Diary of a Middle-Aged Sage's Carefree Life in Another World: Volume 6 (eBook)

Kobobuki Yasukiyo (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
250 Seiten
J-Novel Club (Verlag)
978-1-7183-7394-5 (ISBN)

Infos

Back safe from the academy's training camp, Zelos and his proteges finally have a moment to rest. But it doesn't last long: Zelos-never the type to sit around idle-gets right back to working on a taboo magic experiment, and the academy's beset by shenanigans of all sorts.

Meanwhile, Iris, having been made keenly aware of her weaknesses during her fight against a faerie rose, has taken to training her hand-to-hand combat skills with Zelos's flock of battle-obsessed coccos. She's not the only one sparring with the birds either: The kids from Luceris's orphanage have been there too, honing their skills every single day.

Knowing they'll have to make their own way in the world before long, the orphans want to go out hunting for the first time-but they can't strike out alone, of course. And so off sets Zelos again, this time with Luceris and a group of unruly orphan kids...

Textauszug

“Essence” here, by the way, didn’t refer to a creature’s DNA; it was more like something spiritual.

A being’s essence carried information about its original life-form, and on rare occasions, it could even contain remnants of its ancestors’ memories and experiences. It was something like DNA, but it was ultimately spiritual, and impossible to preserve. Even if you managed to extract it, it’d disperse and disappear within an hour or so.

Spirit essences were primitive spiritual bodies that could fuse with other essences. By embedding one individual’s essence into another, you could create a fused essence containing data about the individual, and in turn reconstruct them. Theoretically, it might even be possible to resurrect the dead by using the spirit of a living creature—though as things stood, even attempting that was taboo.

Besides, even if someone did succeed in resurrecting the dead that way, the very act of incorporating a spirit essence into them would mean they were no longer human. They would be a different life-form altogether. And the reason for that lay in one of the catalysts required: the magimorph seed.

A magimorph seed was a type of seed dropped by a man-eater beastblossom. But you couldn’t use one that had germinated, or your homunculus would become a chimera.

After all, man-eater beastblossoms preyed on all sorts of creatures, and kept all of their essences inside its body. Then, by implanting some of those essences into magimorph seeds, they could mass-produce soldiers to capture more prey.

So while this was just a little experiment, it was all too clear that Zelos could accidentally create a monster here if even a bit of some other essence was mixed in.

I guess I’m just gambling on whether or not there’s another essence mixed into this magimorph seed, huh...? It’s all up to fate. But what do I do if I end up making, like, some old guy with the torso of a human and the bottom half of a tiger...? Would the Dark God kill me for that? They are apparently a goddess, by the sounds of it...

Zelos had ended up with the disturbing mental image of some rough-looking middle-aged guy—his torso covered in ancient Roman armor, and his bottom half a tiger—giving him a flirty wink and a “Hey, hun. ♡”

For now, though, he figured that if he screwed up too badly, he’d just have to dispose of his creation. There was no point dwelling on it any longer.

Homunculi were living creatures, but they were bound by a pact that used their creator’s blood, so they couldn’t act against their master. Specifically, the pact was a binding spell based on a magic formula drawn in blood. Except...there was no telling whether that spell would work if the homunculus was effectively the Dark God. Ultimately, the only way to find out would be to try and bring it into existence.

“Seriously, though... Which one should I pick? And why are there so many essences in there, anyway? Sheesh. It’s...all a bit weird. I can’t decide.”

According to the legends, the Dark God had devoured a great many creatures, and it had taken their abilities as its own.

If those legends were true, it would have contained countless essences.

And one of the test tubes in front of Zelos was, in fact, absolutely chock-full of essences. So maybe the legends really were true.

“It’d be nice if I could tell which ones are the good essences to use, but when there are this many, it feels like it’s more monster essences than anything else. What do I do if I get a female troll or something? Not to mention, the thing I got them from was cursed... That could have some kind of weird side effect. If I’d known I was going to end up in this situation, I would’ve asked Kemo for some tips.”

The Dark God Stone emanated the sort of corruption that made it seem like even the tiniest fragment would curse you for life, though Zelos had somehow managed to purify it enough that it wouldn’t affect its surroundings. If this had been anyone other than Zelos, with his ridiculously high magic resistance, they’d probably be dead.

Purifying the stone had taken him four entire days, so even just getting to the point of extracting the essence had been a major time sink. He wasn’t in a hurry, but he’d still have to wait for however long it took to form the homunculus’s body, so he figured that the sooner, the better.

