Author: 年终 / Nian Zhong
Translator: Kinky || https://kinkytranslations.com/
Chapter 163: Fatal Sunlight
Myss actually hesitated for an instant.
In the past, he would have agreed with absolute confidence. But with Salaar as an added variable, he still felt the risk was somewhat high.
Fortunately, Lord Archdemon had never entertained the idea of backing down. I’ll need to adjust the distribution of magic again in a moment, Myss thought cautiously.
“All right. Move quickly and try not to drag it out.” Myss muttered, “I forgive you, bastard.”
Salaar smiled, and some color returned to his face. “But if you stubbornly refused to forgive me, you could completely control me while I had no magic.”
“You talk too much.” Myss looked away. “That would be boring, all right?”
He had discovered a few things during his earlier fight with the mutated Salaar.
Salaar had to be Salaar. A Salaar with nothing but reason was no good. A Salaar consumed by desire was no good… and a Salaar who could no longer be his enemy was no good either.
Myss couldn’t explain exactly where the difference lay. He only knew that a “flawed” Salaar made him uncomfortable.
Salaar looked up at him with gentle eyes, just as he had throughout the past three hundred years.
He lightly pressed his fingers to his lips and blew Myss a kiss. “Thank you.”
…Myss had no idea what he was thanking him for.
The next instant, brilliant golden light tore through the darkness.
The sudden blaze stung Lawler’s eyes. He shrank back and clutched the head tightly against himself. Faced with such an imposing attack, the head wore only indifference.
Myss could more or less understand that confidence. Only pure spirit existed inside this space, which meant methods that destroyed flesh were completely useless.
As long as “Marcela’s” desire to survive remained strong enough and her spirit refused to collapse, they couldn’t truly destroy her.
She even possessed the thin hope of “lasting until Myss exhausted his magic,” forcing them all back into dangerous reality.
And the only thing capable of defeating a spirit was mental magic.
Myss’s eyes widened. It was rare for Salaar to use mental magic without reservation right in front of him. Of course, Myss intended to watch closely.
Unlike Tass’s storm-like assault, this magic didn’t look aggressive at all. Beautiful light illuminated the small patch of sand, making people instinctively lower their guard.
Reflected in Myss’s crimson eyes were streams of magic as fine as spring rain. They gently wrapped around Lawler and Marcela like swaddling cloth woven from light.
Within that swaddling cloth, Myss saw familiar magical fluctuations. After undergoing his own mutation once, Salaar seemed to have learned a little of “Marcela’s” technique, allowing this spell to amplify emotions. The magic turned into threads and began entering Marcela’s head through her eyes, nose, ears, and mouth.
Following the flow of magic, Myss secretly slipped one magical thread inside.
…And was nearly drowned by the emotions that surged up all at once.
Myss had examined the memories of many enemies before, but he had never paid attention to the emotions inside those memories. Salaar’s magic was completely opposite to his. Only pure feeling flowed toward him.
If the Sea of Concepts was an almost infinite library, then the spiritual world was more like a vast garden, with memories serving only as the soil gripped tightly by the roots.
Myss forced his mind to remain steady and continued probing.
“Marcela” was similar to him and possessed very few emotions resembling those of humans. Her spirit was overgrown with pain, fear, and hatred, filling it with darkness.
Myss barely touched them before those vine-like emotions wrapped themselves around his mind. He hurriedly pulled back. Even if useful memories were hidden inside, he had no desire to be affected by emotions that dangerous.
He shifted his attention toward the area illuminated by golden light.
Within that decaying darkness, the patch of gold stood out vividly.
It illuminated one faint, fragile emotion. It was so weak that compared with those massive negative emotions resembling ancient trees, it couldn’t even be called a seedling. At this moment, Salaar’s magic surrounded it, as though bathing it in sunlight.
Myss cautiously moved closer and touched that area.
For a fleeting moment, Myss had no idea how to define the emotion he felt. It was far too insubstantial. All he could do was silently enter the memory connected to it.
It had begun growing the first time “Marcela” met Lawler.
Just a boring human.
