WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ Surviving in the Magic Academy

Chapter 37

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I slowly opened my eyes. Sunlight was pouring through the window onto my face.

It was morning.

Puppets filled the room. I was collapsed right in the middle of them. Exhaustion weighed down my whole body so badly I could barely move. I did not even have the strength to move my magical power. I must have passed out while working through the night.

Come to think of it, how long had it been since I had lain down like this? I could not even remember the last time I had been in a bed. I glanced at the clock. Less than thirty minutes had passed since I collapsed.

I wanted to enjoy this honey-sweet time a little longer. Just a tiny bit longer. Even with all the work waiting for me, this dreamlike rest had its grip on my body and refused to let go.

Mm, should I just push everything I had to do today onto tomorrow? I wanted to fall asleep right here. Tomorrow’s me would deal with the consequences. So for now, I would rest just a little longer.

That was when I was about to close my eyes again. The door opened, and I heard the bell ring. Someone had definitely come in. I screamed silently. No. My brief rest was disappearing.

“Mister, I came to ask for a puppet modification. Are you not here?”

It was a familiar voice. I slowly raised my hand. Even that took an enormous amount of effort. My hand trembled like it might drop back down at any moment. The visitor must have seen it, because she came closer. It was a blank-faced woman.

“Should I help you up?”

She said it while leaning over my face. I caught the bloody, iron smell unique to sword-users. I weakly nodded. Without the slightest hesitation, she raised her magical power and forced my body to move. In an instant, I was standing bolt upright. My whole body screamed at me.

Still, thanks to that pain, I finally came to my senses. What was I talking about, pushing things to tomorrow? I had a mountain of work to do today. Tomorrow’s work was already piled up like a mountain too. I grabbed my knees with both arms and held myself up so I would not collapse.

A little strength soon returned. With a trembling hand, I wiped my face and brushed away what little fatigue I could. The woman stared blankly at me.

“Thank you, Cassian-ssi.”

I had been very surprised when I first learned who this woman was. She was the crazy woman who had smashed every one of my puppets during my tenth attempt. No wonder her face had seemed familiar. Of course, right now, she was a customer who had come to my shop.

I slowly dragged myself to the reception desk. Once I leaned my upper body against it, I could hold myself up a little better. When I gestured to her, she placed a puppet on top of the desk. It was a huge bear puppet.

The bear puppet filled the entire reception desk. With all its magical power drained, it looked like an ordinary doll. Come to think of it, I had forgotten to supply magical power to the puppets today. I had been working all night, so the thought had not even crossed my mind.

More work for the pile, then. I clutched my head and sighed. While I took a moment to sort out my thoughts, Cassian fiddled with the puppet and spoke.

“Anyway, Mister, I want to modify this child.”

“Yes. How would you like it modified?”

“Please remove some of the functions you put in before. It keeps trying to hug me at all hours, and it’s a little annoying.”

My eyebrow twitched. She was the one who had been so eager for me to make it that way just a month ago.

And yet she was already tired of it. Did she have any idea how hard I had worked to squeeze that function into its already full capacity?

My true feelings aside, I put a kind smile on my face. Then I offered her a compromise.

“Mm, instead of removing it completely, how about reducing how often it reacts? Or I could connect it to a specific action so it only hugs you when you want it to, Cassian-ssi.”

She thought for a while, then shook her head.

“Just remove it. Instead, I want its eyes to show emotion. And can you change the scent that comes from the puppet too? I got tired of it. Ah, it would be nice if the scent changed depending on its emotions too.”

“Please do that,” she said brightly. I looked down at the puppet with trembling eyes. She wanted me to add another complicated function to a puppet that was already packed full of them? It was impossible. What on earth did she think I was, making a request like this?

“One hundred points should be enough, right?”

“Of course. Please visit tomorrow.”

There was no such thing as impossible before points. I wrote down her requests without hesitation. Limits? Who cared? I just had to keep going until it worked.

“Here.”

She held out a ring. After handing me the points, she left just like that.

I stroked the ring, then suddenly came to my senses. What had I just done? I already had so much work backed up, and I had taken another order. I had lost all reason in the face of points.

The amount she had spent modifying this puppet alone had already gone over four thousand points. She was the only person who poured this many points into a puppet. Just how many points did she have to spend them so freely?

I placed my trembling hand on the puppet. It was a puppet I had made with great care. And all the functions installed inside made it more natural and complete.

I had made it myself, but it really was a beautiful structure without a single flaw. The problem was that I now had to cram even more functions into it.

I breathed magical power into the puppet and revived it. The thing consumed a great deal of my magical power and raised its body. All the magic and functions that made up its body began operating, using that magical power as fuel.

Following my will, it headed deep into the shop. After pushing through the puppets, I reached the workbench. I laid it down on top, then collapsed into the chair myself.

I was probably screwed. No, I was definitely screwed.

My body proved it. Even my Sapling, which squeezed out magical power every day, was drooping as helplessly as I was.

It was my second year since coming to the university, and this was a perfectly ordinary morning.

My shadow slowly rose and patted my shoulder. It looked exactly like me.

Over the past two years, the more I suffered, the more it had grown. Comforted by it, I closed my eyes for a moment.

How did things end up like this? It definitely had not been like this at first.

