Project Necro is an official initiative by Re:Library.

“Oh my, so that’s what it is!”

Ekaterina widened her eyes.

“I didn’t realize it. I thought prismites shone much more brightly.”
“Yeah, it’s hard to tell when it’s this mall. They only look transparent because the room is bright, but they definitely are glowing. I was able to confirm the vortex light of magic power, so there’s no mistake. These are waste stones from around the area where a large prismite was mined. I’ve been thinking about whether there’s some way to efficiently extract tiny prismites like these from them.”

Ohhh!
The only prismite she had examined closely was the one made into a brooch during the imperial visit to the ducal residence in the capital, but that one had blue light trapped inside a transparent stone, swirling around. “Vortex light” must refer to that swirling glow.
Even though large, strongly glowing ones can already be mined, he wanted to extract microscopic prismites too.

“So this is for use in prismite magic circles, then. Not only mining high-quality prismites, but extracting microscopic ones in order to artificially create high-quality prismites as well… is that what you are attempting?”
“You know about prismite magic circles too, Ekaterina? Yes, that’s more or less it. With naturally occurring large prismites, sometimes the quality of the magic power inside is low, or multiple attributes are mixed together, which makes the result of activating a magic circle very unstable. So I decided to crush them and sort them by quality and attribute. And if I’m doing that anyway, I thought it would be a shame not to extract tiny prismites from the waste stones we used to throw away. Even small ones can be high quality, or have rare attributes.”

So the goal was to standardize quality and isolate attributes. I see.
He was already improving things before even beginning full trials… impressive. As someone who worked as an SE in my previous life, I know well how important it is to notice problems at the design stage and fix them.

This man already has prismite magic circles in his head. So vividly that he can find problems just by simulating them mentally. He really is brilliant.
Something that will likely change history is being born from the mind of the person right in front of me. Even now, a turning point in human history is being refined before my eyes.
Wow… when I think about it like that, it gives me chills. I’m so moved I get goosebumps.

“Metals like iron, gold, and silver are refined by melting the ore at high temperatures, aren’t they. That method can’t be used for prismites, I take it?”
“prismites don’t melt with heat like metals do. It’s better to think of them as a kind of gemstone, but since they’re condensed natural magic power, they have properties different from ordinary stones… and since they haven’t been studied much until now, there’s still a lot we don’t understand.”
“My… how fascinating.”

It feels like an unexplored new continent of knowledge. An intellectual adventure itself. How romantic!

Seeing Ekaterina’s eyes sparkle, Isaac smiled.

“I’m glad to hear you say that. Most young ladies wouldn’t take an interest in things like this.”
“To me, it would be stranger not to be interested. Is there anything more heart-fluttering than this? It is an honor to be able to touch upon your research, Great-Uncle. It may hold the potential to completely change people’s lives. I’m so excited I can hardly stand it.”
“I’m happy to hear that. Thank you.”

Isaac reached out and gently patted Ekaterina’s head.

“You’re a clever child, just as expected of Aleksei’s little sister. Aleksei was very smart even as a small child, always leaving me impressed, but you seem to have a different kind of cleverness from him.”

To be called clever by a genius… how embarrassing.
No, this is not the time to be embarrassed. I should be apologizing for being a fraud. I’m not clever at all—I just happen to know about civilization a few hundred years in the future from my previous life. If I ever started believing I was clever, I’d question my own integrity as a human being. I must keep that firmly in mind.

“Once again, thank you for this microscope, Ekaterina. I’m truly happy—so happy that I can hardly remember the last time I received something that pleased me this much, except perhaps when Nii-sama gave me a cabinet when I was little.”
“A cabinet… you say?”

Ekaterina tilted her head.

So he calls Grandfather Sergei “Nii-sama..” He must have been doing so since long ago. A white-haired gentleman using such a childish form of address is rather cute. Back then, Grandfather would have been a child too. A child giving another child a cabinet, and that being such a treasured memory—what kind of situation was that?

“I’ve been drawn to minerals ever since I was young. When I was little, I used to pick up stones every day and bring them back to my room. But I was always scolded, and they were thrown away. In retrospect, I understand why they would do that, but at the time I was so sad. I was crying my eyes out in the garden when Nii-sama came along and taught me a way to keep them from being thrown away. He said I should line them up neatly and attach name tags. Then other people would understand that they were rare and that I wanted to keep them. So he gave me a cabinet to store the stones in, and a mineral encyclopedia.”

I see!
They say people are judged mostly by appearances, but it’s the same for objects: if something is displayed carefully, it looks valuable. Grandfather was smart even as a child.
Still, casually giving his little brother a “cabinet”… those are expensive and big. Very much the privilege of the wealthy.

“I was seven at the time. But even then, I still couldn’t read. Even with a tutor teaching me, I just didn’t understand. I thought that instead of reading meaning from letters, I could understand the sky, the trees, and above all the voices of stones much better if I went outside. So I was called a useless child. But with an encyclopedia, there were lots of pictures. You just compare the pictures with the stones and look for the same one. And when you find the same picture as the stone, you copy down the name. He said it would be good practice for writing too. The mineral encyclopedia was so interesting. I was amazed that the stones I’d been picking up all this time already had names given to them by someone. I became absorbed in it, and when I kept reading all night, by the next morning I could read everything.”

…What?

“I could also write most of the technical mineral terms. It was an encyclopedia for adults, so I learned a great deal.”

Great-Uncle said this with a smile, but there are several serious misunderstandings here. It’s to the point that raising objections is impossible.
…He really did learn to read and write overnight, didn’t he. Geniuses are scary!

When I happened to meet Aaron’s eyes, he nodded deeply. Yes, indeed—your beloved Sir Professor Isaac is truly an extraordinary person. You should write his biography someday.
…He might already be writing it.

“But in the end, the cabinet made me the happiest. Just as Nii-sama said, when I put name tags on the stones and lined them up in the cabinet, the maid who had always scolded me admired them. She said she hadn’t known stones had names. It felt as though my whole world changed. When the cabinet he gave me became full of labeled stones and I showed him, he was surprised and praised me greatly. Then he gave me a new cabinet. After that, he supported my research all the way through—arranging places to store the cabinets as they filled up, getting me permission to collect in other territories and places one normally couldn’t go, doing all sorts of things for me. Until the very end, he always did that.”

Isaac spoke quietly. To him, the cabinets might be a symbol of his bond with his older brother Sergei.

“After Nii-sama… passed away, Aleksei has done the same for me. Even though he’s still so young, he’s clever and admirable, and I’m always impressed by him. And you, too, have done the same thing my brother did. Nii-sama always listened to me with an excited face, just like yours now.”

Isaac smiled gently.

“After receiving that mineral encyclopedia from Nii-sama, I began to dream of making something like it myself one day—an encyclopedia that included minerals not listed in that one. And I did make it. But now I want to remake it. I want to revise it into something even better by adding the appearances seen through this microscope. Once my research on prismites settles down, I’ll begin. That’s my new dream. I’m happy that the one who gave me that dream again is my brother’s grandchild. Thank you, Ekaterina.”

He’s so cute. Even though he’s such an amazing person, why is he this cute?
I can almost understand Aaron’s devotion now. And Grandfather must have adored Great-Uncle Isaac too.
I’m a brocon, but I’ve grown very fond of Great-Uncle as well.

Ekaterina smiled.

“I, too, am happy to be related to you, Great-Uncle.”