Chapter 294

“So. Why did you ask me to stay here?”

“……”

There was no answer.

Whether he was pretending not to hear me or just had nothing to say, Leonard simply slept.

‘Am I going to catch a cold from this?’

Even with that thought, I wasn’t particularly worried. Since it was a child’s cold, I would likely already have immunity. As I channeled Divine Power into Leonard’s bed, he finally opened his eyes again. As expected, you have to use magic to wake a magic maniac.

“Shall I bring His Majesty the King?”

He spoke just fine when he was kicking Emanuel out, but now he wasn’t opening his mouth. He shook his head, so I continued to pour Divine Power into him with a sense of ‘here you go’.

“Why did you catch a cold?”

“……”

“Did you study too much? It’s a pretty tough schedule for a five-year-old. Or was it the training?”

At the last word, Leonard quickly shook his head.

He seemed to enjoy the training. Excluding combat magic, this kid had three one-hour classes a day, and while I thought it was a schedule he should endure since he was born a crown prince… the content of what he was learning was not easy, so I could see how it would be difficult. According to the lesson content he told me, this kid had already almost mastered what others learn in elementary school at this age. I didn’t know the secondary education curriculum here, so I wasn’t sure, but I also got the feeling he was doing more than that.

As I was feeling a bit sorry for him, Leonard called me in a low voice.

“Teacher.”

“Yes.”

“I’m hungry.”

“……”

What am I supposed to do about that….

I feel like I’m at school. It reminds me of the kids who would pester their teacher to buy them snacks.

“Then I’ll go tell the kitchen now.”

“Mmm.”

Leonard grabbed my arm, as if that wasn’t the answer he wanted.

I want to go back and ask. Why was he such a kid when he was five? I listened well to my parents when I was five. I poured a ton of Divine Power into Leonard and said.

“Fine…. Just have some Divine Power.”

“That’s not food.”

“The feeling is roughly similar. Because it makes you strong.”

“I see.”

Leonard agreed more readily than I expected, whether it was because he knew I was talking nonsense and decided to drop it, or because he was tired. In the meantime, I called a servant, ordered a meal, and changed the wet towel.

‘Is this really my task for today?’

I came here as a combat magic teacher, not to babysit. But it felt wrong on a human level to ignore his request, go out, and do only what I wanted, so it was right to spend one day like this.

I brought a sofa over, sat on it, and read a book about holy relics and the occult. After a while, Leonard regained his energy, got up, and watched me. I asked if he wanted me to read him a fairy tale, but he replied that he didn’t, perhaps because his intellectual level was beyond that.

Five hours in the sickroom. I looked at Leonard’s condition and said.

“Shall we go out?”

“What?”

I pointed out the window. Leonard’s face lit up, and he called the doctor to ask if he could go out. Fortunately, the doctor said that since it was April and the weather was nice, he was allowed to go out as long as he didn’t leave the grounds of the Crown Prince’s palace. I took Leonard, who was the only one wearing winter clothes, and we went to a grassy area in the garden with a small artificial lake and lay down.

‘Comfortable.’

Leonard also seemed to prefer the fresh air outside to being inside, as he sat next to me with a brighter complexion than before.

He fiddled with my wand and asked.

“Teacher. What can you do with your Divine Power?”

“Almost everything.”

“Then can you manipulate my mind too?”

“Yes.”

At that, Leonard’s eyes widened.

“Then did you?”

“…No. Do I have a reason to get dragged away?”

“Then when do you use mind manipulation magic? Do you use it in battle?”

“You can, but during battle, the opponent is also focusing all their attention on defense, so it’s often blocked. Because the Magic Power flowing through the opponent’s body tries to repel the Divine Power.”

“…! It’s not omnipotent.”

“Of course not. If I could do anything, I would have already conquered the world.”

The 17-year-old Leo naturally knew this, but this 5-year-old didn’t.

Leonard burst out laughing and then fell into thought. Then he asked in a smaller voice than before.

“Are you and my uncle close, teacher?”

“I wonder…. I’m not sure.”

