WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ Surviving in the Magic Academy

Chapter 6

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My eyes opened on their own to a light that warmed my body. The sun was up outside the window. Morning already?

My body had gone stiff and would not move. I must have drunk too much yesterday. My mind was awake, but my body was still soaked in dreams, sinking without end. Probably because of the nightmare. I had heard this happened to everyone who drank nightmares. I did not panic and circulated my magical power. Magical power seeped deep into my rigid body.

Using that magical power, I forced my body to move. My body, collapsed against the wall, sprang upright. A creaking sound came with a sharp stab of pain. I held it in and started some simple stretches. My body, still not fully awake, screamed at me. No mercy. I was already very late.

I had to open the shop quickly. I had to earn money. That was the only way I could take next year’s exam too.

Next year’s exam. Damn it, I was truly screwed. I forced my body to move and tried to forget about the exam through the pain. I could not shake it off at all. The wound to my heart hurt worse than the pain in my body.

This had been my tenth time. I had never imagined I would be taking the exam for this long.

During my first entrance exam, I had been proud, thinking I was a genius. I thought I would pass, of course. Then I was eliminated at light speed.

“Hmm, as expected, the gates of the university are high.”

I acted smug, but I was incredibly flustered. My first thought had been, How the hell does anyone pass this?

Then came the second time. Eliminated again. Me, a genius?

“My realm is still immature. I should raise my realm and challenge it again.”

Just as I said, the Germination realm, where I had only made my existing sprout bloom, did not give me enough magical power to get through the whole exam. So I raised my realm and produced a sapling. Raising the rank of my tree all at once. As expected, I was a genius. Certain I would pass, I challenged it for the third time.

I failed.

Failed, failed.

At some point, after five years of challenging the exam, I realized it. I was not a genius.

Like the other mages living on this street, I was only an ordinary nobody living to set foot at the entrance of the university.

Ten years passed like that.

I was still scraping by on this street.

And starting today, my eleventh year of trying began.

Damn it.

I moved my body and opened the shop door. A refreshing breeze entered the shop along with a musty smell. Money. I had to earn money. Maybe my body was finally waking up, because strength slowly returned to me. I stretched as far as I could and looked around. The familiar scenery came into view.

Most of the buildings were half-collapsed, and people who looked like corpses lay limp in every alley. As always, it was an ordinary morning where people rolled around like trash.

Ah, that one was an actual corpse. Must have frozen to death overnight. I sent one flying insect puppet over and quietly searched it. It had probably been stripped clean during the night, because there was not a single drop of magical power left. I thought I had found free money first thing in the morning. What a waste.

I pushed the corpse deep into the alley. If I roughly cleaned it up like this, the people who needed corpses would take it on their own.

There was something I had to do to start the day with energy.

I had to beat that bastard first. That damned liquor seller. This was why dream demons could not be trusted.

How dare they sell me beer mixed with nightmares? I could not let this go. Before more innocent victims like me appeared, I would beat them up! I needed a dream demon anyway, so this worked out perfectly.

I locked the shop door and set out. Where would they be at this hour? Probably underground, selling liquor. I moved through the half-collapsed buildings toward the area where the buildings that looked more or less intact were gathered.

The closer I got, the more living, moving mages I saw. This place, which at least had the air of people living in it, was the center of this slum. People still rolled around here too, but at least there were no corpses to see. Anyone who looked like they might die got kicked outside.

I headed for the largest building among them. A man with a sword at his waist leaned against the door, chewing on loose tobacco. He was a member of the gang that ruled this street. I could feel faint magical power from the sword. He seemed to be the doorman.

I hated sword-users the most. Any mage would hate them, obviously. They were lunatics who grew swords instead of trees. Their lives were short, but they were that much stronger. During this exam too, a sword-user had wiped out all of my puppets.

My face twisted as I remembered that nightmare. I passed him and headed inside the building. When I moved by him, the iron smell unique to sword-users stabbed my nose. Ugh, the smell. I covered my nose and wrapped magical power around myself. This was another reason I hated them. Letting magical power spill out like that. No class. None at all.

