Author's Note: Okay so another chapter done, Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!
Chapter 119: The Heroic Book Worm
Naofumi finished seeing the last of Kaede's friends off, they had good heads on their shoulders, he was sure that they'd be able to figure out things for themselves. But these four on the other hand... he'd have to ask four patience because if he asked for strength instead he might hurt one of them. Not that Naofumi was capable of hurting them, conceptual magic being what it was.
"Huu. Might as well start with the hard one." It said something that Naofumi got Myne alone in his study and she was still ignoring him and had her head stuck into a book.
"Before your wife said that I'd be stuck in a coma for a few years, could you provide me with more details?" The girl asked in a bored tone of voice not looking away from her book.
"The mana in your body has been poisoning you for several years before you were summoned." Naofumi stated letting out a sigh. "Every time your fever got so bad that you've fallen into a near death state your consciousness was made to spread out, take all the mana in the area, and then pull it back into you, creating room for more mana and prolonging your life a bit. Then you started doing exercises to compress the mana in your body down into smaller and denser packages, increasing your mana regeneration and together with the previous process poisoning your body even worse than before. This damage has affected your natural mana pathways severely scarring them and filling them with shards of dense mana crystals, a situation exacerbated by your hyper dense mana." Naofumi explained in simple terms. "They're like cancer, made out of broken glass. Dealing with this problem will require a potion known as jureve to melt away the crystals inside of your body while also healing it at the same time."
"Is that why my sacred gear built up power so fast?" Myne asked looking at Naofumi bluntly.
"Yes. Your level of danger was probably enough that you could beat a minor deity into submission, and you used it for books." Naofumi let out a sigh at that.
"What else would I use it on?" Naofumi smacked himself in the face. "If you're that upset about it then you probably should've picked someone else as the Jewel Hero. If I was the Book Hero instead there would be millions of weapons built up with high specs by now."
Naofumi just slumped over defeated.
"Yah know what? I'm going to give your caretakers a hand." Naofumi went back into the kitchen and came out a few moments later. "Here drink this." Naofumi stated as he handed Myne what looked like a water bottle filled with suspicious liquid.
"What is it?" Myne asked looking at the liquid suspiciously. "It's a hyper dense liquid nutritional supplement, if you drink this you probably wouldn't have to eat for a week."
That did actually sound pretty good, so Myne drunk it, to her immediate regret. Naofumi's cooking bonuses made the taste in things that he cooks more prominent, it made things that he makes which taste good taste better, and things that tasted bad taste way, way, worse. Myne wanted to throw up but Naofumi held her mouth closed until she swallowed it all and kept it down.
"Blegh!"
Naofumi continued to show Myne no mercy. Grabbing her by her head Naofumi proceeded to the next stage, seeking out all the shards of mana crystal inside of her body in the process. Guided by crafting bonuses Naofumi polished all the sharp edges off of the mana crystals and imbued them with support type magic, as the final step he took out a vial of potion and dumped it on Myne's head. Kaede had exceeded her father's capacity for making potions, not only had she learned how to make Yggdrasil, but it was also the highest quality Yggdrasil, and she made a factory for the stuff too. Immediately all the scar tissue in Myne's body healed up, correcting the issue of her physical frailty and building muscle tissue in the process using the nutrient drink as material.
"Ugh... I think I just got hit with a miracle." Ignoring Myne's complaints Naofumi initiated the soul deep dive on her, just to make sure. What he found disappointed him.
"For Turtle's sake." Being X reincarnated Tanya as an experiment to get people to worship him. Medea reincarnates her followers as a way of using them to attack worlds. In comparison to those two the bunch of gods hovering around Myne's world at least has a better reason but still. "Being unsatisfied with your world's rate of development is no reason for you to go around kidnapping people!" Naofumi just let out a sigh as he punted Myne back to her world.
Myne found herself in front of a tree, a tiny little tree in a vast open field. Her confusion obvious Myne looked down at the Bonzai like tree that she had appeared in front of and kneeled before she plucked off one of the berries in question, and it immediately changed into a book. Best. Tree. EVER! Immediately sitting down Myne opened up the book as she looked through its contents.
'You're not exactly Eve, then again neither am I.' The first page only had that one line on it. Weirdest book ever. Myne turned another page. 'It's hard enough to hold a conversation with you when you don't talk yah know.'
