Chapter 8
Thus, a day of shock and horror passed, and time flowed on.
Lee Serin, who had gone to sleep immediately after seeing the ritual, naturally had a nightmare. In that nightmare, various animals with only their heads left appeared and swarming together flying through the sky, and Jinseong was seen standing like a commander on a bridge made of heads, reminiscent of the Magpie Bridge in the tale of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl.
Could this be some kind of proph... prophetic dream?
[It's just a silly dream.]
Lee Serin, who insisted that her dream was clearly related to symbology and must have some meaning, searched the internet and the mansion's archives, trying to prove to the demon that her claim was correct. The demon, on the contrary, tried to guess based on the sorceries that it had seen over its long life and its foundational knowledge.
But both of their efforts were in vain.
Even two days after seeing the shocking ritual, Lee Serin and the demon could only guess that the ritual was for creating 'some kind of object', but they couldn't even begin to guess which region's magic it was or what mechanism it had.
Therefore, Lee Serin had nothing particular to say to Lee Arin, who came to her saying, "The non-blood-related cohabiting housemate who isn't biologically programmed to be an enemy is acting strange." She could only speculate, remembering Jinseong's efforts to treat them well, that it probably wasn't a ritual that would harm them.
"Lee Arin, Oppa has become a little... a little strange, but still..."
"Ah~ You mean he won't cause harm? I know that~"
Lee Arin said, flapping the chest area of her yellow pajamas.
"Ah, it's hot~"
"Why are you wearing that if it's hot..."
"Ah~ It's not hot because of the clothes, you know. It’s, ah, I don't know."
Lee Arin stopped flapping and sighed slightly. Her slightly reddened face was flushed not from heat or fever, but for some other reason.
"What I mean is, isn't that brother doing something weird to his body?"
"Pfft."
Lee Serin laughed unconsciously at Lee Arin's embarrassed appearance, but when Lee Arin glared at her with a serious face, she quickly stiffened her expression and said,
"It'll be... fine. Probably..."
[That's right. As long as the species' form remains intact, it shouldn't be dangerous. However, since we can't completely guarantee safety, if you're worried, it might be good to regularly check on that man's health condition.]
Lee Arin carefully examined her twin's gloomy face saying it would be fine, then smiled.
"Well, he's always been doing weird things. If he's healthy, there shouldn't be a problem, right?"
* * *
"I'm healthy."
Jinseong muttered while sitting cross-legged in the room.
My body at this point in time is very healthy.
He felt a small sense of emotion as his body remained fine even after performing a ritual, albeit a small-scale one.
Before his regression, vomiting blood was commonplace when performing rituals, and in severe cases, shredded internal organ pieces would come out mixed with coughs. His flesh would rot and decay while he was still alive, and sometimes his body would be covered in mold.
To end with just a slight cold feeling for three days after performing a ritual. It's truly satisfactory.
Rituals always required a price to be paid.
Whether it was very small or very large.
The problem was that this price was quite unpredictable.
Rituals were usually performed on a large scale, so multiple sorcerers conducted them. Ritual magic offered tremendous benefits but came with nightmarish difficulty, and the risks were so enormous that they were impossible for one person to handle alone.
However, even when performing the same ritual, the price paid for it differed for each person.
Some people suddenly have their gallbladder filled with stones, while others end up with just a bunch of skin tags.
Looking at this alone, one might think it just applied differently to each person, but the unpredictable 'price of the ritual' could make the same person performing the same magical ritual vomit blood and be rushed to the hospital one time, and end up with just a stye in the eye another time.
There was clearly some rule, but there was no way to know what that rule was.
Therefore, sorcerers referred to the price of these magical rituals as 'the will of heaven' or 'the choice of chaos'.
But there are definitely ways to reduce the risk.
However, just because the price differed didn't mean there was no way to make it lighter. The method of dispersing calamity and preventing misfortune by offering something as a sacrifice was overwhelmingly dominant in sorcery among all supernatural abilities.
Wealth.
Sacrifice.
The powers and sorcerers who couldn't forget the sweetness of large-scale magical rituals constantly sought means to reduce the risk, and these two elements were what they found.
Offering sacrifices to take on misfortune in their stead to lighten the price, and offering wealth to lighten the price once again.
It was impossible not to pay a price, but they found a way to at least make the price lighter.
Turning death into serious injury.
Serious injury into minor injury.
That was why today's sorcerers, when they needed to perform large-scale magical rituals, always chose the method of infinitely reducing the risk by mobilizing expensive wealth and sacrifices. In addition, they were careful not to be tainted by impurity and maintain bodily purity through purification rituals like bathing.
Of course, the money spent on these processes was astronomical, but…
Wasn't it better than sorcerers dropping dead every time they performed a ritual?
But no one knows why that method reduces the risk.
As is often the case with sorcery, there was no answer to 'why it reduces the risk'. However, numerous sorcerers knew through history that such methods reduced the risk of rituals, and it eventually became the manual and bible for magical rituals.
But I know. The fact that these magical rituals calculate the price in a peculiar way...
It was the fruit of Jinseong's madness, who endlessly pursued sorcery with a living corpse of a body.
Roulette.
Even amidst World War III, Jinseong, as a wandering mercenary, had been able to encounter numerous magical rituals. He excavated them from ruins, found them in the remnants of fallen powers, and sometimes they were offered as rewards for mercenary requests. He participated in magical rituals by asking organizations he had positive relationships with, and conversely, he extorted ritual methods from places he didn't get along with through threats or use of force.
And one day, while living by pouring the money he earned from mercenary activities into the magical rituals he obtained this way.
Jinseong realized something.
『 It's random. 』
Magical rituals had developed in a high-risk, high-return manner.
From praying for the abundance of one small field to a whole village, from a village to a country.
From magic used to wish for a sip of water in a drought where the land is cracking, to magic wishing for rain.
As human domains expanded and the scope of society widened, magic also expanded its range accordingly, and eventually expanded to 'country', the largest unit that humans could perceive.
Naturally, the old magical rituals that provided small-scale benefits to small-scale areas were forgotten, and instead, magical rituals that provided large-scale benefits to large-scale areas became mainstream and survived.
However, Jinseong, who was obsessed with magic, indiscriminately collected such magical rituals despite the dissuasion of people around him saying, "It's inefficient," "There's nothing to gain compared to the effort," "It's useless because it's an old method." And he procured the necessary materials entirely with his own money and conducted the rituals alone, without the help of other sorcerers.
And as he continuously performed these forgotten old magical rituals, Jinseong discovered a peculiar fact.
『 The price paid for completely forgotten old magic is the same. 』
He felt a sense of discomfort when using recovery magical rituals.
As a mercenary, he often got injured in his rough line of work, and among those injuries were some that didn't directly threaten life but would definitely have an indirect impact.
For example, injuries to the stomach or intestines, severe shocks to the eyes, or blood clots in the head.
These injuries might seem fine for a while, but if left untreated, they would often lead to hospitalization or long breaks from mercenary work, so he would use recovery magical rituals to treat them, even at the risk of the ritual.
After all, it was much better to take a momentary risk than to live with a ticking time bomb.
Fortunately, among the magic he had collected, there were many related to recovery and treating internal injuries. Methods that shook and damaged the internal organs were convenient for assassination, and magic to recover from internal injuries and detoxify poisons also developed to counter these methods.
But of course, the effects varied slightly for each ritual, and Jinseong used different magic appropriate to each situation.
Then one day as he was using the Blessing of Starlight Ritual, a magical ritual for healing internal organs, for the third time, Jinseong noticed something strange.
『 Isn't the price the same as last time? 』