"Damn it..."
"This is a disgrace..."
Pinned down by the Five-Colored Golem Maids, Jix and Gunno twisted their faces in bitter resentment.
Elsa’s body double stepped softly toward them.
"Hey, what do you want?"
The double didn't answer. She simply held her right hand over Jix’s forehead.
"Wh-What? What are you doing?!"
Ignoring him completely, the double proceeded with the examination. She was even more tight-lipped than Elsa herself.
"Diagnose."
"..."
Once Jix's check-up was over, she moved on to Gunno.
"What is with this woman?!"
The Golem Maids pressed down harder on Gunno as he tried to squirm away. Once he was held fast, she placed her hand on his forehead and activated the spell.
"Diagnose."
"..."
Observing the grim expression on the double’s face, King Cesar asked with interest, "Lady Elsa, did you discover something?"
"...Yes. It appears that toxins have accumulated in their brains, impairing their ability to make rational decisions."
She explained the situation in terms that the King and the others could easily grasp.
"What?!"
"Does that mean they will return to their senses if treated?"
"I believe they will at least be capable of normal judgment again."
"That is good news. In that case, let us return to the Second Guest House."
The group departed using their own carriages and Gunno’s carriage. Jix and Gunno were bound with ropes, and the Golem Maids took the driver's seats as coachmen.
＊ ＊ ＊
"...I suppose that settles this commotion for the most part?"
Jin muttered as he leaned back in his chair in the command room on Hourai Island.
"...Yes. But I think it would be better if I performed the actual brain treatment myself."
"Ah, you’re right. In that case, let's swap back."
＊ ＊ ＊
Under the pretext of retrieving medicine for the treatment, Jin and Elsa’s body doubles stopped by the Konron 3 and swapped with the real individuals. Naturally, they also brought out some recovery medicine.
Jix and Gunno were taken to the infirmary of the Second Guest House. Since they had been struggling violently along the way, they had been knocked unconscious with Stun. This allowed for a calm, thorough examination.
"Diagnose."
Elsa performed the examination herself this time.
"...As I thought, foreign metallic substances have accumulated in various parts of their bodies."
Even for Jin, the specific symptoms and mechanisms of mercury poisoning were a mystery, so he couldn't think of any solution other than removing the accumulated "foreign matter." Elsa reached the same conclusion.
"I will remove the foreign substances... Extraction."
Extraction was a form of craft magic that separated and isolated specific components. While it couldn't target an entirely unknown substance directly, it could remove unknown elements from a known base material. Elsa was applying this logic to the human body. Since the normal components of a human were known, anything else present would be the substance causing the poisoning.
What was extracted was a small amount of gray powder. Jin wondered if it was some kind of compound.
"It’s dangerous, so let’s put it in a bottle."
Jin administered the recovery medicine to Jix and placed the gray powder into an empty bottle. He took care not to touch it with his hands, using wind magic to skillfully gather it into the vial. He performed the same procedure for Gunno, and once the recovery medicine was administered, the treatment was complete.
"...In short, the poison had reached their brains, making them unable to control their emotions," Elsa explained once again.
King Cesar listened in silence, then spoke with a heavy expression. "I see. Nevertheless, the crimes of these two remain. The fact is that they attempted to harm me, Lagede, and Latant."
In this world, there was no custom of overlooking crimes just because someone was under the influence of a substance.
"At most, their sentences might be slightly mitigated in light of Lady Elsa’s diagnosis."
That was likely unavoidable. Much like the matter of the uninvited entry into the Gonpetition, if one were to constantly create special exceptions, the law would lose all meaning. Furthermore, King Cesar concluded that it was out of the question for the very people responsible for upholding the law to be the ones to ignore it.
After that, the various post-incident tasks were carried out.
First was the recovery of the ten Dull-colored Golems, whose heads had been severed from their bodies. Then came the recovery of the golems that had simply stopped moving. Knowing they would reactivate once they thawed from their frozen state, Jin dealt with them by removing their control cores. While he could have used Master-Slave Rewrite Magic to Erase their contents, he felt it would be a waste to delete the data, so he chose to keep the cores intact for study.
"Now then, let's see what this 'fluid metal' really is."
At the formal request of the Celuroa Kingdom, Jin began analyzing the golems with Reiko as his assistant. Elsa stayed to observe. The work took place in a small workshop within the Second Guest House, a room usually reserved for repairing furnishings.
Latant, the Chief of the First Ministry of Technology, stood by as a witness.
A small amount of fluid metal still remained in the barrels Jix and the others had been transporting. First, Jin tried to use Analyze on it, not expecting much.
"Just as I thought... it's mercury."
More accurately, he discovered it was a magi-isotope of mercury—a relationship similar to that between silver and mithril.
Jin told Latant that he wanted to take some back for research and obtained about one liter of the fluid metal. This, too, was placed in a glass bottle for transport.
"Would a metal container be unsuitable?" Latant asked.
"Yes. Because this is mercury, it dissolves various other metals."
Latant seemed genuinely shocked. "What! Is that so?"
"Yes. Some alchemists should be aware of it."
"Hmm..."
Because magic existed in this world, methods for smelting metals were not particularly advanced. It seemed that even the cupellation method, used to separate gold and silver from ore, did not exist here.
In cupellation, gold and silver ore is crushed and heated with lead; the gold and silver dissolve into the molten lead as an alloy, which is then heated further with a steady supply of air. This causes the lead to turn into lead oxide, separating it from the precious metals. By performing this in a porous, fire-resistant container, the lead oxide is absorbed, leaving the gold-silver alloy behind. In Japan, this had been practiced at places like the Iwami Ginzan.
Mercury could be used instead of lead in what was called the amalgam process. While it required less fuel, it was far from practical because the resulting mercury vapor was incredibly harmful to the human body.
Jin decided he would explain the dangers of mercury in detail later.
That aside, news arrived that Jix and the others had finally woken up. Jin and his companions left the small workshop to attend the interrogation.