The Magic Academy's Physicist-Chapter 134: What Are You Doing, Sis? (14)

Chapter 134: What Are You Doing, Sis? (14)

It was the same dream as last week.

Alone, I was making my way through a world covered in darkness. There was smoke rising everywhere from sea and land alike, and flames burned up the earth’s atmosphere. Everywhere I went turned into ground zero.

I realized I was smiling after some walking. Then after returning to indifference, my unmoving mouth twitched.

─ There goes another universe.

An unpleasant voice rang in my ears. When I heard this sound, my eyes would open and I would wake up.

“...... Haa.”

It was a nightmare that had me considering if I should be getting help. With a sigh as deep as the ocean, I snapped out of it.

I tossed the dampened pillow cover into the far corner and sat up, then saw the back of a round head.

“Oh, you’re awake?”

Lotte, who’d been diligently writing something at her desk, turned around when she noticed my presence. I nodded wordlessly in response.

“What’s wrong? Are you not feeling well?”

“I’m fine.”

“Tell me right away if you aren’t. I can get something prescribed from Dr. Glyston like last time.”

“It’s okay.”

It would already be difficult enough to take care of oneself while studying here, yet she cared so much about others. I liked my roommate for being who she was.

I’d seen a lot of old classmates who begged me to become their guarantor but it was my first time meeting someone who gave so freely without expecting anything in return. Ah, I was going to start crying.

“Anyway, what are you working on this early?”

I purposely changed the topic to hide my gratitude.

“Oh, this? I’m writing a letter.”

“Letter? To your father?”

“No, to His Majesty the Emperor.”

“Ah....”

An unexpected figure came out of Lotte’s mouth.

A letter to the head of the state, eh. I might know what it was about.

“I still don’t understand. How could he have the country manage Flare? You were the one that completed it and gave up the patent so that everyone could use it freely!”

“I did.”

“So it doesn’t make sense for the Imperial court to confiscate it. Who’s going to develop new scrolls after this?”

I was about to nod in agreement.

Bam!

“There’s something else, too.”

A kid came barging through the front door–Freyr, the Youko girl who was to research together with us today.

Freyr was uncharacteristically down today. With a gloomy expression, she continued.

“For the Empire that borders the Beasts’ territory, the individual freedom to develop and possess scrolls is basically the founding ideology. If individuals hadn’t been allowed to make and use scrolls flexibly, then this nation couldn’t have grown and would’ve fallen a long time ago.”

Lotte wasn’t the only one unhappy with the Emperor’s decision.

Updat𝓮d from freewēbnoveℓ.com.

Including Freyr, most of the mages studying and researching in the Empire were objecting to the Imperial court’s latest decision. There was no point in distinguishing between nobles and commoners. In this moment, everyone was making an appeal as a group under the banner of the same profession.

“It might only be Flare this time, but they don’t say that those who steal needles will steal a cow1 for nothing. We have to make them retract this decision no matter what!”

It was obvious who was preventing Flare from being made–it’d be Blueberry.

To be fair, I was the one who triggered this situation. I had threatened Rosemary with Flare so she went and took drastic measures to ensure her own safety.

“Calm down for a minute, you two.”

If my two friends got increasingly angry in this situation, it’d only make me feel bad.

A cornered mouse bit the cat. If the mages’ demands to retract the confiscation of Flare intensified and didn’t give Rosemary any room to think, she might make a misstep. Such as using the Emperor to set an example by killing someone.

They could have Flare. This level of deception wasn’t a choice but a necessity.

“What a sensitive topic to be discussing first thing in the morning. Why don’t we go get books from the library like we discussed yesterday?”

When I changed the subject, the two settled down. Lotte and Freyr looked at each other and nodded.

**A person was allowed to borrow four books and up to twenty hardcover research papers from the library.

We used all of our IDs and borrowed twelve books and sixty related papers, then brought them to the club.

It was twelve books and sixty papers worth of documents. Even with a cart, heavy was heavy.

“Ugh, when are we going to read all of these?”

“We’re not reading all of them, just finding what we need and referencing them.”

“... So what are we going to reference?”

All the books we chose were math-related. None of them were about thaumaturgy or if they were, there was only a Chapter on it.

The other two didn’t seem to understand why this kind of book was necessary for developing Flare. That was because Lotte and Freyr also knew the formulas that acted as its theoretical foundation to some extent. So why were we borrowing books like these when they already had some knowledge of Flare, basically.

“Are you trying to make some new magic like the Elemental King or a Grand Mage?”

“Well.”

With a crooked smile, I went into the room.

That’s right, the private room where I’d conspired with Vermel. This time, I brought my two good friends instead of some elf guy.

Bang.

And as I closed the door behind me after entering last, the room plunged into darkness.

