Chapter 3: Fall a Trap

Paper.
That is nothing less than the very wisdom of humankind—or you could call it our point of origin.

Other animals besides humans can speak—of a sort.
It’s well known that birds and some mammals communicate by voice, and some apes can even converse with humans using sign language.

Creatures that use tools aren’t limited to humans either.
Chimpanzees use twigs to fish out termites to eat, and crows are said to use stones to crack hard nuts.

But only humans have left writing and gained a way to convey their will across time and space.

The spread of paper caused an explosive expansion of that, greatly advancing human civilization.
It was the age when people began to write down events and leave them to posterity.

—We call that recorded history.

In that sense, this world is still prehistoric.
Writing itself exists, but the media for recording it are scarce.

...Well, with so many creatures—myself included—that seem like they’ll live forever, I’m not sure “prehistoric” is the right word.

In Hiiro Village, the main writing media are wooden slips and papyrus.
By papyrus I probably don’t mean the same material used in ancient Egypt. What we have is something paper‑like I made from some grass whose name I don’t even know, based on my hazy memories.

Wooden slips are convenient and easy to write on, but they’re bulky.
Papyrus is thin and light, but it has serious issues with durability.

Lacking flexibility, it tears as soon as you fold it, and even left alone it won’t last ten years. Since it can’t be folded, you can’t bind it into booklets either, and it quickly turns to tatters.

On top of that, it’s extremely labor‑intensive to make: strip the grass and slice it thin and even, soak it in water and leave it for days, line up the strips one by one and press them, then spend another week or two dewatering and drying.

It’s also hard to shortcut those fine steps with magic, so in practice almost no one uses papyrus; wooden slips generally suffice.

But if we’re going to found a university and begin advanced research, that won’t do. Even a dragon’s head can’t memorize everything, and I’m creating a university specifically to enlist researchers other than myself.

We needed paper that’s durable and long‑lasting, yet compact and mass‑producible.

「Rin, it went that way!」
「Okay! Leave it to me, Sensei!」

And so, Rin and I had gone out hunting.

Rin swiftly pulled a leather pouch from her satchel and flicked the lid open with a snap of her finger.
At once, water shot from its mouth like a snake and seized the fleeing cow.

By “cow,” I mean a huge beast with three horns sharp as spears.
I’ve never seen the real thing, but it might actually resemble a Triceratops more.
It was a truly strange sight: a rope of water, floating and wavering in midair, binding a creature that was surely ferocious and strong.

「Thanks, Rin!」

Staying in dragon form, I snapped the three‑horned bull’s neck in one decisive motion. With a dull crack, it died in an instant. It’s been a while since I hunted, but it seems I haven’t lost my touch.

「I hope this one will finally be usable.」
「Yeah. It’s probably an old individual, so I think the hide itself is soft and suitable, but...」

The goal of this hunt was the hide, not the meat.
I was trying to make parchment.

And parchment isn’t limited to sheep as its material.
Besides sheep, people used the hides of goats, cattle, pigs, deer, and various other animals.
Compared to the paper modern people are used to, paper made from animal skin takes more work and is less convenient to use. But it’s overwhelmingly tougher and lasts far longer—some examples over a thousand years old still exist. Plant‑based paper can’t match that.

Why do I know so much about it? Because I actually made it in my previous life.
Since parchment uses animal hide, trimming it into a rectangle inevitably produces offcuts. What do you do with those? Turn them into magical talismans.

They weren’t much—probably like the charms sold at shrines. But in my past life I tried anything related to magic at least once, no matter how trivial. Making talismans on parchment was no exception.

I even went so far as to buy a lamb and, under a craftsman’s guidance, handle everything myself from butchering and dehairing to finishing. Thanks to that, I’ve got the process down pat.

The problem was the materials. At first I tried using the hides of the six‑legged goats we’d domesticated in the village, but once we stripped off the white hair, the skin underneath was pitch‑black like ink. There was no way we could write on that.

The other trial, great‑antler deer, had a deep blue hide.
All the other animals were vividly colored too—not a single one was white, or even a light tan.
No matter how you looked at it, they were all the wrong colors for writing paper.
So Rin and I had been flying all over looking for animals with white hides.

「...No good. This one’s a bright yellow.」

I carefully shaved off the three‑horned bull’s hair with a claw tip, and the vivid skin color beneath made me let out a deep sigh. If only it were a shade paler it might’ve worked, but the hide was a deep orange like a mandarin.

「Next, that valley over there. Umm, I think there was an animal with six legs.」
「All right, let’s try it.」

Even if the hide was unusable, it felt wrong to leave a kill lying there, so I loaded the three‑horned bull’s carcass onto my back, spread my wings, and took to the air. Rin, too, spread her waist fin wide and flew. She hardly moved the waist fin at all; by undulating her tail fin, she looked like she was swimming through the sky.

