Chương 176: Chapter 197: Mathematicians

"That's a lot of trouble for a shopping list," Kurumi said. After teleporting in, we had decided that taking a carriage back was fine. I splashed out for a nice one, luxurious, with good soundproofing so we could chat. On the Academy grounds I'm always concerned about prying ears, and at the Final Form there were guaranteed to be eavesdroppers. But a good coach was as private as it gets.

"On the contrary, this is the easy way by a mile," I said.

"Have you ever tried shopping for magic items?"

"I've never had a reason to. And trade merchants typically work with materials we can buy in quantity and sell in quantity. My family are shipkeepers, not shopkeepers." Her fingers teased at the cords that operated the window blinds.

"Clever," I commended her.

"But anyway, there's a thriving underground market for these things. Something is discovered, or an old collection is broken up. Estate sales, specialty scouts. Not to mention adventurers. Sometimes they'll come through an auction house but most if it is gray-market at least. The trick is not finding a magic item, or even finding a magic item for a somewhat-reasonable price. It's finding the right ones.

Digger spent the last ten months combing the alleyways and rumor-mills to find the things that will be most useful to us. No potions of water-breathing, no scrolls of goblin control. No necklace that transforms you into a wolf while you're in sunlight, no windows that make a fortress more secure. No mana weapons because neither of us can use those. There are thousands of magic objects on the market, and almost none of them would do us any good at all.

The trick is not the expense, it's getting someone who can pay attention to all the details, for weeks or months, and recognize the right opportunity at the right time. Which things to buy right away, which ones are going to be back on the market for a lower price in six weeks. The more time you give him to do his job, the better the results are, the better the bargains are, the more loot he brings you."

"Uh huh," she said, staring at me funny.

"What's a goblin?" Shit. I will never get over that. What fantasy setting has no goblins, no dragons, no slimes???

"It's an old-world term for any kind of creature that inspires fear," I told her.

"No it's not," she said, contradicting me right to my face. She had already seen my reaction. I rolled my eyes. This shit again.

"Yes, it is, but also there's more. It's also a very specific kind of small nasty monster that was in a bunch of books I used to read a long time ago." Kurumi nodded, satisfied with that answer.

"Now then, we've got these things that we might or might not be able to use, all sitting in your purse dimension-""Pocket dimension," I corrected. She pursed her lips thoughtfully.

"It's really more of a purse though, isn't it? Pockets and purses serve very different functions. The-""It's not a purse dimension," I said firmly.

"Anyway, yes, we've got the stuff. Which I will be retaining because this crap was very expensive. And it is all carefully selected to be the items most likely to help us in our expedition to the tombs." Getting ten items, ten, is huge for me. This was a long-term investment and it has scored. Normally it takes most of the school year for Nathan to collect enough money to meet Digger's requirements. You need a damn lucky playthrough to get to him early.

This is part of the reason I was so insistent on having plenty of cash to splash out by the beginning of school. It's a funny game mechanic: the price is always the same, paid in advance. But you get one item for each month you pay him in advance. Get to him late, spend too much for one item. But I got to him impossibly early. And I made a killing off of it. Digger does damn good work. But most playthroughs you're lucky to get three or four rolls for his items. I got ten tries for it. And it was worth it.

Not everything was perfect. Those bracers are almost useless to me, the vestments are not going to do me much good, the salve is a little dangerous to use and the key, book and pawn are all one-use items. The mana potion is pretty great for me personally, because running out of mana has been one of my biggest anxieties. Having a backup supply means a lot to me. The trapsetter boots?.... I'm not sure about them. The rope is okay, but not the end-all-be-all-believe-all that Digger makes it out to be. But that coin?

Holy shit. That coin is useful for most people. Anything from 'let me know when supper is ready' to 'let me know precisely the best time to buy Stableholt Rye at the lowest price'. Or 'let me know when someone decides to rob me', or 'when I should bet on red'. But for someone with teleportation powers?

