The Walking Spellbook
Chris took out the jar and lifted the lid. Mana stones were heaped inside. When the demon let out a sigh, Chris asked.
"You just got your hands on mana stones. Why the sigh?"
"This is my house. Everything in here is mine, and splitting it with you half and half burns."
"Fair enough."
"Then can I have all of it?"
"That won't do."
Chris took the mana stones out and divided them into two exact halves. The demon called a halt.
"Make it three piles."
"You don't get to break the deal and turn greedy now."
"It isn't greed. I need them to run the magic circle."
"Magic circle?"
"You planning to rot down here for the rest of your life?"
Chris's heart surged, and he shouted.
"There's a teleportation circle here?"
"There is."
"One that leads outside the ruins?"
"No. Internal use only. Getting outside takes a key."
Disappointment dragged Chris's shoulders down.
"I knew things were going too well."
With that, he split the mana stones into three piles.
"Where does the circle lead?"
"Where the treasure is."
Chris frowned. At the sight of it, the demon cocked its head.
"Other mages light up when I tell them we're going where the treasure is. Why do you hate it?"
"Because it's dangerous."
"Hate it or not, you don't have a choice. You have to go."
"Why?"
Chris stroked the spatial pouch that held the Motaro.
"This one thing is enough for me."
"Because the key is there."
Chris swore.
"Damn it."
The demon watched him thrash, smiled in a way that begged to be hit, and pointed at the mana stones.
"Put them in the mask's mouth."
Then it slipped back inside the mask. A request of that size, he could grant. Chris set the demon's share of mana stones against the mask's mouth, and mana was sucked in through it. A little later the stones went chalky and dull, as if every drop had been drained.
The mask shimmered, and the demon's form rose out of it.
"Keep feeding me."
Chris kept setting stones on the mouth, with all the sour generosity of stuffing one more bite into someone he couldn't stand. The demon devoured them in a starving rush, like a man who hadn't eaten in days. Before long its pile was gone, and a smack of the lips followed, plainly unsatisfied.
Chris tucked the two remaining piles into the spatial pouch.
"Now let's go find the spellbook."
The demon's mask rose into the empty air. Its lips moved, and unlike before, a clear voice came out of the mouth.
"I am the spellbook."
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"You rotten bastard! That is not what we agreed!"
"I'm a hundred times better than some spellbook with a fixed store of knowledge. I'll teach you."
"And what exactly am I supposed to trust, learning from you?"
"You don't trust me?"
"How am I supposed to trust a demon! Of course I don't."
A fireball took shape over Chris's hand. He was weighing whether to simply hurl it when the mask jeered.
"A little of my strength is back, and I can feel it clearly now. Your magic is far too crude."
He was sick to death of being called crude. On impulse, Chris threw the fireball.
It went with a thin whistle of air. The mask flipped end over end and slipped it.
"Judging by that crude magic of yours, what you need is a beginner spellbook. A great archmage like me would never keep a beginner spellbook lying around. The promise was impossible to keep from the start."
Chris ignored the excuse and formed dozens of wind blades.
"Dodge these too."
"I haven't recovered enough to slip a simultaneous attack."
"Well, isn't that convenient. Die!"
He was a breath from loosing the wind blades when the demon shouted.
"Kill me, and how do you plan to escape this place?"
Chris checked himself.
"Do you know where the magic circle is? Do you know how to activate it? You don't."
The strength went out of Chris's eyes.
"We share the same fate."
The demon wheedled, soft as it could manage.
"Just try learning first. Learn a little, and then you can complain."
"First I'm going to half-kill you."
"Why?"
"A lie has a price, and you're going to pay it."
The demon snorted and flew out of the makeshift shelter. Chris sent wind blades after the fleeing mask.
Its movements were uncanny. Most of the blades went wide, but two caught up with their mark—and a transparent arm shot out from beside the demon's ear and smashed them to pieces.
"Lock letters onto paper and that knowledge dies. A living spellbook is far better. I'm telling you."
The mask climbed as it spoke. It soon struck a limit. The underground cavern was high, but even a cavern has a ceiling.
"Demon, you're a rat in a jar."
Dozens of wind blades scythed through the air, and fire arrows stitched the empty dark.
The demon was aghast.
"Hey! I don't have strength to waste like this!"
"That's the point. Draining you."
The demon turned frantic.
"Your fire magic uses a warped incantation, and your wind magic doesn't use one at all. When it's like that, you chant this way."
The mask drifted through the air and began to teach. Chris followed the chant, and his attack fell away. Only the incantation had changed, and yet the power rose.
The demon caught its breath and told him to alter the combination of his mana. Chris rearranged it as instructed and felt the force spike.
"Yes. That's how it's done."
Watching his face, the demon piled on the praise.
From that day Chris learned magic from the demon, and from that day the demon never praised him again. Every lesson came with the same scolding—blockhead—while it taught him. It began at the very threshold of magic and carried him up through spells fit for Seed Cultivation.
The moment he demanded the training method for rising to Ring Binding, the lessons ended. The demon's face went hard.
"The Ring Binding method is off limits."
"Why not?"
"From Ring Binding on, it's true secret art. I can't teach you any more."
Tom had drawn the same cold line at Ring Binding and refused to teach past it. Tom had done it, and now the demon was doing it too.
