Ch.9691 – Alchemist

Some people sleep lightly while others sleep deeply.

In my past life, I would wake up at the slightest sound, so I always thought I was a light sleeper.

But considering how I almost missed class at the academy because I didn’t hear my alarm, I’m starting to think I might actually be someone who can’t wake up easily unless forcibly roused.

I suddenly remembered what my master once said: the human brain remembers experiences of deprivation.

For example, intermittent fasting where you eat only one meal a day might be effective for short-term weight loss, but our bodies adapt to the reduced food intake by gradually increasing calorie absorption rate.

I heard this is one reason, along with compensatory psychology, why people become more vulnerable to the yo-yo effect.

Was it because I didn’t get enough sleep as a baby?

But I don’t particularly remember feeling sleep-deprived even then.

If anything, I suffered from insomnia due to anxiety about not waking up the next day.

Of course, there were benefits to having this body.

Being able to fall asleep just by closing my eyes was one of life’s blessings, along with not being picky about food.

I was forcibly awakened when someone shook my body so hard it made me dizzy.

It was Yu-na.

“Ah… sorry. I dozed off. Did you eat dinner well?”

She must have come into the room quietly without turning on the lights to wake me up.

I apologized for the shameful display of the host falling asleep when I had prepared a pajama party.

“If you’re done eating, would you like to watch a movie? I’ve downloaded ‘Zootopia’ and ‘Inside Out’.”

“……”

Why is everyone silent? I deliberately chose animated movies considering their age, but maybe they’re not to their taste?

Ha-ru, who had been watching carefully, spoke first.

“NoName… are you still tired?”

Tired?

I was tired from waking up early in the morning, but after taking a quick nap, I felt refreshed.

I tried to explain, not wanting them to think I ruined the mood by falling asleep while they were having fun.

“I just dozed off while setting up the projector. It’s definitely not because hanging out with you was boring. I was really looking forward to our pajama party today and woke up early for it.”

“NoName…”

Yu-na gently pinched my pajamas with a voice full of tears.

Did they fight?

It’s too dark to see their faces properly.

When I got up and turned on the lights, I could see Yu-na with her face all scrunched up.

“Why are you about to cry again? Did you fight with Ha-ru while I was gone?”

She shook her head vigorously from side to side, her red hair swinging.

I tried to hug her as usual to comfort her, but Yu-na pushed me away.

“Is it because I went to my room without saying anything?”

She shook her head again.

I tried pinching her soft cheeks lightly, but she pushed me away again and even huffed.

“I can’t read your mind completely. If something’s bothering you, I wish you’d tell me instead of hiding it.”

Children’s emotions are incredibly complex.

Adults clearly show singular emotions like joy, sadness, or disgust.

But children often don’t even know what they’re feeling themselves, making it extremely difficult to read their thoughts.

The only thing I could tell was that Yu-na’s eyes were brimming with hurt feelings.

“You’re the one hiding things, NoName.”

This time Ha-ru spoke in an angry voice.

“Me? I am?”

“Yes. You… you have things you’re hiding from us too, so why are you telling only Yu-na to be honest!”

“I feel like I’m missing something here. Can someone explain what’s going on?”

This is really awkward.

I feel as confused as an elementary school student who accidentally walked into the art room after school to retrieve a forgotten pencil case, only to witness the art teacher and PE teacher exploring each other’s lips.

For privacy’s sake, I won’t reveal who they were.

Yu-na pressed her forehead against my thigh and tightly hugged my waist.

“You were having nightmares… it was so scary… you were mumbling rune words, then suddenly saying you were in pain, begging for help, and… and… saying you were going to die…”

After Yu-na confessed what she had seen, the girl in pig pajamas approached my side.

“If you’re in pain, just say so. I hate people who say they’re fine when they’re not… they’re the worst kind of liars.”

Ha-ru said this with her fists clenched.

She also looked like she might burst into tears at any moment.

I could only sigh deeply as I embraced the two girls who rushed into my arms.

On the first day of our pajama party, instead of helping the two girls reconcile, I ended up making them cry.

* * *

As a nearly full moon hung in the night sky and dusk settled in.

NoName prepared the girls’ jackets and got ready to go out.

“You’re going outside at this hour? What for?” Professor Cheon asked with a puzzled tone.

“To see the stars,” NoName replied briefly as she opened the front door.

But the professor’s confusion remained unresolved.

In Korea’s brightest city, stars shyly hid their traces.

“There are a lot of clouds today, so you probably won’t even see the few that are there.”

“It’s okay. I remember where they’re all hiding. Can I borrow this?”

NoName’s group headed to the playground in the apartment complex.

It was a desolate open space where the traces of children who once played everywhere had vanished, leaving only silence.

She led Yu-na and Ha-ru by their hands and seated them each on a swing.

“It’s difficult to see stars in the middle of the city because of light pollution. If you want to see stars, you need to go somewhere completely dark.”

“I can’t see anything…”

Ha-ru, who was spouting TMI, and Yu-na, who was still shocked by NoName’s sleep-talking, gave her distrustful looks as she had dragged them out almost forcibly without explaining why.

“What I had wasn’t exactly a nightmare,” NoName said from the highest point of the slide.

“Then what was it?”

