Putting aside the matter with Mine for a moment, Jin returned back to the hotel they were staying in to meet with Reinhardt.
“Jin!”
He arrived at Reinhardt’s room and before the butler Claude could say anything Reinhardt himself butted in.
“What in the world happened? Why haven’t I heard anything from you until now? Is it something you can’t tell about even to me?”
He gripped Jin’s shoulder and talked on and on. Jin quickly said,
“Calm down. I plan to explain everything soon. Just calm down for now, and let’s go to my carriage.”
As a result, as you’d expect from Reinhardt,
“Hm, you don’t want people to overhear? Got it, let’s go! …Claude, I’ll be going out for a bit. Don’t be worried even if I’m late in coming back!”
He loudly told Claude and,
“Come on, Jin, let’s go!”
He said and gave a pat on Jin’s shoulder.
Jin returned to his own room and called out to Ann.
“Yes, master?”
“You come along too.”
And so, Jin entered the carriage together with Reinhardt and Ann.
“Now Jin, please explain!”
Reinhardt urged and,
“Well, just wait. Reinhardt, to tell you the truth, in this carriage there’s a secret that I haven’t told you about. If you do this here…”
Jin said and opened the door behind the back seats that was pretending to be for storing luggage.
“A Warp Gate is installed here.”
Reinhardt was amazed by the statement.
“What’s that you say! So that means, so that means… You can go to Kunlun Island from here!?”
“Well, you’ll know where it goes after we go through it. How about it, are you coming?”
Jin asked and,
“Of course I’ll come too! How exciting!”
Reinhardt said, seemingly ready to crawl in there any time now. Jin smiled and said,
“In that case, I’ll go in first and after that you come through holding Ann’s hand.”
This Warp Gate too let people through only if it recognized Jin’s Magic Energy Pattern.
Once Reinhardt had confirmed that Jin had warped, he took Ann’s hand and plunged into the Warp Gate.
＊ ＊ ＊
Reinhardt came out of a different Warp Gate into a wide room.
At a glance there were no less than 50 Warp Gates side-by-side. Each one looked operational.
“Ji-Jin, where is this? It looks different from the cellar from earlier?”
Reinhardt asked after seeing the room that was not at all similar to the room of the Warp Gate in Kunlun Island.
“Oh, right. Reinhardt, welcome to Hourai Island.”
“Hourai Island you say?”
“Yeah. Well, I’ll explain it all in detail. But first come over here, please.”
For now, Jin took the somewhat excited Reinhardt out of the research laboratory where the Warp Gates were. Outside it was already evening.
“Eh? Wasn’t it just past noon when we were in Tellurs?”
“Yeah, there’s a time difference of about three and a half hours between here and Tellurs.”
“?”
Reinhardt didn’t seem to understand yet. But as Jin would explain it all soon, he showed Reinhardt in the mansion.
“Oh, please take off your shoes.”
He said, and Reinhardt who had already become familiar with this at Kunlun Island complied, nodding and taking off his shoes before entering the mansion.
“There’s someone I’d like you to meet, Reinhardt.”
Jin said and Reinhardt tilted his head in confusion,
“Someone you’d like me to meet? …Jin, could it be?”
Without letting Reinhardt finish what he was saying, he opened the sliding screen to Elsa’s room.
“Elsa, I brought Reinhardt.”
＊ ＊ ＊
“Elsa! You’re okay! You idiot, I was so worried!”
“Rai-nii, sorry. I was foolish.”
The cousins joined hands rejoicing their reunion.
Once the two had calmed down, Jin ordered dinner from Soleil and Luna. The preparations had been entrusted to Laozi and the golem maids and so the two only had to carry the food.
“Come, let’s celebrate our reunion.”
Jin said and raised a glass of wine. Having wine on a low table in a tatami-matted room while sitting on a cushion was the only choice as there wasn’t any good sake.
“Cheers.”
And so the three started eating dinner. While eating, Reinhardt was itching for answers and Elsa also needed them, and then after thinking about it Jin decided on explaining.
First,
“Reinhardt, putting aside your country there’s something I want to tell you as just a friend.”
Jin prefaced. Reinhardt deeply nodded.
Then Jin finally confessed.
“I wasn’t originally born in this world.”
“What do you mean?”
He wasn’t understood in one go, Jin thought.
“Basically, I was born in a different world, then I was… Well, transferred into this world.”
“…”
The two pondered and gauged the significance of that for quite a while, but before long Reinhardt spoke.
“I see, so your outrageous knowledge is from that world.”
“Yeah. In the world I was originally from there was no magic. In exchange the advance of science supported people’s lives.”
“But then how did you get in this world?”
It was the obvious question.
“In the other world, I was about to die and just in the nick of time Reiko summoned me. Well, at that time she wasn’t the current Reiko though.”
“Summoned!?”
“About to, die?”
The parts they were surprised about were different, but the matter was sensational indeed.
“Su-summoned… And from a parallel world at that? Sigh, I’d laugh down that story if it wasn’t from you, Jin.”
“It’s unbelievable that Jin-nii was about to die.”
Jin smiled bitterly and kept on speaking.
“Well, I suppose. Reiko…The Automata that was Reiko’s basis apparently spent 1000 years looking before it found me.”
“1000 years!? W-wait a moment. A thousand years?”
After hearing of the time span of 1000 years Reinhardt seemed to no longer be in control of himself.
“Yeah. The name of the person who made that Automata was Adrianna Balbora Ceci. My predecessor.”
“Eeeeh?”
Reinhardt’s amazement reached its peak.
“So, that means, Jin-nii, you met Adrianna Balbora Ceci?”
Jin shook his head in reply to Elsa.
“No, I remember only what was recorded of her. After being summoned, because of the predecessor’s magic I inherited the magic knowledge she had left behind.”
“……”
For a moment there was only silence.
This time the first one to speak was Elsa.
“I understand the reason why Jin-nii isn’t normal. Are we the first ones you’ve told?”
Jin nodded.
“Yeah, something like this isn’t really a topic to go around telling the public about. I’ll say no thanks to getting weird people to have their eyes on me.”
He said, but,
“…That’s impossible.”
Elsa blurted out.
“By now the Unifilers are eyeing you. Even in Elias Kingdom and Egelia Kingdom Jin-nii stood out.”
“Right.”
Jin too was aware of that.
“If I had just secluded myself on this island that wouldn’t have happened, but honestly being alone is a little, you know.”
That’s to say, having only golems around you gets lonely.
After Jin said that, Elsa visibly relaxed and nodded,
“I’m glad. Even Jin-nii’s got a proper disposition.”
She said something of the like. As usual, she was apparently worried that Jin might be into puppets.
“By the way Elsa, what’s up with the ‘Jin-nii’?”
Reinhardt who had kept quiet for a while spoke up.
“I’ve already abandoned the Randol house. And as such I asked Jin-nii to consider me a sister. That’s why he’s Jin-nii.”
Hearing that, Reinhardt folded his arms.
“Hmm, so that’s why. He did think of her that way…”
Reinhardt grumbled and looked to be pondering a little.
Then once more he looked Elsa straight in the eyes and,
“So you really have no intention of going back any more?”
He asked her with a serious look on his face.