Author: 年终 / Nian Zhong
Translator: Kinky || https://kinkytranslations.com/
Chapter 48: Origin
Several days earlier, in the instant when the Perfected Creation attacked him—
Salaar could feel an outside force tugging at his mind.
Fortunately, he really was exceptional in mental magic. After a moment of discernment, he confirmed that this wasn’t mind control, but pure temptation—it wrapped his heart in agony, trying to induce him to abandon life and become a living specimen named “Salaar.”
You could have thought of more. You could have done better. You could have saved more people…
Every one of your mistakes is steeped in blood and lives lost. You know perfectly well the true burden of what you carry…
You have to satisfy humanity’s endless expectations. Your every action has long been bound by an endless web of rules. Your heart does nothing but constantly produce flaws…
Old wounds split open all at once. Regrets long sunk to the bottom surged up, nearly tearing Salaar’s thoughts apart.
Of course Salaar could endure this kind of pain. What a joke—Myss was right there beside him. There was no way he would just leave that guy alone.
But was that really the best option?
If this pain continued, his cognitive efficiency would drop drastically.
And if the attack failed completely, the owner of the divine realm would certainly become highly vigilant toward them. They had only just arrived and had very little intelligence. The situation was far too passive… and if Myss died here, things would become truly troublesome.
What should he do to lower the enemy’s guard while maximizing their safety?
At that time, Salaar instinctively looked toward Myss. His view was blocked by a corner, and he only saw the shadow of long hair.
That long hair was tied with the scarf he had given him. Sunlight brushed across it, and its shadow looked like a small snake nestled there.
Under the maddening lash of mental torment, Salaar touched his nose and smiled.
“You chose to attack me because Myss is too hard to get at with that temperament, didn’t you? So I’m being underestimated.”
He murmured, “In that case, you’d better not complain if I take advantage of that.”
“…Everything for the sake of ending the Night Scourge.”
And with that, Salaar smiled and gave up resisting.
He willingly abandoned his own body and transferred his consciousness into the little snake Knife.
“My body has been taken over by something. It’s imitating my behavior. You absolutely cannot trust it.”
Salaar lied.
In truth, he knew better than anyone what he would become without emotion—
“Salaar” would never become some perfect collectible. He would only become a cruel, pure strategic machine.
That way, “Salaar” would take the initiative to control Myss, and Myss would direct complete hostility toward “Salaar.” At the same time, because of the contract, Myss would be unable to attack “Salaar.”
That degree of restraint should be enough to dispel the divine realm owner’s suspicion.
Once again, he had bought them time to investigate.
…And now, their investigation was over.
Drip. Drip.
Blood streamed down from two hollow eye sockets. Soon flesh churned within those empty cavities, and a fresh pair of human eyes regrew there.
On the blood-smeared face, Myss found those lapis-lazuli eyes.
“So you understand me that well.”
A familiar voice spoke.
The voice was right, and the infuriating tone was even more unmistakable.
Myss wrinkled his nose, tore open his abdomen again, and pulled out Knife wrapped in blood amber. Under the corrosion of his power, cracks spread all over the blood amber.
Before the blood even had a chance to spill out, the wound had already been healed by Salaar.
“At first, you really did fool me. But something as annoying as you just didn’t feel like it could be reproduced that easily.”
Myss casually tossed Knife back to Salaar. In his hand, the little snake transformed into a sword of light.
“Utter nonsense!” Myss hissed.
“That’s only the most basic kind of arithmetic.” Salaar smiled.
Then he turned toward the expressionless Perfected Creation. “Also, stop trying to mentally attack me. It won’t work—”
In the next instant, he had already flashed to the Perfected Creation’s side.
“—The thing I’ve been best at my entire life is keeping my eyes locked on Myss and forcing myself to go on living.”
The sword of light stabbed toward the Perfected Creation’s heart. The latter shifted sideways and retreated nimbly, only to run straight into Myss’s annihilation magic—its entire head vanished in an instant.
But it didn’t fall. Great quantities of blood amber rapidly condensed and grew a new head all over again.
“How is it still able to heal itself?” Myss complained, springing away and narrowly dodging the twins’ pincer attack.
“That isn’t my magic, that’s Its power!”
Salaar shouted back. Two cold flashes nearly severed his arm—Mr. Anti and the Perfected Creation had attacked simultaneously, their magic thin as cicada wings and sharp as blades.
