Blue Blood (6)
I buried my face in the book like I was trying to inhale the pages, devouring every line of the encrypted text. My translation cheat overlaid the dry, scholarly content in a second layer that my mind could actually process. Once the meaning clicked, the shape of the characters no longer mattered. It was like reading absolute gibberish such as “I dnnt wnt t wrk. I wnt t g hm.” only for it to resolve instantly into “I don’t want to work. I want to go home.”
When we gathered together and persuaded Arma, she reluctantly accepted our proposal.
She would pass her mana on to her descendants across the ages. She understood the advantages of this deeply and sympathized with our reasoning.
Anyone who witnessed the tyranny of the current emperor would feel the same. To our eyes, Romania was already showing signs of collapse. In a world abandoned by the gods, I even had a premonition that my own homeland would be the first nation of men to fall.
…What the fuck is this supposed to mean?
My expression must have grown increasingly sour with every line, because neither Dana nor Veronica—who had been fidgeting with curiosity—dared to ask me anything. I flipped through the pages frantically.
Let us call this ritual Descensus.
If the ritual succeeds, the descendants will be able to inherit mana rivaling Arma’s any number of times. The exact quantity will naturally depend on the talent of the person receiving the Descensus.
May a wise descendant inherit Arma’s power.
That was the preface. The rest detailed the actual method of performing the ritual. First, four descendants from four different bloodlines had to gather. It was forbidden to use four people from the Armaals family alone. One representative had to come from each of the four founding families of the original senate that had helped design the spell.
Huh. More democratic than I expected.
Once the four had assembled, the person who had finished adjusting their body would cast the ritual. That was how the mana left behind by the ancient archmage Arma Shunas before her death would descend from the underworld into the target’s body.
The precise magical structure was beyond my knowledge. Even Odin’s Eye refused to decipher the spell as it was written. The damn thing only worked on magic I’d seen with my own eyes.
I lifted my head from the book and explained.
“The book confirms that the ritual Diabolo performed is exactly this. It’s called Descensus, and the activation method is written here too.”
“If that’s true, it’ll help us manage the aftereffects… but why do you look like you swallowed a lemon?”
I couldn’t answer right away. How the hell was I supposed to explain this? Could I say that the person who created the ritual back then hadn’t dreamed of turning their descendants into living weapons while trampling on their human rights? Or that the emperor at the time was such an unhinged bastard that this spell was their only recourse? Either way, this conversation could easily slide into lèse-majesté territory.
With too many thoughts colliding in my head, I simply let out a long sigh.
“It’s nothing. But if we lose this book, our lives are going to get a lot more complicated. Keep it secret. That includes you, Tirsi.”
The whole party nodded. They seemed to grasp the gravity of the situation. My wives especially. A ritual that could turn a human into a god? It was impossible not to think of the Compilation Battalion. Even without the parts badmouthing the emperor, this wasn’t something you showed to outsiders.
I clicked my tongue as I turned another page.
Maybe… after flowing through history, this very ritual became the magic the Compilation Battalion uses to meddle with the Divine Throne.
If that was the case, I could easily imagine what had happened to the owner of this journal. Back on Earth, I used to worry that the moment I completed some insane technique like dimensional travel, people would try to kill me and steal the results. That was why I’d been desperately looking for a noble patron.
Had the person who wrote this journal met the exact fate I’d feared? A genius scientist captured by villains, forced to create evil, inhumane weapons, then discarded. It was such a cliché that it left a bitter taste in my mouth.
I still had no idea how the book had ended up in Diabolo’s hands.
—Plop.
Just as that thought crossed my mind, a few drops of something fell onto the book. I quickly cupped my palm beneath it to keep the pages clean. What landed on my hand was bright red liquid.
Larilura gasped. “Senior! You’re having a nosebleed!”
“Yeah, thanks for the live commentary. I’m just tired.”
When even the sex-brained Kang Bukho couldn’t think straight, you knew it was bad. Dana frowned deeply, cast a healing spell on my nose, and checked my pulse.
“Ugh, seriously. This bastard pushes his body like a damn machine just because he’s got a healer wife.”
“Having you breathe next to me is already a balm for my soul.”
“You’ve already used up today’s quota of bullshit, so can you shut up?”
She was looking at me like a mother staring at her accident-prone son who’d come home with scraped knees. Damn it, this woman really knew how to shred a husband’s pride.
Dana sighed like she was at the end of her rope. “It’s mana overuse. Go lie down next to Tirsi and rest.”
“It doesn’t even hurt that much.”
“For fuck’s sake, then that jade seal must be one hell of an item. Try absorbing several times your own mana capacity without any buffer. You would’ve collapsed again and made the rest of us cry our eyes out, you son of a bitch.”
