WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ Surviving in the Magic Academy

Chapter 39

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Puppetry, contrary to what the name suggested, covered an extremely broad field.

Of course, most puppeteers handled ordinary puppets. Puppets made of wood or minerals, shaped like people or animals.

But puppets took other forms as well. Some people handled weapons. Others controlled formless things like wind or light. What they handled differed from ordinary puppets, and the way they controlled them differed as well.

The reason such seemingly unrelated fields were all treated as puppetry was because, at their foundation, they followed a different path from similar kinds of magic.

Many people handled weapons. The most common example was the sword-wielders. A puppeteer who handled weapons did not look all that different from them handling swords. After all, creating a weapon, then honing it through experience and magical power, was the same process.

The same went for those who commanded spirits. Spirit arts, which commanded formless things like wind or fire, and even conceptual things like the mind or space, had traits that looked similar to puppetry from the outside.

Even so, their magic was not treated as puppetry.

What puppeteers created had a different nature from the things made by other mages, those often called artisans. Artisans made objects other mages could use. That meant their creations did not have major restrictions.

The same applied to command magic like spirit arts. Corpses, spirits, whatever it was, if someone managed to command it, others could use it as well.

Puppetry was different. What puppeteers created moved only through their own magical power. Even if someone else took it over, once that magical power ran out, it could no longer move.

That was why puppetry existed purely in the realm of talent, and why it had become a classification of magic that covered such a wide range.

Yes. For a puppet, only its creator’s magical power worked.

That was where every problem began.

I finished modifying a puppet and stretched. This was my fiftieth commission. The student who had entrusted it to me had made a fairly unusual request.

They wanted me to make it so they could wear it. They said even paying attention to movement was a waste of time, so they wanted to leave everything to the puppet and focus only on training.

I modified it with great care so they could stay comfortable inside. It was rather fun work. I poured magical power into the puppet and made it move. The thing walked over and joined the puppets gathered on one side of the workshop.

As I loosened up, I checked the time. Four in the morning. Time to move. I had to inspect the tower. Magical power was weakest at this time of day, so I always inspected the tower around now.

I could skip the first and second floors for now. With that thought, I left the workshop. Ever since the first and second floors had been opened to the students, all kinds of disputes had broken out, but there was one fortunate thing. I no longer needed to visit those places every day.

They did their absolute best to manage the rooms they occupied. If anything strange happened there, they figured out the cause themselves and told me. Then all I had to do was go over and maintain the magic circles a little.

I first made a round of the fourth floor, where the workshop was located. I sent several puppets into the empty rooms. The puppets moved around inside without any issue.

Only after confirming that did I enter as well. The flow of magical power inside the rooms was extremely pure. There were no problems. It was the result of the steady maintenance I had done while passing through every day.

Now it was time to go to the third floor. Once I went down the stairs and stepped onto the third floor, my body began to relax. This library was exceptionally clean.

The scent of wood flowing from the bookshelves soothed my mind, and the faint magical power mixed into the air seeped into my body with every breath, clearing my head.

I walked along the shelves and slowly looked around. There were still plenty of empty bookshelves. I did not find anything particularly wrong either. I had never once seen a problem occur here. That, at least, was fortunate.

Then I took the stairs up to the fifth floor. This was the most dangerous place. I looked around and smiled bitterly.

The residential area I used was only a tiny part of this vast floor. It was the relatively safe room I had found through several experiments. Even that place sometimes had problems, though.

Still, it was better than the other rooms. The other rooms created a new problem every day. Two days ago, one room kept expanding endlessly until it tore space apart. I spent a whole day blocking the bizarre magical power spilling out from inside.

Yesterday, the magic that maintained the rooms got tangled and froze the time of everything that entered them. If I had been here instead of in the workshop, I would have been preserved there without noticing a thing.

According to the Professor, the magic placed here had already been completely fixed in place, so it could not be repaired perfectly. The only answer was to keep maintaining it as it was. Of course, that was my job, not the Professor’s.

