Chapter 4: Illegal Alien (2)
I opened my eyes inside an unfamiliar room.
There were no iron bars.
Instead, a polite notice was posted on the wall.
[Welcome to Magiterra.]
[Residents without citizenship may obtain legal residency status through a temporary labor contract.]
[Failure to sign will result in immediate deportation beyond city limits.]
Deportation… Does that mean kicking me out of the city?
Perhaps that wasn't too bad.
If this place wasn't the world I knew, staying inside or stepping outside made no difference—it was all alien territory.
Escaping this giant prison might actually make it easier to find clues needed for dimensional transfer.
But I held off the thought and slowly scanned the room.
One door.
One window.
One middle-aged man sitting behind the desk across from me.
Embedded in the corner of the ceiling was something like a small crystal eye.
Glowing with a blue light, it blinked at steady intervals, illuminating the room.
A surveillance magitech device?
That was my best guess.
Faint blue lines ran along the door as well.
A lock, most likely.
The pattern looked different from the sealing formulas I knew, but its function seemed identical.
The man, who had been watching my face intently, stood up from his seat.
Then he walked over to the wall and reached out for the cord hanging from the black blinds.
"Look."
Rattle.
The blinds went up.
I reflexively looked out the window.
Beyond the glass, a massive outer wall caught my eye even before the sky.
A colossal barrier, intertwined with glowing blue mana circuits, stretched all the way to the horizon and encircled the entire city.
But the wall wasn't the real problem.
It was what lay beyond.
Black and rotted, the soil was nothing but tainted wasteland.
More specifically, a 'polluted land.'
The term flashed through my mind.
At the same time, the desolate landscape of the Demon Continent overlaid itself onto the view.
"…?"
Suddenly, something moved in the distance.
I thought it was just a rock at first—until the thing lifted its head.
It was a demonic beast built like a bison.
The beast lowered its head and licked the ground.
As it did, the soil touched by its tongue bubbled up.
I frowned.
"It's not looking for prey," I murmured.
The man looked at me.
"What?"
"It's licking mana. Forcing itself to consume toxic mana remaining in the polluted land. Even though its body won't be able to handle it."
At that moment, another demonic beast charged toward the outer wall.
It was shaped somewhere between a hound and a wolf.
The second it reached the base of the barrier, it began scraping its claws against the metal surface.
Screeech.
A spine-chilling sound vibrated through the window glass.
Soon, a metallic device atop the wall rotated smoothly, locking on like an eye tracking its target.
A blue light condensed at its tip.
I couldn't tell what it was.
But I knew instinctively.
Dangerous.
The next instant, light flared briefly.
There was no sound.
The demonic beast burst apart in an instant.
Flesh and black blood sprayed across the wall.
I narrowed my eyes.
A beam-type magitech weapon?
Its power was sufficient.
Its activation speed was fast, too.
No chanting.
No caster in sight.
In other words, an automated defense mechanism.
I could deduce at least that much.
Yet the other demonic beasts did not back down.
Instead, they swarmed the freshly killed corpse, tearing, shoving, and trampling over one another.
A few swallowed chunks of the dead beast's flesh and shuddered violently as new spikes sprouted from their backs.
A true hellscape—a demonic realm in every sense.
The man gestured toward the window with his chin.
"That's the outskirts."
"A toxic mana contamination zone," I spoke first.
The man went silent for a moment.
I didn't take my eyes off the window.
"If you step outside the wall, your circuits will break first. Next, your skin. Then your nervous system. If you're lucky, a demonic beast will eat you before that."
The man gave me a strange look.
"And if you're unlucky?" he asked.
I stared beyond the purple mist.
Atop a broken hill stood something that looked like a human.
It stood on two legs, with ragged shreds of clothing hanging off its body.
However, its arms dangled past its knees, and black horns sprouted from the back of its head.
"You'll live," I added. "Just not as a human…"
The man remained silent for a moment, eyeing me with growing discomfort.
"What the hell were you before this?"
"A mage."
"A mage?"
"Not that I have much to show for it right now."
Soon, the metallic weapon atop the wall flashed again.
The humanoid figure vanished.
All that remained was a black bloodstain.
The man pulled the blinds back down.
Rattle.
The polluted land and the shadows of the demonic beasts were blocked out.
Inside the room, only the white light of the welcome notice remained once more.
[Failure to sign will result in immediate deportation beyond city limits.]
I quickly ran through the information and deductions I had gathered so far.
And then, I signed the contract.
Because I had always done whatever it took to survive.
That was who I was.
* * *
And that was how I dropped into the Lower Level as an illegal alien.
Magiterra's Lower Level was another world beneath the city.
There was no sunlight, let alone a sky.
All you could see was cold, bare rock.
Instead, waste discarded from the Upper Levels fell down every now and then.
Broken magitech devices, shattered prosthetic bodies, chemical containers with unknown contents…
And sometimes, even human corpses.
Every time the giant transport pipe opened, trash poured down like a waterfall.
Rumble.
Whenever that sound echoed, the underground dwellers looked up, then bolted.
The reason was simple: if you were slow, you got beaten to death.
I wandered there for a few days and scavenged through the mountain of trash, too.
It would have been easy if I could use magic.
Even casting a small search formula would have made finding usable items trivial.
But I couldn't do that.
My circuits were still broken.
Just then, my foot bumped against something.
It was a magitech device slightly larger than my palm.
A cracked crystal plate was embedded inside a black metal frame, and several severed circuit wires stuck out from the side.
At first, I thought it was just a broken piece of junk, but the moment my hand closed around it, I felt it.
There was mana left inside.
Incredibly faint, but still there.
After checking my surroundings, I tucked the device into my chest pocket.
And that evening, I headed to the LL-19 Scrap Market.
I set the device down in front of a stall.
"How much is this worth?"
The stall owner was an old man with a magnifying lens over one eye.
He glanced at my item, then snorted.
"It's a dead circuit. It won't even fetch scrap value."
"There's still mana remaining inside."
"So what if there is? It doesn't flow."
He tapped the device with his finger.
"The input port burned out, and the conversion circuit snapped. The crystal plate is cracked, too. You can't fix this."
I looked down at the device.
"Can't fix it, huh?"
I took another look at the circuit.
It was a standard I'd never seen before.
The thickness of the wires, the shape of the joints, even the way it routed and severed the flow of mana were all different from the magic formulas I knew.
Yet, it wasn't completely foreign.
After all, any method of controlling mana ultimately converged toward the same principle.
Even if the languages differed, rivers always flowed downward.
I pressed the broken circuit wire with my fingertip.
"That's not it."
"What?"
"The conversion circuit isn't what's broken. The flow is surging backward here."
The old man's face crumpled.
"What do you know?"
"Be quiet for a second."
I didn't inject mana into it.
I merely tapped it lightly.
Zap.
Inside the device, one of the severed circuits glowed faintly.
The old man's eyes widened.
"What did you just do?"
"I found where it was clogged."
I picked up a thin piece of metal rolling around nearby.
With its tip, I scraped away the scorched part of the circuit board.
Then, I painstakingly connected the two broken wires.
It was a crude quick-fix, but the mana flow reestablished itself instantly.
A blue light flickered to life inside the cracked crystal plate.
The surroundings went quiet.
The stall owner stared at the device with his mouth agape.
"How did that turn on?"
"Because it wasn't a dead circuit."
I set the device down.
"How much?"
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