Chapter 158

Magic is truly a beautiful thing.

I was so satisfied that I slumped back into my seat, while Kaisel had moved some distance away with a sullen expression.

“You rotten blood bastard.”

Rotten blood… That would be quite insulting to a vampire, but for me, hearing such words just feels refreshing.

“Mosquito-like bastard.”

Okay, that’s a stronger insult, right?

I can’t stand it.

I jerked my slumped body upright.

“What? If you don’t like it, change it back to how it was.”

“…That’s why I’m only cursing and stopping there. Otherwise, you’d be dead.”

“Do you have confidence you could kill me?”

“……”

Kaisel let out a deep sigh.

It’s been a while since I released the restraints on her wrists, but she hasn’t lost her reason. Around her, black and red magical power flows like mist, and even her languid finger movements give off a chilling sense of threat.

Kaisel has regained her power. In a completely free state—not losing her reason to bloodlust, not having her power restrained or her free will restricted.

That’s what she wanted from me. Since being near Beatrice meant she couldn’t refuse her orders, she abandoned her and remained by my side.

“Sorry. I don’t say thanks very often, so I’m being weird about it.”

Kaisel slightly averted her gaze as she spoke. She never directly said thank you to the end.

Instead, she changed the subject.

“But is it really okay? If you release me like this already, I have no reason to stay here anymore, you know?”

She looks at me with a subtle smile.

Oh? So… she’s going to bail on me?

I just laughed.

“Go ahead then. Live without remembering anything in this world that could perish at any moment. Just go with the flow like that, without being curious about anything.”

“…Really?”

“No.”

I leaned forward and asked slyly.

“You. Don’t you want to learn magic?”

“Ma… gic?”

“Yeah. Right now you have magical power, but you don’t know how to use magic, right?”

I used my Divine Body Sculpting Equipment to finely chop up Kaisel’s magical power.

I cut up the magical power that only brought up sinister memories like ‘Kill them all,’ ‘Don’t leave a single one alive,’ ‘Let’s all die together’ with a scalpel, extracted it with forceps, and ground it up with a drill to prevent it from forming magical power singularities. With my current skill, precise divine body sculpting was impossible, so I just went to town dismantling everything, but the effect was better than expected and I was satisfied. I also got a lot of practice.

But the magical power that had been chopped to pieces didn’t completely disperse. It still flowed around Kaisel like mist.

Kaisel answered in an uncertain voice.

“Well… I don’t know how to handle magical power.”

Magical power is originally the flesh of gods. The era when Kaisel was active was a time when the concept of wielding magical power itself didn’t exist. She could become a magical power singularity and be controlled by magical power, but there was no way for her to know how to use magical power while maintaining her reason.

Snap!

I snapped my fingers and pointed at Kaisel.

“Exactly. You probably don’t know, but you’ve gotten much weaker now. You might be able to beat a 5th Circle mage, but you definitely can’t beat a 6th Circle wizard. If you can’t handle magical power, that’s how you become obsolete. You have power as a vampire that you were born with, but we wield magic that’s nothing short of miraculous.”

“…So?”

“Isn’t it a waste? Being an ancient relic and all, you have a lot of magical power clinging to you… You should use it well, right? If you learn properly, you could wield S-rank calamity… I mean, 7th Circle level power.”

A smile formed on Kaisel’s lips.

“That’s… a hard offer to refuse, isn’t it?”

I smiled back at her.

“Right? Now, let me teach you the first precept of mages.”

“What’s that?”

“Always keep the promises you make with your mouth.”

I stared intently at Kaisel and said,

“So promise me. That you won’t kill people who mean you no harm in the future. And that you’ll actively cooperate with my work for the next ten years.”

If she can’t make that promise? Then there’s no choice. Kaisel’s status will fall back to prisoner.

Fortunately, she wasn’t that stupid.

She chuckled and readily accepted my demand.

“Fine. Ten years for complete freedom and greater power is cheap. I promise. I won’t kill those who mean me no harm. For the next ten years starting now, I will actively cooperate with you.”

I shook hands with Kaisel.

She seemed very pleased with the idea of learning magic, asking eagerly,

“So what about magic? Will you teach me?”

“Let’s research it together.”

Vampires. These creatures that have existed since ancient times naturally attract magical power. Their very existence calls forth the nostalgia of magical power.

What kind of magic system would suit this monster?

As I create a magic cultivation process suited for vampires… I’ll definitely learn something myself.

* * *

We didn’t just leave the Cherry Blossom Continent empty-handed.

We traded all kinds of magic materials and food we’d brought from our homeland, the 7th Continent, for the specialties available on the Cherry Blossom Continent.

“Even a stable place like the Cherry Blossom Continent seems to have its share of troubles when you look deeper.”

After Hwarin’s death, my attendant duties were taken over by Ann Jack, who had been the deputy mayor of Lanciel City. Fel Jack had subtly pushed her forward, asking me to teach her a lot, and since she got along quite well with Yuria, I felt a natural fondness for her too.

Ann Jack gave me a more detailed explanation for my sake, since I’d been holed up in the research lab the whole time.

To survive on the Star Continent, magic items are absolutely necessary. And making magic items requires all kinds of magic materials.

For example, starlight sand found in the Sand Plateau is a magic material widely used in reconnaissance magical devices and portable barriers. But since this material couldn’t be found on the Cherry Blossom Continent, the Cherry Blossom Continent had been having great difficulty producing portable barriers lately. Similarly, ‘cherry blossom powder’ produced in large quantities on the Cherry Blossom Continent was a material used to inscribe blessing texts on various magical devices, but with cherry blossom powder becoming unavailable, the production costs of magical devices on Floating Island Sion had skyrocketed.

