Author: 年终 / Nian Zhong
Translator: Kinky || https://kinkytranslations.com/
Chapter 7: A Strange Scent
Myss was shaken awake by Salaar.
When he opened his eyes, the caravan had just stopped at the city gate. The caravan only took them as far as the gate of Rosha; everyone had to pass the entry inspection independently.
Rosha’s city walls were high, with wilted weeds growing from the cracks. The sun had just set, and the bluish-gray stone merged with the shadows, turning dim and indistinct, its power to intimidate dropping sharply.
Something must have died nearby as the top of the walls were packed with crows. Their hoarse cries were incessant, setting people’s nerves on edge.
Kai said his goodbyes first and trudged off, dragging his suitcases with difficulty. Before leaving, he remembered to recommend the best-value inn in the city.
Salaar took a “Resolve to Elope” pill, then handed one to Myss and motioned for him to swallow it.
“The medicine is fine. I checked it,” he said.
“Why should I take it?” Myss asked warily. He suspected Kai was a swindler. At least to his eyes, Salaar’s presence hadn’t diminished at all.
“The Karns family is trouble. They will not let ‘me’ go so easily.”
Salaar didn’t explain much. “It’s best if we’re not remembered by the guards. If only I hide, the guards will remember your face all the more clearly and that will indirectly implicate me.”
Myss offered a very sincere suggestion. “Then allow me to gouge out your eyeballs. I guarantee no one will recognize you.”
Salaar: “Brilliant. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Excellent. You can handle all the socializing and odd jobs next, and I’ll only heal my eyes when absolutely necessary…”
He hadn’t finished speaking when Myss gulped down the “Resolve to Elope”.
Myss wasn’t sure what raspberries tasted like, but this stuff was actually kind of good.
……
While the effect lasted, Salaar headed to a bookstore first. In one go he picked out about ten books and, just to be safe, added a dictionary.
As long as you did not touch the beautifully bound premium editions, ordinary books weren’t expensive. The tradeoff was that their pages were thin as a cicada’s wing, and the ink had a strange astringent smell.
“A Brief History of the World”
“The Foundations of Magic”
“One Hundred Common Spells”
“Eight Possible Causes of the Calamity Scourge”
……
A slave’s vocabulary could only handle trashy novels; the words in serious books were long and complex, making it difficult for Myss to decipher.
The only thing he could be sure of was that there were no books about the “Chaos Archdemon” or “Saint Salaar”. To be exact, there were none on the nearby shelves either.
While Salaar had his head down choosing books, Myss slipped off to a more distant corner and stopped in the storybook section.
Here, their names were written on covers and set alongside fairy tales and bedtime stories.
One book even had a stick-figure cover. In the picture, Salaar wore a red cloak and raised a comically large sword. His eyes were just two black ink dots, while a laughing mouth took up half his face, giving him a goofy look.
Myss opened “The Brave Salaar”.
It was a picture book for children, with only one or two lines on each page.
It told Myss that Salaar had been born into a happy commoner family and showed an extraordinary gift for battle from a young age, and that he was summoned by the king after he grew up.
For no clear reason, the king announced that Salaar was the only one who could defeat the Chaos Archdemon and Salaar inexplicably believed it. With a cloak on his back and a jeweled sword in hand, he rushed off all by himself toward the ferocious… er, Chaos Archdemon?
Myss frowned at the “Chaos Archdemon” in the picture. The author had no imagination and drew him as a bedsheet ghost, only extra large and extra black.
On the last page, Salaar’s sword pierced the Archdemon’s heart and ended the Night Scourge. He himself died under the Archdemon’s curse, a silly grin still plastered on his face.
Myss: “……”
Salaar’s three hundred years of being sealed were completely omitted, and the thousand-strong elite soldiers he led weren’t even mentioned. The story’s only “brave” element seemed to be that Salaar had the guts to believe the king’s nonsense.
What a mess! Even he felt Salaar didn’t deserve that.
“Are you buying that book?” a gentle woman’s voice sounded beside him.
Myss turned and saw a woman in her thirties with a basket on her arm. She gave him a timid smile and repeated, “Are you buying that book? …If you do not really need it, could you let me have it?”
Myss couldn’t be bothered to answer and chose to put the book of lies back where it belonged.
Only then did he realize that “The Brave Salaar” was actually selling well. This was the last copy on the shelf.
“Thank you, handsome.” The woman let out a breath of relief, then took a bag of croutons from her basket and offered it to him kindly.
It was a common snack in the area. Bakeries cut scraps and unsold loaves into small pieces, toss them with butter, minced garlic, and salt, and bake them. Children loved them.
Myss caught a faint fragrance.
It wasn’t the smell of bread, but more like the woman’s own scent. It was exactly what the magical artifacts merchant had lacked, and it was much stronger than in other humans, Salaar included.
The scent was sweet and soft, reminding him of pancakes drenched in hot syrup. It made him feel a little hungry. What puzzled Myss was that the hunger didn’t come from “his” stomach, but from deeper in the darkness, an impulse that belonged to “Him”.
