Chapter 204
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Translator: MadScientist
Chapter: 204
Chapter Title: Crazy Greek Bastards!
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Crazy Greek bastards!
'Whoa. That musty old sorcery I taught Oedipus caused a mess on this scale?'
The sorcery I'd taught Oedipus was, in essence, an ancient ritual using straw effigies to manipulate spirits.
To put it in perspective, it was something akin to the origins of those solo hide-and-seek games played in modern Japan or Korea.
In this case, it involved transferring the heavenly curse placed upon Oedipus—using a wandering grudge spirit or the caster's own life spirit in his stead—onto an effigy resembling him. The effigy would then enact the curse, fulfilling the prophecy imposed on him and severing the flow of that heavenly fate.
"Honestly, I had no experience using it myself, and in our world's history, there was hardly ever a need for such a ritual anyway. So I suggested he try it as a form of consolation and a test run."
The method was simple.
Take the prophecy of the heavenly curse that Oedipus had heard.
The prophecy that he would kill his father and sleep with his mother—realize it through the effigy to conclusively end the fate clinging to him.
Had the prophecy, which fixed the flow of the curse, directly or indirectly included his own death, things would have gotten incredibly messy.
But since it only contained deaths and tragedies caused by him, not his own, it was somewhat feasible to circumvent.
First, prepare three effigies.
Bind pouches containing hair and blood from Oedipus and the Corinthian royal couple to the head and chest of each.
Place them in the rooms where their respective owners reside, then perform the ritual precisely at twilight when the sun sets.
Blind all eyes from a rat pup unobserved, have Oedipus—skin covered, dyed in pig's blood, cloaked in black cloth and mask—hang an effigy around his neck, leave his room, and stab the effigy in his father's room with a knife.
Smear the effigy's blood and hair on the blade, then move to his mother's room, stack the effigies, and spend the night there.
Before dawn breaks, burn Oedipus's effigy along with the knife in the sacred flames of the main temple until it becomes ash.
Do the same for his mother and father's effigies in their rooms, and it's done.
However, such a full-fledged effigy ritual is a serious attempt to deceive the heavens themselves. The Divine Emperor had sternly warned against it unless absolutely necessary—unless you wanted to get struck by lightning on the roadside.
Even then, for anyone short of a true divine being, it'd likely end in a mere formality or backfire spectacularly. So I hadn't expected much.
And yet, it actually worked perfectly?
"Hmm. Even to me, no expert in magic, the ritual you described seems insufficient to cause an incident like this."
"Correct."
Martial arts have sequences, and techniques have stages.
No matter how diligently you practice fist techniques, your swordsmanship won't improve.
Sure, as related arts, there might be some carryover, but fists and sword are distinctly different skills.
And the same logic applies to sorcery or magic.
"What I taught was strictly a ritual meddling in human affairs. It couldn't possibly cause a localized anomaly like this."
Yet some wandering magician stumbles upon my ritual and turns it into this disaster?
No matter how many times I ran the calculations, the effigy ritual I taught Oedipus couldn't produce a phenomenon this massive.
Which meant the high priestess of Acrocorinth must have used my ritual as a base and devised something else entirely...
'No way?'
Nah, probably not.
She's a full-fledged magician, after all. Would she really try to tamper with that thing?
Anyone who's set foot in this world even slightly would know that messing with it is like handling nuclear waste barehanded.
But if not that, this mess makes no sense. Suppressing my ominous foreboding, I asked Athena.
"By chance, where's the largest temple in Corinth?"
The final step of the ritual—heavenly curses are, paradoxically, one of the grandest flows of fate.
Having deceived it with artificial sorcery, the remnants must be thoroughly purged.
Such flames usually involve the true samadhi fire that leaves not even ash.
But in Greece, there was a surer method: the pure flames burning in every temple.
Nothing cleanses filthy sorcery and malign curses more thoroughly than the fire in a temple housing a true god.
And when my thoughts reached that temple, the bad premonition hit.
"The Aphrodite Grand Temple here in Acrocorinth."
"Damn it."
The emerging picture made curses spill from my lips unbidden.
