Mushoku Tensei (LN) - Volume SS - Chapter 12

Short Story:

The Gospel of Roxy

IT HAPPENED WHILE I WAS in the library doing research, just like I always did.

“Huh?” There was a note in between the pages of the book I was reading. “Hmm.” On the note someone had written a question about combined magic—why does casting Water Fall, Heat Island, and Icicle Field in succession produce mist?—along with their thoughts on the question. To me, it sounded like the sort of natural phenomenon you learned about in junior high. But in this world, they hadn’t even invented microscopes. No one had come up with a scientific explanation for why water turned into steam when heated. But I guess it was only natural that you’d consider this sort of thing when you wanted to understand what you were doing properly. That was way better than accepting what you were taught as just the way things were without understanding the fundamental principles. Just doing the thinking was worthwhile, even if you didn’t arrive at the right answer. You could be sure it would come in handy somewhere else. 

Having said that, the writer of this note finished by saying, Could it be that water changes its form according to temperature? They had arrived at the right answer. They were pretty clever. But what was the note doing here? This book, for the record, was a text on teleportation. It had nothing to do with combined magic… Chances were they’d just used it as a bookmark, then forgotten about it when they returned the book. I returned the note to where I’d found it and was about to close the book when—

“Huh?!” It hit me. The handwriting in the note looked like the handwriting of someone I knew. I quickly opened the book again, took out the note, and took a proper look at the letters. It was just as I’d thought.

“I knew it,” I said. “This is Roxy’s handwriting!”

I’d know these letters anywhere! This…this was a fragment of the word of God!

Would you believe it? After losing the book I’d had in my possession to the displacement disaster, I’d thought none of Roxy’s writings remained. But of course, God’s writings extended beyond that one book. God had lived just as long as I had, including my past life. That meant that, even if it wasn’t the same as a book, she was bound to have left more notes like this one. Especially as this was the Ranoa University of Magic—the very university God had attended in her youth. Given that she had undoubtedly been a diligent student, it was no surprise that she might have noted down questions that occurred to her during her time here.

“What a treasure… Why, it’s like a graduation album of her writing.”

Yes, this was a treasure—a document of historic significance. But no one but me knew its value. It was even possible that if a librarian found it, they might decide it was trash and throw it away. The very idea! I had to rescue them first.

”Heheh…” I stashed the note in my pocket, smiling vaguely. Now that I thought about it, Roxy had been a student at this university too. This was the first time since I’d come here that I’d come across any trace of her, and that made me feel happy, somehow. I don’t know, I felt like I’d never really appreciated that this was the same university Roxy had attended until this moment when I’d seen it with my own eyes. Of course, it was possible I had seen other signs but overlooked them…

“Wait up,” I said aloud. Did that mean there were other Vestiges of God, and I’d just failed to notice them? If so… Oh, the very idea… 

O God, forgive my lack of faith.

“I can’t sit around here, not now I know.” I stood up and was about to dash off, but caught myself. I began to pack away my books. As Roxy’s apprentice, I could hardly leave library books strewn about like this. An apprentice mustn’t go damaging his master’s reputation, after all.

Then, as soon as I’d finished tidying up, I set off running.

***

I began my investigation with the library’s lending record, ­deciding that I should start by rescuing the extant texts. If I knew Roxy, she could easily have made the same blunder multiple times—misfortune never comes alone, after all. And it became all the more likely if she herself didn’t think of forgetting a note as a blunder. With that, I went to ask the librarian. I was told that usually, the records were not made available to ordinary students, but an exception could be made for a special student. 

And so I got to see the records. This library was really something. They kept proper records going back more than a decade. When I voiced how impressed I was, would you believe it, I was told that one time, someone had stolen books from the library collection to sell, and since then, strict controls had been put in place. Thanks to that, I managed to get my hands on the record of books Roxy had borrowed. Back then, it seemed she had primarily taken out texts on magic circles and combined magic. In other words, while she was simultaneously pursuing studies in those two areas, she had also gone hunting for texts on teleportation. She would have been somewhere between a second and a fourth year. That was Roxy for you—she’d pulled off multitasking perfectly, too. It was only too easy to imagine when you considered she was a Saint-tier water magician. After all, Saint-tier was rare among graduating students. I couldn’t help but be proud of my master. 

I’d track down the books, then carefully read through them…or, that’s what I wanted to do, but I had other things to be doing too, so in the end I just flipped through the pages looking for notes. In the end, I did find several more. It seemed she had been using them as bookmarks after all. None of them had anything significant to say about the study of magic, though. To me, most of it was basically common sense…but now I thought back, all of it was things that Roxy had taught me. So Roxy hadn’t just followed the textbook. Rather, she had readily shared with me the knowledge and realizations that she alone had picked up in the course of her studies. That really touched my heart. Anyway, I decided to store the notes safely so that I wouldn’t lose them… But could there be more?

