[How strange.]
Seeing that, the ghost kept exclaiming in admiration. It seemed he found it remarkable that a divine beast followed someone who was not even the head of the house so well.
“So what is it you want from me?”
[You’re awfully impatient....... Let me introduce myself first.]
The moment she entered the room, Camilla asked straight for the point.
[My name is Jishua.]
“Jishua? That name is a little......”
[I know, I know. That my name sounds like a woman’s.]
As if he had heard that many times already, he let out a short sigh.
[I was a mage when I was alive.]
“A mage?”
[Yes, and not just any mage. A highly capable genius mage.]
“.......”
Wasn’t it a little embarrassing to say something like that about yourself with your own mouth?
Camilla stared at Jishua a little blankly as he attached the word genius to himself without the slightest hesitation.
Was I like that once too?
When people used to ask who seemed likely to win the award this time, she would go around saying, Who else would win besides me?
So was that why everyone found me insufferable? Not because my soul changed, but because I really was like that?
While Camilla fell into a bout of completely untimely self-reflection, Jishua’s voice reached her ears.
He briefly explained how he had ended up dying.
[You could say greed brought disaster.]
At his admission that he had been so intoxicated by his own outstanding talent that he could see nothing else, Camilla inwardly nodded.
He was the sort of person who called himself a genius mage without his face even reddening once, after all.
[More than anyone, I wanted to reach the highest realm first. What I chose... was dragon magic.]
“...Dragon magic?”
And out of nowhere, something that belonged in fairy tales, legends, or the founding myth of an empire had appeared. What kind of absurd nonsense was this all of a sudden?
Camilla’s eyes narrowed slightly, as if trying to discern the truth.
[Verkros, the last dragon that existed on the continent.]
“Ah.”
Verkros. Camilla knew that name very well.
And for good reason. It was a dragon with very deep ties to the Fabler Empire.
That signet.
The signet she had found and brought back to Crown Prince Edsen this time.
The signet made from the bones of the black dragon once called the Evil God, slain by the founding emperor.
The owner of those bones had been none other than Verkros.
They said if royal blood touched it, you could hear crying, so I wondered if maybe a ghost was attached to it.
But no matter how much she examined it, she had found no such thing as a dragon ghost. It was simply, in the most literal sense, an ordinary signet carrying something like a dragon’s lingering resentment.
Well, calling that ordinary was not exactly right, but still.
[I found the last grimoire Verkros left behind.]
Camilla, who had briefly drifted into another thought, heard Jishua’s voice again.
“Yes, that’s impressive.”
[...What?]
“What what?”
[What is with that lukewarm reaction? I’m talking about dragon magic!]
“I said it was impressive, didn’t I? Do you want me to applaud for you too?”
As if that were difficult. Clap, clap, clap.
[...Forget it.]
Jishua could not hide his dissatisfaction, looking deflated at Camilla’s total lack of visible excitement.
But from her perspective, that had truly been her best effort.
“I’m an ordinary person who doesn’t know the first thing about magic. No matter how amazing dragon magic or lizard magic is, it doesn’t really move me.”
[L-Lizard? Hey!]
Jishua’s mouth fell open in shock, but Camilla did not care in the slightest.
It was the same when I got Assassin Zero’s sword.
Just like how, even after obtaining that sword, she had thrown it to Rube without much interest.
People in that line of work might go mad over a sword like that, but to her it was less useful than a fruit knife.
What exactly was she supposed to do with a blade she could barely even see?
“Anyway, so?”
Camilla urged him to continue. When she scolded him for making the preface too long, he grumbled that the climax was coming soon, so she ought to wait.
[That grimoire really was incredible.]
“Yes, yes.”
[It even contained a way to move between dimensions.]
“Yes... yes?”
Dimension travel?
At those words, Camilla’s reaction changed completely. Her eyes widened, and she straightened in her seat before asking again.
“You’re saying it’s possible to move between dimensions?”
[Oh?]
At that, Jishua looked at her with surprise.
[You believe there are other dimensions?]
Of course I do. I came from one.
