my magic training had ended, many requests began coming to me from both inside and outside the clan. A mage could be called an excellent solution for almost any matter. Since I needed a lot of money, I accepted all of those requests.

There was a job to kill an enemy of the clan. The guy used a sword, and when I fired a fireball, he cut it apart and came at me. I panicked, ran away, and got slashed in the waist.

I did burn him to death in the end, but it was still quite scary. One of the mere weeds managed to wound me. My pride was pointlessly hurt.

There was also a request to go to some mysterious place and collect medicinal herbs. An old man with quite a few years on him gave me that one, and since he said he would pay several gold coins, I snapped it up.

I had no idea there would be a snake about a hundred years old inside. How absurd it felt when I saw scales that even bounced off magic. I nearly got eaten by it. Terrified, I escaped without digging up more than a few medicinal herbs.

That hardship continued. But soon, I realized that this approach was terribly inefficient. Even if I kept suffering like this, I clearly would not earn fifty gold coins in a year. At this rate, I would have to repeat this nonsense for a hundred years.

I needed to think more about efficiency. What caught my eye then was puppets. In truth, I had tried using them on a few requests. But the puppets were still crude and failed to show the level of performance I wanted. They could not even properly withstand the sword strikes of weeds.

But did I really have to make up for every shortcoming? That thought came to me. What had been my reason for wanting to make puppets in the first place? Wasn’t it to use them like drones? Based on that idea, I made many puppets. The first ones I made were palm-sized flying insects. I tried modeling them after the drones in my memories.

In my memories, I had seen drones fitted with explosives and dropped. Like that, even if the puppet’s performance was lacking, if I attached something with strong destructive power, it could have enough firepower. With that thought, I made them simply as objects that could stay in the air for a long time.

They had no other functions. They just needed to fly for a long time, high up, and quietly. Securing firepower was easy. I just had to soak the puppets in something like oil and make them self-destruct with explosion magic.

Once I sent out a whole swarm of puppets like this, resolving requests became incredibly convenient. Many puppets broke or lost contact in the process, but that did not matter. I just had to send out even more puppets than that.

This method had limits too, though.

Controlling puppets required a great deal of concentration and magical power. Even if I entered simple commands, enough magical power was essential for them to travel long distances. With only the shallow knowledge I had, I could not solve that right away. To make up for this weakness, I would have to research and research, improving them again and again.

But it was not enough. Far too little to buy a boarding pass. I needed more efficient puppets. An innovation that completely overturned the existing method!

With that mindset, I clung viciously to puppet research.

Ten years passed like this.

Through years of research piled on research, I finally managed to obtain an airship boarding pass!

It was a bit bewildering. Uh... I had not expected it to turn out like this either.

Anyway, I obtained one.

It happened when I was thirty-three.

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