Chapter 37
Chapter 37
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: Vine
Chapter: 36
Chapter Title: The Demon's Pact
-----------------------------------------------------------------
“You said we’d know it when we see it—do you know what it is?”
Rachel asked in a mocking polite tone. Abyss couldn’t speak even though he had a mouth.
“I don’t have a clue.”
Deyner chimed in snarkily from the side. Abyss offered a solution.
“There aren’t that many doors, so we can try the key in each one. The one that opens must be the warehouse.”
Ten doors lined up in a row along the underground corridor.
His claim that there weren’t many had its flaws, but it was feasible to try the key in each.
“No other choice, then.”
Rachel nodded and turned the knob on the first door. Naturally, it didn’t open.
She inserted the key properly and turned it, but the key didn’t budge. This wasn’t the door.
“But can’t that thing you used to open the drawer open doors too?”
Rachel asked as she pulled out the key. Abyss nodded.
“That artifact can only be used once a day.”
“I see.”
Rachel moved to the next door and inserted the key. The second door didn’t open either.
One, two, three… She checked all the way to the tenth door, but none opened.
“Is this not the place?”
Rachel muttered, staring at the key.
Maybe she needed to insert it upside down? She tried flipping it and attempting each door again, but still, nothing.
“It really isn’t?”
“But that’s what he described.”
Rachel rested her chin on her hand for a moment.
It was a bad habit to keep comparing everything to horror games, but she couldn’t help it.
‘In horror games, there’s usually a hidden door in cases like this.’
Rachel had only tried the visible doors so far. If none of those worked, there had to be a secret one.
‘Then where?’
There was a hint.
‘The mouth of the face with closed eyes.’
Chris hadn’t been to the warehouse since becoming an adult, it seemed. He must have seen a landscape like that as a child and described it that way.
‘From a child’s perspective.’
Rachel took a step back to survey the entire corridor.
That’s when things she hadn’t noticed before came into view.
She hadn’t paid much attention earlier, but the door handles were ring-shaped.
“Hold a torch close to the handles!”
Rachel directed Abyss. He obediently followed her instruction.
Eight of the ten doors had round handles. But the two on the far left had straight bar handles.
“Now that you mention it…”
They didn’t look like eyes, but to an imaginative child, they might.
Rachel, who had once thought car headlights looked like eyes as a kid, understood.
She tapped the wall between the two doors with bar handles. It gave a hollow, resonant echo.
“Here!”
“Something there?”
Abyss approached at Rachel’s excited cry.
Instead of answering, Rachel ran her fingertips over the wall.
She found a groove.
Normal keyholes cast shadows and looked black, but this one had been specially treated—it was visually indistinguishable.
“Oh, there it is!”
Rachel inserted the key into the groove. The feel was different from before. As she slowly turned it, she felt a satisfying click through her fingers.
A crack formed in the wall. It slid open like a pocket door, slowly revealing the space inside.
Abyss muttered upon seeing the opened door.
“So that’s what he meant.”
With the hidden door open, it blended with the doors on either side to form an expression like closed eyes and an open mouth.
“That’s what Chris saw.”
He had never seen the hidden door and had only glimpsed it open from the start, so he’d used that description.
“Sis, calling him by name now that brother’s not here?”
“Be grateful I call you ‘little brother’ to your face.”
Deyner nodded silently.
Rachel hesitated to enter the warehouse as dust tickled her nose.
Abyss passed her and went in first.
He reached into his bosom, and Rachel thought of a certain robot character.
‘Doraemon or what?’
Abyss bent down and placed something on the floor.
A palm-sized disc began zipping around the floor, sucking up dust from the ground and the air.
Rachel muttered as she calmed her queasy stomach.
“Robot vacuum?”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
Watching Abyss pull out yet another curious item, Rachel thought Paris Emporus was impressive for ruining someone like this.
‘Assassination really was the answer.’
But that thought didn’t last long.
Once the cleaning finished, Abyss lit a lamp. The warehouse came into view.
Chests full of items were neatly stacked. Abyss and Deyner brought them down, and Rachel inspected the contents.
While sifting through various odds and ends, she finally found what she wanted.
“The family record!”
The leather-bound old book wasn’t very long.
But made of parchment-like leather, it was thick.
Abyss made an enigmatic noise upon seeing the family record. “Hmm?”
“Shall we read it?”
“Yeah, let’s.”
Rachel glanced at Deyner as she replied to Abyss.
Deyner ignored the family record. He was pulling out strange objects from the chests and fiddling with them.
Rachel sat on the now-clean floor. She placed the lamp nearby, and Abyss stood behind her, leaning over her head.
Rachel was aware of him above her but ignored it and opened the family record.
The ancient book’s pages seemed made at different times.
The very first page looked so old it was unsettling to touch, and it was blank, with no writing.
