Chapter 144
After the curse mage's ambitious prison-break plan was futilely thwarted.
The guards' cold gazes converged on the curse mage with his head buried in the table.
At the center of those gazes, the curse mage said nothing.
Then the chief guard, who had been quietly watching the interrogation, approached Yulian and whispered cautiously.
“Professor. Should we continue the interrogation like this?”
“Yes. Please wait a little longer.”
After answering that, Yulian gestured to the guards.
As if telling them to let the curse mage go.
The guards who had slammed the curse mage's head into the desk stepped back again with dissatisfied expressions.
The curse mage grumbled as he memorized the faces of the guard and Yulian.
Along with the thought that, on the day he broke out of here, he would curse their families first.
Whether he knew the curse mage's inner thoughts or not.
Yulian continued the interrogation.
“From the hair, I can infer the principle behind the curse you intended to use. You were planning to use an infection curse, a form of sympathetic sorcery.”
“......”
“Puppets would be hard to come by in a place like this, so a curse that involves nailing a doll wouldn't be possible. Instead, you were preparing a spell that would shatter your own prosthetic eye and blind the people whose hair was inside it, correct?”
“!!!!”
The curse mage's eyes went wide.
As if asking how he had known that.
At that reaction, Yulian smiled in apparent satisfaction and said,
“It's because I didn't get the black magic defense professor position by luck.”
Saying that, he glanced at the clock for a moment.
“It seems it's time for the food to come out.”
No sooner had he finished speaking than Erika entered the interrogation room, pushing a cart, accompanied by a ding! of the bell.
She placed the tray covered with a cloche (*a dome-shaped metal cover used to cover food) in the center.
Before opening the cloche, Yulian said to the curse mage,
“About the sympathetic sorcery you, Mr. Otma, intended to use—coincidentally, this meal may be quite closely related to that same kind of sorcery.”
“......”
“Since ancient times, people have believed that by eating certain foods, they could gain health in body parts that resemble them.”
The curse mage gave no reaction, but he agreed with those words.
Eating tomatoes because they resemble the heart,
eating walnuts because they resemble the brain,
and eating seaweed because it resembles hair.
Whether or not it actually works, seeking out and eating such foods was, in a broad sense, sympathetic magic—similar to the principles of black magic.
It was also one of the basic principles of chimera magic.
To obtain a bear's arm, you skin your human arm and wrap it in bear hide for months.
To obtain a snake's tongue, you scrape away the papillae on your tongue and wrap it in snake innards.
That was the basic principle of chimera magic.
Take it one step further—burn off all the skin on your face to obtain a state of 'nothing determined,' a canvas-like state, and you could become a shapeshifter.
In other words, the sympathetic sorcery Yulian was explaining was something the chimera mage sitting across from the curse mage knew better than anyone.
At Yulian's tone, which seemed to hint at that fact, Otma was a little impressed.
'For someone from the light, he really knows black magic well.'
At the same time, it was regrettable.
Why had someone who knew so much not sided with them?
While Otma lamented Yulian's knowledge like that, Yulian unveiled the dishes.
“In that sense, these meals may be just what you need.”
As he opened the cloche, he introduced the dishes.
“Today's course. I've prepared it in an Eastern style. First, the sakizuke is jelly ponzu.”
Yulian left out the part about it being made from shark eyeballs, thinking saying so might turn their stomachs.
Though the earlier explanation left him feeling uneasy, the curse mage scooped up the jelly with a spoon and ate it.
Then his eyes went as wide as the full moon.
“It's... delicious.”
“I'm glad you like it.”
Jelly ponzu.
It was made by separating only the gelatin and fat from the eyeball and turning it into a chilled dish.
A guard spoon-fed it to the chimera mage, who had become half an idiot.
Even after becoming an idiot, his instinct to swallow whatever went into his mouth remained, so he ate obediently as soon as the spoon was brought to him.
Though he did get a lot of sauce around his mouth.
“Mmm... delicious... delicious...”
Looking at his regressed comrade with pitying eyes, the curse mage felt sorry.
But only for a moment.
For now, he focused on eating.
Because food this excellent would be insulting to compare with prison meals, and it deserved proper respect.
Thus, the curse mage Otma ate the appetizer reverently.
