Chapter 9: Chapter 9. The First Day (2)

Professor Klein had been perfectly clear.

Everyone in the top class was to work together on the assignment.

No one here was likely to be able to decipher a passage written in third-generation ancient formula language. It was presumably difficult enough that we would all have to go to the library and work together to solve it.

And yet…

I… can understand it?

Of course, I couldn’t decipher every last detail.

If someone asked me to write out a translation sentence by sentence, I wouldn’t be able to.

But I could understand the general meaning.

Which meant… I already knew the answer: what material we needed for tomorrow’s lecture.

How is this happening?

I had never studied third-generation ancient formula language.

It used the same characters as Standard Scholarly Language, but the vocabulary and grammar were different. By all rights, I shouldn’t have been able to read it.

So why could I understand it?

No, wait.

I scanned the problem on the page once more.

And then I realized something.

Right. There’s a pattern to the sentences.

Again, I had never studied third-generation ancient formula language.

But as I read through the characters covering the page, I could tell that they followed certain rules.

In other words… I had already worked out the grammar of third-generation ancient formula language.

How is that possible?

And that wasn’t all.

The vocabulary of third-generation ancient formula language differed from that of Standard Scholarly Language.

But there were similarities. For example, a four-character word in Standard Scholarly Language became a seven-character word in third-generation ancient formula language, with its characters rearranged and others added.

Once I understood those rules… I could understand the language itself.

This is ridiculous.

Apparently, I had grasped those rules intuitively.

It had happened so quickly that it felt as though I had suddenly begun understanding third-generation ancient formula language for no reason at all.

How did this happen?

I couldn’t understand myself.

If I’d spent days poring over third-generation ancient formula language, I could at least have made sense of it.

I had experienced something similar before: after staring at sentences I couldn’t understand for days and nights, everything had suddenly clicked.

But this had happened in a single instant. No matter how I looked at it, it was strange.

What on earth had caused this?

Could it be…?

Just then, a thought flashed through my mind.

My aptitude for reading comprehension?

My spiritual origin, reading comprehension.

I remembered Professor Horizon’s voice, making grand statements about how extraordinary it was.

And Uncle Kaisel’s voice, telling me, “All you need to remember is that you have potential others don’t.”

Did my aptitude for reading comprehension let me understand third-generation ancient formula language so quickly?

An insight I could only have gained by spending days and nights poring over sentences, puzzling out their meaning.

Had I become able to arrive at it in a single instant?

I couldn’t do this before. Why is it happening all of a sudden?

I came up with a theory.

Until now, I had only used my reading comprehension to read ordinary books. Perhaps encountering all sorts of magical things at Ars Magna Academy had begun to awaken that ability in a new way.

So it could evolve into the power Professor Horizon had described… the power to read everything there was to magic.

---

After giving the students a few announcements, Klein left the classroom.

“Eriol, what should we do? I think we’ll need to work together like the professor said. First, you should…”

“Sorry, I’ll be right back.”

“Hey, Eriol!”

I broke away from Kane and left the classroom.

Then I hurried after Klein, who was heading down the stairs.

“Professor.”

“What is it, Eriol Valencia?”

Klein continued down the stairs without stopping.

I spoke as I followed him.

“About the assignment you just gave us.”

“Is there a problem?”

“The material we need to bring tomorrow… Is it The Great Debate of Oquitrast?”

A masterpiece recording the debates of great philosophers who had lived thousands of years ago.

When I mentioned that dialogue, a work that could be called part of humanity’s heritage, Klein faltered briefly.

But only briefly. Then he resumed walking.

“Wrong.”

“Pardon?”

Wrong?

Had I made a mistake?

“The library available to you doesn’t have The Great Debate of Oquitrast.”

“…?”

“What you can consult there is Oquitrast’s Dialogues with the Philosophers. That’s the title it’s published under these days.”

Klein spoke coldly as he kept walking.

“You seem to know only the title of the old edition. It was called that twenty years ago.”

“The copy in my father’s study… was titled The Great Debate of Oquitrast.”

“Your father must have taken quite an interest in philosophy in his youth.”

With that, Klein gave me a long look.

“So, are you finished with your questions?”

“…Yes, I am.”

“Then off you go. I have work to do.”

After that curt dismissal, Klein walked away on his own.

---

“…”

After parting with Eriol Valencia,

Klein felt his steps growing faster and faster.

But he couldn’t control his pace.

He could barely contain his emotions.

“Heh heh heh…”

Once he had checked that no one else was around, Klein let out a chuckle.

And once he started, he couldn’t stop.

“Ha ha ha…!”

Klein burst out laughing.

“I knew it! That boy really is a genius!”

