Spinel answered with such nonchalance.

The unexpected response left me speechless, unable to ask my next question. I hadn’t anticipated this kind of conversation when I asked…

“I… You must miss her a lot.”

I hastily added.

“Miss? What’s that?”

Could it be that she doesn’t know the word ‘miss’?

Perhaps due to her long years of solitude, Spinel often asked about the meanings of common words.

“It’s the feeling of wanting to see and meet someone.”

“I see. So that’s how humans express it.”

Spinel nodded.

“Do you have someone you miss?”

Spinel asked quietly.

“Yes, I do.”

“Is that person your family too?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must want to see them.”

I’m not sure why tears suddenly welled up in my eyes at those words.

“Yes, I do want to see them.”

“Where are they?”

“…My family passed away long ago.”

“Just like me then.”

Spinel said in an indifferent voice. Then, after lying still for a while, she sat up.

“…Then I’ll become your family.”

“…Pardon?”

“You can’t even catch a wild boar, can’t use magic, and don’t have sharp teeth or claws. On top of that, you keep whining about how hard things are, so I’m saying I’ll teach you how to survive.”

“What does that have to do with being family?”

Confused by the context-less conversation, I asked again, and Spinel tilted her head.

“Isn’t that what family is? Someone who takes care of you so you don’t die.”

When did the meaning of family I knew change to that?

Her answer was so absurd that I couldn’t help but laugh.

“…Pfft. What’s that? Is that what family is?”

“Yes.”

Spinel’s confident response made me miss the chance to refute.

Someone who was threatening to kill me just yesterday is now readily offering to be my family.

Does this mean she no longer intends to kill me?

It was truly bizarre, but perhaps because we’ve gotten a bit closer, it felt like her charm.

Unable to reject her goodwill, I nodded.

“Thank you.”

At my response, she unusually seemed embarrassed and scratched her nose.

***

“You’re saying there are traces of an artifact being installed?”

Sebastian asked in surprise at the Imperial Palace mage’s response.

“It seems to be an explosive-type artifact, likely installed inside the cave.”

“So someone deliberately placed it there?”

“It appears so. It seems it was intentionally detonated to target Miss…”

Sebastian looked at Ilion.

The person who was supposed to visit the mine that day wasn’t Ravenne, but Ilion. If so, the bomb must have been targeting Ilion.

“Paul, has anyone gone missing since that day?”

Ilion called Paul, the chief supervisor of the construction.

“Well, there are so many people, it’s hard to say.”

“…Could it be Bert? I haven’t seen Bert since that day.”

A man standing next to Paul chimed in.

“Bert?”

Ilion asked.

“Yes. He’s a worker who joined a week ago. He was diligent and good at his job, but strangely, he hasn’t been seen since that day…”

Paul trailed off as he spoke.

Now that he mentioned it, it did seem suspicious. He had only been there for a short time, and the timing of his disappearance was odd.

“Bring that man in.”

Ilion ordered the soldiers, suppressing his anger.

Ilion’s face showed clear signs of fatigue as he returned to the temporary barracks set up at the mine.

“Your Grace, perhaps you should rest for a while.”

Sebastian, who had followed him into the barracks, asked while observing Ilion’s expression.

It was good that they had uncovered new information, but the search for Ravenne was making little progress.

They had dug through the earth relentlessly, but there was no trace of her anywhere. Even if they found her, it would be hard to guarantee she was still alive.

Everyone vaguely knew this fact but continued the search operation while watching Ilion’s reactions.

“You haven’t slept for days now.”

“It’s fine. Even if I don’t sleep for a day or two…”

Ilion, who was in the middle of speaking, turned to look at Sebastian.

While he might not feel tired even after not sleeping for a day or two, Sebastian and the others around him looked very exhausted.

Was it stubbornness to continue at this point?

“Your Grace!”

As Ilion was hesitating whether to send people back, he saw Michael running towards him from afar.

“We’ve found Miss’s location.”

He was the one who had cast the tracking spell on Ravenne before visiting Porto.

It seemed he had finally found the location after struggling to locate the body for a while.

“Where is it?”

Ilion hurriedly ran to Michael.

“We found it near the forest area.”

“The forest? Why there… Anyway, teleport us there immediately.”

It was strange that someone who disappeared inside a cave would be there, but that wasn’t important right now. Finding her was the priority.

Michael quickly cast a teleportation spell, and the two arrived in a dense forest. There, a wild boar lay dead.

“This is strange. The last signal was detected here.”

Michael looked around, searching for Ravenne.

Ilion examined the surroundings and found a torn piece of cloth. It was a fragment of the clothes Ravenne had been wearing that day.

It seemed she had indeed been here.

Although it was unclear why she had stayed in this place so far from the cave, if Ravenne was still alive, that was all he could hope for.

If she was alive, he would find her no matter where she was.

“Let’s go back to the barracks. We need to change the search location.”

Ilion asked Michael as he tucked Ravenne’s piece of clothing into his chest.

