Chapter 162
The community’s reaction was explosive. Ian grinned as he replied to the comments, then set his phone down on the table once the comments started coming in even faster.
“Phew. That was fun.”
Using the community purely for pleasure instead of gathering information was inevitably a waste of time.
But so what? As long as it was fun, that was enough.
People naturally go crazy if they only live honest, monotonous lives.
Waking up early, exercising, going to work on time, exercising again after work, showering, and going straight to bed…….
If that wasn’t a madman, then what on earth was? An alien? No, maybe a being infected with Mystery.
“No, isn’t that just a diligent person…….”
He ignored Cecilia’s shout from beside him.
As a rule, you shouldn’t discuss life with clergy. Since talk of faith came before rational reasoning, they weren’t suited for serious conversations.
Of course, that wasn’t meant to belittle them. In a world where faith was real, there was nothing wrong with crying out in faith.
It was just that Ian, as a mage, personally didn’t care much for faith. It was the average mage mindset—believing that you could rule everything in the world with nothing but spells and formulas.
Anyway.
“You had a rough trip. You got through the magic on the house safely, right?”
Ian said, leaning back against the backrest. Cecilia let out a long sigh and undid her twin tails.
“Yeah. Luckily, it didn’t activate.”
Most of the magic Ian had set over his home was remote-triggered defensive magic. For example, if an intruder came in, a pure white blade would fall like a guillotine, or a spear would shoot out and pierce their body. There were also traps that would flood the airway with water or randomly alter the five senses.
They were all spells he had set up with considerable care, so they wouldn’t have been easy to break through.
He had already warned Cecilia in advance, and since she had taken the proper route of entering by keying in the door password, none of the magic activated. If it had, her body would already have been a bloody mess. Mariang would have died, spewing blood from all seven orifices.
Ian’s main magic wasn’t closely related to defense or fortress construction, so it was naturally no match for a specialist’s, but it was still more than enough to make a mage’s home look like a mage’s home. He could easily intercept an assassin who showed up out of nowhere with magic.
If the opponent was a mage, that was the exception, but he had no intention of giving his home address to outsiders anyway, so it was a pointless assumption. Ian nodded and turned to Mariang, who was still sleeping soundly.
By now, the regeneration of her arm had reached the elbow. Her leg had also grown back to the knee. Bubbles rose from flesh and bone as they grew in real time, and while it wasn’t a pleasant sight, to put it mildly, it was still rather fascinating.
It was, after all, that absurd phenomenon known as human self-regeneration. If it were psychic powers, it would make sense, but without that, limbs growing back like a lizard’s was astonishing even from a mage’s perspective.
Ian poked at her boiling bones with a finger and asked Cecilia,
“Cecilia, do you know what kind of bone this is? According to her, she got her regeneration ability by transplanting some kind of bone.”
“Hmm, let me see.”
Cecilia trotted over and stood beside Ian. She stared intently at Mariang’s bones, clicked her tongue, and answered,
“It’s a werewolf bone. In Korean, that’s a wolf-man.”
“Ah…….”
“Though it’s not a pure-blood bone, but a hybrid’s. If she’d transplanted a pure-blood bone, her brain would probably have turned beastlike, so I guess this was the choice she made. The regeneration is weaker, but as long as the bone stays attached, the flesh grows back on its own.”
Cecilia sank onto the sofa as she recalled fighting a werewolf before coming to Korea. Maybe because she was short, her feet didn’t reach the floor.
“They’re rare to see in Korea. This place has lots of yokai and ghosts and such, but almost no outsiders like werewolves.”
“Mm. Right.”
“Unlike vampires, werewolves hardly have anything you could call reason. Their way of thinking is basically just ‘kill,’ ‘hungry,’ and ‘tired.’ They’re practically beasts. But once you actually fight them, they’re really troublesome.”
Cecilia swung her legs and set the cord that had been tying back her hair on the table.
“If you get hit by their teeth or claws, the bleeding basically never stops. You’re forced to keep losing blood, and then you’ll naturally die of blood loss, right?”
“…….”
“That’s why the straightforward method is to kill them without ever letting them land a single attack. But this one even has regeneration, so killing her isn’t easy. So…….”
“You’d use silver. That’s their weakness.”
“Right. Usually you just blast them with a shotgun loaded with silver rounds.”
Cecilia made a “bang-bang” sound with her mouth, miming pulling a trigger into the air. Then she turned to Mariang and took out the silver knife she’d brought.
“This mage would probably suffer a fatal injury to her bones if hit with a weapon made of silver.”
“But since her appearance is no different from an ordinary human’s, most people wouldn’t even bother using silver rounds on her.”
“Yeah. She was probably counting on that.”
Most common urban legends have weaknesses. For example, ghosts are laid to rest if they’re hit with salt or red beans, vampires are vulnerable to silver or stakes, Charon quietly backs off if you toss him a few coins, and demons become much easier to deal with once you learn their true names.
Naturally, there was no benefit to exposing those weaknesses, so they were usually kept hidden. Mariang was no exception.
In ordinary cases, bones don’t poke through the skin and scream, “I’m a bone!” to announce their presence. Choosing bone as the transplant site was, in its own way, a reasonable choice.
Of course, weaknesses didn’t mean much to Ian. If he could get his hands on them, he could kill them instantly with a single click. It didn’t matter whether they had a weakness or not.
“More importantly, how long are you going to let her sleep? Let’s wake her up.”