Rachel carefully turned the pages. They improved toward the back.
It hadn’t been made all at once—descendants had added records after the first page, creating the current book.
“About eleven pages.”
Rachel took a deep breath and returned to the first page to begin reading the family record.
She turned the pages one by one until she reached the last.
“Nothing strange here.”
It matched the family record at home, except Rachel’s generation wasn’t listed. No oddities to her eyes.
“Only sons are listed. No daughters?”
Abyss asked.
Rachel wanted to explain that part, but with Deyner there, she couldn’t.
Instead, she gave a simple answer.
“If things went as I think, the same happened to me.”
Abyss understood immediately despite the missing subject.
“Finished reading?”
“Yeah. Nothing special.”
He reached down from above, pinched the family record between thumb and forefinger, and lifted it up.
He examined the book, stroked its surface, and muttered softly.
“As I thought.”
“What? Did you figure something out?”
“Did you know this is made of human skin?”
Rachel’s expression hardened.
If she’d been holding the book, she might have thrown it.
“And it seems special ink was used.”
Abyss brought the family record close to his face. He sniffed it, then took out two small vials of reagent and a thin brush.
“This should do it.”
He uncapped the vials, mixed the solutions, and shook vigorously. Then he dipped and withdrew the brush in the mixture.
The brush passed over the blank first page. Red letters emerged on the thinly coated surface.
Hidden text.
[Leaving this record for my descendants.]
The two read the passage that began that way.
The content was roughly as follows.
The writer of the first page was the founder of the Emporus family, named Emporus.
Born a slave’s child, he was sold as a test subject to a black sorcerer and, showing talent in black magic, became his disciple.
At the end, he succeeded in summoning the demon Amaimon.
Having lived his life in the shadows as a slave-born black sorcerer, he wanted his name to be eternally remembered and renowned.
Believing his descendants must spread his name for him to be unforgotten, he set the contract terms accordingly.
The contract with the demon Amaimon was as follows.
Amaimon promised glory and wealth to Emporus’s descendants who upheld the contract.
However, the initial contractor, Emporus, must offer his blood-descended daughter as a sacrifice to the demon at the designated altar as proof of the contract.
The next contractor upholds it similarly by offering a pure woman of Emporus’s blood at the designated altar.
And upon offering the tenth sacrifice, Emporus’s name and bloodline’s heir becomes the greatest of all.
In other words, a contract to become king.
Rachel flipped to the next page in shock. The family record she knew appeared.
“Wait.”
Abyss took up the brush again. New letters appeared where the brush passed.
Next to the name Emporus, a woman’s name, Delphise, emerged.
A line connected their names downward, meaning they married and had children.
But where a name should be, it simply read “First Sacrifice.”
“He sacrificed his daughter and hid his wife—either killed her or she died, who knows.”
Abyss said, looking at the family record.
Before the solution, only a woman named Polia was next to Emporus, with three sons below her.
Abyss’s hand moved, coating the blank space. Text continued where the solution touched.
[After contracting with Amaimon, I discovered a gold mine. Thereafter…]
The passage that began thus detailed the contract.
The contract ends when the tenth sacrifice is offered and that contractor becomes king.
Until termination, it passes to the eldest son, but if he dies, it can transfer to another son or brother.
“There’s even a clause that if the successor doesn’t know the contract details, Amaimon informs them after a year.”
“So contingencies for sudden death of the prior contractor are already in place.”
“Moreover, if the one who receives the contract knows the details but fails to fulfill within twenty years, Amaimon can kill the prior successor.”
Not only that, Amaimon could choose the next successor from Emporus’s bloodline.
Both their faces darkened as they read. The demon and initial contractor had formalized every scenario.
[However, if the contractor’s house declines and falls within twenty years after offering a sacrifice, Amaimon is deemed to have failed faithful fulfillment, and the contract automatically voids.]
Rachel tapped that sentence with her finger.
“This is the only part we can use.”
“Indeed.”
Her guess that daughters had been sacrificed all along was correct.
The Emporus family founder, Emporus, was a black sorcerer contracted with a demon, and his descendants had continued it generation after generation.
Moreover, per the text, eight months from now—on the first anniversary of Paris Emporus’s death—Amaimon would inform Chris of the contract.
‘Then he’ll try to sacrifice me.’
Rachel chewed her lip.
The sacrifice must be a pure woman, explicitly stated.
With only a few years until Rachel’s marriageable age, Chris would target her immediately upon learning.
Abyss and Rachel coated the entire family record with the solution to count how many sacrifices had been made.
“Nine.”
It was extremely odd for commoners to keep a family record.
Odd that it listed ancestors back to before the great-grandfather who bought the barony, but now the reason was clear.
The Emporus family record was a ledger to track the number of sacrifices.
Per it, nine girls had been sacrificed so far.
“I’m the tenth.”