We tried deer, goats, rabbits, boars, and all the rest of the creatures I knew, but none had white skin suitable for parchment. Their coats weren’t such strange colors, yet as soon as you stripped the fur, a vivid hide was exposed.

If none among the animals I knew would do, then we had no choice but to try ones I didn’t.
Luckily, after traveling here and there for decades, Rin knew many plants and animals I didn’t.

「Ah, look, that one, that one!」
「I see it—six legs, sure, but...」

The hitch was that her memories were rather unreliable.
I looked at the predator Rin was pointing at and muttered my complaint.

The creature, with a face like a cross between a cat and a dog, split from the waist and had two upper bodies. It had two hind legs and four forelegs in a row—and of course, two heads on the ends. It was like Orthros, the monster from Greek myth.

She said six legs, so I’d expected three pairs lined up two by two—but a two‑headed beast? That was a bit much. From its features and the rows of grown teeth, it was clearly far more ferocious than the three‑horned bull.

It was quite large, too—Rin looked like it could eat her in two bites. Well, it had two mouths, so maybe one bite.

「Can you stop it with that water you used earlier?」
「Mmm, that might be a bit too hard.」

Circling in the air, Rin and I worked out a plan.
Simply killing it would be fairly easy, but with the hide as our goal things got difficult: we had to bring it down with as few wounds as possible.

Most animals run when they see me like this. That holds even for predators.
But if I take human form, I might get myself killed, and I can’t use Rin as bait either.

Catching a fleeing target without injuring it is many times harder than simply killing it.

「...All right. Let’s go with that. But if it gets dangerous, you run, understood?」
「Okay, leave it to me!」

Her confident answer still left me with a twinge of unease—but she had managed solo journeys just fine. I convinced myself of that and we took our positions.

『All set—』

After a moment, the scale at my ear vibrated and Rin’s voice came through. In hunts like this, scale‑mediated communication is incredibly handy.

『Okay. Here we go.』

I folded my wings and dove. Let’s call the two‑headed beast Orthros. I landed before it with a thunderous crash.
The beast decided quickly. Orthros didn’t bother to threaten me; it immediately wheeled around and bolted. We were in a valley boxed in by ravines on both sides. It could only flee one way—and Rin was there.

「Now!」

At my shout, Rin pressed her palm to the ground. Light ran along the line traced on the earth, carried into the magic circle it connected to. The ground swelled up into a wall and trapped Orthros as it charged onto the circle.

「We did it!」
「Rin, behind you!」

As Rin cried out in delight, I called a warning. There were two of them. The other had crept up behind her and was about to pounce.

Even if I flew now, I wouldn’t make it in time. Its two pairs of forelegs—four in all—bristling with sharp claws were already reaching for her.

「Scales—become my armor!」

I shouted on reflex. The scale Rin wore in her hair swelled huge, spread out like a coat, and wrapped her body.
As Orthros’s claws bounced off the red coat, I beat my wings hard and bellowed.

「GROOOOOOOOOOOAR!」

The instant the thunderous roar made Orthros flinch, I swept its neck with a foreleg.
A giant predator to Rin is, to me, like a small dog.
Both heads popped off and smacked into the canyon wall, where they squashed like tomatoes.

「Rin, are you hurt!?」
「I-I’m okay...」

Seeing Rin timidly emerge from the coat of scales unscathed, I let out a long sigh of relief. I’ve been in human form so often lately that a flicker of flame nearly slipped from my throat by accident.

「Sorry—I missed that one. That gave me a scare.」

It was a snap decision, but that was the first time I’d transformed a scale I’d removed from my body by itself. I’m truly glad it worked. Even if Orthros’s hide proved suitable for parchment, with this much trouble there’d be no way to mass‑produce it.

「Sensei, you really are a dragon, huh.」
「Eh—now you realize!?」

Rin said it in a tone of genuine admiration, and I, conversely, was a bit shocked.
Well, even I admit I’m not very dragon‑like...

After finishing off the Orthros trapped in the magic circle, I loaded it onto my back.
The two Orthros likely weren’t there by chance; they were probably a mated pair or something similar.
One took a conspicuous spot while the other lay in wait and hunted—that seemed to be their tactic.

The line drawn from the magic circle back to Rin’s hand is what I named the conduit line.
There’s no special trick to it—it’s just a line—but when connected to a magic circle it lets you trigger magic inside the circle from a distance.

We’d improvised a trap using it, but I hadn’t expected the other side to have laid a trap for us too.

「Let’s head back for today.」
「Yeah. I’m a little shaken and tired—can I ride on you, Sensei?」
「Sure, go ahead.」

I stretched out my neck to set Rin on my head, then beat my wings toward Hiiro Village.
Even Rin, who’s always fearless and full of pep, will react like this after a brush with death, I found myself thinking.

—For the record, Orthros’s hide was a vivid, flame‑like red.