Myne blinked stupidly for a moment.
"I'm Myne, who're you?" Myne flipped the page again in an effort to find that out.
'I am the tree of knowledge. Exactly what kind of tree did you think I was?'
"A Book Tree." Myne stated as if the answer should've been obvious. "Besides isn't the Tree of Knowledge supposed to grow apples not books?" An apple suddenly grew from one of the branches of the bonzai. Myne flipped another page.
'Books didn't exist back when Adam plucked me bare, or scrolls, or letters for that matter. You eat one of my apples and the knowledge appears in your mind.'
"Wait a second, I thought Adam and Eve ate an apple each and were kicked out of heaven for it, what's this about plucking the tree bare?" Myne flipped over to the next page.
'Here's what really happened. Eve rejected the serpent's advances, so in retaliation he took a bite out of one of my apples and told all the gods that Eve did it. At her trial, just as she was about to be kicked out of heaven Adam showed up, with all of my apples in a basket, took a bite out of them one by one spitting out the contents as he left a trail up to the serpent whose arms and legs he ripped off before taking Eve and leading her to the mortal realm.' The tree would be more impressed if Adam's act of defiance didn't mean that all of the tree's apples weren't wasted. It was one of the main reasons it was reincarnated in the first place.
"Adam sure sounds impressive." Myne stated stunned by this hot blooded light novel protagonist type person she was hearing about. She wasn't sure the church, either of them, would approve of a story so... blasphemous. No wonder she got the dumbed down version.
'We're getting off topic.'
"Agreed, as a start..." Myne looked at the tiny shrub. "Why are you so small?"
'... Because I always have room to grow.' The 'tree's' logic made sense. Sort of.
"So what do you want to talk about?" Myne asked looking at the tree with interest. 'Plant my seeds, then you will be able to leave.' The book turned into a seed. Shrugging her shoulders Mine plucked the tree bare and dug some holes with her hands as she planted each of the seeds and then left.
When Myne awoke she was back in the church's library, the Four Hero's book opened in front of her as she looked down at it from her usual spot in the library. The Hunting tool Hero was a warrior of the gods back on her home world, having yet to earn her wings but no less fearsome because of it, and then having earned them anyway as she turned the enemy she was brought there to defeat into a ally closer than any other. The Blunt Instrument hero also was a warrior, not of god but of men, she has fought against the super natural for several years, learned their abilities, and while aiding her circle of warriors ultimately won. The Card Hero on the other hand was a mage, one who inherited the power and knowledge of the greatest mage in her world and with that power placed the inheritance of both the East and the West under her control. The Jewel hero spread prosperity, using her vast knowledge of her world to raise the quality of life wherever she went, be that in the world she called home or the one she was sent to protect, however she would soon learn that she hadn't been sent home, but rather sent to hell.
"Well that's not ominous at all." Myne stated as she soon saw that her hands were twitching.
"Myne!" Myne nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw that Gil had pulled on the sleeve of her robes. "The Head Priest wants to talk to you."
"Well I have some things we need to discuss too." Myne picked up the book and walked out of the library, there was one more grey robe priest than what she remembered, a white haired young man with red eyes and pale skin like a albino.
If Myne had to guess she just met the one person in the temple who spends less time outside then what she herself does. No matter she simply had to go to Ferdinands office for now. To Myne's surprise she somehow lost the majority of her grey robe priests, except for the white haired guy that is. Ferdinand was a handsome young man of his mid twenty's, or rather early twenty's, the calendar here was a little longer than the one on her home world so in terms of time spent years had a little more value to them. But the matter of Twenty and Twenty Five was irrelevant at the moment.
"Gil said you wanted to see me?" Myne asked looking at the Head Priest with concern. "Yes. We have a lot of paper work we need to sort through." Ferdinand stated and was a little concerned when Myne let out an audible sigh of relief. "Is there a problem?" Ferdinand asked as he watched Myne walk over to one of the Ceremonial cups and pick it up. "You could say that." Myne explained as the bracelet around her shaking wrist transformed into a ceremonial cup itself.
"The usual place. Now!" After Ferdinand led Myne into his secret room and sealed it shut Myne handed him the Book of the Four Heroes. Ferdinand's eyes nearly bugged out of his head, he counted at least six different schools of magic mentioned inside of this book, and it gave instructions on how to use them. Even that paled in comparison to the potential threat made apparent by the Hero of Mirror and his seemingly legion of insanely powerful lunatics.