“Then why haven’t you been in the Crown Prince’s palace lately?”

“……”

Ah….

I know the reason for his lack of energy now. I had a feeling, but to think it was true. I tilted my head and smiled.

“I should have played with you more.”

That wasn’t the right answer either, as Leonard’s expression hardened.

It didn’t take long to realize that the word ‘play with’ was the problem. No matter how much of a child he was, I shouldn’t have treated him like one. Thanks to that, the air felt like it was getting chilly. The moment I opened my mouth to correct my earlier statement, Leonard beat me to it.

“If I had been born in 1863, I would have been friends with you, teacher, right?”

I want to tell him we’re already friends.

I know exactly how he feels. When you’re young, there are times when you want your favorite teacher to only watch you and praise you. Since the world still revolves around them, I suppose. It’s not just with teachers either. Isn’t it a time when you even think you want your close friend to play with you more often? This tendency clearly decreases as you get older, but it’s too much to expect that much maturity from him yet. I remember being like that with my acting teacher at that age.

‘Aside from being grateful that he thinks of me so fondly…’

This is fun….

I can’t help but laugh. Even if I told the 17-year-old Leo this story, he wouldn’t understand.

“Teacher.”

“Go ahead.”

“Will you be my teacher until I become an adult?”

I can’t lie.

I didn’t answer and just looked down at him. Leonard looked at me, then his gaze shifted to the ground.

“I’ve been studying the era of the Five Good Emperors recently. I’ve finished reading the Meditations with my philosophy teacher.”

“I see. You’re studying something interesting.”

“Do you know Fronto?”

He was the teacher of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, who is famous to us as the author of ‘Meditations’. ‘Meditations’ is the same as ‘Reflections on Self’. I nodded.

“Of course.”

“Fronto and Emperor Marcus were close, weren’t they? ‘How can I call you by any other name than my dearest friend?’. That’s what Marcus Aurelius said to his teacher Fronto. They were close friends despite being almost twenty years apart, and aren’t you and I also almost twenty years apart, teacher?”

“My dearest friend.”

He’s dissatisfied with this situation where I have to ‘play with’ him because he’s young, and he wants to be as close to me as his uncle is.

Even without him saying so, he’s already my dearest friend in this world. If we’re only counting living people, he might be the closest person in my entire life. I don’t want to think about this topic anymore. As I closed my eyes, Leonard, as he usually did, began to list off the things he had learned.

“I like the stories Fronto and Marcus Aurelius shared. It wasn’t just Marcus Aurelius who cherished Fronto, but Fronto also cherished Marcus.”

“Hmm, I suppose you mean something like, ‘Farewell, my lord, most sweet, most missed, my best reason for living.’ A phrase Fronto wrote at the end of a letter to Marcus Aurelius. Or ‘who am no lover, but I can discern your beauty as well as anyone else, aye, far more accurately, I might say, even than your lover’?”

“…You can speak English too, teacher?”

“I’m from America…”

“Ah.”

Though I didn’t learn it in America. I’m just remembering what I read in the original text. Before coming to this world, my favorite book was Meditations. I read it until it was worn out, and I memorized everything. After memorizing every single letter of Meditations, I looked for the correspondence between Marcus Aurelius and his teachers, but they were mostly not translated into Korean, so I had to find and read books in English or German. Sometimes, that was more comfortable for me, and it was more difficult to translate and read it in Korean, so I remember it in English.

Leonard, who seemed to have completely forgotten the fact—a lie—that I was from America, nodded with a look of great shock. Yet the words he uttered were quite calm.

“…That’s right. Things like that.”

“Hmm, good. I’m not a classics teacher, but to explain…. I don’t mean it’s not sincere, but this is a rhetorical convention of the Roman era. If you ask your Latin or Greek teacher, they’ll explain it to you. It’s problematic to take such rhetorical conventions literally with the knowledge of our time. Even if it was a sentence written with perfect sincerity… if I were Fronto, I would be a teacher watching a disciple who moves contrary to my wishes.”