"Let me know when my enemy is unguarded".

"Let me know when nobody is watching over the treasure". Whatever. The real power of that coin is that it can pick up information from anywhere, any distance. And the limitation for that, usually, is that you would be too far away to be able to use that timely information. But I can. From anywhere. Not to mention my ring.

'Let me know when there is incriminating evidence on Ediscod's desk'. And then look through the ring then, instead of just watching it at odd times and trying to get lucky. Getting equipped for a dungeon run for my year-end math project is all well and good. But I'm picking up the gear that's going to open up options for the next four years, because anything that isn't destroyed, I get to keep in my inventory. And in another two months, I'd get assigned my second-year project.

Digger won't be available, but instead we get the blessings from Sister Schneider, which is a whole other thing.

"Yes, and thank you," she said.

"I don't think I'd want these anyway. When will I ever need to blaspheme someone to death, or use a rope? But I'm more eager to hear about this dungeon now. You say you've been doing research, what is this all about?"

"Are you eager to hear about the dungeon, or about the treasure?"

"Pretend it's the dungeon." I shrugged.

"All right. So basically it starts with the ancient forebears, ancestors to us all. The civilization before our civilization. They had some brilliant stuff going on, but they also had a whole bunch of really dumb ideas. Now, not to denigrate the whole culture too much, I'll focus on three particular men. A mathematician and his two disciples.

And if I had meant 'students', I would have said students, because these two were apostles who brought a cultist's fervor to some of the most verifiable and falsifiable subjects. Things like, 'decimals are just another kind of integer', or 'zero is a prime number'. And they believed that divinity, magic, and mathematics were all the same thing, that the nature of the world was composed of numbers." I paused, and grimaced.

"And not even in a feasible way. Like, main integers. They resolved the inconsistencies by hypothesizing an infinite number of higher planes that had infinite power and that- sorry, I will get sidetracked on this stuff. Anyway, they were brilliant mathematicians, powerful mages, charismatic leaders, and entirely self-deluded. Some of their conclusions and axioms were essential to the development of modern mathematics. Some of it was patently stupid and could only be considered as a point of faith."

I was getting off track. Okay. Pause, reorient, remember what the question was.

"Anyway, it started with the master, Keikthagorus. His two brightest students, Ofxupo and P'gyaqu, were cut from the same cloth. They gathered followers, they collected secrets, they published scathing review articles about each other's works, they invented and performed magical ceremonies to unleash terrifying powers, they invented and performed magical ceremonies that turned out to be useless mumbo-jumbo. Sometimes they did math.

And as their cults grew, so did their egos, and their need for validation from Keikthagorus." Kurumi groaned sympathetically, she could already see what was coming.

"And so there was drama. Competitions, ultimatums, and everyone lost perspective."

"Right, just like what we deal with every day at the Academy," I agreed.

"They started making wilder and wilder theories just to distinguish their work from each other, and started mustering up all kinds of magic and weapons to threaten each other, and their followers got increasingly militant. And then long story short- sorry, too late for that. Long story medium, they all killed each other. But they were all necromancers and turned themselves into liches.

But back then it was illegal to be a lich and so they were imprisoned in tombs with an everlasting sentence, and they remain there since. All three of them in tombs designed by the other two so that they could never escape and their followers could never rescue them."

"It is still very much illegal to be a lich," Kurumi pointed out.

"Not to take away from your story, but that's really still a thing."

"Sure, but nowadays it's illegal because they're an existential threat, which is why I destroy them on sight," I said.

"Back then it was illegal because they saw it as an attempt to circumvent estate taxes."

"Uh huh."

"Anyway, they were buried with all their treasures that were not impounded by the government, as was the custom at the time, and they were all fabulously rich, so it's a lot of money and valuables."

"And now you've got me back," she smiled.

"So we just need to get through these forbidden tombs whose details are lost to time, filled with traps and monsters and puzzles and locks designed by brilliant madmen with a grudge, defeat three liches and we get all their money?"

