Author: 年终 / Nian Zhong

Translator: Kinky || https://kinkytranslations.com/

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Chapter 16: Pathology of the Mutation

The croutons were still in their original paper bag; a small portion had been eaten by Salaar.

Myss suddenly thought of the two bowls of cranberry soup that Salaar had knocked over not long ago. Mina might have used the same trick: the person who gave him the croutons was actually someone else, and she simply replaced that person’s image with “Mina”.

Thinking it over, every time Mina appeared there was food nearby. Even if there wasn’t, she would remind them to eat.

Could it be that “Mina” needed to use food to influence others?

It wouldn’t be hard to test. He still had croutons in hand. He only needed to find a human to try them on.

Hailey… Hmm, not Hailey. The girl is still somewhat useful.

What about the supervisor? No. He had already swallowed his pride to wear this outfit. If it affected the Summoning Ritual, that would be shooting himself in the foot. And Myss was certain Salaar would give him trouble.

Then—

“Is there any scum around here, the kind you would gladly see dead?” Myss asked Hailey.

Hailey froze for a few seconds. “You always like to ask very particular questions.”

“Is there or not?” Myss repeated.

“If I have to name someone, it would be Barlow the Cripple.”

Hailey still answered. She tightened her too-youthful face, her eyes full of contempt. “Barlow is a pervert who likes children. Several of my friends—boys and girls alike—were molested by him when they were little.”

“Two street kids also died at his hands. He said they broke into his house to steal and he accidentally strangled them. My uncle was furious. Those two were always well-behaved, and Barlow’s house had nothing but a pile of rotten straw! Pah, everyone knows what really happened.”

As she spoke, she grew more emotional. The long-tailed chickadee on her head fluffed its feathers and grew even rounder.

As usual, Myss let her words go in one ear and out the other. His mind sifted out only one piece of information: it didn’t matter if Barlow died.

“Where’s Barlow?” Myss asked.

Even Hailey, slow on the uptake, sensed the problem. “Are you planning to…?”

“Where’s Barlow?” Myss ignored her question.

“Sir, Barlow is a big man, and he’s always drunk.” Hailey was a little frightened. “The soldiers don’t really care about disputes in the Lower City. You’d better not provoke him.”

“Mm,” Myss said. “Tell me where Barlow is.”

……

When she realized Myss was set on finding Barlow, Hailey still told him the place. Out of a certain stubbornness, she also insisted on coming along.

“The streets in the Lower City are a mess. You’ll definitely get lost if you go alone. That would be dangerous,” she said with a strained smile. “And there are people there you can’t afford to provoke. You are not yet familiar with Rosha…”

Her fingers twisted the hem of her clothes. She seemed to regret having brought up Barlow at all.

Naturally, Myss couldn’t care less about such details.

While Salaar was away, Myss changed out of the cumbersome costume and back into a practical ranger outfit. Seeing that he carried no weapon, Hailey quietly breathed a sigh of relief.

She still didn’t quite understand why Myss brought along that half bag of croutons.

The Lower City wasn’t very large, yet Myss felt as if they had walked for a long time.

As they went deeper, the buildings on both sides of the road lost their color and turned withered and dilapidated. They looked more like the remains of houses than actual houses.

Many doors and windows had been nailed shut with boards. Hailey told him there were corpses of the victims that died from the “strange disease”. Those eerie bodies hung suspended in midair, and not even mages could remove them, so the soldiers had boarded the places up.

Further in, even the cover of buildings disappeared.

Most of the walls had collapsed, and the roofs were half gone. The living and the dead lay together by the roadside, and those bizarre meat cocoons hung brazenly in the sunlight.

Myss was strikingly handsome, and Hailey was young. The two of them drew every eye in that filthy neighborhood. Many damp, greasy stares clung to their heels, trying to trip them up with sheer attention.

Amid the malicious whispers, Hailey held her breath and walked close to Myss.

Fortunately, their destination wasn’t far ahead. There was a tavern here as well. There was no signboard, no servers, and only grimy casks and swill full of dead flies.

Compared with the Hammer Tavern, this was at best a “watering trough”. The air reeked of sweat and urine. Even so, the men gulped their liquor and laughed hoarsely.

Myss stopped.

The men in the tavern naturally noticed them. Whistles sounded again, interspersed with filthy greetings.

“All right, before it gets dark, let us go back,” Hailey whispered, sneaking a look at Myss’s face. “I-I know you want to punish Barlow. But you see how it is around here…”

“Which one is Barlow?” Myss asked the drunks.

Another shrill whistle, and the drunks roared with laughter.

“Ha ha, Barlow, your little sweetheart is looking for you.”

“Did you change your tastes? These two are too old for you.”

“That pretty boy looks like that, so what if he is older—”

“Who?” Amid the laughter, a hulking man with bloodshot eyes swayed to his feet and squinted at Myss. “Who are you, and what do you want with me?”

Myss sprang like a leopard. In an instant he landed in front of Barlow and shoved a fistful of croutons into his mouth.

The tavern fell silent. No one moved.

