Chapter 44
The story continues off the page
The Last Dance Before Midnight
A masked dragon asks the lanternwright for one slow dance
Ferda safely returned to Valdrova Castle.
Arwen returned to Count Consilius’s domain as soon as he saw them enter as far as the castle gate.
At the main gate, Luri welcomed Ferda and his party.
“How was your journey?”
It was a businesslike question, and Ferda answered in kind.
“Comfortable. We weren’t attacked, and having an escort meant I wasn’t bored.”
“I see. But it seems there’s one more person than when you left?”
When they had set out from the castle, there had been only Zed, Ferda, and the coachman, but a man covered in dangling luggage had tagged along.
“Regent! I’ve loaded my belongings into my cart. Shall I load Your Excellency’s luggage now?”
Malcolm, who had been unloading his belongings from the cart, belatedly spotted Luri.
“Eek! You’re that intruder from before!?”
Malcolm recoiled in terror and began trembling.
It wasn’t because he had been exposed to something like Dragon Fear.
Even if something like that had been emitted, Malcolm had put on a resistance ring before coming to Valdrova Castle.
He was simply a coward.
“Another pathetic fellow has appeared.”
Luri sighed through her nose.
“He is pathetic, but he’s also an excellent specimen.”
“What kind of specimen?”
“What other kind would there be besides one for experiments?”
“……Are you researching black magic?”
“I have research to do, but not in that field.”
After saying that to Ferda, Luri tried to step into the castle.
Luri blocked Ferda’s path.
“What is it?”
“What do you mean, what is it? Are you really asking because you don’t know?”
Luri’s gaze rolled around before stopping at Ferda’s right hand.
“Don’t you think entering the castle while carrying that foul stench is a serious crime?”
“…….”
Ferda felt an inexplicable chill at those words.
His gaze reflexively swept over her entire body, and he spotted something slipping from her pocket.
It was a rough towel dyed green.
If that towel touched him, it would strip away his grime-covered skin along with the grime.
Naturally, there was no avoiding the pain of having his flesh scraped away.
Wham! Wham!
White explosions erupted around the towel as it followed Luri’s hand.
Ah.
Had she been waiting for this moment……?
Luri had an excuse.
The fact that the scent of another woman clung to Ferda’s hand could cause Valdrova to misunderstand.
They had to eliminate such a misunderstanding in advance.
Ferda understood it that way, but he had not forgotten the knights’ screams.
The screams they had let out like children facing a demon.
Ferda didn’t think he would be able to endure what they had been unable to.
Ferda’s eyes discreetly glanced at Luri once more.
Unlike the worried Ferda, her face was filled with anticipation.
“May I ask one favor?”
“Please, go ahead.”
“I’d at least like you to do it inside that spatial severance spell.”
He said it like the last words of a condemned man awaiting execution, and Luri solemnly nodded.
“Of course. I can’t go around telling everyone about Lord Ferda’s masochistic tastes.”
“……Right.”
He had no strength left to come up with a retort.
Ferda followed Luri inside.
What happened in the bathhouse that day became a secret shared only by Luri and Ferda.
* * *
After being scrubbed until his body gleamed, Ferda barely managed to put his clothes back on.
His sensitive skin prickled whenever it touched the fabric.
‘I have to endure it.’
From this point on, Ferda had to concentrate.
He looked down at the book resting on the desk.
Barbatos’s Shadowcraft.
The magic of the Demon of Intrigue, who preferred to move stealthily and specialized in magic that used shadows like limbs to strike at an opponent’s blind spots.
As a grimoire that emphasized stealth, it was also difficult to seal.
Unless it was kept bound by silver chains treated with a shape-fixing spell, its form would melt away and move to another location.
Barbatos’s Shadowcraft emphasized one thing.
‘The shadow must become me, and I must become the shadow.’
Just as one had to regard the Shadow Hand as a third hand, failing to keep that in mind would result in severe phantom pain.
‘But there are things I need.’
The greatest advantage was that using Shadowcraft required no magic circle.
And it could be used not merely as a hand created from magic, but as a real limb.
That meant Ferda could use the Shadow Hand to manifest other magic as well.
‘It doesn’t have much power when it comes to firepower.’
True to Barbatos’s nature as the Demon of Intrigue and Stealth, it followed a completely different path from the Shadow Circles of other black magic.