The inside was packed with people. All of them were mages. Anyone from this area stopped by here. It was a request brokerage run by the gang. I visited this place often too. It was easy to find the materials I needed for making puppets.

Right. Since my puppets were almost wrecked, I also needed to make new ones. I roughly wrote down a few familiar materials and hung the note on the board. I had written my shop’s location on it, so they would find me on their own. I nodded to the people whose faces I vaguely knew and headed for the stairs in the corner of the building. The stairs sank into the ground and continued deep underground. After going down for quite a while, I reached a wide open space.

Even more people swarmed the open space than above. It was an underground market built to avoid magical beasts. When trading goods mixed with magical power, magical beasts were bound to be drawn in, so they had dug into the ground like this to prepare for them. If this had been inside the walls, there would have been no need to hide and trade like this.

There that bastard was.

I saw them at once. A bald seller was wiping their shiny head with one hand while dealing with a customer. All around them was liquor they had made. If I went near, the scent of alcohol would probably be everywhere. I had fallen for that too and bought several bottles of beer at a high price.

I took a few flying insect puppets out of my pocket. When I injected magical power, their hearts beat and they rose into the air. The insects disappeared silently and lay in ambush nearby. I moved too.

“Hey, look at me for a second.”

I lightly kicked the liquor they had laid out. The bottles fell over like dominoes. The seller approached with their face all scrunched up. That shining head seriously got on my nerves.

“Still scamming people, baldy?”

“Why are you trying to ruin my business, you puppet freak old man?”

“Puppet freak? Is that something someone who fucks the liquor they brew should be saying?”

Their face turned pale.

“W-What are you talking about? When did I ever do that?”

They stammered. The people around us who heard it made uncomfortable faces. They each stared at the liquor they had been looking at, then started putting it back down.

“It’s a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding! I’ve never done that!”

They hurriedly tried to call the people back, but everyone had already lost their appetite and started leaving with expressions like they had bitten their tongues. Anger twisted the seller’s face. Their already ugly face became even more vicious. They came closer and lowered their voice.

“You promised you wouldn’t talk about that! I even gave you mana stones as hush money.”

Right. Was it about two years ago? I saw this bastard doing it with my own eyes. It had been deeply shocking. The memory came back again, and I almost gagged. I settled my churning stomach and buried that memory deep down again. I would never remember it again.

“If you had kept your promise too, I would have stayed quiet. What was it again? Liquor full of only good dreams? You said I’d have happy dreams if I drank it? I drank that yesterday and nearly died on the spot, you bastard.”

I slapped their head. They rubbed the spot I had hit and stood there blankly before flinching.

“Looks like you remembered. I think I bought it around three years ago. That liquor I paid you about ten mana stones for. I definitely warned you back then. If anything weird was mixed in, I’d beat you to death.”

They quietly took half a step back. Trying to run? Not a chance. The insects already surrounded the area without a gap. The hidden flying insects began to flap their wings. Several layers of explosion magic floated on their backs. If the seller kept thinking of running, they would turn to ash along with the puppets.

They looked over the puppets and slowly sank down where they stood. The flying insects settled down with them. I glared at the seller with the warning that if they tried that again, I would blow them up right away.

“You still have those filthy puppets….”

“What?”

Filthy? These precious things had been my livelihood ever since I escaped the island. If I had not had these self-destructing insects, I would not have survived until now. How could they say something so cruel to these cute little ones?

I attached five or six insects to the seller’s back. If the flying insects exploded now, their upper body would vanish with them. When the insects flapped their wings, baldy started sweating cold sweat.

“Our cuties are sad now.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I must have misspoken when I meant to say they were wonderful. A-Ahaha!”

They shouted with an awkward laugh. I stopped the insects from moving. While they relaxed, I stomped hard on their leg so they could not move carelessly.

“So, how much did you mix in?”