He bowed his head slightly to Yulian and said,
“Though we met in this manner, kindness deserves its due respect. I truly thank you.”
Though this wouldn't make him open his heart and spill information.
At the very least, Otma would follow his principles and offer a formal greeting befitting the kindness shown.
After that, the dishes kept coming.
“This time, it's soup and an appetizer.”
Otma's expectations swelled with the appetizer he had just eaten.
A dish a little warmer than the previous one was set before him.
Just from that, Otma, who had once served nobles, could roughly guess the flow of this full course.
'Is this a course meal that starts cold and gradually gets warmer? The cooking is very orthodox and high-level, too.'
The next dish was soup.
It was shark head ushiojiru.
It was a clear broth dish made using a shark's skull, jawbone, and cartilage.
Otma savored it without the slightest idea of its ingredients.
'Huh...'
It was delicious.
If he had known the word umami, he would have said this was the very essence of it.
Before he knew it, he had forgotten that he had just been discussing 'sympathetic sorcery' with Yulian and was waiting for the next dish.
He no longer had the leisure to think about why Yulian had brought up such a topic.
For someone who had been eating cold bread, this kind of gourmet fare was more violent than torture.
“What on earth is this supposed to be, honestly...”
“Sister Jenny. Is this method really correct?”
“...Hmm... let's wait just a little longer.”
By contrast, beyond the surveillance artifact that stood in for the magic mirror.
the soldiers and Sisters watching the interrogation grew increasingly uneasy.
It seemed like they would end up doing nothing but pampering the dark mages.
“Next is a cold appetizer.”
The cold appetizer was shark cheek pickled in kelp
a dish where the cheek meat was lightly seared like sashimi and the kelp was laid on top.
And it was further aged with accelerated time using black magic to deepen the flavor.
“Delicious... mmm... heeheehee...”
“I can't help but agree.”
The chimera mage had already been an idiot to begin with.
Now he had forgotten everything and was enjoying the feast too.
At last, just before the main course.
A warm appetizer, the real start of the meal, was brought out.
And when the curse mage confirmed the identity of that hot appetizer, he lost the ability to speak.
“......”
“Aren't you going to eat?”
The hot appetizer was shark eyeball arani.
It was an Eastern-style soup dish in which the ingredients were left intact and floated in a clear broth.
It was also a dish of the Eastern slum poor, with shark eyeballs floating strikingly atop a steaming brown broth.
Yulian had merely elevated it a little.
It was a dish using eyeballs, just like the appetizer.
However, this dish differed from jelly ponzu.
Namely, while jelly ponzu became an ordinary jelly shape during the cooking process,
arani retained the eyeball shape, with the black pupil left intact.
“......”
The curse mage and the shark eyeball floating in the broth met eye to eye.
Serving a soup made from eyeballs to a curse mage who had lost one eye.
What on earth was that supposed to mean?
Before that, cooking with eyeballs?
Only then did the curse mage remember that, all throughout the meal, Yulian had never explained the ingredients in detail.
It seemed the curse mage wasn't the only one who thought that.
The soldiers watching through the surveillance artifact did too.
Even Jenny, who had proposed this method, as well.
Though they thought there was no way that could be true,
even though they had clearly watched the cooking process from the side,
the conversation they had just had and the atmosphere at the table seemed to point to one fact.
And in that silence, the curse mage said in a trembling voice,
“W-where... where did you get these eyeballs?”
If he said they were shark magical beast meat, wouldn't the others start retching like the other students?
Worried about that, Yulian kept things vague without actually lying.
“Let's just say I was barely able to obtain something that was being discarded.”
It wasn't a lie.
Usually most special parts, including the innards, were always thrown away.
Even if you searched this world from end to end, people like Yulian who deliberately cooked with innards could be counted on one hand.
Only Erika and Freyja had grown used to it; there were no others who cooked with innards.
For that reason, those words reached the curse mage with a somewhat different meaning.
His own eyeball, removed a few days ago before it could rot.
His artificial eye, smashed in their first exchange.
A soup containing eyeballs of exactly the same color and size.
The conversation about the principles of sympathetic sorcery they had shared just before the meal.
“......”
He wanted to believe it was just his imagination.