Since this was an area where accidents never stopped happening, I stayed tense as I moved. I sent puppets ahead and explored the rooms, but contrary to my expectations, that exploration ended quickly.

For some strange reason, no problems occurred today. It was the first time this had happened since I took charge of managing the tower.

Why? The incidents that happened every day had not happened today, and that made me feel even more uneasy.

Because of that unease, I checked the magic circles that made up the fifth floor very carefully, but I could not find a single abnormality. They were maintaining a perfect balance.

Well, was that not a good thing? It made sense for there to be a day like this once in a while.

I forced my thoughts in a positive direction. This meant I had a lot of time left. Now I only had to pour magical power into the puppets before people arrived.

Then I could spend all the remaining time freely. Normally, this would have been the time I spent groaning over some abnormality that had broken out on the fifth floor.

Then should I go charge the puppets? Since puppets used only my magical power as fuel, I had to pour magical power into them once every day like this.

When I headed to the workshop, the puppets were lined up in rows just as I had seen earlier. I poured magical power into them with a light heart. Since I had plenty of time, I did it at a relaxed pace.

As I slowly charged them, however, the amount of magical power being consumed felt anything but normal. Half of my magical power melted away in an instant.

It definitely had not been like this. When I first made the puppets, charging all of them had not even used twenty percent of my magical power.

But now, even after using half of it, I had not finished filling the puppets with magical power. Only after pouring in half of what remained did I barely manage to charge them all.

My expression hardened. Why had I not noticed this until now? Even though this was part of my daily routine, I was only discovering the problem today. After thinking for a moment, I understood why.

The fifth floor. It was because nothing had gone wrong there.

Usually, I walked around that place with my nerves on edge while fixing the problems that occurred. Because of that, I barely paid attention when charging the puppets.

Until now, I had not done it slowly like this. I had simply slammed a huge amount of magical power into them. It had not mattered how much leaked out in the process. Time had been more important than magical power.

That was why I had not recognized this problem at all.

I hurriedly examined the puppets. Every puppet had a different appearance. Some were shaped like people, and some were shaped like magical beasts.

They did not simply look different. The functions they carried inside were all different too. Even the basic puppets that had not yet been modified often had several extra functions attached.

These were the problem.

Puppets packed with all sorts of inefficient functions had, at some point, turned into monsters that devoured magical power. Maintaining each and every one of those functions consumed magical power.

And more of these functions were going to be added in the future. I already had a mountain of accepted commissions piled up. Enough to keep me working for the next half year.

My face turned pale. Even now, they were sucking up almost all my magical power, so what would happen later? The result was perfectly clear.

But I could not cancel the commissions either. I had already eaten the points. If I unilaterally canceled the commissions, I would have to cough up double. I did not have that many points.

The moment my thoughts reached that point, I realized my future.

Time passed like that.

And now, just as I had expected, I was dying like this.

To charge all the puppets now, I had to pour out my magical power three times. I emptied it, filled it, then emptied it again.

I had to focus on that whole process for at least three hours. Once I drained my magical power down to the bottom, a deep sense of helplessness always pressed down on my body, so I had no room to do anything else.

Yet commissions were still piling up. Just like Cassian a moment ago. Once I finished all these commissions, I would have to pour even more magical power into those things.

But that did not mean I could stop accepting commissions. I already owed a lot of points. To pay that back, I needed points. A lot of points.

I fiddled with Cassian’s bear puppet and sighed.

The first time I made puppets, it had been purely for my own convenience. For that, I poured in all my points. And at the end of it, I regained some breathing room.

Then I used that free time to earn points. Just touching up puppets a little made points duplicate themselves, so how could I resist that? Back then, I had been nothing but happy.

But as that piled up and kept piling up, I ended up in my current state. Far from resting, I had to pour all my remaining time into puppets. Now I was actually more exhausted than before I had made any puppets.

In the end, this was a disaster I had brought upon myself. My greed for points had made things turn out this way.

Over the past year, I had struggled in many ways to solve this situation. I thought there were three main possible methods.