I can see Leonard’s mouth gaping in shock. It’s fun to tease him. He must have said it with the intention of having a good teacher-student relationship, not with the intention of becoming a disciple who moves contrary to his wishes, so of course he would be like that. I smiled at his expression and continued.

“Fronto, a Latin rhetoric teacher, wanted his disciple to focus entirely on rhetoric and eloquence without being seduced by philosophy, and he was a person who stubbornly insisted on Latin during a time when Greek literature was popular, punishing his disciple whenever he used Greek. But what is Marcus Aurelius famous for to us in the end? In what language was his greatest work, Meditations, written?”

“……”

Ah, this is fun.

Leonard’s face turned pale.

Marcus Aurelius is famous as a Stoic philosopher in our time as well as in the 19th century. His teacher Fronto hoped his disciple would not be seduced by philosophy, but that disciple eventually became a philosopher, and he hoped his disciple would focus on rhetoric, but that disciple writes in the first book of Meditations that he was fortunate ‘not to have a talent for rhetoric and thus not to fall into it.’ Fronto hoped his disciple would know and fall in love with the beauty of Latin, and of course, that disciple may have known the beauty of Latin, but nevertheless, the diary that candidly contains his inner thoughts in his later years is written in Greek.

The two maintained a good teacher-student relationship even after their paths diverged, but primarily, Marcus Aurelius did not grow old as his teacher wished.

At the same time, I was amazed at Leonard’s unchildlike memory. Showing such a reaction means that Leonard knows the answers to all my questions, but no matter how frantically one studies imperial studies, it’s difficult for a person who has only lived for 70 months to remember everything they heard in class. As expected, a promising person is different from the start.

“But the fact that Fronto cherished Marcus doesn’t change. The emperor must have been a precious disciple to him.”

“And you, teacher?”

Leonard said with a slightly anxious face.

Me?

I’ve teased him enough, so shall I finally respond properly?

“Your Highness is well aware that Latin was the first language of Rome in the 2nd century AD. Although Greek was used as the language of the Eastern Roman Empire and Greek gradually revived due to the popularity of Greek literature, Latin was still used in the administration, law, military, politics, and aristocratic society of the Roman Empire. As I said earlier, Fronto was a Latin rhetoric teacher.”

“Yes.”

“And Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations in Koine Greek in his later years.”

“……”

I checked to see if Leonard understood what I was saying. He was just staring up at me.

“So, you’re saying… in an era when Latin was the standard, Emperor Marcus, who studied under a teacher passionate about Latin, wrote his diary in Greek because he hated his teacher?”

His summarizing ability is excellent, but I can’t say that. That’s a leap.

I shook my head, smiled gently, and said.

“What do you think I’m going to say?”

“…I’m not sure.”

“I want to make Your Highness write your own Meditations in Latin.”

Leonard looked up at me with his mouth open. Then, after a long while, he said.

“My ‘Meditations’.”

“Yes.”

“Do you intend to leave your influence on the numerous thoughts that cross my mind?”

Now he understands correctly. It’s nice that the conversation flows smoothly with me. In fact, I don’t really have conversations like this with the current Leo. Listing off things with an excited heart is only possible right after learning something; after a long time, that knowledge itself becomes just a given to me, so there’s no such occasion.

“I don’t mean to have my ghost haunt Your Highness for the rest of your life.”

“I already understand that. You’re saying you’ll be a better teacher and friend than Fronto was to Marcus Aurelius.”

Well… I said it in such a roundabout way, but to have him say it so simply and directly is a strange feeling. I smiled and replied.

“Is my confidence unpleasant to you?”

“Of course not.”

Alright, good.

Now that I’ve made my intentions clear, I don’t think he’ll be sulking when I’m away.

And apart from that, this situation is so absurd it’s funny. To become the childhood teacher of a friend I met as an adult, I’m having an experience here that no one else could have. What I said applies to all the Leonards I know, but if I said this to the Leo I met as a friend, he would look at me like ‘who do you think you are?’. Because we’re equal friends, without the strange mental hierarchy we have now. So it would be good to enjoy this time and tease him to my heart’s content.