"Is all of this true?" Ferdinand asked looking at Myne with eyes filled with concern.
"Near as I can tell yes." Myne explained as Ferdinand looked through the book, and at the ending.
"Do you know what these potions that he fed you are?" Ferdinand asked looking at the contents of the book with concern. "One was a nutritional supplement. I don't know what the other one did, only that he would save you 'a bit of trouble.'"
"You should have him conduct a medical exam on you." Myne's jewel turned into a leaf like accessory, the base form of the sacred gear.
"Since when can you talk!?" Myne asked looking concerned.
"Since I became able to. Conduct the exam, the 'Danger' is already grinding down on your sealed weapons." Ferdinand laid Myne down on a couch as she examined her body.
"Are you really Myne?" Ferdinand asked looking shocked. "What does that mean?" Myne asked looking at Ferdinand with blatant suspicion, and he didn't answer. "What does that mean?" Myne repeated increasingly concerned by the moment.
"In lieu of the little girl that was dying from the devouring, I'm not looking at a little girl who's afflicted with Hero's syndrome." Ferdinand stated holding his chin in his hands.
"Hero's syndrome?"
"The Mana crystals that were probably formed from your raging hyper dense nigh out of control mana have instead evened out, the tissues they lodged themselves into have healed around them and are now receiving support magic from them." Myne was confused.
"Is this a bad thing?"
"Your body now has specs which are several times higher than they were before, and is burning through calories at an accelerated rate. If we don't do something soon you're gonna end up starving to death." Hence where the Sacred Gear was rapidly breaking down seals. Then a knocking was heard on the hidden door.
"It's me Accel, let me in."
"Accel? Whose that? Is it a Blue robe priest?" Myne asked and Ferdinand's eyes went wide. Immediately Ferdinand opened up the secret passage way and let in not a blue robed priest but rather the teenage Grey Robe that Myne saw earlier. Quickly the White haired youth walked up to Myne's side and put his hand on her head.
"Mistress, the unsealing is dropping. They've stopped, it seems that we're safe now."
"For now." The white haired teenager calling himself Accel corrected not taking her hand off of Myne's head. "Start using the different weapon transformations to absorb the girl's mana. Break down those damned rocks as soon as possible." Accel instructed bluntly.
"Seeing as how you're clearly not who I thought you were who are you?" Ferdinand instructed bluntly.
"I'm called Accelerator where I come from. I have the ability to control Vectors, the direction in which all things move. I could tell you more but frankly I have no time." Accel explained bluntly. "What you need to concern yourself with is making sure this little girl doesn't die, isn't that right?"
'I can move the mana in her body around the buffing type jewels and keep her from getting killed.' Even though his words were left unsaid at the same time they had said everything.
"Your demands?" Ferdinand stated and Accelerator seemed to ponder the question for a bit. "Three hot meals and a bed sounds pretty good." The replied nonchalantly. "Look I ain't here to hurt you. My job is to keep the girl alive and make sure that the little leaf gets lots of nutrients and doesn't waste another miracle on a library." Myne's back went straight at that.
"Hey I worked hard on that library!" Myne shouted and Ferdinand face palmed.
"I don't know who I should be more mad at, her for wasting a miracle, or you for letting her do it." Ferdinand wiped off his face as he just let out a tired sigh. "What do you intend to do next?" Ferdinand asked looking at the white haired youth suspiciously.
"At the moment I'm waiting for this girl who has supposedly studied Ki flow to learn how to do the thing I'm doing to her so that she doesn't eat herself from the inside out." Accelerator turned to look to Myne who closed her eyes as she focused on manipulating her internal supply of Ki.
"How long do I need to keep doing this?" Myne asked looking concerned.
"Oh. Any time that you don't want super human stats again." Accelerator stated as he took his hand off of Myne.
"Remind me to punch Naofumi when I see him again." Myne stated puffing her cheeks.
"Sadly he's indestructible, so you'll only end up breaking your hand instead." Accelerator let out a sigh as he explained, the look on his face that of someone who was speaking from personal experience.
"What's with that defeated sigh?" Myne asked looking concerned.
"Nuclear bombs aren't that impressive." Myne visibly recoiled at that statement. "There are more people that can survive one going off in their face than I can count with one hand." Myne's jaw nearly hit the floor.
