After leading the two trainees and one animal to the classroom on the fourth floor, I immediately began my lecture.

“Now, quiet, quiet. Settle down, everyone! Today's lesson will now begin.”

As always, Azi yawned on reflex, then went to the back of the management office and lay flat on her belly. Really, now. Never mind understanding—she wasn't even showing any willingness to try. With such a clear difference in the wisdom and intelligence conveyed by our languages, did human speech truly mean no more to a dog than a dog's barking meant to a human?

But a gentleman finds something to learn even from the ill-mannered. A dog might know nothing of courtesy, but a human couldn't sink to the same level. With as much dignity as I could muster, I addressed my trainees.

“Today's story is going to be fucking amazing, so prepare to be impressed. And get ready to give me a rousing round of applause.”

“If it's nothing special, you'll get a dagger instead of applause. Go on.”

Still displeased at being dragged here, the Regressor shot back sharply. Couldn't even make a joke around here. How was I supposed to explain anything with this terrifying Regressor around?

Lamenting that my authority as a teacher hadn't merely fallen to the ground but plunged into the bottomless pit, I began my explanation before an audience of one human and one corpse.

“To check how well you're paying attention, I'll be making today's lesson interactive. The bottomless pit. Does anyone know what that means? Yes, Trainee Tyrkanzyaka?”

Lifting her parasol a little, the vampire answered in a leisurely tone.

“Is it not a term the Church of Mother Earth uses much as others use hell? The fate of land cursed by Mother Earth, deprived of her support.”

“Correct! Ten points to Trainee Tyrkanzyaka! Those points will count toward the rankings in my heart, so be sure to save them up!”

Having rewarded her answer with an empty promise, I continued loudly.

“That's right. The bottomless pit is a hell of the sort so many religions describe—specifically, the hell of the Church of Mother Earth. It's the first concept those mama's boys came up with when trying to describe the most terrible place to punish sinners. True to form, they say any place without Mother is hell. Oh, how embarrassing.”

More than a purgatory of burning brimstone, more than an underworld of eternal torment, the believers of Mother Earth feared having their feet leave the ground. They hadn't looked far for their terror. A fall, the dizzying sensation of one's feet no longer touching the earth, and the horrific carnage it produced. That was their hell.

“But you see, that place, which should have existed only in their doctrine—that hell so simple it lacked any impact despite all the effort they'd put into imagining it—appeared in reality following a certain incident. That place is right here: Tantalus, the bottomless pit.”

I tapped the floor with my foot to emphasize that all of this, the ground we stood on, belonged to the bottomless pit.

“Ever since the Military State drew up its plan to use the bottomless pit—the hell of a fairly major religion—as a mere prison, people have come to think of Tantalus as something like a prison for serious criminals. But a prison isn't what it fundamentally is. Land you cannot set foot on. An abyss where you can only fall forever, dying alone without time or space. That is the bottomless pit.”

However.

This was where they should have noticed something strange. They should have recognized the inconsistency and challenged what I'd said.

Why could we stand on solid footing inside the bottomless pit?

One-sidedly imparting knowledge wasn't true education. An educator's duty was to help students think and reason for themselves.

Having given them something to ponder, I read the trainees' thoughts.

'Oh, how interesting.'

'I know all this already. When is he going to talk about Tantalus's structure?'

“Woof...”

I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up. They had absolutely no desire to work out an answer themselves!

And that last one wasn't even a thought! She was actually barking!

“Everyone, aren't you curious? How can we stand on solid footing in a bottomless pit like that?”

“I am curious. Explain.”

These people had no desire to better themselves whatsoever. They weren't baby birds squawking in a nest. Did I really have to spoon-feed them?

I picked up a piece of white chalk and went to the board. In the middle of its green surface, I drew two long vertical lines. The bottomless pit.

“Now, look. The bottomless pit is, fundamentally, land without a bottom—a deep hole where you fall forever. So, if someone were to fall into it...”

I twirled the chalk between my fingers, drawing mana up from my elbow and shaping it. A faint alchemical glow shimmered at the tip of the chalk as though melting into the air, proof that it held magic. With the enchanted chalk, I drew a stick figure between the vertical lines.

The little figure spread its arms and legs, glanced down once, then faced forward again. Then it fell in a ridiculous fashion, like something out of an old cartoon.

“They'll never reach the bottom, so they'll keep falling, and falling. They'll have the rare experience of dying before they hit anything.”

As though it truly had entered the bottomless pit, the stick figure flailed its limbs as it fell to the lower edge of the board... and vanished beneath it.

The simple enchantment I'd placed on the chalk let me move anything I drew with it as I pleased. It used so little mana that even a magical bottom-feeder like me could manage it.

Military State blackboards were double-sided. Having gone around to the back, the stick figure now crawled up the board upside down. Before long, it reappeared at the top and repeated the same fall.