Combined with the Perfected Creation’s almost inhuman mobility, Salaar couldn’t land even a single strike.
Even more outrageously, the Perfected Creation simultaneously raised its other hand, and at once the surroundings blurred. It seemed to be some sort of visual distortion spell. The scenery in his field of vision warped chaotically, leaving Myss feeling dizzy and disoriented.
Just as expected of a more “mature” god. Even with the two of them pressing it together, they could only barely force an even match. The Perfected Creation’s abilities were too troublesome. They needed to destroy its “collections” first.
Myss immediately redirected his attack toward Mr. Anti, intending to break them one by one.
But the moment he moved, Iver and Danton stepped in front of Anti. Visual distortion magic and light magic activated at the same time, dazzling Myss so badly he couldn’t open his eyes.
Salaar let out an interested little hum.
Myss couldn’t care less about such trivialities. Since his vision was being interfered with, he raised his hand and wove sheets of black gauze into existence out of thin air.
The gauze fell like storm clouds about to burst. It drifted eerily through the air, wrapping around every moving target like burial shrouds—even Salaar himself—as annihilation magic attacked indiscriminately.
Salaar raised a golden defensive barrier to fend off the attacks. The Perfected Creation, meanwhile, instantly solidified all its collections and suppressed its own presence, allowing the black gauze to drift past in the gloom.
“It’s no use. That thing is wearing us down.”
The Dragon Fae sounded worried. “Its movements haven’t slackened for even a moment, and its reactions have no flaws at all. But we can get tired; we can lose focus… We have to finish this quickly. If it keeps going like this, there’s absolutely no way we’ll win…”
Smack!
In the middle of all the magic flying about, Myss still found the time to whack Tass on the head. “Shut up. Less useless chatter!”
With his vision in disarray, Myss simply closed his eyes and used the black gauze flying everywhere to sense the magic.
He couldn’t rely on a single sense… He had to feel its essence… understand “power” on a deeper level…
Myss’s bare feet stepped silently across the thick carpet as he spun and shifted, dodging attack after attack by the narrowest margin.
Lethal spells came at his face; sharp spikes aimed for his skull, yet Myss slipped past them all like a ghost.
He danced amid black gauze and wind blades, silently drawing closer to the Perfected Creation.
Salaar, meanwhile, pulled back to a safe distance.
He took the chance to preserve his strength while keeping his gaze fixed tightly on Myss, raising shields at the right moments. If the Perfected Creation dared concentrate too much, he immediately thrust out the sword of light, ensuring that it could never fully focus.
Three steps. Two steps. One step.
Following the magical currents, Myss cast off the Perfected and pursued the Perfected Creation like a curse. At last he caught a sliver of an opening and closed the distance directly.
The Perfected Creation raised a slicing spell and struck straight at Myss’s heart.
Myss should have dodged, but he only shifted slightly to the side.
In the next instant, his left shoulder and left arm were sliced clean away, and his heart was nearly split in half. Before the blood even had time to erupt, dazzling golden light descended from above and wrapped around Myss completely.
His severed limb hadn’t even begun to fall away before healing magic pushed it back into place.
The sudden burst of golden light was too strong. The Perfected Creation narrowed its eyes and reflexively paused for the briefest instant.
With his eyes closed, Myss wasn’t affected in the slightest. His right hand punched straight through the Perfected Creation’s chest.
Everything happened in a single instant. This game of chicken ended with Myss’s victory.
He caught hold of that beating heart. It was warm, wet, unmistakably a human heart.
As the “endpoint” of the divine realm, it gave off terrifying magical fluctuations, and it smelled exactly the same as monster-transformed Scintilla.
The scent of an Abnormal Fruit drifted out from the wound, and Myss instantly forgot the pain from before.
And yet—
Even with all his strength, he couldn’t pull the heart free.
Every wound his annihilation magic created was repaired at once by surging blood amber. He couldn’t just yank the whole thing out, and he couldn’t even smash it to pieces.
“I don’t like violence, nor am I as skilled at it as the two of you are.”
The Perfected Creation let out a soft sigh by his ear. “But I’m not so easy to destroy either, Mr. Myss.”
“Give up. All of this is—”
Smack!
Myss freed his other hand and also knocked the Perfected Creation on the head. “Shut up. You stop talking nonsense too!”
