Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Two: Fire 3
Even when she stepped into the smoke, her eyes didn’t sting. As long as she properly enveloped her body with ample of magical power, she wouldn’t get burned even if she touched the flames.
She knew it in her head, but Karen’s heart still pounded loudly. With visibility poor due to the smoke, she placed her hand on the wall and ran up the stairs.
Regarding the mechanism by which holding medicinal herbs in her mouth allowed her to go without breathing—or rather, how the herbs produced oxygen—Karen’s theory was that the herbs were performing ‘magical synthesis’ rather than photosynthesis.
Medicinal herbs grew inside dungeons in the first place. They wouldn’t grow in the immediate surroundings—the so-called dungeon influence zone—but could be found in the far outer regions beyond it, those inhuman wildernesses crawling with monsters, even if it wasn’t inside a dungeon.
In other words, medicinal herbs grew in places with high concentrations of magical power in the air. So Karen thought that medicinal herbs would produce oxygen if given magical power.
While thinking this and infusing the herbs in her mouth with magical power, she passed through the smoky fifth floor where the smoke was originating and reached the room on the seventh floor.
In this world, most valuables were either worn, entrusted to someone, or kept in magical safes, so many people didn’t lock their homes. This home was the same, and Karen was able to open the door without difficulty.
As soon as she opened the door, she heard violent coughing, and Karen shouted while still holding her breath to avoid inhaling smoke.
“I’ve come to rescue you!”
“Co… cough…!”
A man crawled out into the hallway and collapsed, exhausted. She had heard his body couldn’t move, but thanks to that, he had fallen and avoided inhaling too much smoke. If one absolutely had to breathe during a fire, it was better to keep a low posture and inhale whatever oxygen might remain in room corners along with dust, since smoke rose to the ceiling.
The man continued coughing, and his breathing sounds were becoming more strained.
Karen covered the man’s mouth with a wet handkerchief and lifted his body.
Just outside the room into the shared hallway, there was a window, and below it were Lyos and everyone else.
Karen pushed open the window. When she leaned out, her eyes met Lyos’s.
“Jump down! Karen!”
“Make sure you catch me properly!”
“Karen!?”
“Below are adventurers, including your wife, and even a knight from the Royal Knight Order, so please fall down without worry!”
“Ah, ah…!”
Karen first dropped the man from the window. Lyos and the woman who was the man’s wife stood ready to catch him side by side, and the wife pushed Lyos aside to catch her husband. There was no danger at all.
Come to think of it, the adventurers who seemed to be her companions had said she was C-rank. Maybe it would have been smarter to leave it to her from the start rather than to Lyos. Karen was most familiar with Lyos, so she had instinctively asked him.
“Karen! You hurry up and come down too!”
Lyos called from below. Karen hesitated while still holding her breath. While her body was covered with magical power, she wouldn’t die from being burned by fire. If she kept medicinal herbs in her mouth, she wouldn’t get carbon monoxide poisoning either.
So if she wanted to, she could go to her own home on the fifth floor. She had moved all valuables, including her brother’s belongings, to the alchemy workshop. But even so, there were still things she had left behind.
She had left all her memories there.
Even the keepsakes of her adventurer father, who had gone to a dungeon and never returned—
“Karen!”
Almost simultaneously with Lyos shouting, an explosion occurred behind Karen.
Pushed out by the blast, her body flew through the air from the window.
A sensation where she couldn’t tell up from down. The clear blue sky was clouded with gray smoke.
If she had jumped down properly, she could have landed on her own, but Karen fell without being able to maintain her balance.
“Karen!”
While thinking "Huh?" at a voice that wasn’t Lyos’s, falling Karen was caught in someone’s arms.
“What are you doing!?”
“—Mr.… Julius?”
As she tried to ask why he was here, Karen started coughing. The medicinal herbs had almost entered her airway.
Moreover, while coughing, she understood why Julius had come here. Julius’s earring with its embedded light blue magic stone was sparkling with magical light. Since Karen had spread magical power all over her body to protect herself, magical power had probably accumulated in the earring, too. So Julius’s earring had heated up, and noticing Karen’s abnormal condition, he had rushed over. Julius had a stern expression, but seeing Karen cough, he set her down and rubbed her back.
Karen wondered while coughing. The medicinal herbs in her mouth were almost gone. That’s why she was coughing after almost inhaling them.
“Huh…?”
She had thought that because the medicinal herbs produced oxygen through magical synthesis, she could breathe while chewing on them. But if that were true, it would be strange for the herbs to disappear. They dissolved as if melting, becoming small fragments—it was as if they were becoming a potion.
What had happened when she set the twenty-minute record before? At that time, Karen was about seven years old. After making dinner and while waiting for her father to return from taking her feverish brother to a nearby clinic, she was eating medicinal herbs to stave off hunger.
They were bitter, so she pinched her nose to block the taste, chewing away—and then, as an experiment, kept her mouth closed the whole time, finding she could go nearly twenty minutes without taking a breath.
Back then, the medicinal herbs in her mouth gradually decreased. She had assumed it was because she was simply chewing and swallowing them.
Potions—magical medicine.
Her master Yuluyana had said that when magical materials changed into something else through alchemy, it was called transformation.
“It wasn’t that oxygen was being produced through magical synthesis, but that the medicinal herbs were magically transforming into oxygen by adding magical power—?”
Medicinal herbs were materials for recovery potions. She didn’t understand why such herbs would change into oxygen when infused with magical power.
But they did transform.
Karen now understood that herbs could transform into things other than healing potions.
At that moment, the flow of magical power drifting through the air changed.
Magical power began to swirl around Karen as its center. As its concentration—normally invisible—grew denser, it eventually took the form of glimmering particles visible to the human eye.
“Lady Karen!”
Harald’s voice came from afar. Natalia was approaching with Tim and Harald in tow, carrying large baggage. She had probably brought minor healing potions.
Karen felt all of this like distant events.
Rainbow-colored particles of light gathered around Karen and showered down on her. When the light particles touched her, she was enveloped in an inexplicable, eerie elation. Her whole body was hot, and she was intoxicated by that heat. She almost drowned in the omnipotent feeling similar to intoxication if she let down her guard.
The sky felt closer than ever. There was a sensation of having ascended much higher than usual. So this was why leveling up in this world was called ascending steps—Karen experienced it firsthand.
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