He had held himself back as much as he could to appear cool in front of Eriol, but now he had reached his limit.

“A new student deciphered third-generation ancient formula language in an instant? How does that make any sense?”

It didn’t.

But he couldn’t deny what had happened right before his eyes.

Eriol Valencia had deciphered third-generation ancient formula language in an instant.

He had solved a problem meant to require the combined efforts of the entire top class, all by himself, in one go.

If that wasn’t genius, what was?

“He averaged 97.5 on the entrance exam! That kid’s a lunatic! A mad genius!”

Klein flung both hands skyward and jumped for joy.

He looked like a handsome, well-groomed young man, but his greatest flaw was his occasional inability to control his emotions, which led to bizarre displays like this.

“My time has finally come!”

Klein had ambitions.

He had become a full professor at a young age, but he wasn’t the youngest ever. Kaisel Valencia had achieved that rank at an even younger age.

So Klein was now aiming to become the youngest department head in the academy’s history. To that end, he had built up a record of achievements and lobbied various people to secure the position of professor in charge of the first-year top class.

If I can draw the top class’s best students into my own department, the Lore Department… I could become its next head.

The head of the Lore Department was elderly. Retirement seemed likely within five years at most, yet there was still no suitable candidate for the succession.

If Klein brought in outstanding students and added to his achievements… he could claim the position for himself.

Eriol… I’m not letting you get away.

Klein had already made up his mind.

He would make full use of his position as their supervising professor to win Eriol over completely during the coming year.

Of course, that didn’t mean he intended to be overly friendly toward him.

He would play hot and cold, just as he would when wooing someone of the opposite sex, until he had Eriol utterly captivated.

“Heh heh… Ha ha ha!”

Klein laughed on, his ambition blazing.

Kaisel drove past in his magical automobile and gave him a look that said he was pathetic, but Klein never noticed.

---

So… I was right, then?

Klein’s cold treatment had left me confused, but apparently all we had to do was borrow The Great Debate of Oquitrast, or rather Oquitrast’s Dialogues with the Philosophers, from the library.

But how do I tell the others?

If I suddenly announced that I had found the answer on my own, they would all be dumbfounded.

How was I supposed to explain it?

“…?”

When I returned to the classroom with those thoughts on my mind,

I was greeted by a cold voice.

“Where have you been all this time?”

It was Monark Orson, the boy from the ducal family.

Surrounded by several students, he stood glaring at me with his arms crossed.

“We’re supposed to be working together on this assignment, and this is how you act?”

“…”

“We’ve already divided up the work. There’s nothing for you to do, so you can leave.”

The students gathered around Monark nodded along in agreement.

“Yeah, let our top student handle it alone, like a top student should.”

“Let’s see how well he does on the assignment.”

Apparently, Monark had already gathered himself a following.

Most of the other students seemed to be getting swept along by the mood his followers had created.

“All right, then.”

“What?”

I calmly gathered my things and turned my back on them.

“Good luck with it.”

“Hey! That little…!”

There was no need to engage with every last jab.

I left the classroom without another word.

“Eriol!”

But a few people came after me.

Kane, Senia, and the siblings Karis and Milia.

“Hey, sorry. I looked away for a second, and suddenly everyone was turning against you.”

“I’m sorry. We were going to object, but…”

“Hmm. A few students took the lead in setting the tone. They wouldn’t listen to anything we said.”

“They seem to have known Monark already. They stepped in, made him the leader, and pushed everyone toward shutting you out.”

The dean had just told us that power and influence meant nothing at the academy… These people were heading in the exact opposite direction.

“It’s fine. I don’t care.”

“Hey, let’s just do it ourselves.”

“Yes. If we work together, we can certainly solve a problem like that.”

When Kane and Karis made the suggestion, Senia and Milia nodded too.

“Yes, let’s work on our own. With Eriol here, we should be perfectly capable of it.”

“Yeah, I think that’s best too. We don’t need to work with people like them.”

Apparently, all four of them had already made up their minds.

“Then let’s all go to the library and start researching. We might run into Monark’s group, but they won’t deliberately get in our way.”

“Right. That works for you too, doesn’t it, Eriol?”

“I’m happy to go to the library.”

I spoke calmly.

“But we don’t need to do any research.”

“What?”

“I already know the answer.”

“W-wait, what are you talking about?”

“So we can just borrow the book and leave. Then let’s head straight to the dormitory.”

As the four of them stared at me wide-eyed, I continued in the same calm voice.

“Oh, we should eat before we go to the dormitory.”

While the others floundered around in the library… we would take our time enjoying our first day at the academy.

“Let’s have something other than hot dogs today.”