From what I'd seen so far, a god's divinity scaled with the piety and faith of their followers. I'd told Oedipus to handle it at the grandest nearby temple—my call.
And now this disaster erupts near that grand temple, with its high priestess fingered as the mastermind by a magician?
There was one fact I'd overlooked.
This was divine-era Greece.
The kind of place where someone might chug nuclear waste and call it fine.
'Crazy Greek bastards!!'
"Then your mission is straightforward. Punish Despoina for recklessly invoking a ritual not her own knowledge, endangering Greece's order, and clean up this mess."
For now, Athena and the city's spirits were holding back those things from crossing into the mortal realm, despite the bizarre anomaly on the earth.
But who knew how many more would spawn? They wanted me—the source—to dismantle the ritual and subdue the caster.
"...It seems your heroes have come along as well."
"Pardon?"
-Krarung!
No sooner had I asked than a massive bolt of lightning tore through the gloomy sky.
Even from afar, unmistakable—Heracles' fist aura.
And amid it, a red meteor streaking through swarms of black wraiths: Atalanta's handiwork, no doubt.
"Then I wish you good fortune, my Arcon."
With that, Athena vanished.
"Tch... Just my luck. Can't even complain."
Who would've thought resolving the heavenly curse would snowball like this?
I didn't know the full situation, but it stemmed from my actions, so calling it Athena's errand felt off.
-Krarung!
"...Guess I should pick up the kids first."
I kicked off the ground toward the rumbling lightning, as if it were calling me.
Since time immemorial, Aphrodite's innate allure and beauty had earned her great renown, making her the idol of alchemists and magicians who worshipped beauty itself.
And the Aphrodite Grand Temple in Acrocorinth was the greatest shrine to that myth.
Accordingly, its high priestess was more beautiful and skilled in magic than any other.
Couples blessed by her enjoyed the happiest honeymoons, and women empowered by her potions and spells captivated their beloved men.
Truly, no woman was more fitting for Aphrodite's high priestess than Despoina.
Yet Despoina was not satisfied.
She craved even greater beauty, greater wisdom!
She was a formidable magician who could ignite flames with a touch, command shadows as limbs, and bend flying birds to her will.
But Despoina could not be content.
Trapped now in human flesh, hiding as Aphrodite's priestess—but she had once been a goddess.
Not some common spirit born of field flowers or forest trees, but of Poseidon and Demeter's bloodline!
Her father Poseidon cherished her so, naming her Despoina—"mistress of the house."
Her mother Demeter passed to her secret mysteries unknown even to mortals.
Through them, she gained fame as a master alchemist and sorceress, teacher to those pursuing arcane truths.
But that was ancient history.
Long ago, Zeus fell victim to a potion she'd gifted him, only to be cursed by Hera into a bird—until recently returning to human form.
"Tch, as if Zeus could've been swayed by some test-batch love potion!"
Finally back in human guise, Despoina hid her identity, posing as Aphrodite's priestess while conducting all manner of magical experiments to reclaim her divinity someday.
Then, recently, in the deep predawn before the rooster crowed, a strangely attired traveler burst into the temple.
When she demanded to know his business, he wordlessly tossed a bizarre straw doll into the fire and vanished.
As she wrinkled her nose at the oddity.
Her foot brushed the straw doll the traveler had left behind.
"This...!"
Despoina, who had honed Demeter's mysteries for ages, wandered as a bird for centuries, beholding what gods and men could not—now felt that doll calling to her with its strange power.
Undeniably alien, grotesque, horrific.
Yet the power sealed beneath the doll, burning with it, was immense.
If harnessed well, it could substitute for the divinity she'd lost.
That realization spurred her to snatch the doll from the flames—but too late; it had burned almost entirely, leaving only the head.
Still, some power lingered within.
She immediately began experiments with the head.
And now.
"What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?"
In a small sanctum of the Aphrodite Grand Temple.
Beneath the beautiful Aphrodite spreading her arms overhead, Despoina trembled on the floor before the statue.
-Kee-hee-eek!
-Ku-hwaaak!
Every candle blazed, illuminating the sanctum brightly. Beyond the heavily sealed door stretched not the mortal world, nor the underworld—but a realm of darkness.