Chapter 77

Quilbion observed the flow of nark with his hand pressed against the sky-barrier.

The condensed nark forming the sky-barrier was like a dense net. A net woven with holes so fine that even needles would need to be made of logs.

He applied force to his arm and pushed hard. It didn’t budge with simple physical strength. How much brute force would it take to smash through and get out?

This time he gathered nark in his hand. Simple condensation without release. The nark that had been rippling without fixed form suddenly transformed into a short rake shape.

It was a tool he’d frequently used when cleaning the livestock pen. Drich got a hammer, so I get this?

He lightly shook the rake in his hand. He could see mana being drawn in.

He scraped the sky-barrier with the rake.

Damage appeared in the nark forming the barrier, but it quickly recovered. It seemed difficult to pierce the sky-barrier with either physical force or sorcery.

Quilbion dispersed the nark he’d been holding, then looked down at the ground.

Hundreds of trees were running with their roots pulled up. They weren’t moving in formation—they were colliding with each other, toppling over in complete chaos.

Trees with broken trunks became stubby and crawled across the ground. Trees whose branches were tangled together and couldn’t separate ran in opposite directions before tumbling about.

Most of the trees had lost their leaves and were bare.

A forest with holes where the greenery had disappeared.

Quilbion watched the nark seeping out steadily.

Ten days had passed since he’d concretized the sorcery.

The nark hadn’t dried up. The nark transmitted through the cracks was increasing day by day.

The amount he could release at once was also gradually increasing.

Someday, couldn’t he fill the entire space beneath the sky-barrier with nark?

“I’m done!”

He shouted toward Winte on the dormitory rooftop below. His body that had been fixed at the point touching the sky-barrier dropped straight down.

Thud—he touched the ground.

After pulling out his ankles that had sunk into the earth, he leaped to the dormitory rooftop.

“When I touched it, it did tear. It looks like I’ll need a bit more time to completely slice through, though.”

“You’ll definitely be able to leave here. What matters is after you get out.”

Winte’s voice was like a spring breeze. A comfortable expression and relaxed posture. Plus deeply fragrant coffee.

“Today’s coffee is truly ideal. It’s the kind of coffee that almost reaches the first level.”

Winte savored the coffee while praising it extravagantly.

“Really? I brewed it the same way as usual.”

“It’s a fantastic collaboration of particles, molecules, and subtle temperature.”

A string of incomprehensible words. He just accepted it now. An eccentric who knew far too much.

Quilbion flicked his index finger. The trees that had been running around the dormitory charged toward the eastern sky-barrier.

“If I keep digging away at it, something will change.”

“When you have abundant resources, methods become simple. I’ll pray for good results.”

After a while, sounds came from the distance. The trees must be throwing themselves at the wall they couldn’t pass through.

Cloaked in nark, they kept pounding.

It was like scraping an iron gate with wooden skewers, but if they scraped for decades, wouldn’t a hole appear?

Time and nark were abundant anyway.

“What must that child be doing?”

Winte said.

“Who are you talking about?”

“Twella.”

“She must be staying still, too exhausted even to cry. That place is like that. A place where you can’t do anything.”

“When you saw it, you said there were flowers and a house.”

“There were. They quickly got covered in sand and disappeared though.”

“That child might rest briefly from exhaustion, but she’s not the type to give up. If she’d had a disposition to give up in the first place, she wouldn’t have saved you either.”

“Let’s stop with the depressing talk. It’s not like there’s a method available right now anyway.”

Foolish Twella. Thinking of that child made him irritable. Even though he’d worn down to the point of detachment from emotions, thinking of Twella standing blankly on the gray sand made his molars clench first.

“After I pull her out of there, I’m going to nag for about three years straight. That people shouldn’t be so good-hearted, that your own life is most important, that you should never commit the unprecedented idiocy of trusting someone and sacrificing yourself for them.”

“How verbose.”

“If you’d handled things cleanly, there’d be no reason to be pathetic.”

“I’ve said repeatedly that it couldn’t be helped.”

“And I say every time that ‘it couldn’t be helped’ is really fucking terrible.”

Both I and that child left in the gray world had greatly deviated from the flow of time.

How was Twella’s time flowing? In a monochrome world without sun or moon, where the passage of time couldn’t be gauged—could she maintain her sanity?

Quilbion rather hoped Twella had gone mad.

That she’d lost her mind to the point where she couldn’t distinguish anything, so when he pulled her out in the distant future, it would feel like a brief nightmare had ended.

Spending time there alone while maintaining complete sanity was far too cruel.

Quilbion hadn’t been alone.

When he’d believed he’d survived alone, the hawk who was Twella’s close companion had approached him.

When he couldn’t see the future and felt lost, Winte had appeared at the cost of Twella’s sacrifice and helped.

That’s right.

I was living by trampling on Twella.

He’d been able to breathe because she existed as a stepping stone.

When he didn’t know, she’d been an object of resentment, and she too had wished to be cursed and forgotten.

But what could he do?

He’d found out.

Quilbion’s goal was no longer ‘survive’ but ‘pull that child out.’

Time? Method? Necessary resources?

Those things didn’t matter.

If the objective was clear, a way would emerge.

He’d become half-monster enough to make it possible.

He’d been able to smile even when facing ‘that woman,’ Sheryl. Though it had been her mental entity encountered in a crack rather than her main body, the important point was that he hadn’t been intimidated.

She’d gone from an existence he couldn’t dare look up at to a target he could overcome.

Everyone takes their first step that way.

“There are no more readable books now.”

Quilbion looked at the bookshelf Winte had summoned. They were books containing goblins’ secret transmissions, but only a few were decipherable.

