chapter01 · 013-ep12
Episode 12: The Dark History I Threw Away — Not a Single Piece Lost
We got home just before noon, and the instant I opened the front door, Seina came flying out.
"Big bro!"
And headbutted me straight in the gut. Right where the cracked ribs are, mind you.
"Gah..."
"I thought you died!"
"I nearly did, but I'm alive! I'm alive, so back off — it hurts, it really hurts!"
"Huh? Where? Where does it hurt?"
"Ribs. Cracked."
"Why didn't you lead with that?!"
"You're the one who charged me before I could say anything!"
Mom gave me a full round of scolding, and Dad left work early, took one look at my face, said only "Idiot," and went off to take a bath. That's him doing some serious reflecting.
I slept until evening, and by the time I woke up, my body hurt even more. At last, alone — I opened my status in my room.
There was something that had been bugging me. Right before I blacked out in that nest, something like text had streamed past the edge of my vision.
Name: Ichinose Saku
Lv: 68
Job: Chuunibyou
"Huh?"
I rubbed my eyes and looked again. The number didn't change. Closed it once and reopened it — still 68.
"Sixty-eight?"
Yesterday morning I was definitely 21. That's forty-seven levels overnight.
Well, I did take out hundreds of goblins plus a C-rank individual. So maybe it adds up? And on top of that, I was using the King's power, so XP should have been halved. It's still this. Run the math and I'd have cleared 90 if I'd fought them plain.
Not that fighting them plain would have gotten me to 90 — it would have gotten me killed.
Every other number was up too.
HP: 104
MP: 61
STR: 48
AGI: 55
INT: 72
LUK: 22
STR is 48, people. It was 8 at appraisal. It hasn't even been two weeks since that day.
LUK alone is still rock-bottom. Why. ...Then again, running into a C-rank on Floor 1 of an F-rank dungeon kind of rules out good luck.
And below that:
Condition fulfilled.
Unlocking skill.
【Vault of Tomes】
It's here! The first of the three that sat in a row saying "Not Reached."
I opened the description.
【Vault of Tomes】
"The words I have written abide within me. Therefore, they shall never be lost."
Effect: Every record you have ever set down is stored automatically in the void. May be browsed at will
So I don't have to carry the notebooks around? No — this goes way beyond that.
It says "automatically."
Scrolling down the screen, there was more.
Magic Eye unlocked.
【Magic Eye of Karma】 (left eye)
【Magic Eye of Star-Reading】 (left eye)
【Magic Eye of Bewitchment】 (left eye)
【Magic Eye of Discernment】 (left eye)
Four of them at once. Truth at Lv 10, Thousand Leagues at Lv 20 — if the one-every-ten-levels pattern holds, then the batches for 30, 40, 50, and 60 all arrived together. That streaming text in the nest was this.
I opened the descriptions one by one.
【Magic Eye of Karma】
True effect: Beholds causality, and rewrites causes from their results
-
Restricted by Release Rate
-
Current: attack trajectories appear as lines
Rewriting causes from results — what does that even mean? What was I thinking back then, writing this?
And what it can do now is show attack trajectories. Wait, that's genuinely strong. If this had been open in yesterday's nest, things would have gone a lot smoother.
【Magic Eye of Star-Reading】
True effect: Reads the courses of the stars, and knows the configurations to come
- Current: tells you your bearings and present location
It's a compass.
I mean, you lose all sense of direction inside a dungeon, so it's still handy. But the name is WAY too grandiose.
【Magic Eye of Bewitchment】
True effect: Completely dominates a target's perception
- Current: shifts the target's perception by a slight margin
This one's dangerous — in the good way. Combined with the presence-thinning skill, avoiding eyes just got stupidly easy.
【Magic Eye of Discernment】
True effect: Nullifies and exposes every concealment, disguise, and barrier
- Current: reveals the locations of traps and mechanisms
All four built the same way: the true effects are from another dimension, the current effects weirdly practical. Like the grand settings my past self wrote are being throttled through a faucet called "level," down to just barely the amount a human can use.
Flip it around, and the higher the level, the wider the faucet opens. What happens when it's open all the way... no, no point thinking about that now.
For a test, I covered my left eye with a hand and focused my mind on it. Nothing happened, of course. Also, there was no reason to cover it just now. Pure old habit.
I focused on Vault of Tomes to try the usable one, and something opened in my vision.
A bookshelf? Technically, rows of spine-like lettering floating in empty space, and they just look like a shelf.
†The Book of the King†
Officers' volume
Underlings' volume
Weapons volume
More than I expected. No — that's way too many.
I wrote them myself, and I never once grasped how many there were. Shoved into cardboard boxes in the closet, never counted.
And below that, still more.
Doodle book (fourth grade)
Free notebook (sixth grade)
Technique-name book (eighth grade, summer)
Lore book (ninth grade)
...and more
It's ALL there. Even the fourth-grade doodle book.
Apparently everything I've ever written gets filed here, no matter what I think of it. The notebooks I threw away, the ones I put out with the burnable trash — all of it.
Uh, creepy. Convenient, sure — but it also means I've become someone who can never lose a single piece of his own dark history.
For a test, I focused on †The Book of the King†, and its weight dropped solidly back into my hand. Black cover with uneven paint, white pen lettering — the real thing. Coming straight out of the void.
"WHOA!"
This is huge. No digging through the closet, no fear of the family finding it. Take it to school and my bag stays empty — read it whenever I feel like it. Even in class. Not that I will. I won't.
...I was supposed to be graduating from chuunibyou, you know.
I stored the notebook in the void and flopped onto my bed.
Kanayama's closed, so no diving there for a while. And if I go looking for another dungeon, "F-rank and no crowds" narrows the field fast. Nagoya has dungeons coming out of its ears, but the empty ones all tend to sit in out-of-the-way places.
Eight days until the entrance ceremony. I need to find somewhere before then.
Thinking all that, I checked my phone, and the notifications had hit a catastrophic count. The group chat the four of them and I have run since middle school: 267 unread.
Nothing but bad premonitions, but I opened it anyway.
Osawa: "Huh?"
Osawa: "Oi."
Osawa: "This is you, right???"
Yamabuki: "Kanayama Dungeon — Undiscovered Territory — C-rank individual defeated"
Yamabuki: "Slayer: Ichinose Saku (15)"
Miyake: "!!!!!!!!"
Miyake: "!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
Miyake, type words. Also, the second one has MORE exclamation marks.
Fujidou: "You alive?"
Fujidou: "If you're alive, answer."
Osawa: "You're on the news."
The news? Wait, I'm on the NEWS?
I came out of that dungeon this very morning, and it's still going? This day is entirely too long.