The biggest problem was my lack of magical power. Modifying puppets and adding functions was not actually a major issue. The problem was the increase in magical power consumption caused by that. The more functions were attached, the more magical power the puppets ate.

Because of that, I thought I could solve it by increasing my total amount of magical power. And among the ways to increase magical power, the best was raising my realm.

My Sapling had grown almost to its limit by now. I was at the point where I needed to leap to a higher stage, not simply increase its size.

But that leap was extremely difficult. The wall I had to overcome was far too high and thick. For that purpose, I even obtained and ate several elixirs. Elixirs were another way to increase the amount of magical power.

The elixirs were fairly effective. Part of that wall crumbled. But the destination was still far away. I bought and ate several elixirs even while going into debt, but the result was the same.

I could not eat any more either. I had no points, and if I forcibly raised my realm that way, I could not even dream of future growth.

In the end, only the amount of my magical power had increased a little, while raising my realm remained a distant goal.

That was how the first method failed. I tried it even while piling up debt, but all I gained was a very small amount of magical power.

The second method was retrieving the puppets and removing their functions. But because the first method failed, this also became impossible.

The puppets whose modifications were already complete had already become their property. To remove anything from them, I would have to return their points, but those points had already become elixirs and been sucked into my body.

In the end, only the final method remained. It was also the part I had worried over the most. Cutting costs. Maintaining the puppets’ functions while reducing the maintenance cost.

For that, I even went to find the puppeteers in the city.

When I opened the door to [On's Puppet Workshop] and entered, I saw Mauro. As always, he was fiddling with a puppet. Actually, on the way to Professor Heisen’s tower, I had often stopped by this place. Every time I looked at puppets, I learned something new.

“Mauro-ssi, how do you manage that many puppets?”

I asked. Like me, he was only a mage of the Sapling realm. But this shop contained countless puppets. Every one of them held magical power in its body.

Even if those puppets were built in highly efficient forms, it would have been a number I could not handle. He only smiled.

When I kept pestering him, he said lightly,

“Developing puppets is like magic. To every puppeteer, the puppet they command is their own magic and the crystallization of themself. So no matter what advice I give, it is more likely to harm you than help.”

He spoke at length, but the core of what he wanted to say was clear. Figure it out yourself. In the end, there was nothing helpful. He saw me off, and I returned to the tower.

And now here I was. I sighed. Then the shadow that had been modifying puppets in my place came over again and patted my shoulder.

It was a very useful fellow. In Professor Heisen’s lecture, it had been nothing more than an ordinary weakling that got swept away by other people’s shadows and was eliminated first, but when it came to making puppets, it was an absolutely perfect assistant.

This shadow had stayed by my side for the past two years and learned my actions. As a result, it had reached the point where it could modify puppets in my place, just like now.

Now that every method I had thought of earlier had failed, this fellow was my only hope.

It did not just contain my magical power. It also functioned as a kind of living creature and possessed its own magical power. And it used that magical power to control my puppets as well. It had inherited a little of my talent.

The first time it moved a puppet was three months after I recognized the magical power problem. At the time, I had been sprawled on the floor from the side effects of an elixir, and a puppet carried me to the bedroom.

I had not done it. Startled, I examined the puppet, and the connection led to the shadow. When I saw that, hope filled my chest.

This was it.

My shadow had copied me this way and eventually taken part of my talent. If so, could a puppet not do the same?

If a puppet’s shadow moved the puppet in its place, and if the puppet became able to move on its own using that magical power as a foundation. If that happened, the puppet would be able to move by itself without receiving my magical power.

That was the idea I came up with while looking at this shadow.

I began my research with that hope. But there was a very big problem.

This thing was a special fellow Professor Heisen had handed out. It was the kind of being only thirty out of three hundred mages could receive. Other shadows did not move like this. They did not have this kind of intelligence either.

I struggled to solve that, but I still had not found the answer.

I sighed and stood up. There was not much time left to worry. It was time to pour magical power into the puppets.

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