“I didn’t catch a cold because I was playing with my uncle, did I?”

“No.”

Leonard answered firmly, as if he knew I was teasing him. He’s been feeling under the weather since that very day, what does he mean ‘no’. I shrugged and continued what I was saying.

“You’re very consistent. I said I would have Your Highness’s Meditations written in Latin, but actually, first of all…”

“Yes.”

Leonard is waiting for my answer with sparkling eyes.

I thought for a moment, looked at those eyes, and then turned my head.

“I’ll tell you later.”

“What? Why?”

“Just because.”

Leonard gave me the same questioning look that the 17-year-old Leo often gave me. As expected, kids don’t like it when you stop talking in the middle.

It was too heavy a topic to talk about now, and I don’t want to talk about heavy things with this Leo.

And so, I played with Leonard all day and was held captive until the next day. Of course, it was a waste of time to just sit there blankly, so on the second day, today, I got Leonard’s permission and called the Archduke to the Crown Prince’s palace. As Emanuel said, looking at the Archduke’s artifacts was a way to get information about him.

The Archduke, carrying a box-like bag, came to the garden of the Crown Prince’s palace and greeted Leonard. Emanuel hadn’t come due to the aftereffects of yesterday.

“I am honored to meet His Highness Crown Prince Leonard Wittelsbach.”

“It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

“I heard you were unwell, is it alright for you to be out like this?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

What does he mean, fine.

In fact, Leonard needs more rest. I was going to come out alone while he was sleeping and talk to the Archduke, but he wouldn’t leave my side.

Just like yesterday, as I laid out a spot on the grass, the Archduke, as if he had been waiting, immediately opened the box and said.

“I’ve brought some artifacts. I’m also interested in making artifacts in my own way. And since Sir Everett also showed interest in my things.”

Since Leo was there, he spoke in a roundabout way, but ‘my own way’ referred to the occult.

“I’ve already heard from His Excellency Emanuel. You made an artifact that sends the reflection in one mirror to another.”

“That’s right! That was last year’s masterpiece.”

“Then do you have a masterpiece this year as well…?”

“Yes.”

He’s an amazing person in many ways. He nodded firmly and continued.

“To talk about the masterpiece I’m going to make, I can’t help but talk about this. Where did you hear about the Lion’s Duke’s treasure chest that you mentioned before, Sir Everett?”

“It was a story I picked up in America. It might just be a rumor, but I’d like to try and find it someday.”

“I’m curious how that story made its way to America. That was actually a story only Emanuel and I knew.”

“……”

Right, that story never made it to America. Because I heard that story from the Hermetische Gesellschaft 12 years later.

A chill ran down my spine. The Hermetische Gesellschaft is indeed this person’s work. As I remained silent, the Archduke continued.

“It’s not a rumor. That French noble was a person who could use magic from the 14th century, and he said he hid a box containing his magic book using space magic. I’m planning to create an artifact that can find metal hidden by space magic. That will be this year’s masterpiece.”

“That’s amazing.”

“It’s still just in the planning stages. Hahaha. The ‘find’ magic formula only works with Divine Power, so it’s really difficult. I think I can make it with Sir Everett’s help.”

“Hmm. Yes. I’ll help if there’s anything I can do.”

An artifact is made by layering magic formulas. You can’t make an artifact if you don’t know the magic formula or don’t have the materials for it.

However, Divine Power has characteristics similar to a unique ability, so it’s almost impossible to contain it in an artifact. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I accepted because he said it with such confidence.

Leonard, who had been sitting quietly and listening, asked.

“Is there by any chance an artifact that allows someone to use another person’s Magic Power?”

“Hmm, a magic formula like that…. That would have to be a very high-level object. Because there’s no magic formula that allows you to use someone else’s magic. Instead, storing Magic Power and allowing someone to use the stored amount is a function possible in any basic artifact. That’s the principle of artifacts.”

The Archduke looked at Leo’s expression and continued.