“Rudeus?” I realized that Fitz was peering at what I had in my hand. “I never thought I’d see you reading about combined magic… I didn’t think there was anything you didn’t know about it.”

“Don’t be silly. There’s loads I don’t know.” It was true that thanks to my memories of my past life, my knowledge of things like science and chemistry was above average for this world. But for all that, I was still a high school dropout. I was at the same level as a junior high student. Plus, it was all hazy recollections of almost twenty years earlier, so for a lot of things it wasn’t until Roxy taught me about them that I finally remembered that, oh yeah, that ­phenomenon worked like that. Never in a million years could I have remembered and applied them myself.

“But this isn’t for class,” I explained to Fitz. “I’m looking for these.”

“Huh? ‘Why is it that casting Water Fall, Heat Island, and Icicle Field in succession produce mist?’” he read aloud. “Uh-huh, uh-huh… Their conclusion is correct, isn’t it? What are these?”

“It would appear that these notes were left behind by my master during her time at this school. I ended up wondering what she’d been like as a student, so I started looking.”

“Huh…” Fitz nodded, but he looked a bit bored. I mean, fair enough. In my past life, I hadn’t been a Christian, so if a friend had come and told me about a fragment of something written by some saint they’d found and how amazing it was, I bet I’d have reacted like Fitz did. Not that I’d had any friends to talk to back then, mind you.

“So I thought I’d go look for another special something of the same kind,” I said.

“I see… Would you mind if I came too?”

“Oh? Are you interested in the writings too?”

“No, I’ve just never seen your eyes light up like this before, so you know…”

Ah, so while Fitz wasn’t interested in the holy scripture, he was interested in joining me as another brave explorer venturing into the depths of the jungle. Boys would be boys.

“All right, let’s search together.”

“But where do we start?”

“Hmm… You’d expect most things like this to be in spaces she used in her daily life. So where she slept. The girls’ dormitory seems promising.”

“You’ll get in trouble with Goriade again.”

Uh oh, that’s right. There was a gorilla that guarded the depths of the jungle. Watch it, Rudeus. That’s a line you’re not supposed to cross, and you were about to run right over it.

I had to tread carefully. If I ended up surrounded by people hurling blame at me, it’d trigger my trauma.

“Um, okay, how about we ask a teacher who’d know about back then?” I suggested. 

So that was what we ended up doing.

***

To cut a long story short, we didn’t find any teachers who knew where we might find vestiges of Roxy. Vice Principal Jenius had been teaching here since Roxy was a student, so I thought he would know something about her, but I didn’t want second-hand stories. I had set out on this journey to seek relics—holy relics—and nothing else. Obviously, I was curious about what Roxy had been like as a student, but Vice Principal Jenius hadn’t seemed all that keen to talk to me, so I wasn’t about to force him. On the off chance he said something bad about Roxy, I might not have been able to keep my inner beast at bay. Faith is an anchor for your soul, like a fire on a dark, cold night. But that’s also why, when someone tries to trample on your faith, you can’t help but resist with all your might—you know that without it, you can’t go on.

Anyway, when I didn’t get any information from the teachers, I moved on to the university shop. At first, Roxy might strike you as sleepy and disorganized, but in fact, she was an extremely ­active woman. She’d probably often gone out to the town during her student days and might even have done some adventuring to earn some allowance. Because of that, I’d thought about heading to the Adventurers’ Guild next…but when I considered it properly, I didn’t see Roxy mixing her studies with her adventuring activities. She’d probably only use notepaper if she were sleeping outside and needed to get a fire going because it burned easily. There wouldn’t even be ashes left by now. No, the best place to find vestiges of her was inside the university. Apart from the library and the dormitory, the places Roxy was likely to have visited were classrooms, the training area, the dining hall, and the university shop. From what I heard, the dining hall was completely different now, thanks to Nanahoshi, so that was out too. There were too many classrooms to count, but only one University of Magic shop. So that was how I ended up here.

When I asked the woman at the desk about Roxy, she said, “Roxy Migurdia? Why yes, there was a girl by that name. Yes, I remember. She was a demon with blue hair, a tiny wee thing, no?”

If Roxy were here, she’d have shot back, “I am not tiny,” straight away. 

“She always came to buy her lesson supplies with such a scowl. Always muttering about things being too expensive or how she didn’t have the money, you know.”

So Roxy had been a starving student back then. Maybe, unable to buy the things she needed at the school shop, she’d collected them outside while she did her adventuring quests. That was a rough life for a student. If you asked me, Roxy could have been a special student, but then, it wasn’t like she’d been Saint-tier when she enrolled, and she’d still been yet to become an A-rank adventurer who pulled off feats like defeating a labyrinth solo. As such, she hadn’t made much of a name for herself, so that was that.