“Ahem, I have no idea what you’re talking about….”

“If you don’t know, you should die.”

I gave the insects the order to self-destruct. The sound of their wings grew louder.

“I mixed it! I only mixed a little!”

They shouted in a panic. Did this idiot have no ability to learn? They knew why I had come, yet they were pretending not to. This was just a problem of intelligence.

“Yeah, when I drank it, it was pure nightmare. How much did you mix?”

“Only a little nightmare. The rest really was happy dreams. I’m telling you, I definitely only added enough that no one would notice, so how did you….”

“You little shit, what do you mean no one would notice? The moment I drank it, I got dragged straight into a nightmare.”

I smacked their head hard with my palm. With a sharp slap, a red mark remained on their head. They might be the first dream demon whose head had gone completely bald. The other dream demons looked fine, so why was this one like this? It was hard to believe this bastard was only twenty.

I kept hitting their head. Even when it turned red like it had been dyed, I did not stop. No matter how much I hit them, my anger did not fade. I looked at the seller, whose face had crumpled as if they were about to cry.

“Right. I’ll give you two choices.”

I held up two fingers.

“One is that I cut off part of your body. I only need one hand. I already needed to get some dreams, and if I make a glove out of your hand, I’ll be able to scoop dreams up myself.”

Their face turned blue. Their head had swollen bright red, but their face had gone pale, so it was quite a sight. When I saw them try to open their mouth, I flicked my fingers. The waiting insects flew over and blocked it.

“You have to hear the other one too.”

I folded one finger and waved the other.

“You donate part of your tree to me. Not enough to cause serious damage, just about enough for you to work? With that much, I can cultivate a dream demon puppet.”

Their face turned completely white. When I moved away the insects blocking their mouth, their eyes rolled around as if they were looking for a chance to flee.

“Ah, if you run, I’ll take both.”

They drooped. Anyone who scammed me paid back tenfold. That was the standard I had set after coming to this city. If the liquor they sold had been normal, I might have come back to buy another bottle.

This bastard had fooled me and dragged me into a nightmare. They said that roughly one in a thousand mages dragged into a nightmare never returned. What a horribly dangerous chance that was.

“I’ll give you ten seconds. If you don’t choose by then, I’ll rip out both.”

“The tree! I’ll do the tree.”

They shouted. I jerked my chin at them to start right away. Baldy laughed hollowly, then closed their eyes and moved their magical power. The gray magical power unique to dream demons slowly stirred, and then they spat a gray stem out of their mouth.

I took out a magical power bottle and caught it right away. Inside the bottle filled with liquid magical power, the stem slowly stabilized. It was a fragment of a sprout that had not yet become a sapling. I could definitely feel magical power a little different from a human’s.

“Most people would give up the body. Interesting.”

I said that as I tucked it into my clothes. If I asked other mages to choose between those two cases, a hundred out of a hundred would give up the body part. The tree was everything to a mage. This bastard seemed to value their body more. Was it because they were a dream demon?

“You can grow a tree again, but you can’t get a hand back. This is my livelihood.”

They grumbled. Since I had gotten everything I needed, I let them go. When I gestured to the insects, they burrowed into the roomy folds of my robe. The bald bastard collapsed and sighed.

“No wonder the back of my head felt prickly today.”

They opened a bottle of liquor on the spot. A delicious smell spread out, but I paid it no mind and stood up. As if I would be crazy enough to drink that bastard’s liquor again. I stretched all the way out. Mm, refreshing. As expected, you had to take care of things as soon as they came to mind. Since I had even done my morning exercise like this, today was going to be a vigorous day!

Since I had come all this way, I thought about walking around the market, but even a quick look showed only a bunch of worthless things. I would come back when an auction opened later.

I left the market and climbed to the surface through the stairs connected to the outside. Now I had to go back to the shop and do my work.

There was a lot to do. I had left the shop alone for two weeks because of the exam, so requests had piled up, and I had to repair the puppets that had all been smashed during the exam. Busy, busy.

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