kscans

Chapter 146 - Yuri, Take Up Your Gun 3. Artificial Magic Stones

Partly due to the fact that he had little else to do, Yuri's weapon development progressed smoothly. After all, his development policy of creating a magic tool version of a rifle from his past life was set, so there was no need for unnecessary trial and error. As a result, improvements progressed briskly, and the current prototype model had taken on almost the same form as an automatic rifle. The feeding and ejection were handled by magic, or rather, he had used magic to replicate the mechanisms of an automatic rifle from his past life. Since the basic idea already existed, constructing the magic formulas was relatively easy. Thanks to that, his Magic Tool Creation level had also increased. He was putting off improving the bullet's power for later, but Yuri was facing a problem.

"This consumes a lot of Magic Stones..."

After all, modern warfare in his Earth world was a massive consumption of resources. Ship-mounted anti-aircraft guns, for instance, would spray over a thousand rounds a minute. Yuri had no intention of developing something that extravagant, but an automatic rifle still consumed bullets. The magic stones used in place of cartridges could be reused if their magic power was replenished, but it was doubtful whether he could recover every magic stone in the heat of battle.

And so, Yuri came face to face with the problem of a magic stone shortage.

Though he could obtain them by defeating the monsters that attacked him, magic stones were fundamentally valuable and not something he could acquire in limitless quantities. Furthermore, the magic stones he obtained varied in size and shape, and using them as they were would result in inconsistent muzzle velocity and range. It was possible to split a large magic stone for use, but large magic stones were generally hard to come by and highly valuable, so he was hesitant to split them so easily. Moreover, once a magic stone was split, it could not be reattached to make it one again. And as for gathering scrap magic stones to form a large one, that was a pipe dream that countless mages and alchemists had attempted but failed to achieve.

"If I can't secure a supply of magic stones, this rifle I've put so much effort into will end up being a failed project..."

Thus began Yuri's project to secure a supply of magic stones.

*

The first thing Yuri tackled was not the fundamental question of what a magic stone was, but the, in a sense, more practical question of where magic stones were found. Since magic stones were inside monsters, they must be something the monsters created within their own bodies. He figured that if he investigated their location, he might find a hint on how to make them himself.

"Hmm... looking at my dissection results so far, they're almost exclusively found near the liver. Does that mean blood is necessary for magic stone generation?"

At this point, knowledge from his past life surfaced in Yuri's mind. One was about gallstones and kidney stones formed inside the body, a topic that was, in a way, familiar to Yuri, who had spent a long time in the hospital. The other was about pearl cultivation.

"They say magic stones are condensed magic power... but could the structure that holds that magic power be made of blood components?"

This was an easy idea for Yuri to come up with, given his knowledge of gallstones and kidney stones. However, he was not the only one to have reached a similar idea. They, like Yuri, had attempted to cultivate magic stones by culturing blood, but all had failed. However, Yuri had another piece of knowledge. Namely, the pearl cultivation technique that Japan had pioneered in his past life.

"For pearl cultivation, I think they implant a nucleus into an Akoya oyster. Couldn't I cultivate magic stones in a similar way? ...Ah, right, I remember in a chemistry experiment, when we were making a large crystal of copper sulfate, we used a small crystal as a nucleus in the same way..."

Thus, based on what Yuri considered a simple idea, he attempted to cultivate magic stones, and... though it took a fair amount of time, he succeeded rather easily.

There was actually another reason for this. When cultivating the magic stones, Yuri had poured in, of all things, non-elemental magic power. Yuri himself just thought that since it was basic research, he should use magic power without any extra elements attached. But this was, in fact, the other key that made cultivating magic stones possible, the first key being the use of a magic stone fragment as a nucleus.

Whether a monster or a mage, they possessed an elemental affinity for their magic power, and they wielded magic according to that affinity. Consequently, the magic stones possessed by monsters, and their blood, also had an elemental affinity. If magic power that did not match those affinities was poured in, the magic power condensation reaction would not proceed smoothly. For some reason, very few mages and alchemists had ever considered this, and the few who did had not reached the idea of a magic stone nucleus. Thus, until now, the artificial synthesis of magic stones had been considered an impossibility.

However, the magic power Yuri poured in was non-elemental. It did not repel the affinity of the magic stone fragment or the blood, and the reaction proceeded without any hindrance. Moreover, there was another bonus. The result of providing non-elemental magic power was, regardless of the affinity of the nucleus magic stone fragment, a non-elemental magic stone. Yuri had succeeded in mass-producing non-elemental magic stones, which contained the non-elemental magic power whose very existence had been doubted.

However... Yuri, who did not know just how rare non-elemental magic power was, did not notice this.

What Yuri did notice was something else.

"It... succeeded so easily... but if it's this easy, why are magic stones traded at such high prices...?"

In reality, it was anything but easy.

"Someone must have figured this out already. ...Are they not making it public? ...Maybe they're secretly making magic stones and getting rich... or could it be... no way! A military secret?!"

Precisely because he had knowledge from his past life, he arrived at the possibility that the technology for artificial magic stones was being kept secret as a military secret. Indeed, if this technology had been discovered, such a development would not have been out of the question. However, in reality, the technology for artificial magic stones had not been discovered.

"This is bad... if this gets out... in the worst case, the country will have me eliminated..."

Terrified by an assumption completely different from the truth, Yuri resolved to never leak the technology for artificial magic stones to anyone else. Though, he would be using it for himself.