But it seemed the curse mage wasn't the only one feeling that unease.
“Urk...”
Some of the guards who had been silently standing watch in the interrogation room began to retch.
Unlike the soldiers, the guards hadn't seen Yulian's cooking process.
“Hah... huff...”
His breath was catching.
Meanwhile, Yulian was making the idiot chimera mage drink the soup by giving him a straw.
And even with a gentle voice, as if soothing a child.
“Yes. Just keep sucking. Like a good child.”
Sluuurp.
The chimera mage drank the broth blankly, his face drenched in ecstasy.
At the sight of that, the curse mage felt an inexplicable disgust.
But Yulian paid it no mind and brought out the next dish.
And so, the main course finally appeared.
It was ostrich liver steak and pancreas sweetbread.
It was also the most blatantly organ-based dish among the special parts.
Seeing the steak, the curse mage felt relieved for a moment.
Thinking the eyeballs had been a coincidence and that Yulian couldn't have intended anything by it.
But that relief did not last long.
“The smell... is nice...”
“It should be good for the body. You may need this dish even more than the others.”
Yulian smiled faintly as he cut the steak on the chimera mage's plate.
Seeing the cut cross-section of that steak, the curse mage sucked in a sharp breath.
'...Liver?'
When the steak was cut, what appeared wasn't marbling or the grain of muscle one would see in meat, but smooth liver tissue.
And the cross-section of the sweetbread beside the liver steak was that of a pancreas.
There was no mistaking it.
Any dark mage who had studied the innards of countless people would know.
'Liver... and pancreas...?'
Cold sweat ran down the curse mage's forehead.
Organ dishes themselves weren't rare.
Poor people with nothing else to eat would sometimes eat such things.
If nobles took the fresh meat,
they would sometimes barely manage to cook and eat even the innards thrown into the slaughterhouse trash.
As for liver dishes, commoners and the poor could eat them fairly often.
The problem was that with someone from a noble background like Yulian, it was impossible to know why he would deliberately use innards instead of meat.
'Why the innards, of all things...?'
Liver was at least acceptable.
But pancreas and eyeballs?
Those were parts even the poor wouldn't bother eating.
What's more, he couldn't understand why anyone would go so far as to adapt them into noble-style cooking and call it a delicacy.
The curse mage, forgetting even to lift his utensils, fidgeted as he tried to divine Yulian's intent.
Across from him, the chimera mage let out a goofy laugh and savored the liver dish.
“I'm glad you're eating so well. It makes the effort worthwhile as the one who cooked it.”
“Wine... wine...”
“You seem thirsty. Here, have some wine.”
With a pleased smile, Yulian stuck a straw into the wine to help the chimera mage drink it.
For someone interrogating dark mages, he looked far too pleased.
Watching that, the curse mage was finally able to be certain of Yulian's intent.
Yulian, who should have hated them, was actually delighted to see them eating the food deliciously. Why?
And why had he given eyeball dishes to one who had lost an eye, and liver dishes to one who had lost a liver?
There was only one way to explain it.
'No way... these are...'
That was when it happened.
As if adding certainty to the curse mage's unease, Yulian muttered,
“The liver is an organ that can return to its original state even if half of it is gone. Baltazan, that means you also have a good chance of recovering.”
That was the final blow.
The way he spoke with such expectation sounded almost like...
As if he were hoping the chimera mage would recover his liver as soon as possible.
“Hehe... I'll... get better... soon...”
“That would be best. Only then will you be able to serve your purpose.”
So that he could provide useful information.
Yulian swallowed the rest of his words and wiped the chimera mage's mouth.
Beside his mad comrade.
The unnervingly kind black magic professor.
That sight was far too chilling for the curse mage.
“Urk...”
As nausea surged, his reason returned.
The reason that had returned urged his stomach.
To hurry up and vomit out everything he had eaten.
This was neither poison nor food.
This was an insult and an act of malice that trampled human dignity underfoot.
Unable to resist reason's plea to bring everything back up, he vomited out the contents.
“Bleeegh!”
“Heehee...”
The curse mage Otma pleaded with Yulian, tears as big as chicken droppings streaming down his face.
The chimera mage watched the scene with glee, like a child who had found poop.