"I'll give you mana stones."
Absorbing more mana no longer raised Chris's realm, so he had been storing the stones instead of using them.
He dangled them as bait. The demon's refusal didn't bend.
"You don't teach magic to anyone who isn't your disciple. What I've already taught is too much."
For two days Chris clung to it, stroking its pride, coaxing, bowing and scraping. The demon did not change.
"Fine. I feel dirty just asking. I won't beg again."
From then on he treated the demon as if it weren't there. When it spoke, he gave no answer and only drilled the incantations.
The positions reversed. Now the demon trailed after him like a puppy, talking.
"You sulking?"
No reply.
"You are sulking. What kind of man sulks over a trifle like that?"
Chris said nothing.
"So when are we getting out of here?"
Nothing.
"You said you wanted to leave the ruins."
Nothing.
"You can't live down here your whole life."
Eight days after the answers stopped, the demon threw up its hands.
"Fine. I'll teach you. If I teach you, that settles it, doesn't it?"
"Really?"
"Have I ever lied to you?"
"Feels like quite a few times."
"When?"
"You said we'd go where the spellbook was, then led me wherever you needed to go."
"I taught you magic in place of a spellbook. Ah, this bastard really does hold a grudge. You're too small-minded. Becoming a great mage is hopeless for you."
"Whether I can or not, teach me and we'll see."
"Fine. Damn it. Let's try it. Take out the Motaro."
"Why Motaro?"
"You drink the Motaro and make the rings."
"Hold on. To reach Ring Binding, you have to weave the rings by your own power."
"Who says? Weave the rings and it's Ring Binding."
"Isn't rising there on your own strength the proper way?"
"That is the natural order. But you don't know the Ring Binding method."
"You just said you'd teach me."
"When did I?"
"Just now. You fraud of a demon."
"A fraud! I will not endure an insult like that."
"I'd have thought you were used to being called a fraud. Why the anger?"
"I've been called a villain, a murderer, a mass murderer. Never a fraud."
Chris's voice went heavy.
"Is that true?"
"It's true."
Chris could hardly believe his ears.
"And that's something to brag about?"
"It isn't a brag. It isn't anything to be ashamed of, either."
"You really are a rotten one."
Chris spat.
"You went around doing evil like that and fell until you were a demon. The shape you're in suits you."
Stung, the mask the demon inhabited drifted in until it hung at the tip of Chris's nose.
"When I was whole, dregs like you wouldn't have dared speak to me."
"What an honor... is that what you expected? The past is the past. Now is now. You know who the most pathetic fool in the world is? The one who walks around saying back in my day."
The mask sighed.
"Yes. You're right. Fallen to this, and still talking about my glory days. I'm the madman."
It drew back, and silence settled in. An hour passed before the silence broke. Chris spoke first.
"Teach me."
He gave that step because knowing how to use Motaro seemed better than not knowing. With that as a reference, he thought, he might work out how to weave the rings on his own.
When it comes to hacking away at training all by myself, I'm a seasoned hand.
The demon gave the lesson in a voice with no enthusiasm in it at all. The usual arrogance was gone, and so was the contempt. It didn't even curse. Paradoxically, that showed how deeply the quarrel had wounded it.
Chris sat well apart from the mask, turning the bottle of Motaro over in his hands. However he turned the problem, climbing to Ring Binding by teaching himself would be nearly impossible. There was nowhere to learn it, and he had no real hope of laying hands on a spellbook that recorded the secret.
"So in the end, do I have to drink this?"
He set his hand on the bottle to open it, then drew the hand back. Elder Julien of Touleno Magic Tower kept rising in his memory, and the hesitation came with him.
Julien had said it plainly. The Tower taught the shortcut for binding rings only after you had bound three of them by your own strength. Manage only two, and they would not teach you even if your life hung by a thread and you were already dying.
Why?
Because binding them yourself was the best path.
Motaro looked like something other than that kind of shortcut.
But if it was the same?
Then later it would stand in the way of climbing higher. It would trip him at the one moment that mattered.
Wasn't the wisest course to leave it untouched, and drink it only after he had reached Ring Binding—when he could bind no more rings, when he struck a wall, when the limit of his lifespan finally came for him?
"But there isn't another way, is there?"
Chris took hold of the glass lid again. He twisted, and it began to give—then he faltered.
Ah. This is agony.
What kept catching was that the one urging him to drink was the demon. That thing was a villain who had tried to take Chris's body. It had said, with not a trace of remorse, that it had been called a villain, a murderer, a mass murderer.
Circumstances had twisted strangely enough that they were clasping hands for now, but it was the sort of creature that could turn its back at any moment.
Could he trust a recommendation from something like that, and follow it?
Chris called Julien's words back again.
He had said that the first ring, the one that carried you into Ring Binding, lengthened a life by about a hundred to two hundred years, and that every ring after that added another fifty to a hundred.
Why would a difference like that exist?
If you bound a ring by a shortcut, or with a drug, wouldn't the years you gained fall short of what you earned binding it by your own power alone?
"If that guess is the truth...?"
Chris took his hand off the lid.
"But what if my guess is wrong? What if Motaro has no side effects?"
His hand closed on the lid again. Then it let go. Not once had Chris thought of himself as an indecisive man, and yet on this one question he could not decide, lurching from one choice to the other.