The Dangerous Abode
The dangerous place.
Learned Ritual Magic
“All at once, huh.” I had succeeded in obtaining Basista’s ability. Yet this part left me puzzled. There were several conditions for acquiring new abilities. Most often it happened when I embraced a wounded woman, or when I maintained an ongoing relationship with a single woman. But Basista hadn’t been gravely injured, and she was a woman I had only just met today.
“I don’t get it.”
“Hngh… ahh… hngh…” While fondling Basista’s rear as she thrashed in the throes of climax, I mulled it over, then quickly gave up. Right now, figuring out how the ability worked mattered less than what I needed to do in this place.
Information about the ritual magic Basista possessed flowed into my mind. After sorting through it, I summed up ritual magic in a single word: unstable. It required far more preparation time than ordinary magic, carried the risk of failure, and demanded a sacrifice in exchange for using less mana. Of course, when it succeeded, the results could be far greater than what magic could achieve. Ritual magic was truly a lottery-ticket form of spellcraft. Fail, and you were ruined; succeed, and the effect could range anywhere from one to a hundred.
Recently, when Eos had captured the red-furred Ratman, the mana-stone magic that used its red fur as a medium had been the closest thing to ritual magic I had seen. The answer was already clear. The hidden evidence inside this mansion could only be uncovered by a sorcerer who possessed this ritual magic.
“She really is an S-rank sorcerer.”
Basista had lost consciousness, yet the bedroom we were in was already under the influence of ritual magic. It was night now. The spell seemed to activate only at specific times. That was why the entrance was sealed, preventing my escape. Once this night ended, I would be bound by the magic and become her eternal plaything.
“Basista already knew I was an enemy.”
She had been convinced I was suspicious. That was why she had lured me to this villa. I had walked straight into the dangerous mansion without realizing it.
“Ignorance of ritual magic is this dangerous, huh.”
The party members waiting outside the mansion wouldn’t be able to enter. I could already feel the ritual barrier blocking them. In the end, I would have to find the hidden evidence and leave this mansion alone.
“Good thing I prepared for this.”
Ever since falling into this world, I had constantly thought about the need for the ability to solve problems by myself. That was why I had steadily accepted prostitution requests and continued obtaining abilities from adventurers. Syucali and Eos were merely my hands and feet; every matter had to be started and finished by me.
“Let’s go find it, then.”
I left the unconscious Basista where she lay and stood up. Walking to the door, I stopped. Basista’s green mana was faintly visible. She had used spiderwebs as a medium to cast a sealing ritual. I couldn’t open the door and leave, but now that I knew the ritual, I could undo it as well.
“Flame.”
A mana flame rose at my fingertips. The most basic way to unravel ritual magic began with fire. I would use this flame to solve the problem Basista had created.
“Remain at the end and the beginning.”
Those were the words that had remained in my mind after obtaining her ritual magic. Following them, I placed the flame at the very first and last of the countless spiderwebs.
—Click… creak…
A room that no one ignorant of ritual magic could ever leave. I had solved the ritual problem with her own ability and stepped out of the bedroom.
The moment I opened the door, countless rituals came into view. Memory rituals etched into the floor. They recorded people’s footprints. They would already know that Syucali and I had come to this mansion together. Next came spirit rituals emanating from the vases. Spirits that clung to intruders could track their location even if they fled later. On top of that, the maids of the mansion weren’t human. They were ritual marionettes created by combining dolls and totems. No wonder Basista was called an S-rank sorcerer and a hero. To her, I was already an intruder.
“This was a mansion full of ritual traps.”
Even Eos would have trouble detecting them. She read spaces and used magic, but this system was based on mediums like dolls and spiderwebs, or on spirits, rather than magic. Unless one was an expert in ritual magic, simply recognizing the existence of these problems was impossible.
With every step I took, a ritual array activated. She was that wary of people. Or perhaps she had designed it this way because she only came down once a month.
“Where could it be…”
While unraveling the rituals and scanning the corridor, I stopped.
“This place…”
I heard the sound of liquid flowing beside me.
“Blood…”
There was something hidden, with blood flowing from it. Yet there was no door here—only a wall. Looking around, I saw that the blood never dried; it kept flowing from the point where the floor met the wall.
“The blood of a powerful sorcerer… Basista’s blood, maybe.”
If she had used blood ritual magic herself, it meant something important was here.
“Flame…”
I began with fire.
—Fwoosh!
The wallpaper turned to ash, revealing a door. To open it, a solution process was required. I carefully observed the path the blood took. The lines and dots it formed seemed to depict a certain shape.
“This is… a constellation.”
Ritual magic fundamentally looked to the heavens and offered sacrifices. The power of the sky was ritual magic itself—making rain fall, summoning wind to move ships. Among them, the stars were the most important. Depending on the positions of the stars, the power of ritual magic could drop to zero or multiply a hundredfold. I now understood why Basista came to this mansion only once a month. This was the period when ritual magic was at its weakest, so she came in person.