“Perhaps Your Highness isn’t talking about that, but an artifact that allows you to use someone else’s Magic Power as if you had transplanted their core, right? Such an object doesn’t exist yet.”

“I see.”

Leonard replied with a calm face. In that calmness, a hint of disappointment that he couldn’t hide was visible. The Archduke read it and smiled.

“It might not be what Your Highness wants, but there is a magic like this. Do you know what my unique ability is?”

“What is it?”

“Like Your Highness, my unique ability is to control natural objects. Like this, I can create a little bit of water from anywhere.”

The Archduke drew his finger in the air. Water droplets formed along the direction and floated in the air. The Archduke tilted his head and asked.

“Do you think there’s an artifact in this world that creates water?”

“…No. Isn’t there no magic formula for that?”

“Actually, there’s something similar. The magic formula for creating water is in the realm of unique abilities, so unfortunately, it hasn’t existed in this world until now, but if you layer multiple magic formulas like storage magic and item warp magic on a place with water, and then add stabilization magic, you can create an artifact that makes it look like water is being created in mid-air.”

“I see.”

Leonard replied with a forced smile, his face asking why he was talking about something so obvious. My impression so far was somewhat similar. The Archduke observed our expressions and picked up a fallen twig from the ground.

“It’s not over yet. I have something to show you. Now, look at this twig.”

He picked up a thin twig and drew a hexagram magic circle on the ground with his wand. This time, there was also a strange sentence written in something similar to Latin inside it. He carefully placed the twig in the middle of the hexagram, then stood in front of it and raised both arms. His solemn voice was heard.

“Sun. Moon. Wind.”

“……”

I jabbed my thigh hard with the tip of my wand. Fortunately, I got through the first hurdle naturally. Leonard, still not seeming to grasp what was happening, was staring blankly up at the Archduke.

“Spirits around us. I feel your grace with my own body. Please allow me to return my power to this natural object.”

‘Relatively fine, except for the spirit part.’

I’m just grateful I didn’t have to jab my thigh again. While I was feeling relieved, a bright light shot up from the hexagram.

‘Hmm.’

Is he trying to make an artifact for me right now? It’s a scene that’s hard to believe is an artifact synthesis process. I don’t know what kind of artifact he’s trying to make, but he hasn’t even properly prepared the magic formula that will be applied to it. While I was half in doubt, he held out the twig to Leonard.

“Now, try waving it.”

“Yes.”

Leonard, with a tense expression, lifted the twig. Then, water droplets formed in the air along its path. Leonard’s eyes widened.

“…Oh!”

“It’s a success! This is the magic formula I developed! Do you know what it is? Sir Everett, with this, I can…”

The Archduke’s excited voice, along with Leonard’s, scattered in my ears. My vision blurred except for where the water droplets were.

“……”

Got it.

Two thoughts crossed my mind. First, about the story I hadn’t heard the answer to yet, but had a guess about. Second….

“Just a moment.”

I have to go back right now.

I shot up from my seat and headed towards the Crown Prince’s palace building. I found an empty place, sat down, and opened the Extra Chapter.

‘Let’s go back.’

As soon as I thought that, my vision went black as if the power had been turned off, and then light came back in an instant.

It’s my room. The difference from about two weeks ago is….

The magic lamp in the room was on, and I was lying on some kind of grass. A sense of unease that arose instinctively made me shoot up, and something pressed down hard on my back.

“…?!”

A plant crawled up my arm and wrapped itself around another plant on the bedsheet. Before I could properly assess the situation, the plant stem covered my arm and wrapped around my wrist. I tried to use Magic Power, but the blood wasn’t circulating, so it was a problem.

The plant stem is pressing tightly on my neck, but I’m trying to lift my head as much as possible to avoid being crushed. For now, there are no signs of anyone, and in fact, there is no one in the room.

‘What kind of plant is this…. A trap?’

He would have been fine without me teaching him. He’s using this peaceful ability as a lethal weapon so well. Now that I look at it, the room was a complete botanical garden.

“Whoa.”

At that moment, I heard Elias’s flustered voice from behind.

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