This material shortage crisis was greatly alleviated by this trade with the Cherry Blossom Continent. Floating Island Sion had become the world’s only inter-star trade route.

“The Cherry Blossom Continent would have been in quite a predicament too if we hadn’t visited. But continents like this 36th Continent, which have even lost their connection to the Tower of Covenant, are in complete chaos. The entire continent is in this state.”

Ann Jack looked around with a bitter expression.

A large rock jutted prominently upward, with houses and buildings made of pieced-together planks visible around it. This place, which probably housed about 400 households, would have a name like ‘Big Rock Crossroads.’

But currently, the crossroads’ barrier had collapsed without a trace, and only corpses who had starved to death and gruesome bodies torn apart by calamities were scattered about.

“…Thank you. Divine Wizard.”

Thank you… Those weren’t really appropriate words for the situation. But I could understand what Ann meant. From what I’d observed, Ann Jack was someone with deep compassion and high noble pride. She seemed to feel a sense of responsibility for this carnage. And she appeared to feel some relief knowing there was something she could do.

But if her emotion was responsibility, then what I felt was sympathy.

“No need to thank me.”

[Sooooowing]

Green wind reeds grow on the bone-strewn ground.

Seeing this made my heart feel a bit lighter.

This was what we’d been doing lately.

Rather than heading straight to the Southern Sea, we swept through the surrounding continents, restoring the world destroyed by the Great Cataclysm.

Even now, the mages led by Lytol were working tirelessly to restore the crossroads’ barrier, and Pan-Dalus and Hedric were doing their best to plant new vegetation throughout the continent. Refinement, Kim Ji-woong, and Sonnet, who remained on Floating Island Sion, were pushing forward with teaching new magical theories to students and developing barriers to prevent the destruction of water.

Thus, we worked hard to create places where people could live again on every path we took.

‘To climb the tower to the end, you need basic stamina…’

Because only we can do this work.

Going to Ragnarok to find traces of the Outer God is important, but we can’t stop the work of restoring the world.

‘Actually, that’s what’s giving me a headache.’

What if our power consumption becomes too great in the battle with Ragnarok? There’s no one besides us who can handle this restoration work…

But we can’t just spend time waiting for humanity to develop sufficient self-reliance. With the Outer God’s plans unknown to us… we can’t even be certain how much time we have left.

But charging in recklessly when we don’t know Ragnarok’s strength…

It’s difficult, so difficult. Even with the reliable organization called Pathfinder, we’re not relaxed at all. It would be perfect if we had three or four more organizations like ours.

As I was piling up frustration and sighing deeply, I heard an utterly indifferent voice beside me.

“Hmm. <Sowing>? Using such an amazing miracle just for food production? Humans really are… When you don’t have food, just get in a coffin and sleep for a hundred years or so. So weak.”

It was Kaisel, looking disdainful as she watched the wind reeds sprouting up. Being a vampire, she seems unable to feel any particular emotion about whether humans live or die.

“You! Right now…!”

Ann Jack, infuriated by her indifference, immediately flared up, but Kaisel cut her off dismissively.

“Ah, ah, forget it. Don’t try to lecture me.”

Whooooo—

Kaisel ignored Ann and immediately began preparing magic. Her magical power swelled greatly before being absorbed back into her body.

‘That thing again? Even though I coached her on it… I still have no idea how it works.’

Her method of handling magical power was extremely unique.

Up until now, there have been three main ways humans handle magical power. ‘Circle magic,’ ‘Ki-blood magic,’ and ‘Totem magic.’ And I could understand the operating principles of all three of these magic types just by looking.

But Kaisel’s magical power manipulation didn’t belong to any of these categories.

Of course, at first she also tried to create Circles or Ki-blood. But whether it was because I had chopped up all her magical power, or because of vampire characteristics, she kept failing to fix her magical power in place. Instead, she developed on her own this strange breathing technique of sucking mist-like magical power into her body and expelling it again.

But what’s amazing is that through such behavior, she succeeded in causing several magical phenomena.

Magical phenomena I couldn’t understand even while watching.

When I asked ‘How did you do that?’, I got the nutritionally void answer of ‘I just felt like it.’

Even now it’s the same. After inhaling and exhaling magical power a few times—whatever effect that had—she accurately pinpointed the locations of survivors.

“Looks like quite a few survived. Here, here, here… and so on, there are people gathered. I only marked places with over three hundred people since there were too many. For reference, we’re here.”

She roughly drew the shape of the entire continent on the ground and poked the locations of survivors with a wooden stick.

I don’t think I could do anything like this with my detection magic… Kaisel’s newly learned magic consisted of only a few types and relied purely on intuition, but its power was surprisingly amazing.

I felt impatient every time I saw it, wanting to quickly figure it out, but anyway, right now I needed to handle saving people first.

“Good work. Thank you!”

“Well, I don’t really care if they live or die, but a promise is a promise.”

She just has to add a comment like that to lose people’s goodwill.

Well, what can you expect from a Night Calamity…

I was shaking my head as I was about to depart for the location she’d pointed out.

“Huh?”

Kaisel suddenly frowned and looked down at her feet.

Her shadow rippled like water and formed words.

<Dangerous. Don’t come.>

Just two sentences.

“What is this…?”

When I asked, Kaisel frowned and answered.

“It’s a message from Beatrice.”

“Beatrice?”

“Uh… this sneaky little brat mixed something into my shadow. I had no idea.”

<Dangerous. Don’t come.>

Looking at this sudden message, only one thought came to mind.

Shit…

Honestly, isn’t this basically telling us to come?