Well? How did they like my technique?

'Moving pictures must be common these days. Fascinating, but... since no one else is surprised, it must not be anything remarkable.'

'His fine control over mana is pretty good. Hmph. Right. So this much is just basic for him?'

I'd pulled off a trick worthy of a star lecturer, and this was all the reaction I got. So little return for so much effort. Even the notoriously fickle stock market would be more honest than these people.

Tch. Enough tricks. Back to the explanation.

“But the bottomless pit only lacks a bottom, not walls. There's nowhere to stand, but there are cliffs surrounding it, aren't there? And if there were even a tiny ledge somewhere on those walls—or if you made one...”

I drew a protrusion on one of the vertical lines. The stick figure, which had been falling all this time, struck the newly appeared ledge and bounced. Flailing arms that were short compared with its head, it barely managed to get its feet onto the ledge.

“You could catch hold and stand like this, at least for a little while, couldn't you? It may be the bottomless pit, but you'd stop falling.”

Of course, it wasn't enough ground to eat, sleep, and live on. Human life required a minimum amount of space.

But the vampire, a corpse who needed only enough room to lie in a coffin, looked puzzled by the drawing.

“Hm? Could one not live quite normally with that much?”

I shook my head at her question.

“Mother Earth's curse isn't that forgiving. This is only a loophole. Soil you can stand on is still land. In the bottomless pit, even that land eventually erodes and disappears into the depths.”

No sooner had I finished speaking than the chalk ledge slowly began to run downward as though melting. The stick figure standing on it hopped anxiously and pressed itself against the wall. But there was nothing to be done. The bottomless pit was cursed land. Here alone, the mother of all would permit no one to set foot and stand.

Eventually, its foothold disappeared. Deprived of its tiny, handspan-wide refuge, the stick figure resumed its endless fall...

“Now, countless adventurers threw themselves in to seek the legacies that might lie sleeping at the bottom of the pit, only to turn their own remaining fortunes into inheritances. They drove pitons into the walls and tied themselves to ropes, but with the entire ground sinking beneath them, they too ended up feeding the pit. Over the dead bodies of fools who had to taste something to know whether it was food or poison, people finally gained the wisdom to stay away. Our proud Military State, however, decided to make use of even this property of the bottomless pit.”

I drew a large disk over the bottomless pit on the board, then added a large five-story building and a towering lamp atop it. Anyone who wasn't an idiot would immediately have realized what the building was.

The vampire let out a quiet sigh.

“This place.”

“Yes. The Military State built an enormous structure. So enormous, in fact, that the round structure covered the entire bottomless pit like a manhole cover.”

“A manhole?”

“Right, you're from a thousand years ago. You wouldn't know what a manhole is. Just think of it as a lid for a well. Anyway.”

I waved a finger like a conductor. The chalk drawing of Tantalus slowly descended onto the bottomless pit, its movement slow but heavy, like an enormous meteorite.

I could almost hear a thud. Of course, a mere chalk drawing settling into place couldn't make a sound, but the ponderous motion and the fine detail of scattering chalk dust made one imagine a sound that wasn't there.

Pleased with my own presentation, I continued.

“To the Military State's engineering corps, concrete is an all-purpose stone. They shaped ground from it, erected pillars, and placed the resulting enormous structure over the bottomless pit. Then they released prisoners—people—onto it. Every one of them, daring to stand on something in a place cursed by Mother Earth, should have sunk into the depths.”

However.

The earth could sink. Concrete did not. It wasn't a collection of dirt and sand, but a single, separate object.

“But this concrete structure—made from materials humans quarried, processed, poured into molds and over steel frames, designed and built piece by piece—could never be land, even if it was made from the earth's bounty. It was, strictly speaking, an enormous structure made by humans. In other words, an object. Normally, an object should fall into the bottomless pit, but this one was wider than the pit itself, so both edges caught on the sides. As a result, Tantalus doesn't fall. It merely sinks. Like this.”

The walls of the bottomless pit flowed downward like wet mud. At the same time, the enormous structure covering it gradually sank.

But it didn't fall. A manhole cover might flip over, but it wouldn't drop through. Caught between the walls, the structure slid slowly down, sinking in a precarious balance.

“This is how we're living on sinking ground. Like a piece of bread stuck in a throat.”

I ought to thank Gamma.

If he hadn't thought to descend into the depths through the basement of the management office, I never would have learned this. Thanks to him, I knew a little more.

I'll make good use of that last piece of knowledge you left behind.

'This ground, all of it, is an artificial object... I thought it rather strange for rock, but this is astonishing.'

Looking fascinated, the vampire glanced back and forth between the board and the ground. She even perched on the edge of her coffin and tapped the floor with her toes.

Come on, don't just marvel at it. Feel something more.