“I’m actually looking for books she wrote in…”

“Books?”

“Even just something like a notebook. Can you think of anything?”

“How would I…” the shop woman began, then her eyes widened, and she clapped her hands together. She bustled away into the back of the shop. Apparently, she had something.

She came back holding a pamphlet. “It was so long ago that I’d quite forgotten. She asked me to give this to any student I saw like her who was having a hard time.”

The pamphlet was a stack of around fifteen pages of note paper, roughly bound together. I took it and peeked inside. Sure enough, there was Roxy’s familiar handwriting.

O God, at last I have found it. The holy relic you left me is in my hands. I had no doubt that she had left this holy book for me. Deliver me, O God.

Acani Grass grows in the forest to the west as you leave Sharia. It is a comparatively safe place for anyone able to cast beginner-level offensive magic, so you may harvest it yourself.

That was the first page. There was even a helpful illustration of Acani Grass.

If you are not confident in your abilities, place a request at the Adventurers’ Guild for a large Ranoa copper coin. This will take longer, but it is cheaper than purchasing from the university shop.

I flicked through the pamphlet. She had written detailed instructions for obtaining not just acani grass but mustard treant seeds, tadeeye roots, and more of what seemed to be ingredients for something. 

“What is this?” I asked.

Fitz had the answer, of course. Where would I be without him? “Ah, those are the ingredients for magic circle ink. The simplified sort that doesn’t need mana crystals. I used it in class once… Wow, I didn’t realize so many of them grew around here. Usually, you’d just buy this stuff at the university shop…but I guess that’s tough for people without any money, huh…”

I could more or less guess who Roxy had made this pamphlet for now—starving students. At the Ranoa University of Magic, if you weren’t a special student like me, you had to pay a hefty enrolment fee. For students like me from Asura, whose currency was highly valued, it wasn’t so much that you couldn’t save up by working hard, but not everyone was like me. Some who managed to pay the enrollment fee would find their expenses stacking up until they couldn’t even properly take part in classes anymore. Roxy had left this pamphlet for students like that. As proof of that, when I flicked through the pages, I found not only ingredients for lessons, but shops in the town where you could eat for next to nothing, fishing spots in the surrounding area, edible plants, and adventurer requests that were good value for money.

Roxy must have struggled. Now I thought about it, even in Buena, where my family provided her with food, clothes and board, she had taken jobs clearing rocks and tree stumps from land to be cultivated or summoning rain to vegetable fields. She’d called it “earning pocket money.” It must have been hard work being a student without any money. It gave me a sense of comfort to learn that about her.

As I went on skimming the rest of the pamphlet, I began to ­notice that she’d written complaints here and there too. There were all sorts—some seemed to be directed at the friends she shared a room with or other students in her year. Some were about discrimination from students from the Millis church. For some reason, I’d thought that Roxy had always been alone. But of course, that wasn’t true… That was obvious, really.

“What’s wrong?” Fitz asked after a while.

“Oh, it’s nothing.”

I didn’t know what sort of student Roxy had been or what sort of people she had around her while she was at this university. But looking at her complaints, it was easy to see that it hadn’t been all bad things and bad people. It was totally unsurprising, but it must have been how she had become the Roxy I’d known in Buena—the Roxy who, even when people looked at her in suspicion for being a demon, had gone around introducing herself to everyone and taking on jobs, until in the end the villagers had smiled and greeted her themselves. I realized that my heart was bursting with warmth. It had to be because of the people she’d met here that Roxy had learned it wasn’t futile to go up and talk to people. And it was thanks to that that I wasn’t still shut up in my room.

“Ma’am, would you do me the favor of giving this to someone who seems harder up than me?”

I couldn’t let what Roxy had left at the university go to waste. The pamphlet wasn’t for me to take. It was for someone who needed it. Even if the shops with the dirt cheap meals might have already gone out of business.

“What good does it do me to hand out a pamphlet with instructions on how not to use my shop?”

“This pamphlet is to stop students who can’t afford to use this shop from dropping out. I can’t say for sure, but I doubt it’ll affect your sales. Well, all right, they might drop a bit… Still, would you please do it?” I bowed to her.

The woman considered a moment, then shrugged. “Oh, very well. So long as I’ve got my shop here, that’s peace of mind enough for me.”

Some time later, I heard from Fitz that fewer students had dropped out that year than usual. Was that because the pamphlet had helped them? I couldn’t say. But according to the woman at the university shop, she’d had a few students leaf frantically through it before dashing out again, so I was sure it wasn’t entirely unrelated. If all those poor lambs had found salvation through Roxy, then as far as I was concerned, this was a great success. Yes indeed. All humanity should find salvation in Roxy. 

The woman at the university shop did come to me to complain that her sales had gone down after all, so I ended up having to buy a bunch of stuff I didn’t need…but I decided to think of that as a necessary expense.