‘Instead, it can strike at an opponent’s blind spots.’
Though weak in direct combat, it held limitless possibilities in games of strategy.
That was why Ferda had chosen Barbatos’s Shadowcraft from among all that black magic.
‘To read it, I need to undo these silver chains.’
To undo the silver chains, he had to dispel the magic, and to dispel the magic, he needed to decipher the runes.
That was why Ferda had gone to Echidna.
“I’d like you to undo these chains. Do you think you can?”
“O-of course. I’ll do it right away, hehe.”
Echidna looked at Ferda with a silly grin.
Her expression lay somewhere between a girl smitten with a prince and a witch entertaining gloomy fantasies.
“Thank you. What would you like as payment?”
“P-payment? I don’t particularly need anything, though??”
“If you’ve done the work, shouldn’t I pay you a corresponding price?”
Paying someone a fitting reward for work they had done.
That was the best way to work with a witch without suffering any unpleasant consequences later.
“A reward…….”
Echidna’s eyes rolled around.
The blonde girl standing beside Ferda.
Mori.
“Th-then, could you let me sleep with Mori for one night?”
Sharing a bed with Mori.
If it was simply one night between two women, it didn’t sound particularly strange.
But the other party was, after all, a witch.
A witch who drooled unpleasantly and lasciviously.
“Would that be all right?”
Ferda asked while looking at Mori.
Mori answered with a note she had brought.
-Judging from Echidna’s behavioral patterns, if she sleeps with Mori, I predict a 30% decrease in work efficiency.
Thirty percent was far too much.
Ferda wondered what kind of behavior she had exhibited to cause a thirty-percent decline.
“I can’t accept that.”
“Eh, then it can’t be helped…….”
“Should I have brought it up at all…….”
Echidna muttered to herself.
Ferda decided to offer what he had been considering to the disappointed Echidna.
“How about giving you some time to spend with Zed?”
“With Lord Zed?!”
Echidna’s face flushed bright red.
Overcome with excitement, she repeatedly nodded while puffing out her nose.
“Th-then, h-how much time would……?!”
“How about this much?”
Ferda held up three fingers.
She was extremely satisfied.
“Thirty whole minutes! Mm-hmm……! That sounds good too! Let’s do it! Deal!”
“……All right.”
Ferda had meant three hours when he held up three fingers.
Yet she was satisfied even after cutting it down to one-sixth herself.
‘If I had said three hours, it might have had the opposite effect.’
Anything excessive was bound to cause problems.
Since he had established a baseline with the first reward, Ferda decided he would adjust the payment based on it.
“Then shall we take a look?”
Echidna placed the Shadowcraft grimoire on the worktable with an excited expression.
She put on large-lensed glasses and examined the book.
She observed every element comprising the book as thoroughly as possible, using not only her eyes but all five senses.
“Hmm, the material isn’t hard; it’s soft, like clay. The smell is…… Hss~. Haah, the smell of sulfur rising from Hell is exceptional. You know that funky smell? That strange one, like it’s coming from someone’s armpit—.”
“Enough.”
“Ah, yes. Hehe…….”
Ferda stopped her from veering off into filthy stories and redirected her attention to the task at hand.
After finishing her examination of the book, she moved on to the silver chains.
When she lightly infused the chains with mana, blue letters rose from them.
They were runes.
“Hmm…….”
Echidna’s gaze grew distinctly serious.
She looked so different that it was hard to believe she was the same woman who chased after men all day.
‘She’s in a similar line of work to Vunnel.’
When she focused on her work, she became solemn and began interpreting the runes.
‘If she can create runes, she can interpret them as well.’
What Echidna was doing resembled identifying and dismantling a set trap.
By interpreting the runes, she could determine how the magic operated and identify the side effects that would occur if it was forcibly dispelled.
“They even set a trap spell on the shape-fixing magic that strikes the person performing the forced dispelling. An ordinary mage would die, wouldn’t they? And this signature here…… seems to belong to the Alte Church.”
“Can you undo it?”
Echidna smiled sweetly.
“I don’t think we need to undo it.”
“Why not?”
“If we undo the shape-fixing magic, who knows when this book might run away? Are you planning to read it only once and be done with it, Regent?”
Ferda shook his head.
