Magi Craft Meister

Magi Craft Meister 581

18 Further Progress Arc

18-01 Recovery

"'V?llig Geneseng'."

"Ugh…"

"Brother Jin, are you okay?"

"Yes, I'm fine. I don't feel as much pain as before."

At the manor on Hourai Island, Elsa was casting Healing Magic on Jin.

The date was September 29th. 12 days had passed since Jin's return from the land of the demons.

During that time, Jin has had the same recovery spell cast on him once per day.

At first, Reiko had been the one in charge of the spellcasting.

Then, along the way, after having Elsa run a checkup on his body, the role was passed onto her.

The reason why this was possible was because, at this point, Elsa was completely cured of her "Magic Excess Syndrome".

＊ ＊ ＊

Eight days before that…

"Jin, how do you prepare water with one millionth of a gram dissolved in it?"

"I wanna know that too."

Standing in front of the entire "Family", Jin was explaining that he had found a way to cure Elsa's "Magic Excess Syndrome".

"Jin! R-Really… can Elsa's illness really be cured!?"

Mine, Elsa's biological mother, clung to Jin with teary eyes.

"You're truly amazing, Jin! To think you'd find a cure for the 'Magic Excess Syndrome', which until now was known for being incurable!"

Reinhardt was also very excited to hear this.

"A mental catalyst, huh? What a wonderful substance…!"

Toa was impressed and seemed to be wanting to see the thing for himself.

"How are you going to prepare one millionth of a gram?"

On the other hand, Saki just asked questions.

At any rate, everyone was very excited about the news and were already talking to each other about it.

"Brother Jin… Can you… really cure me?""

The only one with tears in her eyes was Elsa, and seeing her face made a lasting impression on Jin.

Both Saki and Toa were eagerly staring at Jin, wondering how he was planning to create an aqueous solution that had one millionth of a gram of mental catalyst in 100cc of water.

"Is it even possible to measure a millionth of a gram?"

Saki wondered if Jin's Engineering Magic had such precision.

"No, it's actually impossible. But I can use these to measure all the way down to 0.1 grams."

Saying that, Jin showed Saki and Toa the weighing machine he had just finished working on.

"What's this? It looks strange."

It was a top pan balancing scale.

In this world, scales were either of the hanging-type or the beam balance-type. Jin was the first to make a top pan scale.

"This one makes it easier to make fine measures."

Hanging-type scales had the disadvantage of making it harder to put weights and samples on their plates simply because of the strings the plates hang from. So a top pan scale would be easier to work with as it did not have that limitation.

Jin had planned to hand over this new top pan scale to Saki after this weighing was finished.

"Ok, so you can weigh 0.1 grams with this, but that's just one tenth of a gram, right? How about one millionth of a gram…?"

Jin gives a hint to Saki, who still seemed confused.

"Even after the mental catalyst dissolves in water, its nature won't change. So if the water is later evaporated, the dissolved mental catalyst should return to its original state."

"Huh? Then… No way, Jin!?"

Saki seemed to have finally understood the answer after seeing Jin preparing water in a huge container.

"Uh-huh. If we're trying to get one millionth of a gram in 100cc of water, we could get the same ratio by dissolving 0.1 grams into 10,000 liters of water, right?"

In other words, dissolving 0.1 grams in 10 tons of water would yield a solution with the desired concentration.

Jin then put 0.1 grams of the mental catalyst into something that looked like a small pool rather than a simple container, then used 'Homogenize' to make a homogenous liquid solution.

"Now… I guess we'll take a liter from this."

Jin decided to prepare a bit more of this precious medicine, just in case he ended up meeting someone who might need it other than Elsa.

He then split this into 10 crystal vials of 100cc each before proceeding to separate the mentalk catalyst from the remaining solution.

"'Extraction'."

"Oh."

Saki's astonishment escaped her mouth.

Having retrieved a little less than 0.1 grams of mental catalyst from the near-ton of water, he carefully stored it into a hermetically sealed container, and discarded the remaining water.

"Come on, let's have Elsa drink this."

Just as Jin was about to see Elsa with the vial in his hand, he stopped suddenly. Elsa was there, standing in front of him.

"…Elsa."

"Brother Jin…"

Elsa stared at the bottle in Jin's hand.

"Is that… the medicine?"

Jin nodded and held out the vial.

"That's right. There shouldn't be any harmful ingredients mixed in. But feel free to analyze it.

But Elsa took the vial and shook her head.

"No, this is the medicine that you made for me, Brother Jin. I trust you."

Saying that, she swallowed the contents in one gulp.

"…It doesn't taste like anything."

"Well, it probably shouldn't. After all, this was 0.1 grams in 10 tons of water. The medicine you just took had a concentration of one millionth of a gram."

"Jin, is Elsa already cured after drinking that?"

Saki, who was watching from the side, said with interest.

"No, it seems that it's going to take about two days for the mental catalyst to circulate through her body and finally settle itself in her brain cells."

"Hmm, I see."

＊ ＊ ＊

Back to the present…

Two days after that, Elsa woke up with an unusually refreshing feeling all over her body.

"…Does this mean that the medicine worked?"

Of course, this refreshing awakening didn't mean that she had always woken up feeling bad.

Still, that feeling she was so used to having in her body, which would somehow tell her that something was wrong, was now completely gone.

To her, it was as if she had thought that 100 points was the highest score until this morning, when she realized that there was way more than that more than that.

Feeling like that had become standard for her, so now that she was "OK", she actually felt way better than ever.

When Elsa told Mine about how she was feeling, the latter cried tears of joy and quickly embraced her daughter.

"Elsa… Oh, I'm so glad…"

Ever since learning that Elsa had an overabundance of magical power, Mine has always been by her side and has become an outlet for her surplus magical power.

This surplus magical power (or rather, of Mana) would be usually manifested in the form of a fever.

Therefore, whenever Mine felt that Elsa had a slight fever, she would immediately have Elsa use magic so that she could vent her excess out.

By the time she turned 13, Elsa had learned to see her body's signs on her own and was able to deal with them by herself, but after Jin made a bracelet that absorbed her surplus magical power, she no longer had to do that. Elsa thought she could live her life like an ordinary mage. And she would reflect upon her happiness, thinking about how great it felt to finally have a relatively normal body.

But this time, things had gone even further.

"I… I owe Brother Jin a great deal…"

He had been the one who had saved her from the Unifiers, who had caught her shortly after her leaving her house.

He had been the one to make her feel safe and at home as his protegee.

The person who had helped her birth mother Mine, and allowed for Elsa to be reunited with her.

The one who made the bracelet that eliminated her excess magical power.

The person who showed her the new world of Magi Craft.

The one who showed her that there was another world, one highly advanced in the art of "Science".

And now…

He was the one who had managed to completely cure her "Magic Excess Syndrome", a condition she had thought she would have no choice but to live with for the rest of her life…

"… I will dedicate myself to return every single one of his favors…"

With a new resolution in her heart, and having heard that the synthetic cells that made up most of Jin's body were inactive, Elsa offered her hand, willing to do anything she could to help Jin.

"'Diagnose'… Quite a lot of them are now activated."

＊ ＊ ＊

Having earnestly examined Jin's body, Elsa was surprised at his initial imbalance. But now…

"More than half of the once inactive cells are now active."

Hearing that, Reiko, who handed over the role of casting Healing Magic to Elsa, also smiled.

"In less than 10 days, Brother Jin's body will be fully functional."