CH 3

It’s been a while since my encounter with Father, but I haven’t heard anything about my tutor yet. I thought I was going to have the staff around me act as my private tutor, but it seems that’s not the case. They’re looking for a fairly full-fledged tutor, and so it will take some time to seek them out, interview them, decide if they were worthwhile, and then for them to arrive here

During that time, my mother took care of me. Mother, Maria, seems to have wanted a girl, and now that she’s finally given birth to her long-awaited daughter, she’s very fond of me. Even though I’m a three-year-old with thin hair, I feel like I’m being used as a dress-up doll, styling my hair and getting put into dresses.

But my mother doesn’t play with me just because I’m like a toy to her. From now on, I will have to take lessons as the daughter of Margrave Carruthers, learn manners, make my debut in noble society, get engaged to the son of another influential noble house, and eventually get married. For that reason, from this early age, I’m being taught how to look fashionable and persevere to develop patience.

“Mot’er, this dress is a lit’le tight,” I said, picking up the skirt of the dress Mother is putting on me.

This outfit was tailored for me a while ago, but it’s already too small for me, toddlers grow up so fast.

“My… you’ve grown so much already, Flora,” Mother said. “Mm-hmm-hmm. I never thought I’d be so excited about my daughter’s growth.”

With an expression full of affection, she picks me up and takes me to Emma, the maid. She was the maid same who was there in the room when I first regained consciousness in this world. Mother had experience raising my two older brothers, but this was the first time she was caring for a girl, so she consulted Emma about this and that while raising me.

Now that Emma’s taken me into her hands, she quickly takes off my dress and looks for another dress. Normally, I might choose a dress to change into first, but in this case, since I was wrapped in a too-tight dress, I guess they’ll take it off first.

If it’s a staple of people reincarnated into other worlds like me, but I feel like there are many cases where the maid is a young, beautiful woman who understands the protagonist well. But unfortunately, Emma is a pretty old lady. She must be in her forties or fifties, older than my mother Maria.

Of course, Emma is a good maid who is kind to me and also skillful. It’s just a little disappointing because I was expecting “hee-hee, haha” fun interactions with a young and beautiful maid. Well, when I grow up, I might be able to get a maid for myself. It’s a common pattern to assign a maid of the same generation to a significantly grown child. That was just to be expected.

Most of the time I come into contact with Mother and Emma, but I have very little contact with other people. Even if I’m still an infant, it doesn’t make sense to me that I hardly interact with other people here in the Margrave’s mansion. I meet with the other maids and butlers a bit, but they only do the minimum necessary errands.

I hardly ever met my father and my two brothers. I’m still an infant, so I don’t have the chance to meet everyone in the dining hall, but even so, I feel like it’s a strange house. Or is this what a noble house is like just because of my strange senses and perceptions as a commoner?

A few more days passed like this.

Today is the day when the tutor that Father found will finally arrive. I haven’t read a book since he found me in his study. If I ask Father or Marius, the Majordomo, to go with me, it’d be fine for me to go into the study but it’s kind of hard to say if it’d work. I have almost no contact with Father, and I can count the times I’ve met Marius on one hand.

What’s more, I don’t like being watched the whole time I’m reading. Anyone would hate it if there was an audience to what they were reading and how fast they were reading. That’s why I haven’t been in the study since. I endured because my tutor would teach me, and I wouldn’t have to force myself to read books alone. It was unreasonable to say that I shouldn’t be expecting it because they’re finally coming today.

“I am Christoph Bierschmidt.”

But something is wrong. The person who introduced himself to looks ruthless, in a word. I don’t know what he’s actually like. It may not be possible to judge people by their appearance since they just happen to look like that.

But hey, listen? Isn’t a normal for a magical tutor to be a beautiful female elf witch or a young and cute adventurer witch? Isn’t it also normal that a retired great wizard or an old sage will be affectionate to me as they consider me a candidate for their successor?

What is going on here? The person in front of me now is a man in his thirties with an expressionless or ruthless face. No matter how much you say that I’m just a three-year-old child, is that face you give to the young daughter you’re supposed to tutor?

I can’t get rid of the impression that he’s middle-aged. Normally, middle school tutors would be high school students, and high school tutors would be college students. It would be just right for a slightly higher person to teach a slightly lower person. Alternatively, retired senior citizens may become tutors.

In modern Japan, there are professional tutors and cram school instructors, so middle-aged and middle-aged tutors and instructors are common. But I haven’t heard that such a profession exists in this world. Only aristocrats and wealthy merchants can give special education to children, so even if tutoring was established as a profession, it would be a very small profession.

This man who introduced himself as Christoph Bierschmidt, I don’t think he’s a private tutor. In my image, if there is a tutor with such an attitude, the aristocratic employer will get angry and banish him. Won’t he be thrown into jail for his rudeness, at worst?

“I’m Fulora Shall-rut bon Cawuthers,” I said.

However, I can’t afford to stand her dumbfounded. I haven’t learned etiquette or manners yet, but I mimic my mother’s and Emma’s movements to greet him. Grab your skirt, lift it, lower one leg, bend your knees and lower your head. The curtsy, which was also on Earth, must have been like this. I’ve seen my mother do something similar, so greetings in this world might not be that different.