Myss had no interest in preying on humans, just as humans wouldn’t eat horseshoes. Yet right now, the “horseshoe” in front of him was giving off the aroma of tempting food, which left him confused.
Perhaps he had stood there stunned for too long. By the time Myss came back to himself, the woman had vanished, and a bag of croutons had appeared in his hand.
Myss decisively picked up the bread cubes and strode back to Salaar. He grabbed the other’s collar, buried his face in the crook of his neck, and sniffed intently.
Salaar tensed, nearly dropping all the books in his hands.
“What are you doing?” he exclaimed in shock. “There are too many people here. Even if the pill’s effect works—”
No. Myss let go. There was indeed a faint scent on Salaar, but it was tender and green, like unripe fruit, and it did nothing to rouse his appetite.
Salaar: “I am telling you, you—”
“Shh. Croutons for you,” Myss muttered, shoving them into Salaar’s arms and hoping that would shut him up.
Salaar did shut up, and he even looked a little dazed.
The Demon Lord had made a circuit of a human bookstore, ended up with a bag of croutons, and then took a good long sniff of him. Every part of it was incomprehensible.
“Why give this to me?” Salaar chose the simplest question.
“Don’t you like to eat while you read?” Myss said, as if it were only natural.
Back when he was sealed, Salaar always enjoyed his mushrooms while reading. Even if he had read those books countless times, he kept eating mushrooms for hundreds of years. Myss had noticed all along.
Salaar froze for a moment, his gaze shifting.
He accepted the croutons and didn’t ask any more questions. Before the night grew deep, the two of them left the bookstore. Outside it was dim, the air clammy, and rain could fall at any moment. Myss’s skin felt as if it had been licked, sticky and stifling, and he gave an uncomfortable shiver.
Perhaps because Rosha was relatively isolated, the city’s inns felt a bit empty. They went to the inn Kai had recommended. When the enthusiastic clerk heard that Salaar and Myss would be staying for more than a week, they were upgraded to a better suite for free.
The room was four times the size of the little cabin from before. The windows faced the square, with a view of the fountain at its center.
There were even two huge double beds, supposedly prepared for family trips. The original guests had suddenly canceled, and the staff had already made the room up.
Myss sprang first and claimed the bed by the window. Salaar didn’t contest it; he set the books he had bought on the headboard of the other bed.
He also took out the bottle of “Resolve to Elope” and placed it beside the stack of books.
After several hours of testing, Salaar had roughly figured out its effect—it was hard for others to notice them in a crowd. However, if they took the initiative to greet someone, or if anyone touched them, they would still be noticed.
“That thing only works for twelve hours. You will be exposed sooner or later,” Myss said disapprovingly. “What a hassle! Can’t you just use magic to change your eye color?”
“I can’t.”
“What?”
“I am only skilled in combat and healing. Everything else I would have to learn from scratch.”
Salaar switched on the bedside lamp and picked up “Foundations of Magic”.
“Three hundred years ago, magic was a talent possessed by very few. People preferred to use it to save their lives. No one would waste time on little tricks like ‘changing an object’s color’.”
That’s surprising, Myss thought.
Salaar and every soldier under him possessed magic, and with Lord Karns going mad from a lack of magical talent, he had assumed humans were born able to use magic.
“Fine. I had hoped you would be more useful,” Myss said, thinking of the all-powerful ink-drawn hero from the picture book. “Shall we go find that guy’s pen pal tomorrow? You said there were leads…”
Salaar tossed a crouton into his mouth and then threw a few letters onto Myss’s bed.
Myss lowered his head to look at them. The envelopes with addresses were nowhere to be found, and those damned pages had been soaked in corpse fluid, the fishy stench stabbing straight up into his skull.
Very reluctantly, he pinched them up and read the remaining writing.
In the correspondence, Lord Karns, under the pseudonym “Pilgrim”, had a lively rapport with someone called “Patience”. They discussed many topics about souls and corpses.
The difference was that Lord Karns was very interested in the “magical spirit that lingers in corpses”, while “Patience” preferred to talk about souls. Compared with the young lord’s rambling, his—or her—prose was neat and concise, suggesting a well-educated person.
In one exchange, the young lord complained about the harsh conditions in Ring Town, and “Patience” replied, “I understand. Winters in Rosha are always hard to endure.”
Beyond that sentence, “Patience” said nothing about themself.
Myss looked at Salaar in disbelief.
“Patience” had mentioned Rosha only once. For all they knew, that person had already moved. Even if “Patience” was still here, let alone their real name, they didn’t even know the person’s sex or age.
With Rosha this big, how were they supposed to search?
Salaar crunched his croutons and spread his hands at him innocently, as if to say, “Do you have a better idea?”
Myss flopped straight back onto the bed and buried his face in the pillow.
Then he decided Salaar’s breathing was too loud and chose to go for a walk. He had heard the inn offered free late-night snacks, so he could pad his stomach and fend off hunger.
However, on the way to the snacks—
“Are you blind?” a voice roared at him.
The author has something to say:
Why are those two not eloping yet? Elopement requires both determination and presence of mind.
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