I traced it back to the beginning.

If I had become like this, it had definitely started there.

It happened after the first lecture ended.

Once the tower’s areas were opened, many people came to the tower. The number was a full two hundred. People usually applied for a lecture because they wanted to improve through it, but there was also the goal of using the tower.

That was why ordinary university students apparently did not take more than one lecture. Once they got into a lecture, their daily life was to stay in the tower where that lecture took place and train. Well, I would have done the same.

The magical power accumulated in a professor’s tower was purer and stronger than anything else. How efficient would training be in such a place? So when morning came, all the course participants swarmed to the tower. The first floor was very wide, so it was large enough to hold all of them.

But that was where the problem arose. Since the opening hours were fixed, they visited at the same time every day, and they often came face to face.

Then countless incidents broke out. Arguments, duels, even assaults. The hostility they had built up while searching for treasure had exploded. They formed groups, occupied rooms one by one, and began treating outsiders with hostility.

Professor actually liked seeing this. She opened the second floor to them as well. The magical power on the second floor was denser and stronger than on the first. Of course the strong flocked there.

In that way, they turned the tower into a battlefield and stole each other’s territory. Professor found it amusing. The only one dying in the middle of it all was me. I had to mediate their conflicts and repair broken furniture.

The customer-service puppets I had placed in advance were nowhere near enough to handle everything. And they asked so many questions. Plenty of them came to leave suggestions too.

Handling the course participants alone drained me, but I still had more work to do.

I had to inspect the tower every day. The tower’s magic was extremely powerful, and because of that, it created strong distortions. These annoyingly fussy things would slip out of alignment and create abnormalities in the tower if I did not check them every day.

At first, I did not notice this. So the distortions kept piling up until they finally tore open space itself. The sensation of those strange eyes that appeared inside staring at me was something else.

That unknowable foreign thing tried to seep into the tower as it was. Then it died by Professor’s hand after she discovered the tower’s abnormality. After that, I also died because I had failed to manage it properly.

From then on, I inspected the tower’s magic every day. The sixth floor and above were Professor’s domain, so I did not need to go there, but the first through fifth floors were all under my jurisdiction.

Just inspecting those spells every day was enough to drain me dry. Most of them were magic I did not even know, so in the end, I had no choice but to personally experience the magic to inspect them.

While managing the tower like this, I also had to prepare for my own lecture.

The lecture was held once every three months. But in the first lecture, all of my puppets had been smashed. Even the puppet materials I had gathered for nearly a month had almost not been enough. I needed to prepare and brace myself far more thoroughly for the lectures after that. Professor was sure to torment me even more now.

As for Professor Heisen’s lecture, it was not that difficult because all I had to do was grow my shadow. The shadow copied my actions, ate my magical power, and steadily grew larger. If I kept this up, it would definitely grow at a decent pace.

Even so, I still needed to visit his tower. That was the best place to grow a shadow. Just wandering around various places in that shadow world made the shadow grow quickly.

But going there was work, and coming back was work too. And when I came back, another pile of work had stacked up. While I handled all the things I had to do, time passed in a flash.

Whenever I tried to rest for a moment, something happened. Once I handled that, something else happened. It was one incident after another. After dealing with all of it, I fell asleep like I had collapsed. I had no time to train at all.

At this rate, even if a hundred years passed, I would still be suffering through this same miserable grind.

I had to reduce my work. That was the thought I had four months after coming to the university.

It was when the second lecture ended.

No one had obtained Professor Irian’s treasure, but the others had grown while competing in that lecture. They had also grown through training using the tower’s magical power.

I could not even dream of that. I was only suffering under all this endless work.

If I could not solve this situation, I had no future.

With that thought, I began making puppets in bulk. In the end, what I was best at was making puppets.

I poured almost all the points I had into making those puppets.

I went all the way to the city to buy materials for puppets, and I left requests to secure a wider variety of materials. In that way, all sorts of wood and minerals began gathering in the tower.

Then I poured all my magic and mental strength into refining those puppets. The puppets I made while even using the tower’s magical power performed far better than I had expected.

I handed out one of those puppets to every course participant. They were not simple minor copies like the previous customer-service puppets, but higher-level attendant puppets with judgment and mobility on par with Butler, who served Professor.

They devoted themselves to the course participants set as their masters. They recognized each of their habits and provided better convenience, then judged and mediated disputes between them on their own.

Soon, the number of people coming to find me dropped sharply. It was a success. I smiled at that sense of freedom.

Of course, I did need to keep charging the puppets with magical power. My puppets could only move with my magical power, after all.

Still, compared to before, it was very simple. Before opening the tower, I only had to charge the puppets with magical power and have them wait at the entrance.

For the first time, I was able to rest. It was almost the first time since the lecture had begun.

I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. Why had I not thought of this method until now? My reluctance to spend points had kept me tied to a path of suffering all this time.

Points that only sat piled up were dead points. Only when I used them and enjoyed their benefits could I truly call them mine.

Of course, all my points had been sucked into making the puppets, but just being able to savor the happiness of this moment made it feel like no waste at all.

Since the course participants who had made up most of my suffering had quieted down, I thought I would finally be able to focus on my training.

Until she came to find me, that was.

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