Yu-na pushed hard against the ground to move the swing, as if expressing her frustration.

NoName was a girl shrouded in mystery from head to toe.

She knew everything about herself, but Yu-na knew nothing about her.

That’s why she was angry and frustrated. Whenever she took one step forward to learn more about her, NoName would take two steps back.

Yu-na was determined not to tolerate any more evasiveness.

“Do you have a moment in your life when you were happiest?”

NoName’s dream was a nightmare yet not a nightmare.

It was indeed the most difficult and desperate moment of her life, but it was also the struggle of someone yearning for the return of their happiest moment.

“Today, I’ll show you here how many stars there are in this world.”

She took out the portable rune inscription device she had borrowed from Professor Cheon.

It was a wand-type product that could create runes and magic circles in the air without any medium.

It had the disadvantage that the stages of recording, injection, and activation all proceeded uniformly through ‘inscription,’ making it impossible to modify in the middle.

But every disadvantage comes with advantages.

It had excellent computational processing speed that reflected the caster’s mental processes in the magic circle, and it injected mana at the optimal approximate value, resulting in less mana consumption.

Considering that the magic NoName was about to use would involve a large amount of rune language and formulas, it was an essential item.

“There are many eccentrics in the world. It seems there have always been people curious about whether a magic circle would activate if they used each rune word once.”

The ‘null’ representing the empty set could be omitted, but this time she wanted to cast it properly, so she created 128 blank spaces in the magic circle.

The girls still didn’t understand what NoName was doing.

Not until light entered from the north of the magic circle.

“Null. El. Ras, Maven.”

She began the incantation with the runes most commonly used by those casting 1st and 2nd circle magic.

As runes were embedded at the top of the magic circle, lights came on one by one.

“Sutra, Arhen, Gernum, Psyche.”

The related circuits moved five gears with formulas.

With each tick of the clock’s second hand, the outermost track gradually illuminated clockwise.

“Istanya, Lumiere, Preshian, Fantasia, Nelimelo, Samatra, Bestial, Hyprit.”

Yu-na’s mouth slowly opened, overwhelmed by the size of the magic circle that felt sublime beyond wonder.

The amount of mana being injected through the inscription device was endless.

Whenever she squeezed out golden mana, a new rune appeared and devoured it greedily.

A massive magic circle with a diameter of 8 meters revealed its majestic form around NoName.

Five layers of gears, brighter than the flickering streetlights, illuminated the playground.

But only half the lights had come on so far.

As the swing stopped with a creak, NoName contained the final 64 seven-syllable rune words in one breath.

“Zigmuntashente, Reshaikhbar, Saleantirumoneh, Harayetreika.”

The name of the magic circle that used all 128 rune words typically found in magic circles was:

[Cast: Alchemist]

“Alchemist, the magic that stores wishes.”

As soon as NoName finished speaking, all light around the three girls disappeared.

“…!”

Before they could be startled, the North Star was the first to twinkle and greet them.

Thirteen stars shone blue in the east.

Nine stars glowed red in the west.

Stars began to appear above Yu-na’s head and beneath Ha-ru’s feet, covering the entire world with starlight.

They suddenly realized they were no longer standing on the ground.

“How is it? Feels like being at the center of the universe, right?”

NoName, who had come down from the slide, approached the girls.

Ha-ru’s heart raced when she realized that even the swing she had been sitting on had disappeared.

“What kind of magic is this…?”

“Aren’t the stars beautiful? You won’t find a place like this anywhere else.”

That was certainly true.

Ha-ru could definitely say she had never seen such a landscape where thousands, tens of thousands of stars densely filled the black canvas.

“NoName, then what you were mumbling in your sleep…”

“Yes. I must have been using this magic. It’s my favorite spell.”

What could this magic possibly be?

Was all this just to see the night sky?

But Yu-na’s question was soon answered.

Her eyes were naturally drawn to the spot NoName pointed at.

A shooting star streaked across the northern sky.

“A star is falling…!”

As if to say it was too early to be amazed, NoName smiled.

Soon two, then three stars began to fall.

Hundreds of stars still hung in the sky.

This time, ten, twenty stars fell all at once.

Worried they might fall toward them, Yu-na tightly gripped NoName’s hand.

Ha-ru felt the same way.

The spectacle of the meteor shower filling the night sky made Ha-ru’s heart swell with emotion. She also held NoName’s empty hand tightly.

Following the paths of the fallen stars, cracks appeared in the black sky.

If the world the girls were seeing was the inside of an egg, that egg was now about to break.

Crash!

When the 128th star completed its role and fell, the black dome completely collapsed, revealing the outside world.

A clear blue sky without a single cloud and a vast prairie teeming with life stretched before them.

Crimson flowers blooming profusely on the lush green meadow added color to the earth.

Where the wind blew, warm spring sunshine and fresh grass scent combined to spread like nature’s perfume.

Flower petals carried by the refreshing breeze stuck to the girls’ cheeks as if greeting them.

“Alright, let’s go.”

“Wh-where to?”

NoName pointed to the end of the hill.

Two figures were seated on an elegant mat spread over the grass-scented meadow.

One was a cold-looking blonde boy, and the other was a slightly younger girl with a face full of smiles.