Marcela’s emotions had been completely undisturbed at first. Carrying black wounds that were unhealable, she could only feed on magic as a momentary respite from the pain. She knew she was slowly dying.
Myss could sense her attitude toward humans. It wasn’t deliberate contempt or dislike, but sheer indifference.
A human living through the Night Scourge and starving to death probably wouldn’t care how a stray dog felt either. Most of the time, it would only become food.
That was what Marcela thought at first.
She would eat him, just as she had done countless times before. This human came from a low background and had nothing remarkable about his abilities, except for the naturally rich magic in his body. He was ideal food, with almost no risk involved.
She allowed the foolish human to escort her home and prepared to act.
“Goodness, your house is really messy,” he said in surprise. “The bread on the plate has gone moldy. It’ll make you sick.”
No, in truth she didn’t actually need this so-called food. It was merely a “prop” used to maintain her disguise.
Marcela silently watched the man who had willingly walked into hell and was just about to continue…
“I’ll help you clean,” he said. “You deserve a better life.”
His tone was utterly sincere. His eyes shone brightly, still every bit as naive and foolish.
…Marcela stopped.
Perhaps she wasn’t in as much pain at the moment. Perhaps she wanted a better “disguise.” Perhaps she also wanted to see what the room would look like if it were less terrible… She wasn’t entirely sure.
I’ll kill him next time, she thought.
Lawler happily ran around the house. He cleaned the cobweb-covered ceiling and the furniture buried beneath dust and trash. The moldy bread vanished from the plate, replaced by clean fruits and vegetables.
Sweat covered his unremarkable face, his lips slightly pursed in concentration. Only after confirming that the room looked fit for a person to live in did Lawler smile.
“Doesn’t it look completely different?” he said sincerely. “Trust me, ma’am. Everything will get better.”
Marcela examined the transformed room.
She had thought she had already forgotten what the place looked like. In truth, she didn’t know how the real Marcela had maintained it.
When that woman was devoured, she had caused an enormous commotion and stubbornly fought until the very last moment.
At the time, she… It had been completely unable to understand. That woman clearly had little desire to survive, and no one lived nearby. Her death couldn’t warn anyone.
Why had she made herself suffer so horribly?
Later, when the human called Gentry visited, it vaguely understood a little.
Because the real Marcela had struggled desperately before her death, it didn’t dare touch Gentry at all, afraid of drawing the human world’s suspicion.
But Marcela was already dead. Even if it spared Gentry, a dead person could gain nothing from it.
…Lawler was just as incomprehensible as Marcela.
Marcela shifted her gaze and watched Lawler leave.
She had believed that would be the last time they met. But only a few days later, Lawler appeared again. Caught off guard, Marcela had no choice but to toss the moldy vegetables and meat into a barrel and pretended she had finished eating them.
Lawler brought fresh food, even though she had no need for it. Still, to avoid trouble, she accepted it anyway.
This human had delivered himself to her again. Should she eat him?
She could tolerate the filthy nest, but she wouldn’t eat rotting remains of plants or carcasses of animals. This human offered her little benefit and merely brought noise and risk.
Still, a clean room truly was slightly better than a filthy one. The clean air smelled pleasant. It reminded her of that unreachable thing called “hope.”
“The weather is nice today,” he said. “You’re looking a little better too. That’s great.”
She numbingly watched the energetic young man.
This person behaved exactly like the real Marcela. They offered things on their own initiative without gaining anything in return.
How curious. She decided to understand this mystery before killing him… It was a necessary lesson.
Yes, she had merely encountered a puzzle capable of distracting her. That was enough.
I’ll kill him after I figure it out, she thought.
Time and again, the wounded disaster victim stroked the stray dog’s head and ultimately didn’t turn it into meat for the cooking pot.
And so the seasons turned.
…Finally, on a certain winter day, it was no longer Lawler alone who disturbed her. Another human came with him, a pathetic scrap whose magic was barely worth mentioning.
The scrap shouted excitedly about something, roughly meaning that he intended to drag Lawler away. That would be a fine ending. It fitted the logic of the human world perfectly. She should let events proceed and return to her previous solitary existence.