Everything was grotesque.
This room was far too grotesque.
In the end, the curse mage lost even the will to resist amid that grotesquerie and pleaded with Yulian through chicken-dropping tears.
“Please! Let me tell you everything I know. Please...”
“What is the matter? We still have the next main course and dessert...”
“Please... I want it to stop...”
The curse mage begged.
Because he absolutely did not want to eat the next dish with his own mouth.
Eyeballs, liver, pancreas—in that order.
Then whose body part would the next dish match?
He felt like he could tell without even looking.
Beyond the iron bars leading to the waiting room, he looked at the blood mage woman who had lost an arm.
With a gag to keep her from interfering with the interrogation, the woman watched the scene and seemed to be trying desperately to say something.
“Mmph... mmph...”
The blood mage woman was in tears, desperately trying to plead something.
The curse mage's gaze briefly fell on that arm that seemed absent.
She had realized it too.
That once this interview was over, it would be her turn to eat next.
There was no sane person who could calmly eat something like this.
Naturally, the person who could make someone eat it was even further from sanity.
This wasn't the way a human mind worked.
At the very least, only someone broken to the level of a fiend could come up with that.
Only then did the curse mage realize.
Why Yulian before him had been selected by the imperial family as a black magic defense professor.
Why the military was advertising Yulian as the natural enemy of dark mages.
“Please... I'm sorry... I absolutely can't eat this... please have mercy...”
Having finished his thoughts, the curse mage lay sprawled across the table and begged.
“Next... next...”
In contrast, the chimera mage across from him swayed back and forth, eagerly anticipating the next dish.
That sight seemed to embody the madness of this place.
In this surely insane situation, this place would be paradise for a madman.
That was why the chimera mage fit in here better than anyone.
But the curse mage lacked the courage to ride along with this grotesquerie and madness.
“Please... I'll tell you whatever you ask... please... stop...”
In the end, all he could do was beg the monster before him for mercy.
Even the guards who had been sending hateful looks at the dark mages were, before he knew it, looking at the pleading curse mage with pity.
It wasn't just the guards and the dark mages in the waiting room who pitied the curse mage.
Beyond the surveillance artifact, the soldiers and Jenny watching all this also covered their mouths.
“My God...”
“Uh... um...”
Jenny clicked her tongue too.
This wasn't what she had intended.
She had expected an interrogation that pressed him as if it knew everything.
But Yulian had broken the dark mage's spirit in a completely different sense.
The sergeant who had agreed to this operation covered his mouth with a hand and said,
“Was this what you intended, Ms. Jenny?”
“......”
“Why are you silent...? Don't tell me the rumors among the students were true too?”
“......”
Jenny couldn't bring herself to say no.
She hadn't understood why her classmates refused Yulian's second invitation with such weird stubbornness.
Now she thought she understood.
'Come to think of it, I was scared when I first met him too.'
It's hard to explain, but there was just something about the atmosphere.
It just did.
While dining with Yulian, the more she talked with him, the colder her blood ran.
Each time, she would fidget with the revolver in her pocket for no reason.
If he hadn't been Charlotte's fiancé, she might have run away after the second invitation.
That made the rumors surrounding Yulian understandable too.
But it would also be strange to let the soldier keep misunderstanding Yulian like this, so she corrected the rumor.
“It's true the professor cooks with strange ingredients, but those ingredients aren't from sources you shouldn't eat.”
“So you're not denying that the ingredients are strange.”
Because that was true...
However, there was something Jenny was curious about too.
“Setting the ingredients aside, why do you assume the source is a person rather than a magical beast?”
“Don't you know? I heard the place where the professor lives now used to be a graveyard.”
“......”
Why had he chosen such a place, of all places, for a mansion?
Jenny sighed, feeling the rumor keep getting more and more embellished.
“It is magical beast meat. Maybe the guards don't know, but we saw the professor cook it himself in the kitchen.”
“Th-then... that really was magical beast meat, right?”
“I’m sure it was.”
And in the middle of all this calamity.
The one who had caused this misunderstanding...
'This is why I hate dark mages. What exactly is wrong with my cooking that they're throwing up again?'
He set down his utensils, irritated that his cooking had been rejected.