“Yes ma’am. Sorry ma’am. Long live Dana, long live, long may she live.”
When she growled, I shouted the three cheers and obediently lay down on the bed. Zero husbandly authority. Is this… what being whipped looks like?
“You two have such a harmonious marriage,” Tirsi said with a bitter smile, watching the domestic comedy of the henpecked Nord. My wives didn’t go anywhere; they stuck right beside me, fully invested in my humiliation play.
This is so fucking embarrassing.
I couldn’t even make a sound. I just pulled the blanket over my head.
“…I’ll just close my eyes for a bit. Wake me if anything happens.”
“Sure, we will. Now hurry up and sleep, Nord.”
The fact that our gentle Franc was lying so boldly was actually shocking. Just from the look in her eyes, it was obvious she had zero intention of waking me and would instead stand guard at the bedside like a stone widow.
I nodded and closed my eyes. Even with my eyes shut, the book Diabolo had left behind kept feeding me both positive and negative fantasies. If the Descensus magic was truly the origin of creating fake-Thor-like God-men, could I do something similar? Or would I have to actually perform the ritual to analyze it properly?
The spell on Tirsi had been canceled when the rift in the sky closed and Diabolo passed out. There was no way to reactivate it. And what was the deal with needing four people before the Descensus could begin? Today there had only been three—Tirsi, the lord of Renapolis, and Signatio. Who was the fourth? It couldn’t have been Primor… Fuck, please don’t let it be.
I desperately prayed it wasn’t. Otherwise all the gratitude and patronage would vanish, and I might become mortal enemies with Primor. Damn it, I shouldn’t have fallen for the leading questions.
A messy chain of such trivial thoughts rattled around inside my elite skull. Lying in bed and finally relaxing seemed to let my brain start working again. But as usual, thoughts before sleep tend to dissolve into actual sleep. Whether it was because my body was more exhausted than my mind, the moment I closed my eyes I fell into a deep, dreamless slumber.
If you strip away the fantasy elements, dreams are supposedly the brain’s way of organizing memories. That’s why when you’re completely exhausted you fall asleep like someone flipped a power switch and don’t dream at all. I don’t know if that’s true, but that night I didn’t have a single dream. I only opened my eyes when dawn arrived.
Since I’d fallen asleep a little after lunch, that meant I’d slept nearly eighteen hours. After my body had reached a certain level, I’d never been this tired. Looked like Dana was right—I really had pushed myself too hard.
“…The hell?”
When I woke up, I found my wives asleep around my bed and Tirsi’s bed completely empty. Thankfully the accident-prone young lady hadn’t been kidnapped again like Peach in Super Mario. A single sheet of paper rested on her bed, saying she had stepped out for a while.
I slipped out of the makeshift infirmary carefully so as not to wake my wives. Tirsi was standing outside alone, bathed in the pale light of dawn, wearing a dazed expression.
“Hey, what are you going to do if some bad guy kidnaps you again while you’re standing here by yourself?”
When I spoke, Tirsi blinked as if she hadn’t noticed me approaching at all.
“Ah… you’re right. I wasn’t thinking.”
“I wasn’t planning to scold you. But if you get kidnapped again, Lady Hennesis will probably explode with rage even more than I will.”
“Hehe. I’ve done something terrible to Maria too.”
Her smile as she answered looked as faint as a piece of ice on the verge of melting. I asked without thinking.
“…Are you disappointed?”
“Pardon?”
Tirsi’s eyes widened to the size of fists, as if she’d heard something absurd. She looked visibly downcast, genuinely hurt.
“Don’t tell me you think I’m disappointed because I couldn’t become Diabolo’s woman, or because I lost that incredible mana? I know I’ve shown you many pathetic sides of myself, but if that’s really what you think of me, Nord, I’d be quite shocked.”
“Not that. Weren’t you the one who came all the way to Romania because you had a chance to become a noble?”
The gloomy Tirsi now looked simply blank.
“…Even when you asked me questions before, you never asked why I came to Romania. So you already knew?”
“Just a hunch. Otherwise there’d be no reason for you to travel this far alone.”
And truly alone, at that. Tirsi hesitated, unable to answer right away, then finally spoke.
“…Nord. Do you know what the Ritter rank is?”
“I found out by chance a few days ago. It was in Diabolo’s name, after all.”
Ivan Ritter von Diabolo. I’d probably forget the bastard’s full name in about a week. Foreign names are hard for a native Korean to memorize. It’d be so much easier if they had names like Kim Bok-deok, Kang Pal-chun, or Do Yeop-cheol. Names like that I’d remember for ten years.
When I pretended to know, Tirsi skipped the explanation and went straight to the conclusion.
“I intended to participate in this year’s selection for honorary nobility.”