But when she saw the extinguished look in Lawler’s eyes, she felt faintly uncomfortable. Perhaps because her question still hadn’t been answered, she told herself.
“He counts as half my student. Leave him alone,” she said.
Indeed, she simply… wasn’t accustomed to giving up, nor returning to that blank endurance before. Afterward, she removed a small piece of her true body, diluted the power within it, and fed it to Lawler.
Lawler happily ate it without asking anything.
With that, this fragile human wouldn’t be polluted by her power and wouldn’t see her true form.
Once she solved the puzzle of Lawler, she would still kill him. Until then, he had to stay alive.
“Lady Marcela.” He addressed her by the name of a dead person. “I… can I call you Teacher?”
She thought for a moment. “Yes.”
Nothing would change anyway.
As days and nights passed, Lawler visited with increasing frequency. He smiled happily at her, his basket always piled with fresh fruits and vegetables, even though he still hadn’t learned anything.
One day, she discovered that when Lawler said, “I have something to do tomorrow, so I’ll come the day after,” she remembered it.
But Lawler didn’t appear that day. She stood by the window all day. Fog rose among the trees, hiding everything from view.
The next morning, Lawler arrived early and hurriedly apologized, saying his uncle had suddenly asked him to cover a shift. She gave a small acknowledgment and concealed the confusion in her voice.
She had lost nothing so why was he apologizing?
On another day, she suddenly remembered that Lawler had once said he had learned how to make syrup pies and would bring some over.
She walked to the window and looked once again toward the forest shrouded in thin mist. She had remembered many unnecessary things.
But sometimes, only sometimes, she would forget that the puzzle existed. She would even forget the wounds that were destined never to heal.
Every day, when the fog was about to disperse, Marcela would always stand by the window.
Myss wasn’t sure what that vague feeling was.
But under the influence of Salaar’s magic, the emotion began growing wildly like weeds. It covered the deep-rooted pain, the hatred covered in thorns, and the despair that blocked out the sky.
At that moment, Myss even forgot the exhaustion of sustaining the black space. He merely watched in bewilderment.
Was Salaar really planning to play the saint and redeem this hopeless thing?
Suddenly, the sunlight illuminating the dim spirit vanished.
The golden light ignited the spreading emotion, along with the pain, despair, and hatred wrapped inside it. All of them turned to ash.
Magnificent golden fire burned through Marcela’s spiritual world like an empty daylight.
…So that was it.
Myss had once thought that when Salaar “killed” his companions, he had simply erased their emotions. After all, Salaar had once sealed human emotions right in front of him with apparent ease.
But now that he thought about it, that hadn’t been true killing. To completely kill a heart, one had to force its softest part to grow and magnify it. Then destroy it all at once.
A howl of absolute despair exploded beside Myss’s ear.
Myss hurriedly withdrew his strand of magic. He abandoned his observation and focused entirely on “Marcela.”
The head in Lawler’s arms was twisted in agony, all traces of its former composure gone. Even when Tass had pierced her body again and again, she had never suffered this much.
Lawler frantically stroked the head. He looked at the golden light surrounding them in panic, despair faintly appearing on his face.
“Teacher…”
Salaar slowly walked in front of Lawler, who was kneeling on the ground. He lowered himself onto one knee and looked at the screaming head.
He lowered his gaze, his face devoid of any triumphant joy.
“That puzzle,” he said. “Did you find the answer?”
The head didn’t respond. Gravely wounded, she knew she was destined to die. Perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow. She only wanted to live one moment longer, even if that moment was filled with pain.
She didn’t want to die. She refused to die. If she were forced to die today, she would set the fire burning and incinerate the ending she despised.
But why had that foolish stray dog come running back again?
It knew nothing. It understood nothing. It merely circled around her anxiously, making her unable to resist loosening her hand and stroking its head… Even though she would gain nothing from it.
Within the golden light, the screaming stopped.
She had imagined countless endings, but at the final moment, all she remembered was a small window.
For one instant, just one, she forgot to fear death.
The head burst into brilliant golden flame as she slowly turned her head and looked at him one final time.
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