The Perfected Creation: “…”
It immediately realized something was wrong—after failing to strike decisively, Myss withdrew cleanly and wrapped the Perfected Creation’s heart in a layer of black gauze.
Pitch-black magic annihilated everything. It could keep repairing the wound, but it couldn’t remove that thing that consumed all things.
With his eyes closed, Myss flashed a provocative smile.
Got you.
His power was capable of much more than just annihilation.
From the black gauze spread countless tiny magical threads. They extended into the Perfected Creation’s body, once again imitating Mina’s pale red threads, and pierced into the Perfected Creation’s memories.
In an instant, everything about the Perfected Creation spread open before Myss, like a perfectly dissected corpse, or a tomb exposed to daylight.
But rather than calling them the Perfected Creation’s memories, it would be more accurate to call them the memories of that heart… More precisely, they were clearly the memories of Antis Crosien.
Without the slightest courtesy, Myss skipped over the man’s sorrowful childhood, skipped over the cyclical routine of his daily life, and went straight to the parts involving “Iver.”
The first meeting between Antis Crosien and Iver had taken place while Antis was investigating his father.
At the time, Antis wasn’t an employee of the Red Amber yet, while Iver had only just begun to rise to prominence in Semper.
Holding his father’s “list of sponsored individuals,” Antis went through the names one by one to confirm whether they were safe. And so, one morning, he “happened to encounter” Iver by the river.
The morning glow reddened the surface of the water. Iver hummed a tune, his brush racing freely across the canvas. Paint stained his handsome face and his loosely worn clothes.
Just looking at that sloppy state made Antis itch all over.
The man’s appearance was utterly careless, and his style of painting was equally controversial.
Most nobles liked the classic style: meticulous composition, pure colors, elegance. Iver, however, preferred bold smears of paint and free mixing of all kinds of colors.
Some said Iver’s use of color was especially daring, that his paintings made viewers feel as if they were standing inside the scene. Others condemned him, saying that it was outrageous to use mottled blue and green on human skin—“Just like lividity!” They sneered at his work.
“I remember your face!”
Iver seemed to have eyes in the back of his head, spotting Antis’s spying immediately. “You’re young Master Crosien! How has Lord Crosien been lately?”
“Thanks to his support, I’ve been able to keep painting until now. I just received an invitation from the Red Amber—come on, let’s have a drink!”
Antis looked at Iver’s paint-streaked clothes and instinctively wanted to refuse. But in order to investigate his father’s affairs, he hesitated a few seconds before forcing himself to agree.
…Very soon, Antis discovered that Iver was truly a strange person.
He was practically Antis’s polar opposite.
Iver was as free and unrestrained as his paintings. He could be very elegant, but his elegance was not the clockwork precision of a machine. It was more like the orderly arrangement of petals on a flower, carrying a strong sense of life.
As a taxidermist, you must grasp the most perfect moment of a living thing, his father had said.
And to understand such a moment, you must personally understand ‘perfection’,” His father had said.
…Yet when he looked at Iver, he couldn’t grasp that moment at all.
Antis sat quietly at the table, allowing Iver to guide the conversation. Somehow, even with someone as dull and silent as him, Iver could keep the atmosphere lively and comfortable. It was practically a kind of magic.
A server brought them sweet apple wine. Just as Iver was gesturing with his hands, the server moved too quickly and spilled the cup on the spot.
Wine soaked Iver’s chest. The young server froze in panic and turned pale instantly.
“Whoa, man, sorry about that. I was moving too much.”
Iver winked at the server and deliberately showed off the paint already on his clothes. “Let me tell you a little secret—I was just about to wash this anyway, so now it’ll pick up this lovely apple-wine scent!”
“Come, bring us another glass! This time we’ll both be more careful, all right?”
The server nodded in visible relief.
“…That was his responsibility.” After the server left, Antis frowned. “Indulging him like that does him no good.”
Iver laughed. “Come on, it’s not as if he injured me. Why ruin the mood of all three of us over a few silver shields? That would be the real waste. He’ll be more careful next time.”
“No. He’ll just think he got lucky.” Antis said, “Regret and pain are the staircase toward perfection. You should make sure he remembers this lesson.”
Iver stared, then burst out laughing. “Oh wow, young master, you really are strict.”