***

It was approaching the fourth day of my stay here. Living with Spinel wasn’t as difficult as I had thought.

She always procured food, and with her help, sleeping in the cave was manageable.

If I didn’t return like this, Ilion would probably think I was dead, so living with Spinel didn’t seem too bad.

Except for one thing.

“You can’t even lift this?”

“…How am I supposed to lift this?”

In response to my words, Spinel lifted the wild boar carcass effortlessly and asked.

“Like this.”

“……”

As she lifted it up and put it back down, the cave echoed with a thud.

“How do you survive if you can’t even lift this?”

“I can survive without lifting that. I’m alive right now, aren’t I?”

Spinel looked at me with an expression of incomprehension.

“I see. Since you don’t eat much anyway, instead of catching wild boars, we should start with something like rabbits.”

That one problem was that she really intended to teach me how to survive in this mountain.

“With bare hands?”

“What else would you use?”

“Can’t we just pick fruits and live on that?”

I asked, trying to dissuade the enthusiastic Spinel, having no intention of catching rabbits, especially with bare hands.

“Didn’t you say that humans need car-something… Anyway, that they need to eat a balanced diet?”

“Come to think of it, I found out you can live without eating all of that. I mean, I’m not a growing child, so a little nutritional imbalance…”

“Enough with the useless talk.”

Spinel cut me off and snapped her fingers. Against my will, I was thrown into the bushes once again.

“Today, don’t think about coming back until you catch a rabbit.”

“…A rabbit?”

“Yes. There’s one right there.”

Saying that, Spinel pointed to one side. A rabbit that looked quite different from what I had imagined was munching on grass.

“That… is an herbivore, right?”

Judging by how it was chewing grass, it seemed to be an herbivore, but why did it look so scary?

After an hour, I returned to the cave, exhausted.

In the end, not only did I fail to catch the rabbit, but I was repeatedly kicked by its hind legs.

“You’re so weak…”

Spinel clicked her tongue as she looked at me, but I didn’t have the energy to retort.

What am I doing here? How did I end up receiving this Spartan survival training?

Just a few months ago, meat was something you bought from stores. Not something you caught!

Too tired to move a finger, I just lay there, staring at the lights adorning the cave walls.

The cave ceiling was so tightly sealed without a single hole that it made me wonder if I really fell from above.

“Spinel, I did fall from up there, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then why isn’t there a hole?”

“Because I sealed it with a barrier.”

Is that why people can’t find me? Because the hole has been sealed.

No, maybe they’ve already given up searching for me and gone back. If it were Ilion, he would have judged that I was already dead and stopped the search.

If that’s the case, does it mean I no longer need to struggle to escape from Ilion?

I wonder how things are going with Artia.

Have they both found their places?

Are Lily and Sebastian worried about me?

As I absent-mindedly stared at the cave wall, I suddenly started to miss the people from the mansion. It seemed I had grown attached to them in that short time.

“By the way, Spinel, how do those lights glow?”

I asked about the lights adorning the wall, trying to divert my thoughts.

“Those bugs?”

“Huh, those are bugs?”

So I’ve been sleeping with bugs all this time?

But do bugs move so little? Curious about their appearance, which looked like they were embedded like stones, I approached closer.

The bugs, which were round like ladybugs, were glowing transparently throughout their bodies.

They were so beautifully formed that they looked more like jewels than bugs.

“What’s the name of these bugs?”

“Mana suckers.”

“What?”

“That’s what Ceras called them. Mana suckers.”

What kind of name…

“But how do they emit light?”

“They absorb mana and emit light.”

“Ah, I see.”

Now that I think about it, it was quite an intuitive name.

“Because of me, they gather around even when I put up a barrier. It seems they’re attracted more to the barrier because there’s mana around it.”

“Do they stick to your body too, Spinel?”

“You think bugs would dare touch my body? Even if they’re just bugs, they instinctively know. That they shouldn’t touch me.”

This must be what they call being the one and only under heaven.

Today too, Spinel was expounding on how great a person she was, lost in self-admiration.

“Somehow, they look similar to magic stones.”

“Magic stones?”

“Transparent pebbles. About this big…”

“Ah, those are probably their corpses.”

“…Pardon?”

“When they die, they harden like stones.”

“……”

Could it be that magic stones were actually bug corpses?

I felt like I had learned a truth I shouldn’t have known.

“But why are they so still?”

“Well, because there’s enough mana around.”

“What if there’s no mana?”

“They’ll move. They’re quite quick despite their appearance.”

They look pretty unlike bugs…

I peeled off one of the bugs stuck to the wall. Perhaps because it wasn’t moving, it felt just like a sparkling jewel.

“I had no idea that all the magic stones in the mine were these creatures…”

As I was looking curiously at the motionless bug, suddenly my vision blurred and my head started spinning.

“Suddenly feeling sleepy…”

I tried to shake my head to clear my mind, but my body was already losing balance and tilting.

Unable to resist the strange drowsiness that came over me, my body collapsed to the floor.