Even if he obtained all the magic, he would be uneasy about letting the book loose somewhere.
“Then let’s loosen the conditions a little.”
“How?”
“We loosen the conditions of the shape-fixing magic. Rather than simply sealing the book as it is, we allow it to take on a certain limited form. Enough for it to be read, that is.”
“Proceed.”
“Got it!”
Echidna chanted a spell while tapping the rune with her pen.
A moment later, a circular magic circle unfolded before her.
It appeared to be a magic circle of at least the Fifth Tier.
She touched the magic circle with her fingers and began manipulating it in various ways.
‘Manipulating a magic circle…….’
Even when Ferda had been an Archmage, he had considered doing something like this.
But destroying magic and rewriting it before binding it was easier and more universal.
‘Rune makers are different.’
They could touch the magic itself and understood its flow.
That was why they arrived at the idea of loosening the conditions instead of destroying it.
“If I do this here…… Done!”
She tapped the rune with her pen, and the magic circle slipped back inside it.
At the same time, the tightly wound silver chains visibly loosened under Echidna’s power.
“May I read it here?”
“Yes! Of course!”
“Bring me several thick books.”
“Books? J-just a moment!”
Clatter, clatter.
Rummage, rummage.
As he had instructed, she held up several thick dictionaries.
“But why?”
“I need to adjust the seated height.”
“The seated height?”
Ferda placed about three books on the chair.
He was adjusting it to match Mori’s seated height.
“Will this height do?”
Mori nodded.
“Then let’s get to wo—.”
“W-wait a moment!!”
Just as they were about to begin, Echidna interrupted and wrapped her arms around Mori.
“Was our Mori the one you were planning to make read the book? Making a child do something crueler than death?”
“Then why do you think I brought her?”
“I thought it was because Mori wanted so, so badly to see me. Isn’t that right?”
Echidna grinned foolishly at Mori, who wrote on her note.
-That is not correct.
“Eek…… I thought we had definitely become close…… Was I the only one sincere??”
-That is correct.
Mori drew a clear line between them.
At the confirmation, which struck like a bolt from the blue, Echidna sniffled back tears.
“Only this child can do this job.”
“But being exposed to the demon language written by a demon…….”
“Yes, a person gradually goes insane.”
“You know that and you’re still making her do it? Isn’t that too cruel!?”
Echidna hugged Mori and rubbed her cheek against Mori’s head.
Ferda could understand a little why her work efficiency dropped by thirty percent.
“It doesn’t matter. In any case, it’s impossible to corrupt this child.”
“R-really?”
Echidna asked, and Mori nodded.
“If that’s the case…….”
Still anxious, she stroked Mori’s hair right up until the last moment.
“Begin.”
At Ferda’s command, Mori opened the book.
At that moment, something contained within the book began to emanate.
A sharp smell of sulfur filled the air, accompanied by the sensation of something filthy crawling over his entire body.
That was what it meant for the demon language to have been written by a demon.
Merely looking at it was blasphemous, and simply taking it into one’s eyes branded the observer.
Rumble—.
Ferda and Echidna looked away from the letters.
Demon language had been created from Hell itself.
Anyone who encountered the demon language written by a demon would see a fragment of Hell.
Those who encountered that fragment of Hell were branded and forced to hear the demons’ whispers for the rest of their lives.
It was a trial that would never end.
If they failed to overcome that endless trial, they would become demon worshipers or go mad.
Thus, they became conduits through which demons could enter this world, taking one step closer to domination.
‘The same applies to me.’
Because demon language derived from the essence of the letters themselves, it was impossible to block it in advance.
Ferda, too, had encountered demon language in order to learn demonic magic.
Indeed, the reason he had been able to learn the Shadow Hand of Shadowcraft was that he had learned demon language.
‘Though I erased all of it after learning it.’
The best approach was to learn and interpret the magic, then erase the demon language from one’s mind.
That was why Ferda had not been controlled by the demons despite knowing the magic of Hell.
‘I no longer need to learn demon language.’
There was someone who had learned it, and someone who could interpret it in his place.
Mori, the slave sage.
She would become Ferda’s amanuensis.
Mori stared clearly at the demon language.
Crimson flames kindled in her eyes.
Those eyes became spears aimed at peering into Mori.
Yet there was no way Mori could be shaken.
That was not because Mori was flawless.