I had realized the ritual problem involved constellations, but I had no knowledge of this world’s constellations. This was a different world from Earth, after all. Still, I tried thinking with the ritual ability I had obtained from Basista. Roughly basing it on Korea’s standards… the season when wheat turns green. In my original world, that would be around March to April. So the constellation for March to April would be…
“Aries, huh. Hmm…”
But this world and the Earth I lived on were different planets… the latitudes would be different too.
“…Yet this ritual problem is obviously Aries no matter how you look at it.”
A chill ran down my spine. Come to think of it, there was only one moon floating in this sky. Just like the Earth I came from.
“Was I really transported to another world?”
“Or was I thrown onto a movie set?”
While the constellation problem stirred such doubts, I traced the blood with my finger and drew the ram constellation.
—Click…
It opened. As the door swung wide—
“Hwaaaah!!”
Something burst out. I grabbed it without missing.
“…A spirit, huh.”
“Hwaah! Hwaaaah! Let me out… let me out…”
It wasn’t trying to attack me so much as desperately attempting to flee somewhere. Peering through the open doorway, I checked the interior.
“…She really was insane.”
The stench of rotting corpses wafted from inside the room.
—Creak…
Stepping through the door, I saw that there wasn’t just one or two corpses. Men. The room was filled with nothing but male corpses. Men impaled on skewers. Men hanging from hooks. Severed arms and legs—also male. Men hanging upside down. They all looked like attendants, just like me. After spending a single night with Basista, they had become decorations, unable to leave, forever preserved. Even as spirits, they were bound by ritual magic and forced to remain in this mansion for eternity.
Basista was no longer the woman I had known.
“What could have turned her into this?”
They said humans were the cruelest creatures of all. Yet she had once been called a hero, an S-rank adventurer who lived as a monster hunter. That woman had suddenly retired, built a farm in the countryside, and created this horrific ritual mansion. Even if she wanted men, she could have just used prostitution once and met them again later.
“I guess her obsession and possessiveness are on another level.”
Seeing the corpses turned into preserved specimens, it was impossible to call it normal. Looking around the secret room filled with preserved male corpses, I noticed documents carelessly tossed on a corner of the table.
“A contract… this is it.”
I obtained the document bearing the joint signatures of the work she had conducted with The Ear. Reading the contents, it detailed a plan to use the men in the village as sacrifices alongside The Ear to mass-produce named monsters—in other words, variant monsters.
“How to utilize the monsters is up to The Ear, then. So Basista only contracted to create the variant monsters.”
Looking at the preserved male corpses, I noticed that several of them lacked spirits. It seemed they had been placed into monsters through ritual magic. But the spirit I had just caught…
“Let me out… please…”
“Who are you?”
“Ugh… Bei… Bei…”
“Bei… you… Bei… Don’t tell me you’re Basista.”
“Aah… aaah…”
The blurry spirit nodded frantically.
“If you’re Basista, then who’s inside the real Basista?”
“A… aaah… aaah.”
The spirit didn’t answer. Instead, its gaze stopped at the doorway.
“Hngh… hngh… How did you find this place…?”
At the door stood Basista, crawling in on all fours while drooling and leaking fluids. Even in the midst of climax, she had retained consciousness and come here.
“A… wi…tch… aaah…”
“…So there was a witch inside her.”
“Hngh… hngh hngh… hngh hngh hngh…”
At the word “witch,” Basista’s lips stretched all the way to her ears.
“Hngheee… eeeeeeek…”
Something began to emerge from the mouth of the laughing Basista.
—Gulp… gulp…
I thought it was a monster, but what came out was a white-haired girl. Emitting a white aura, she escaped Basista’s body and opened her eyes.
“Uwaaah… How could you do that~ You’ve completely melted a woman’s body~”
The girl seemed to have discarded the troublesome Basista’s body.
“Such a bothersome body, really…”
The white-haired girl who had emerged from Basista’s body kicked the limp form.
“Huhu…”
Yes—the girl displayed the exact same behavior as the Basista I had just met. It was this white-haired girl who had been wearing Basista’s shell.
“Who are you?”
“Me~? I’m Basista.”
“That’s impossible. This spirit here is Basista.”
“Hee… heeheehee… How did you know? Can you see spirits? What, were you a sorcerer? With black hair? Kyahahahaha.”
The white-haired girl let out a mad laugh and mocked me.
“I thought they all died a hundred years ago, but one was still alive.”
“What do you mean?”
“Huh…? You don’t know? Hngh hngh…”
The girl approached me with a mischievous expression.
“Kekeke, yeah. That’s right. I thought something was off from the very beginning.”
She circled around me, then stopped behind my back.
“You’re not a man of this world, are you?”
“!!”
I was startled for a moment, but in the end, I had found it. The hint that would let me return to my original world.