“… Your greetings are fine,” Christoph said. “If I believe you’re not worthy of teaching, I can leave at any time. I’m going to test whether you’re worthy of my tutelage from now on, so depending on the results, I may not see you again. First of all, I will see if you have the minimum knowledge, to begin with, so please solve this.”

Christoph took out a piece of paper from his bag as soon as he sat down at his desk. I wonder if it resembles what you’d call papyrus. Compared to Japanese paper, the quality is poor and it seems difficult to handle. Since this is a different world, I don’t know if it’s exactly the same as the papyrus in the world I used to live in, or if it’s a mysterious substance unique to the other world, but I think it’s bad quality and hard to write on.

This piece of paper has something written on it, it seems to be a problem. And I’m given a blank sheet of paper where I’m supposed to write my answer. The quality is also bad, and paper is probably a valuable item in this world. It’s a waste to leave it blank with all that’s written here, so I’ll fill in the answers as much as possible.

… It’s hard to say how difficult this is. Of course, there is no such thing as a question too difficult for me to solve. Even if my university wasn’t that good, I’m still a university graduate. There are some parts that I forget and worry about, but the contents are mainly at the level of junior high school students to high school students, so it’s not so difficult that I don’t understand them at all.

However, the reason I was surprised was that this was a “prerequisite for learning magic.” As Christoph said at the start, if this is the prerequisite knowledge necessary to learn magic, then magic requires a fairly high level of knowledge. Do the children of this world have the knowledge and education to handle such things easily?

It seems that I was a little puffed up because I was educated in my previous life. It seems that noble children learn magic once from around the age of five at the earliest, to around the age of ten at the latest. Of course, not everyone can use magic, but even if they can’t use it, they need to know all this as basic knowledge.

Aristocrats are originally those who are responsible for fighting on the battlefield and managing domestic affairs. As long as I’m in such a position, it doesn’t mean that I won’t have an education about magic just because I can’t use it. Without knowledge of the magic that the enemy might use on the battlefield, it would be impossible to counter all their strategies. If you don’t understand the work that can be easily done with magic, you won’t be able to make policy decisions.

Or, as preparation for assassins, you must know what kind of magic is available and how they will attempt to assassinate you. That’s why all aristocratic children, the sons and daughters of nobles, should learn about magic as necessary knowledge. It is amazing to think that these children have acquired this level of education.

Expertise in history and magic is fine. Naturally, the knowledge of my previous life won’t help me with the history of this country. Coming from a world where magic didn’t exist, I can’t help but have little knowledge of magic. There is no such thing as either Japanese or English, and the problems are written in the language of this country, so you could say the language problems are about their grammar.

As for mathematics, the problems vary greatly, and some things have only reached the level of junior high school students, and there are various problems at the level of high school students.

As far as science subjects are concerned, it seems to me that there is little development. There are almost no physics or science problems, and there are problems that cannot be found on Earth, such as whether the laws of physics in this world are different from those on Earth or whether the understanding of them is incorrect.

Mathematics and language are at junior high and high school levels. For me, the knowledge of history and magic is very difficult because I only have the knowledge I read from the book in Father’s study. After struggling hard to solve it, I handed the answer sheet back to Christoph, who silently accepted it and stared at the sheet. Apparently, he’s not going to grade it.

“Next is this,” Christoph said.

“Ehh!?” I cried.

He took out another question from his bag while he was still looking at my answer sheet.

“What is it?” Christoph asked. “I believe I said that the previous questions were a prerequisite. This is to check your current ability.”

“Un’erstood……” I said.

It seems that he’s decided to become my tutor for the time being. Since the prerequisites have been cleared, the next step would be to do a proficiency test to see where to start.

The next problem, however, is even more difficult than before. It’s absolutely high school level and there’s not a single easy problem at the junior high school level. Moreover, there are many words that I don’t know about history and magic. I thought it was hopeless, but when I asked Christoph about the terms I didn’t know, he answered me.

Is that so? It’s not a school test. It’s to measure my ability at the moment, so if there’s something I don’t know, it’s okay to say I don’t know. However, if the problem that should be solvable cannot be solved because of that, it will be useless, so he will give the bare minimum explanation. I thought Christoph was expressionless or cold, but he seems to have common sense.

When I finally finished solving the second problem and handed over the answer sheet, Christoph stared at it again.

“Today, I was only preparing to test your abilities. I will come back later to teach you about magic. I will let you know a day ahead so you can keep your schedule open,” he said.

“Okay. T’ank you bery much,” I said.

It seems that Christoph will become my tutor. He looks cold and scary, but I also feel like he’s reasonably good at what he does. Since my Father took the trouble to bring him here, and if he teaches me, I might be able to use magic. With that in mind, I forgot the fatigue of being forced to test my skills and saw Christoph off, then returned to my room.

Turning back time a bit, Albert, Margrave of Carruthers, was walking down the hall. He senses something in his study. From time to time, he saw signs of movement and suspected someone was in it. However, there was no evidence that it was being vandalized, and things were being shifted about, so I thought that the maid had just been cleaning it and moving things around.