“Why did you want us to come in here?”

“Wow, so dark. Can we even research properly here?”

“Just wait.”

After getting the right amount of light, I pulled out a scroll from the bag that was now one with me.

“What’s that?”

“White Night.”

“White Night?”

It was the first time I was showing Lotte and Freyr this scroll–a rare item that I got for handing over the tokamak to Akasha during my time in Saliere County.

Result-wise, it was an advantage. This was the only copy of White Night though it was unfinished, but I could build the tokamak anytime as long as I had the materials.

“What’s a White Night? What’s it used for?”

“I’ll just tell you one thing for now. If we can figure this out, then we won’t need Flare.”

The two of them widened their eyes like a carp caught on a fishing hook.

“There’s something more powerful than Flare?”

“Where did you get it from?”

I brought my pointer to my lips, indicating that I couldn’t reveal that much. Neither asked me beyond that, because they were both occupied with appreciating the glorious runes etched into the White Night scroll.

“Wow, it’s so complicated.... I can’t decipher any of it....”

“The world is big and there’s still so many things to learn. Do you understand this? If so, can you teach it to us?”

I was glad that my friends were academically passionate. I didn’t even need to ask them to do research with me because they took initiative on their own to learn new things.

It’d be nice if I had these kinds of research colleagues back on Earth.

[Honestly, there’s nothing that flops easier than group projects, right?]

Poring over White Night, Freyr pursed her lips and let out little noises of admiration. Then when she floundered due to a section that was too far for her to see, I put her on my shoulders.

“... Euuu, it’s hard! But if we do this, then it’ll definitely turn out to be something exciting!”

“So you’re saying that we can use this as a replacement for Flare as well as a stepping stone in developing a powerful spell to defeat all Beasts, right?”

Seeing their eyes, I knew who to leave this to. No, I didn’t even need to point it out.

“Aether, leave this to me. I’ll try to decipher the bloom unit, at least. I can ask if I have any questions, right?”

This scroll defined in the Minkowski spacetime2 must have provoked Lady Saliere’s thirst for knowledge. Of course, I was willing to allow this.

“Of course. To give you a hint from what I know....... Yeah....”

This was how White Night was defined in the hardcover.

[A Legendary Innate Magic that freely manipulates plasma in the quasi-neutral state. When casted, the excited electrons in the atmosphere release energy and photons so that it always stays bright even at night.]So White Night itself was a magic related to electromagnetism.

The people of this world didn’t know what electromagnetism exactly was. It wasn’t that they had no clue, only that things advanced slower compared to Earth and they didn’t teach it properly in schools.

Based on the explanation in the hardcover, one needed to know something about electromagnetism in order to decipher this properly. But there wasn’t enough time to teach electromagnetic interactions from the beginning, step by step, to Lotte and Freyr.

[Then what are you planning to do? You can’t do this alone, but you’d need to teach your friends all the basics first to work on it together.]

I knew, so even if I taught them, I was going to do it in a different way.

“Lotte, Freyr, you’re both good at math, right?”

“Mm, to an extent.”

“Hey, are you underestimating us? You have to be able to easily handle four years worth of education at other academies to get into Tilette!”

“That’s good, then.”

[What are you going to do?]

There was a way.

A mathematical method that would let you understand electromagnetic interactions even without knowing Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations. Simply put, you could derive one of nature’s basic laws using a few mathematical tools.

[Is that even possible?]

Why, didn’t someone once say?

If the language of Korea was Korean, and the language of the world was English–

The language of the universe was math.

“I’ll start with what I was thinking of last time. You see those books about linear algebra and group theory? Search for unitary matrix and symmetric groups. If you also carefully read through the metric section, then the bloom unit should be relatively easier to understand.”

Lotte nodded without question and began flipping through the books.

“What about me? What should I do?”

“Come outside for a minute.”

Freyr quirked her head slightly like a baby fox whose curiosity was piqued. I took Freyr and sat at the workstation after grabbing some metal tools and mana stones from the supply room.

“What are we doing?”

“You know how there’s the Culture Fest happening soon, yeah?”

“Yup.”

“We’re going to submit an entry.”

“Ack, that’s so random.”

Freyr tilted her head in puzzlement, but soon focused on me as I drew a blueprint.

Even as I drew the blueprint, my mind was full of thoughts on how I could deceive Rosemary.

As a result, I left the daytime research to Lotte.

Then what were Freyr and I going to do?

Simple. Deceive them.

Footnotes

1. Basically saying that a bad habit/act will grow into something worse when repeated2. "In physics, Minkowski space is the main mathematical description of spacetime in the absence of gravitation. It combines inertial space and time manifolds into a four-dimensional model" (Wikipedia)