"I have no idea what that is and I have no desire to find out." Ferdinand wisely chose to skip over this part of the conversation immediately, Myne's book brought far more important topics to light. "If this Sacred Gear 'eats' danger then I doubt you'll find much of it here." Ferdinand held up the book in question as if making a point. "At least not the same kind in this book." Too much politics and power struggles and not enough world ending apocalypses.
"She'll find plenty of it as is just learning how to regulate those crystals without me." Accelerator stated smirking knowingly. "After all not only will she have to learn to do that without me, but also all of her normal daily life stuff on top of that if she's going to survive dealing with both them and the nobles." Myne's eyes nearly bugged out of her head, a rainbow glow encompassing them as she nearly had a panic attack.
"You fool you've set off the devouring again! Quickly suppress her..." Myne held up her hand in the negative, holding up her hand Myne whistled a tune causing a nearby pot with a neglected plant inside of it to bloom to life. Now Ferdinand's eyes were bugging out of his head. And then he let out a sigh. "Of course you learned magic, the book detailed about six or seven different kinds, most of them from different worlds." Ferdinand face palmed himself. "Which is an issue, because A in this world only nobles are allowed to learn magic, and B because she's just gotten her hands on several fresh bundles of information that people will literally kill to get their hands on." Accelerator followed up with a smirk. "Can you destroy this?" Ferdinand asked indicating the book of the four Heroes.
"We can do the same as destroying it." Saying that Accelerator took the book and shoved it into Myne's weapon.
"I'm not a garbage disposal!" The Sacred Gear protested her mistreatment. "Now than you're going to be responsible for helping to keep Myne's magic from going out of control."
"I know that." The leaf like gem replied in protest.
"What can it do, aside from making a personal library for Myne?" Ferdinand asked looking at the leaf gem suspiciously.
"Each transformation can double as a container for Mana." Myne explained indicating the weapon in question. "I recently acquired several million of them and all of them need to be unlocked." Ferdinand's face twitched at that, as if he just heard something truly unimaginable. If each of those weapons have a mana capacity at least on par with a low ranking nobleman... "Are there any other pieces of horrifying information that you would like to drop in my lap before I go find a pillow to scream into!?"
"Several million. Each transformation holds a unique power referred to as a bonus, the majority of those bonuses are useless without the world that I came from however perhaps you'd like one with the power to break magical contracts without backlash? Or perhaps you'd like a weapon of mass destruction that can wipe out an entire continent. As for my 'useless Miracle' the Library holds every book that Myne has ever read be they from her original world, yours, or the one she was summoned to protect." Ferdinand's face twitched. Accelerator wisely read the room and carried Myne out on his shoulder, throwing Ferdinand a pillow from his office as he went. As the two of them left Accel saw a sound proof barrier being erected around the secret room. He'll be fine after he's done pulling his hair out.
"Accel!" Gil and Fran frantically ran into the room calling out for the third man in their group. "Have you seen...!" And then they saw Myne on his shoulder. "Oh thank heavens!"
"Myne's condition has been tweaked a little bit, she had one of the High Priest's potions." Fran's face cringed into one of sympathy and horror. "We should discuss some of the finer details back at the orphanage." Accel explained while leading the rest of the group away. In the meantime the massive stack of paper work that Ferdinand had called Myne there to help him deal with was going unnoticed, and was in fact, increasing in size as people came in and added more stacks to it. Ferdinand's nightmares would not just be limited to Myne.
For the time being Ferdinand was scrambling to come up with explanations for Myne's renewed health, luckily this world had physical stat enhancing accessories, and because of that blasted jewel Myne would always be carrying them around with her too. That was how she was able to run around but as for why, Ferdinand was making her work on improving her physical health as opposed to just doing paper work, course on top of that she was also helping Ferdinand with the nightmarish amount of paper work he was doing, filling up dozens of grails with magical energy, and running the orphanage on top of that. With so much work Myne shouldn't have the free time for books that keep her happy and sane, so why was she smiling? While it lacked the same appeal as getting to read books she had found a substitute through a private communication accessory from Ferdinand that her weapon had copied and which she was wearing like a circlet.
"This is a huge waste of my abilities." The weapon complained into Myne's ear while she worked.