Plus, the essences had been exposed to the stone’s corruption for a long time, and there was no telling what sort of effect that might’ve had. Even if Zelos succeeded in making a homunculus here, there was a real chance that something would be wrong with it.

“Kemo,” by the way, had been one of Zelos’s fellow Destroyers in Swords & Sorceries. His full name was Kemo Lavyune—so named for his love of characters with kemonomimi, or animal ears—and he’d devoted every hour of every day to creating homunculi, hoping to make a harem of cute animal girls.

At one point, a special event had granted Kemo the ability to create his own dungeons, which he’d used to create something that was less of a dungeon and more of a harem—a harem by a furry, for furries, full of nothing but furries.

He’d forced Zelos to help him out with it too, so Zelos had learned a bit from that. But still, cultivating a homunculus was a pretty tough task—and if you screwed up, you’d have one hell of a monster on your hands. Though that monster could at least give you a decent chunk of XP...

Any weirdly large essences are a no-go. They give me a bad feeling... Maybe because they remind me of some of Kemo’s old failures. Should I go for something medium-sized, then? Or, no—if I want to play it safe, maybe one a little smaller than medium...

As Zelos thought things through, he swirled the essences in the test tube. He chose one a little on the smaller side, took it out with a dropper, then used a syringe to inject it into the spirit essence.

There would be no second chances here. With that in mind, maybe Zelos was being irresponsible—but at the same time, just worrying about it wasn’t going to get him anywhere, so he figured his only option was to press on.

There was no telling what might happen. It was all up to luck, and his chances weren’t great. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

“Hmm... Nothing’s happening. Strange...”

Adding another essence to a spirit essence was supposed to change the color of the spirit essence from blue to silver.

But there wasn’t even the slightest hint of that happening.

Zelos leaned forward and peered into the test tube as it sat in the rack.

And just as he did, it let out an incredible burst of light, almost as if it had shot up out of the test tube right at his face.

“My... My eyes...!”

Zelos had been caught completely off guard. He was left pathetically writhing around on the floor, like a monster that had tried to attack a hunter only to get its eyes gouged out by a last-second counterattack.

He’d succeeded in combining the essences—at the cost of a fair bit of pain.

* * *

“Urgh... That was terrible. Guess it was a delayed reaction...”

Now that he had his eyesight back, Zelos unlocked the door to his underground storeroom.

His homunculus culture tank was underground, and the door that led to the room was locked with a mechanism similar to a Yosegi puzzle box; it wouldn’t open unless you made the right sequence of moves. This was something he’d gotten into the habit of using back on Earth.

There was no need, of course, to say why he’d gotten into that habit.

When specific sections of what was essentially a sliding puzzle were moved in the correct sequence, a door embedded into the floor opened up. Solving it required a full seventy-three moves, and there was a steel plate fitted inside, so it wouldn’t be easy for someone to brute force their way through.

As Zelos deftly manipulated the panels, the clasps in the mechanism opened. Then, once the puzzle was completely solved, the clasps converged and a handle emerged from behind them.

Zelos took hold of the handle and pulled it toward him to open the door.

Test tube and flask in hand, he descended the stairs, heading for the very back of the storeroom.

Beyond another wooden door was a steel culture tank.

It was already filled with culture fluid; all Zelos had to do now was to dribble a bit of his blood over the magimorph seed containing the essence and toss it in.

Zelos took the magimorph seed, steeped in liquid, from his inventory. Then he made a small cut in it with a scalpel, and inserted both the combined essence from earlier and a fragment of a spirit crystal.

The spirit crystal fragment was only about as big as a grain of sand, but it would eventually transform into a magic stone of the same sort as those found in monsters. If his creation really was the Dark God, there was no telling what could happen next.

Zelos summoned a sigil akin to a world map. He placed the magimorph seed on top of it, then nicked his finger with a knife and smeared his blood across the seed.

As he did, the magimorph seed activated a sigil of its...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.5.2025
• Reihe/Serie: The Diary of a Middle-Aged Sage's Carefree Life in Another World
• Illustrationen: Kobobuki Yasukiyo
• Übersetzer: Kobobuki Yasukiyo
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• Schlagworte: gamer hero • harem gamelit • Isekai • Light Novel • LitRPG • older protagonist • overpowered main character
• ISBN-10: 1-7183-7394-5 / 1718373945
• ISBN-13: 978-1-7183-7394-5 / 9781718373945