Even a perfect person could be shaken if careless; that was the nature of demons.
She had no ego.
The demons needed to use her ego as a handle in order to shake her, but without a handle, there was no way they could seize Mori.
She took hold of her pen and began writing on the paper.
Even with the window into Hell open, she maintained her supreme reason and continued interpreting the text.
Ignoring the demons’ whispers all the way to the final page, Mori quickly finished the interpretation and closed the book as it was.
The original was held in Mori’s right hand.
The translated version was held in her left.
“Did you finish everything?”
When Ferda asked to confirm, Mori nodded.
Ferda gave his final command.
“Then forget everything you saw.”
At that moment, the eyes that had reflected red flames returned to their original color.
With a single command, she truly forgot everything.
It was an instruction that could not be carried out with a mere word if she were an ordinary human.
Only Mori, the slave sage, could accomplish it.
A moment later, Mori’s body began to sway.
She struggled to keep her heavy eyelids open.
She had exhausted too much strength for the interpretation.
“Go to bed early today.”
Once Ferda gave her permission, the suffering Mori leaned against the backrest and closed her eyes.
“Echidna, could you take Mori to her room?”
“Of course!”
Echidna watched her with a lascivious gaze.
“Ehehe, ehehehe, ehehehehe……!”
As if that weren’t enough, she began to drool.
Ferda thought he understood a little why her efficiency had fallen by thirty percent.
Ferda added another warning.
“Lay her down in her room and come back out. I won’t permit any further contact. Understood?”
“O-of course! I never had any ulterior motives!? Never!?”
That was what she said, but the way she smacked her lips in obvious disappointment did little to inspire trust.
Ferda picked up the translated version Echidna had completed.
He began by reading the Shadow Hand section of Barbatos’s Shadowcraft, which he already knew.
‘She wrote it just as I understood it.’
He judged that reading only the translated version would be sufficient to understand the magic.
Ferda returned to the beginning.
‘The reason I needed to obtain this grimoire.’
It was the mana cultivation technique.
One of the ways to advance from the Third Circle to the Fourth Circle.
‘Shape of Shadow.’
That page caught Ferda’s eye.
Even though he was reading the work of an archdemon from a grimoire of Hell, there were no side effects whatsoever.
‘How long did it take to reach the Fourth Circle normally?’
The Fourth Circle was the stage at which one was truly granted the title of mage.
It was that difficult; even talented people had to devote several years to the process.
The Red Circle was no different.
‘If anything, it was more dangerous.’
The Red Circle’s madness and danger increased as its stages rose, making it highly risky from the outset.
‘Was I ever the kind of person to worry about that?’
Ferda had grown stronger for the sake of hatred and risked everything to challenge whatever stood in the way of becoming stronger.
The difference now was that he was doing it for Valdrova.
Ferda decided to try the cultivation technique immediately.
Since the cultivation technique produced specific effects, the method of practicing it was simple.
He lit a candle in a sealed room where not a ray of light could enter.
Then he positioned the candle behind his head to create a long, dark shadow.
He began by staring into that shadow.
At first, it involved only magic using the shadow, but later, one could become the shadow itself or even become someone else’s shadow.
To pursue freedom beyond common sense and handle it freely—that was the goal.
‘The shadow becomes me, and I become the shadow.’
Keeping that in mind, he quietly looked down at the shadow wavering with the candle’s movement.
That was when it happened.
Ferda suddenly felt his body flatten against the floor.
He moved only two-dimensionally in a cramped, suffocating space, as though trapped inside a wall.
He entered a state of complete concentration on the shadow.
‘I’ll close my eyes like this.’
Carrying that sensation with him, Ferda headed toward the Circle rotating within his dantian.
He concentrated like that for about an hour.
He needed to draw mana down into the shadow and create a flow that circulated within it.
‘I don’t feel anything.’
Ferda’s state was utterly calm.
When it came to the Red Circle, calmness was no different from a brake.
‘It won’t work for now.’
If it seemed impossible, he gave up without regret.
Ferda was still young, and he still had much left to do.
He left the dark room and went outside.
It was a night when the moon had begun to sink.
Since it had fallen toward the west, it must have been well past midnight.
He had no idea how many days had passed.
Only the hungry rumbling from his stomach proclaimed that a long time had passed.