“How about thinking of it this way instead? Meeting me today was his good luck! Leave the staircase business for later—life ought to come with a few surprises.”
Antis looked at Iver in disapproval.
He didn’t understand Iver’s words, didn’t understand Iver’s laughter, and didn’t understand that entire overly casual way of thinking.
Would you also consider the sponsorship Father gave you a surprise of life? he thought, staring at the smiling, bright-eyed Iver.
I know Father. There’s no way he could appreciate your individualistic style. He only set his sights on your body. He wants to turn you into a specimen.
…And yet, people couldn’t deceive their own hearts.
Antis had no choice but to admit it: he really did like Iver’s smiling face.
After that, Iver invited Antis out for drinks every week.
Antis believed this was simply a matter of etiquette—a basic social method for maintaining friendship with the son of one’s sponsor.
Iver was always surrounded by all kinds of interesting people, packed together like a disorderly, flourishing flowerbed. There was no place for him there, and there never could be.
“I saw you at the Red Amber—you actually have your own private studio?”
During another gathering, Iver exclaimed, “And the specimens you make… gods, they look alive!”
“I’m not an employee of the Red Amber. I just cooperate with them occasionally.”
Antis replied in his usual stiff way.
“Oh—occasionally cooperate.” Iver laughed. “Let me watch the process sometime. I still have no idea how specimens are actually made.”
Antis fell silent.
His technique was clean and beautiful, the entire process flawless. But when he thought of the bloody fluids and the sharp medicinal smells, for some reason he didn’t want Iver to witness it.
“I’ll consider it.”
That was all he said in the end.
Iver seemed to understand the subtext. He merely looked at Antis for a long while and said nothing more on the matter.
Soon, those little gatherings with Iver became a fixed part of Antis’s schedule. Heaven knew where Iver found so many topics of conversation. He could chatter endlessly to a block of wood like Antis without the least sign of boredom.
And Antis also discovered that Iver enjoyed teasing him more and more.
At every gathering, Iver would deliberately bring some bizarre present—bouquets made of socks, tiny kittens sculpted out of cat fur, or even an actual living puppy.
“You’re wound way too tight, Anti. Come on, smile.” Iver would say, “You deserve to relax more. Ideally, you should even try messing something up once in a while.”
Utterly incomprehensible.
Antis accepted the gifts unhappily anyway, then responded with brand-new painting tools, wool fingerless gloves, and a pile of complaints about the puppy.
Of course, he never told Iver that he only dared keep the dog outside. If Father discovered it, he would certainly kill it.
To be honest, Antis had considered giving it away. But the puppy licked at his fingers softly, looking up at him with wet eyes completely unlike those of a specimen, its nose repeatedly nudging his palm.
That look reminded him of Iver.
“From today on, your name is Pinecone.”
Looking at the puppy’s pinecone-colored fur, Anti declared it just so.
…That was the last gift he ever received from Iver.
The cause was simple: Antis discovered that his father had selected his next sacrifice—
His father had chosen Iver.
The instant he realized it, his mind blanked for a rare full second.
Was it because they had grown too close? Or because Iver had gradually become known, making him harder to get at?
Antis couldn’t determine the reason. He only knew that…
He could no longer investigate in an orderly, step-by-step manner. A black killing intent surged up all at once.
He had to kill his father as soon as possible, even if it stained him as a murderer. This wasn’t even a question worth weighing. It was simply a plan that had to be carried out.
—Myss skipped through this memory quickly.
He already knew what came next. Antis met Tass and hired him to kill his father.
After that, Antis should have been free. And yet, judging from what they had seen before, even after killing his father, Antis’s friendship with Iver hadn’t lasted much longer.
So what had driven Antis to seek help everywhere for this “not especially close” friend, to the point that it drew in V.O.R.?
Myss skillfully manipulated the magical threads, calling up the memory he wanted.
The origin of the “Perfected Creation” had to be hidden there.
The author has something to say:
Myss: Rather than reflect on myself, I’d rather blame other people! Dragon Fae, shut up! Perfected Creation, shut up! I definitely won’t lose! [cat paw]
…Salaar doesn’t need to shut up, though. If Salaar shut up, that would be no fun.
Salaar: [good]
The Archdemon’s fighting style has evolved again, and he’s gotten first-hand information too, hasn’t he, Mr. Hero?
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