They didn’t know whether to marvel at Myss’s skill or to be baffled by his inexplicable act. Yet when they saw Myss lift Barlow like a chicken, they wisely kept quiet.

Myss was under one meter eighty, while Barlow was close to one meter ninety, yet he was able to grab the front of Barlow’s shirt with ease and hauled him up into the air.

Barlow instinctively swallowed the croutons.

Myss: “How do you feel?”

Barlow: “……” How should he feel? Was the stuff poisoned?

Seeing that Barlow showed no particular reaction, Myss grunted and focused on observing his Magibase.

Barlow’s Magibase was hidden on the right side of his chest, symmetrical to the heart, though the sizes didn’t really match. Judging by the shape, it seemed to be a fly.

Myss was more focused than he had ever been. He felt carefully for the fly buried in flesh and finally sensed a faint wrongness.

Barlow’s Magibase was a little loose.

Myss had noticed that for both him and Salaar, their magic and their flesh were completely integrated, like milk and flour baked into a cake.

Other humans were more like sandwich cookies. The “Magibase filling” and the “body cookie” had fused to a degree yet could still be separated in the end.

A similar situation was appearing on Barlow.

A pale red filament of magic slipped out of the croutons. It bored into Barlow’s flesh, delicately breaking the points of adhesion and trying to slice the Magibase away in one piece.

Unfortunately, it was far too feeble, so the process crawled along. What if he sped it up?

Myss split off a trace of pitch-black magic, turned it into hundreds of fine threads, and sent them into Barlow’s mouth and nose.

At once, patches of pitch-black necrosis bloomed around Barlow’s mouth and nostrils, and a blackened half of his tongue dropped out. Myss’s magic didn’t devour him outright, but the slow corrosion looked even more terrifying, as if an invisible swarm of insects were gnawing him alive.

Barlow let out a scream no living thing should make and thrash frantically. However, Myss’s grip was like an iron clamp. No matter how Barlow jerked and writhed, Myss’s arm didn’t even tremble.

It was his first time controlling his strength like this, and he wasn’t very practiced at suppressing the annihilating power. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Barlow stayed alive.

His pitch-black magic had already reached the Magibase. Myss mimicked that pale red filament and quickly severed the connections between Barlow and the Magibase.

All at once the air filled with the smell of baked flatbread. As the cutting went on, the aroma grew stronger.

“Bastard, stop,” Myss heard the Magibase fly buzz in a wail. “No, no… Mommy, it hurts…”

With the keening, the pale red filament became strangely active.

No sooner had Myss cut the last connection than the pale red thread sprang up, wrapped the Magibase fly completely, and writhed without stopping. In a few seconds the Magibase was gone without a trace.

At the same time the smell of baked flatbread vanished too, leaving only a faint aftertaste.

The pale red filament stretched out again and multiplied into a dozen or so threads. Three or four snaked out of Barlow’s mouth and crawled into a nearby cask, while the rest disappeared into thin air.

The pale red magic was too weak. Myss’s power hadn’t yet recovered. He focused for quite a while and still couldn’t make out where the vanished magic had gone.

Before he knew it, only dead silence remained around him. Myss finally pulled his attention back to the present.

Barlow in his hand had mutated.

He had gone still and was floating in midair, turned into a strange meat cocoon identical to Covington’s. Black traces of Myss’s corrosive magic still marred his skin.

From the moment Myss hauled Barlow up, only two minutes had passed.

Myss shifted his gaze, and the corrosion marks spread with speed. In a single instant the cocoon turned jet black from top to bottom and was annihilated before everyone’s eyes.

There were no screams and no commotion. People were so shocked by this nightmarish development that they hardly dared breathe.

Beside Myss, Hailey had fallen to the floor.

The girl’s lips trembled; her expression caught between terror and daze. Instinct told her to run, yet she tried to convince herself that “Myss is not a bad person,” so she froze in place in miserable awkwardness.

Clatter. The tavern keeper’s ladle hit the floor, like a thunderclap.

Myss blinked and flexed his wrist.

“This is… truly interesting.”

His voice was soft, yet very clear. “Don’t you think so?”

As he spoke, he lifted his head and looked toward the broken roof not far away.

Two figures were standing there.

One of them was Salaar, as expected.

Myss knew this old adversary. Salaar wasn’t someone you could simply shake off. Not long after they left the inn, he had followed in silence.

Before using Barlow as a test case, Myss had specifically checked for Salaar’s presence. Since the great hero didn’t plan to heroically save the wretch, that meant he had tacitly agreed to help clean up afterward.

Salaar looked at Myss in silence, his expression dark and unreadable.

The other figure was the bird-beaked demon. He stood just as quietly, his beak turned toward where Barlow had been.

A crow alighted at his feet and gave a soft caw.

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The author has something to say:

Don’t expect too much humanity from Myss.

He is, in every sense, a pure nonhuman, not some misunderstood good guy. Salaar’s hostility towards him is justified; the title “archenemies” isn’t a joke…

In short, this is something Mr. Hero will have to resolve personally.

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