kscans

Chapter 29 - Even Small Monsters Won't Be Wasted! The Alchemist's Eco-Spirit

For a moment, Leonhard thought he had misheard what Mireille said.

But he didn't need an appraisal skill to know. This necklace top was emitting an incredible amount of mana.

(Wow... this is bad. Just a moment ago I was thinking 'I've had enough of monsters'... but this makes me want to test it out.)

Hearing its performance specs made him freeze. It cut both physical and magical damage by 50 percent. You would never find a number like that in a regular weapon shop.

Normally, even a 5 percent cut would be a super high-end item. A non-attribute sword cost a captain-class knight one to three months' salary. If it had some kind of attribute, it would cost half a year's pay.

A charm-class item that you could clearly feel was 'working' would cost a full year's worth of weapons. The market rate was for adding to fire or water attributes, or a 10 to 15 percent physical cut.

...And this one cut both physical and magical damage by half? This was probably at the level where you could buy a house.

"Uh, this... are you sure I can have it?"

"What are you saying? It's a thank you for fighting the Helkaarn, and I'll need you to protect me from now on. I, I'll be wearing one too... and besides, it's not 100 percent, so it's not perfect protection."

--It would be rude to refuse.

Leonhard accepted it graciously and threaded it onto his own name tag.

Mireille was worried, saying, "The color is so garish, it's not very attractive," but that wasn't true. He was even happy with the garish color. The fact that she had made it for him, that was what held the most value.

"What about you, Mireille?"

"I don't have a chain, so I plan to braid some magical beast hide to make a cord. You can slice the hide thin, but if you braid it, its durability becomes comparable to the hide of a really strong monster."

While she was passionately talking about magical beasts, Leonhard was gazing at the nape of her white neck.

Should I buy her a chain when I go back... no, the magical beast leather is probably stronger and better.

--The feeling of wanting to give a gift to a girl you like and have her wear it. He was starting to understand it a little.

◇

The fourth floor had no windows. The back was crammed with wooden boxes, and he planned to go through them one by one to see what was inside.

"Is it okay if I go through these as best I can?"

"I'd appreciate it, but let's clean up first."

The thing Mireille brought from the third floor was a small, humanoid magic tool. It scurried around, sucking up dust, and even did a final wipe-down.

"Just having one of these in the shop makes the kids so happy. This tower has a lot of good things that couldn't be sold, or things like this that were used as signs and weren't for sale. But it cleans while moving, so it was really convenient and helpful when it was in the shop."

The mechanism was surprisingly simple, she said. A wind-attribute magic core and a large bag were placed in the little man's stomach, and it sucked up garbage through the intake ports on its feet. It was powered by a magic box on its back, which stored mana extracted from the magic cores of small monsters.

"For wiping, you just attach a cloth to its hands. Then it just moves around without bumping into things."

The tool for extracting mana from the magic cores was properly stored in the tower's warehouse. But given the parts and time, Mireille could apparently build the tool itself from scratch.

"The Magic Furnace in the Royal Capital is just a larger version of this. But on that scale, just the circuitry alone would require a master alchemist... or rather, someone at my master's level."

A Magic Furnace took years to build in the first place. It required the magic of large monsters for power, and it was beyond the scope of just alchemy, she said.

A regular alchemist could only make, at most, a mana extraction machine for their work.

"But if we use the magic of small monsters for everyday items, we can avoid wasting their lives... and if we hunt too many monsters, the ecosystem will collapse."

The profile of Mireille as she spoke was tinged with a little pride.