"And also priceless knowledge of our world's history," I pointed out. I've gotten more comfortable lately thinking of it as being my world. For a long time I did not, I just considered it to be the world that I'm trapped in but Earth was my world. But by now I've spent almost as much time here as there, and my time in Hearstwhile has been a lot more impactful.

"Sure sure," she said.

"History." I was actually getting a little annoyed by her cavalier attitude now.

"Kurumi, this is serious intellectual discovery!" The look she gave me was a little pitying and a little patronizing.

"Natalie. I worked to get a scholarship so that I could get my tuition reimbursed and pocket the difference. I worked hard enough to become salutatorian so that I could get offered research grants with almost no oversight. I competed for Student Council president because there's a stipend and a clothing allowance. Knowledge is not power. Knowledge brings you power. Money is power. You and I are both living proof. The purpose of knowledge is to profit."

This felt like whiplash, like I needed a few minutes to reconcile this. I was seeing a very different side of Kurumi. Nothing that she ever showed to Nathan. His romance run with her, and my romance run with her, were just very, very different. I was needing to reevaluate most of what I know about her. And not for the better. He's got the hero path, I've got the rival path. He gets the quirky childhood friend, I've got The Ruthless, the Assassin, The Broken.

I take some satisfaction back from the fact that I'm winning. I had checked the menu: I've advanced Kurumi's attraction more than Nathan has. Maybe it's a small victory, but your victories are like your children, you learn to love them all equally. And then I blinked hard "Wait, am I eligible for research grants?"

"During first year? Probably not," she said, tapping her chin thoughtfully.

"But probably before you graduate. Might be harder for you, because everyone already knows that you're more than able to fund your own work anyway, and that you're probably going to keep discovering and inventing even if nobody pays you for it."

"Hardly seems fair!" I protested.

"From the perspective of a grant committee and application reviewer it's extremely fair," Kurumi pointed out with a sort of self-satisfied matter-of-fact tone.

"I may think it's just a little funny to see you not getting paid for that. Just a little mean, but still very funny." She laughed, and I rolled my eyes. I was glancing at the window, but her laugh cut itself off so fast that I turned back to her, seeing her with a very troubled look, a disturbing revelation.

"Hey... you mentioned that you've got income from songs and stories, but you've never told me that you've got any sort of money from your machines and innovations. I've studied those enough to know that this is major work. Are you getting paid for any of that?"

"Not yet," I said, hiding my smirk.

"Dean Corder is in charge of the Academy's research and development. He's been in charge of marketing and licensing all of our work. I understand the Academy is actually making a huge profit right now from those works. The money is mostly reinvested into the school itself, including the Developing Theories department. But I'm also quite sure that the money is getting skimmed eight or nine times as well."

Right now there are manufacturing plants that are churning out Hearstcliff Academy branded lightbulbs, tesla coils, toasters, fans, space heaters, electroconvulsive therapy tables, electric fencing, roll-up gates, doorbells, pH measuring kits, plasma ball toys, marquee signs, power-winches, water purification kits, typewriters, movable-type printers, kettles, motion detectors, burglar alarms, and phonographs. They're being churned out at a high volume and selling like hotcakes.

The Hearstcliff Academy brand is worth a lot of money these days, and the school's licensing division is making enough money that they are having a hard time justifying their annual attempts to guilt-trip the alumni into donating money on top of the expensive student tuitions. (Not that it's stopping them from mailing out those pleas for donations, it just makes it hard for them to claim with a straight face that they need the money.) The money flows into the school, and it seems to move back and forth through various accounts before it disappears, presumably into House Pailser's central coffers. I said all this with a pleasant and affable tone, and Kurumi's expression turned appropriately suspicious. She knew me well enough to know that if I sound untroubled by this then something is up. She pursed her lips before she spoke.

"And you are... all right with that?" Me? I grinned like the cat that has that canary right where I want him.

"I'm choosing my moment," is all I would say to her about that.