“You said there were three ways to learn sorcery, right?”

“I did.”

“What’s the last method?”

“Receiving it.”

“Do I have to beg? Asking you to give me a sorcery you’ve mastered?”

“That’s right.”

Quilbion tilted his head.

“It’s binding the essence of sorcery to objects to make sorcery books, isn’t it?”

“Correct.”

“Is there much difference from that? It seems the same—extracting and passing on sorcery by one’s own will, just with the process omitted.”

“Concretizing and binding the essence involves intervention of the mental world—in other words, consuming mental power. It’s also drawing upon one’s own destiny. Though it’s connected to lifespan and your life shortens, you don’t die immediately.”

Winte lifted his coffee cup.

“But passing it on means you definitely die. Whether it’s crude sorcery or powerful sorcery containing strong Karma, the moment you willingly pass it on, the one who passed it dissipates. It’s the tragedy of goblins who’ve gained imperfect form. At least the Human Tribe doesn’t die from passing on skills they’ve learned, right?”

Quilbion crossed his arms and smiled.

“Getting sorcery through the third method seems impossible. What goblin would offer their sorcery along with their life? For whose benefit?”

“There are some.”

“There are?”

When Winte gestured, something dropped to the floor with a thud.

It was a frozen corpse.

It resembled a human in form, but had three eyes.

“This goblin passed on sorcery to me and died. I ended up freezing and storing it before the body decomposed.”

“Did you threaten to torture it to death if it didn’t pass it on?”

“Well, I could obtain it that way, but not this one.”

Winte tapped the frozen corpse with his foot. Cracks formed in the corpse, then it split into several pieces.

The fragmented corpse melted instantly and disappeared without a trace.

“‘Find a spiritual successor to carry on the lineage of sorcery.’ That was the covenant I made with this one.”

“Spiritual successor?”

“The sorcery this one created by offering its life and sorcery is precisely—”

Winte pointed east.

“Trees Run?”

Quilbion thought of the trees that must be ramming the sky-barrier.

“You awakened to the essence and made it completely yours. It was impossible for me.”

“It wasn’t such a complex sorcery. You would have awakened to it easily, Winte.”

“‘Awakening.’ I truly hate that profound word. I wanted to dig into the essence of sorcery too. What exactly is sorcery? I understand it conceptually, but embodying it and making it mine is a different story.”

Winte formed a hand seal with his left hand and snapped his fingers with his right.

The blue sky turned red.

Waves made of fire covered the sky.

Conflagration that would devour everything.

Just looking at it felt like his eyes were burning, so Quilbion gently lowered his eyelids.

“Sitpin Yellow Form art. It’s simple sorcery that creates cooking fire.”

“What food would you cook with that? It’s fire that looks like it would burn up the entire world.”

“It took the form of sorcery, but the nark I used doesn’t even come close to your toenails. My body isn’t suited for moving nark in the first place. By your standards, I’ve struggled for over 600 years, and this is barely this level.”

Winte pointed at his own body.

Quilbion looked at Winte with his discernment eye.

He could see rippling nark.

In the past, he’d thought it was a tremendous amount, but perhaps because he’d witnessed Sheryl and Twella directly, it seemed moderately impressive.

“That’s the result of 600 years?”

“Yes. It was the first time I’d tried so hard. And yet, I’m at this level.”

“Then that……”

He looked carefully at the fire covering the sky. A mass of pure power. It looked similar to the small sun Winte had created.

“Wielding nark that responds to will to construct a power system, then summoning mana there to induce phenomena. That’s the concept of sorcery. But what I use is embarrassing to call sorcery.”

“Right, it is. That’s not sorcery—it’s…… brutish power pretending to be sorcery.”

Winte’s lips jutted out.

The fellow who wouldn’t bat an eye even if cursed to his face.

“Power that deviated from the Designer’s intentions. That’s why I can’t handle it. I’ve only come this far thanks to the great Sitpin’s help.”

He’d wondered why it was the great Sitpin, but now he understood.

“Sitpin processed what even the monster the Designer created couldn’t understand into a form that could be understood?”

“Exactly. Both the philosophy of leaving behind sorcery and the flexibility of sorcery that transcends form originated from Sitpin. That one can be called great, comparable even to the first of those things.”

Winte clapped lightly.

The bookshelf with sorcery books was engulfed in flames. White flames erased the bookshelf from the world.

Screams that made his ears tingle burst out from between the books that had become ash.

Quilbion watched the various nark dispersing into the atmosphere.

“Since they’re sorceries you can’t learn, there’s no need to store them. I didn’t make a covenant either.”

“I’ve heard that word ‘covenant’ a few times—it’s not just a simple promise, is it?”

“A contract that can be made between lives, capable of imposing the strongest constraints.”

“Strong constraints?”

“It’s simple. If you break it, you die. Even I can’t break covenants. Because I’d die. I could break one if I resolved to die, but I still have many coffees I haven’t collected.”

“You’d die? Even though you’re an existence close to a god?”

“That’s what a covenant is. That’s why you shouldn’t make them carelessly, but they’re often used when receiving sorcery transfers.”

Winte reached his hand toward the sky.

The raging flames vanished in an instant.

Stars appeared densely in the blackened sky.

“Some goblins come to have dreams that transcend their karma. Sitpin’s influence is significant, but separately from that, there are also those who awaken on their own.”

“Like humans?”

“Not just humans. All intelligent beings the Designer created. Ironically, goblins who weren’t fashioned by the Designer come to resemble the Designer’s creations. You know well what that means.”

“It means get lost from this land—we’ll be the masters.”

Quilbion shook his head while looking at the stars emitting gloomy light.