But she had no intention of telling him that, so Camilla only gave a large nod.
“So then?”
[I put everything else aside and focused only on that magic.]
“Dimension travel magic?”
[Yes. It looked the most incredible. I thought it would be perfect for proving my abilities. It took some time, but I succeeded in casting it!]
“What?”
You succeeded?
Now that Camilla was finally showing interest, Jishua seemed to perk up as well, his tone lifting with excitement as he kept going.
[I really did succeed!]
“You’re saying you actually went to another world?”
Jishua nodded vigorously. As if recalling that time, his eyes filled with excitement.
[It was a world I had never encountered before. Towering buildings so high you couldn’t see the end of them, and huge iron carriages that ran far faster than horses! Everywhere I looked, it was full of astonishing things.]
“...So you really did cross over.”
At his words, Camilla’s mouth fell open before she knew it.
From how vividly he described what sounded like skyscrapers and cars, as though painting them with words, it was clearly no lie.
Dimension travel. Wasn’t this genuinely incredible?
[It was a dazzling world. I was so happy, thinking I had proven my abilities.]
He wore a distant expression, as if dreaming.
But it lasted only for an instant.
As if it had never been there at all, Jishua’s face quickly hardened.
[Then a problem arose.]
“What kind of problem? Was something wrong with the magic?”
[No, the magic was perfect. It was dragon magic, after all. But.......]
“But?”
A long ⊛ Nоvеlιght ⊛ (Read the full story) sigh escaped his mouth.
[There was one thing I had overlooked.]
“What was it?”
[To move between dimensions, your wavelength had to match with someone in the other world.]
“Wavelength?”
[In truth, the principle and method of dimension travel are simpler than you might think. You only need to exchange souls with someone in another world for a short while. The problem lies in the process.]
The key to success was finding a soul whose wavelength matched your own well enough.
If such a being could not be found, the spell itself could not even be cast.
[That is probably why the dragon who completed the spell could never use it himself. Even if it were another world, how could there possibly be a human whose wavelength matched that of a dragon?]
There would be no body in that other world capable of bearing a dragon’s immense knowledge and mind.
[But I was fortunate enough to find a human whose wavelength matched mine. That was tremendous luck. I prepared everything thoroughly.]
“What kind of preparations?”
[I installed a magical device so that the person who woke up in my body would immediately fall asleep.]
So that the person forcibly dragged over here against their own will would not panic.
The instant he finished speaking, Camilla frowned.
“Isn’t that a bit too much? They were dragged here against their will.”
[I know. But I thought it would only be for a very short while, so it would not be a problem at all.]
“Hmm.”
At her icy expression, Jishua mumbled in a gloomy voice.
[Don’t condemn me too much. I was punished for it too. Horribly.......]
“Punished?”
A long sigh slipped from Jishua’s mouth.
[When I returned after experiencing the other world...... I found myself dead.]
“...What?”
[It seems the sleeping spell did not work properly. The person who woke in my body wandered around here and there, fell off a cliff, and died on the spot.]
“.......”
She had nothing to say to that. There was no one to blame, was there? It was a death brought about by something he had done of his own accord.
“Then what happened to that man’s soul?”
[The moment I returned, he safely crossed back to the other world. I was the only one left without a body.]
Should she call that a relief, at least? That the other person had survived?
Camilla clicked her tongue briefly in her mind. She had heard all sorts of ghost stories by now, but this man’s might have been the most futile and ill-fated of them all.
“So, what is it you want from me?”
Camilla returned to the point again. Whatever his circumstances were, what mattered now was the resentment he still carried.
[I want the dragon magic I found to be passed on to others. I’ll tell you where the grimoire is.]
“Do you really have to?”
He had cast that magic and ended up parting ways with his body forever, and yet he still wanted to pass it down to the next generation?
When she shot him a dumbfounded look, he flared up and shouted.
[It is an extraordinary grimoire unlike any other. As a mage, I absolutely cannot tolerate such magic vanishing!]
...Should she call that professional pride?
If it were me, I’d never want to lay eyes on that kind of magic again.