"When you complain like that you break my immersion." Myne darkly stated while on her morning walk. A morning walk where she casually circled the temple grounds several times in the span of a few moments.
Of course Ferdinand was putting the Jewel to work too. Every day he had Myne use her Balance Breaker to bring out the library and produce the various books on magic that she picked up in the other world and the books on science and technology that Myne had collected and was copying them down. When he had free time he would use them as reference points to expand upon his knowledge of magic and improve the spells that he was capable of casting in order to achieve new effects. All of this was in order to sell the illusion that Ferdinand was the one that modified Myne's body so that the damage from the Devouring wouldn't be fatal, though the results instead had too good of a effect producing someone with super human ability instead. The High Bishop attempted to get his hands on Ferdinand's 'research' on more than one occasion.
Hero syndrome was called as such for a reason, people who suffer from it are able to fight, act and move with super human ability, if you're someone like the High Bishop, or someone from the same circle of high ranking individuals who pretend to be decent members of society as he who only view people as disposable pawns 'a technique to mass produce people who have super human ability but have some health problems' are like a god send. The High Bishop had a lot of dirty tricks, but Accel was used to swimming with sharks, and not the kind from Myne's world, the kind that spew magic and eats whales, the likes of the Bishop was no issue. For a few month's Accel sat in on the Bishop's meetings, discreetly of course his ability to manipulate direction left him effectively invisible with no light to reach him, and learned his every dirty little secret, every crime and blatant act of treason that he's committed up to and including treason against the crown.
The main issue here was however not the severity of his crimes, but the fact that he was the well beloved uncle of the current aub of the territory meant that he would be shielded from the consequences. Accelerator however rarely concerns himself with matters of the law. One day when the Bishop was taking a carriage to a nearby town for his 'duties' a small bump in the road sent the carriage flying through the air and crashed off the side of the road. In the middle of a rain storm, surrounded by hungry predators. The Bishop's love of 'flowers and fruits' was well known in universe, so it only made sense that he would be taking so long to get to the village, and so long to get back from the village, it was hours before the knights were dispatched to look for him, and hours more before his remains were found. Ferdinand suspected the man who called himself Accel, a man that has far as he knew has grown up in the orphanage all his life, yet despite the heavy labour he performed never built any muscle tissue, despite spending most of his time outside never tanned, and despite growing up in that same notoriously neglectful orphanage was hale and healthy as a larc. Most importantly despite being assigned as one of Myne's attendants she didn't recognise him when she first came back.
"You people are more dangerous than I realised." Ferdinand noted simply watching as the scrawny looking Accelerator easily carried a crate that should be thrice his weight.
"Oh your imagination isn't that good!" Accelerator stated letting out a smile, like a shark who locked onto prey.
Review Section:
RonaldM40196867: Not really, to either question.
coolkid0806: Yeah. Considering the number of secret societies tampering with forces beyond their comprehension they're lucky they haven't triggered a K class apocalypse yet, and also loot boxes. In any case you want more omakes? Then you can have more omakes: "As you can see here in sub paragraph B by extracting Steven Rogers of Earth-93074 before he gets frozen in the ice and summoning him as Hero of the Shield during the 3rd Melromarcian-Siltvelt war he will be able to apply his advance knowledge of warfare and tactics to improve upon the situation on the Siltveltian front and negotiate a cease fire with Melromarc. At the same time by pairing him off against..." As cosmic entities, they have all been introduced to countless horrors, and of them, a power point presentation of 'Why you should let me pull out alternate versions of your various top heroes and send them off to save my multiverse' probably made it into the top ten for how mind numbing it actually was. This Naofumi guy was either trying to genuinely explain his point or drive them insane until they just let him do whatever he wants.
Nightshadegirl: Kuro's going to stuff them into Humonculi bodies, she can do a much better job with her divine magics then what Chaldea did with Mash.
Guest: Your grammar is atrocious and your auto correct deserves to be taken out and shot but I'll do my best to translate. Kuro is going to be able to bring along the Heroic Spirits yes, and if the Magus association is stupid enough to try and come after them again after the defence they just put up and with a army of hundreds of heroic spirits on their side then they are welcomed to do so, the universe will be better off without them. If Kuro works hard on it, then yes. For one thing I'm pretty sure that most of her relatives have already been drawn into the grail as a variety of Heroes already, the ones she cares about anyway.