As he pondered silently, Cecilia spoke up. Ian also stopped thinking and nodded. He stood up and tapped Mariang on the cheek.
“Wake up.”
“Mmm…….”
Mariang responded immediately. But she didn’t get up. She only tossed and turned, flailing her missing arm. Ian briefly considered slapping her cheek, but since he had decided to hold back on rough methods unless she actively resisted, he settled for pinching her cheek instead.
“I said wake up.”
Tug.
He twisted and yanked the pinched cheek. Mariang’s eyes flew open.
“M-master……! It hurts……!”
“Stop whining. Your arms and legs got blown off and that didn’t hurt, but this does?”
“B-both hurt. Cut it out……!”
Mariang flailed her missing limbs. Thanks to her youthful appearance, the picture was fairly convincing, but since the person inside was about Eddy’s age, the feeling was oddly unsettling. Eddy had definitely said she was in her forties or fifties, so Mariang too…….
“Mm.”
Ian stopped thinking and let go. Mariang rubbed her stinging cheek with an arm that only went down to the elbow.
“Ugh…….”
“If you’ve slept enough, it’s time to work. Just answer what I ask.”
He said as he sat down on the sofa opposite Mariang. Mariang nodded, then narrowed her eyes as she glanced at Cecilia sitting beside him.
“But, master. Is it okay for her to listen too? What if she goes and hands the information over to the Vatican…….”
“Don’t worry about it and just talk. It’s not something you need to be concerned about.”
At Ian’s firm voice, Mariang pouted.
“Yeees…….”
Compared to before the contract, her childish side had become much stronger. It was a phenomenon caused by the spell that made her regard herself as stupid. Her total intelligence hadn’t changed, but the personality formed by a slightly twisted perception was, in effect, a separate person.
The problem was that people from her past might find this drastically changed personality suspicious. If she were someone Ian was meeting for the first time, that would be one thing, but using her as a spy to steal Laplace’s information was somewhat difficult.
So she needed prior coaching. Ian leaned slightly forward and said in a cold voice,
“First, let me make one thing clear. Wherever and whenever, keep a clear distinction between how you treat me and how you treat other people. You can speak casually to me, but treat everyone else the way you did before.”
“Um…… before…… you mean before I met you, master? Before you saved me?”
“Mm…… try acting it out the way you just said.”
“Ah, okay.”
Mariang cleared her throat, then stared at Ian with a blank face.
“What are you staring at? Get those filthy eyeballs out of my sight before I rip them out and crush them.”
“Oh.”
“What do you mean, ‘oh’? Shut up and tell me why you brought me here. If the reason isn’t good enough, be ready to lose a limb.”
There was no life in Mariang’s eyes at all. They were the same eyes she had when Ian first met her.
He nodded.
“Good, stop there.”
“Yeees…… whew. Ugh, even knowing it’s just acting, treating you coldly doesn’t feel good, master. Sorry…….”
Her face softened again. Ian crossed his arms and looked back at her.
“I see that. It looks like I can just do it the way you said.”
“Got it. It isn’t even that hard. I’ll just do it like usual.”
He tilted his head while quietly watching the relieved Mariang.
“Then let’s get to the main point. I have quite a few things to ask, but first this: why did you come to Korea? Why were you in the mirror world?”
“Ah, that.”
Mariang scratched her cheek and replied.
“Umm…… the reason I came to Korea was to retrieve Eddy’s corpse. A mage’s corpse has high value as material, after all. I was going to recover it and use it.”
“……So you knew about Eddy’s death from Laplace? Who told you that information?”
“No. People in Laplace are given bead-like items that break when they die. I realized Eddy was dead by looking at that.”
“Ah…… then you have one too, I assume.”
“Yes, I do. It’s not that impressive—it only tells you whether someone is alive or dead.”
Mariang shifted little by little until her hips pressed against the back of the sofa, then continued,
“The reason I was in the mirror world was to let my body recover. I was being chased by the Bureau.”
“The Bureau?”
The name of an unexpected organization suddenly popped up. Mariang nodded.
“Yeah. While I was wandering around, I ran into an insect sorcerer and fought him once. I don’t really remember where or why we fought, but…… I got injured in the process, and then the Bureau came after me too, so I had no choice but to enter the mirror world. Since Walter made it, getting in was easy.”
Walter. Laplace’s leader.
‘So even the mirror world had been a Mystery touched by his hand.’
Maybe because he possessed a grimoire capable of creating Mysteries, he had made all sorts of outrageous things. Ian clicked his tongue and leaned back.
“Where is Walter now?”
“I don’t know. He’s the kind of person whose residence changes every day, so location doesn’t really mean much.”
“Hmm…… were you trying to recover Eddy’s corpse for personal reasons? Or was it Walter’s order?”
“I didn’t have any feelings like that. Being Eddy’s lover was all just scripted acting. As I said earlier, the corpse was only for use as material, nothing more and nothing less. Walter wasn’t involved.”
“Good. I’m tired too, so this is my last question.”
Ian took his phone from his pocket and checked the message that had come in earlier.
One of them was from Kim I-seo.
The painting of the Laplace mage that had supposedly been found at the Museum of Vision.
He asked Mariang for the name of the mage who had painted it.
“Irene. What kind of person is she?”
At Ian’s question, Mariang’s face twisted slightly. Without the slightest hesitation, she answered at once.
“She’s a crazy bitch.”
“No, you’re the same. I meant something else.”
“Waaah.”