But today it’s definitely strange. The maids can’t be cleaning the study now. Albert decided to open the door and see who was in the study and what they were doing.

His youngest daughter was there. Albert had no books in his study for children to read. There are no picture books or fairy tales, even simple ones that children can understand. If you were talking about a book a child could read, at best, it would be about books about etiquette.

But what was this? The book that his three-year-old daughter was reading was a tome that contained esoteric magical theory, difficult even for adults. It’s not a simple manual written for children to learn magic. It’s a specialized book for those who study magic to learn its most foundational elements. And she seems to understand what it means. A three-year-old child understanding a technical book that even Albert could not understand half of, it seemed to be a joke that he would have laughed at. 1

But Albert didn’t laugh. He had vaguely noticed that this young girl, Flora, was strange. She has clear intentions that you wouldn’t expect from a 3-year-old child, and she is quite active. He’s not going to rejoice that his daughter is a genius. Rather, it’s more terrifying to think that a demon has possessed his child.

However, it might still be worth betting on the possibility that it was just his daughter Flora’s potential. Even if she’s an eerie child who looks like she’s possessed by a demon, he’ll use her if it’s for the benefit of House Carruthers. Even if she was possessed by the Demon King himself.

And after Albert had a conversation involving comprehension a three-year-old shouldn’t have, he promised Flora he’d get her a tutor and left the study.

Christoph did not even bother to hide his blank expression when Albert summoned him for his services. After working as a lecturer at a school in the royal capital, Christoph climbed up to the rank of a court magician in the royal palace but was forced to withdraw from his position and flee to a remote area due to certain circumstances.

He was indebted to Albert for assisting him with his flight. Chistoph was asked to tutor Albert’s children, and when he accepted the offer, he was told that he was not tutoring his two sons of a certain age, but his three-year-old daughter, and then Christoph thought of refusing.

No matter how hard the times he’d fallen in, he used to be a lecturer at a school. He was once chosen to be a court wizard. He can’t do something like tutor a three-year-old child. He doesn’t think she’s worth privately tutoring unless she’s at least a child with the top-class ability and academic ability at the capital’s schools.

Albert didn’t get angry with Christoph when he explained all this but calmly asked Chistoph to check Flora’s ability and that if he wasn’t convinced, he could refuse. These blunt refusals to his benefactors like Albert were part of the reason that Christoph had to flee the royal capital, to begin with, but one’s nature can’t change so easily.

And so, with Flora’s abilities hinging on whether he would accept her as a student or not, Christoph created a somewhat cruel problem for her to solve.

Christoph’s first impression of Flora was that she was a very mature child. When it comes to three-year-olds, there would probably be no such level of sophistication. Certainly, it may be unavoidable for parents to misunderstand and think that their child is a genius. In order to bring her back down to earth, Christoph made Flora solve a difficult test.

He handed out a question paper with questions that were almost unsolvable even by someone who finished all the courses at the royal capital’s academy and graduated at the top of the class. If you were a normal child, you would throw it away without understanding the meaning just by glancing at them.

But, even though he was watching with that in mind, Flora began to solve the problems smoothly. And she almost never stops. She seemed to be thinking about her answer sometimes, but her hands did not stop like they did when he tested students at the schools. It doesn’t seem like she’s pausing because she doesn’t know what to answer at all.

It isn’t as if she’s haphazardly writing answers, either. He hasn’t seen all her answers, but he can tell they were solid attempts.

Christoph was astonished when he received Flora’s answer sheet. She had perfectly solved a problem that he himself could get wrong.

(Interesting.)

It’s what he thought as he looked at Flora. Some of the questions about history and magic are wrong or left unanswered, but that’s probably because she didn’t know about them. These kinds of problems are determined by the person’s education, not by the person’s creativity or how sharp their mind is. There’s no way you can say a three-year-old is ignorant because there are things she doesn’t know about her country’s history. Rather, it’s astonishing she knows so much, for a three-year-old child…

In addition, Christoph asked Flora to solve a problem he was researching that he could not solve himself. There are many problems that no one in this world can solve, such as mathematical theories that have not yet been clarified.

Even so, Flora solved those. Christoph doesn’t know if all the answers are correct. It’s an answer that he can’t verify unless he tries to create a mathematical proof for it.

Christoph trembled. What is going on with this child’s head? Perhaps it would be more convincing to say that she was possessed by a demon.

But that doesn’t matter. For Christoph, if he can unravel the mysteries of this world, whether it be a god or a demon, he will use any means provided to him. If he could teach this girl, Flora, with everything she has, she may unravel the truths of this world that no one had yet to tug at the strings of.

With that belief, Christoph immediately went to Albert and accepted the tutoring job, and left the manor. Witnessing all this, Albert was even more convinced. Although Christoph has a slightly flawed personality, he was the most talented of the court wizards. There is something about that girl that Christoph would willingly become Flora’s tutor.

Albert and Christoph were each smiling while thinking about what to do about gifted education for Flora, moving forward.