Shizuku had woken up to this particular surprise several times before, but seeing it that day was a shock.

Clutching her groggy head, she called out to the man who was sitting in a chair reading a book.

“Erik…?”

“Oh. Good morning.”

“Huh? Uh… Did you stay up all night?! I’m so sorry!”

“It’s nothing to worry about. I was just reading.”

The previous night, Shizuku’s fear surrounding her strange situation had driven her to ask for Erik’s help, but she’d never expected him to stay up all night. She leaped out of bed in a panic and bowed her head.

Mea was also in the room, and she was just serving Erik his breakfast. It wasn’t clear whether she’d slept or not. As Shizuku’s assistant demon left the room, she said, “I’ll bring some for you, too, Master.”

Once she was gone, Shizuku turned back to Erik.

“S-so what happened?”

“Nothing. You slept fine.”

“Aghhhhh, I’m so sorry!”

Shizuku squatted down and covered her face, which had instantly turned bright red. It was extremely embarrassing that Erik had watched her all night and nothing had ended up happening. She wanted to roll around on the floor in agony.

“I-I’ll make it up to you someday…”

“You don’t have to. It’s no big deal.”

Erik was sipping his tea and reading a navy-blue book. Once he finished his light breakfast, he stood up, casually raising the book to show it to Shizuku.

“Well, I’m going to borrow this. Let me know if anything happens.”

“Oh, okay! Thank you!”

The man showed no sign of exhaustion or discontent as he left, and she watched him go, holding her reddened cheeks. When Mea came back, Shizuku frowned with confusion.

“That book he borrowed… Is that one of mine?”

The answer to that question had already submerged itself deep inside Shizuku. She had no memory of what had happened and no way to recall it.

Mea smiled sadly.

“Come now, Master, please have something to eat. I’m sure you have another busy day ahead of you.”

And with that, another uneventful day began.

A new paper cover had been put on the navy-blue book.

Erik had made it from some paper he’d found to hide the leather cover. Putting paper covers on books wasn’t customary in Erik’s world, but he’d made a number of them by now, having been inspired by the ones he’d seen on books from Shizuku’s world.

Erik carried on reading in the privacy of his room, summarizing the contents of the book on paper as he went. He organized the information into a table, noting which country and what time in history each part of the book referred to, while skim-reading the detailed passages.

Deciding to take a rest after finishing a chapter, he closed his weary eyes.

“I should have known there was more than one book…”

He’d realized there were gaps in this book’s knowledge as he’d been making his notes. It wasn’t that specific countries, regions, or eras were missing entirely; accounts of a time period would describe events that occurred in certain countries and omit those that happened elsewhere, while particular eras of a country’s history might be covered and others ignored. Such haphazard and incomplete coverage was unusual for a history book.

Regardless, the contents were arranged in chronological order. Erik had managed to confirm that much, even though there was no table of contents or index.

“The missing sections must be in another book…”

He knew about the red book, at least. Erik tried to discern a pattern that linked the omitted sections, but he had yet to find one. It was as if pieces of history had been picked at random, like children fighting over a bowl of candies trying to grab whatever treats they could get.

Still, there were two things that were undeniably intriguing.

Firstly, some of the accounts from ancient times contradicted one another.

The earliest sections of the book—which dated to around a century before the Dark Age—were among the oldest known records. Multiple contradictory versions of these accounts appeared, spanning a period of roughly eleven hundred years that ended about three centuries ago.

The very beginning of the book, for example, claimed that an elder brother had ascended the throne after a succession dispute, whereas the second time this story was told had the younger brother stealing the throne from his brother. The last of the several different versions most closely aligned with the “history” Erik knew.

There weren’t just one or two contradictory accounts, either. The majority of the first half of the book was filled with them. There were no page numbers, so it was hard to know for sure, but it also seemed to have a lot more pages than one would expect at first glance. If someone who didn’t know about the book read it, it would come off as a confusing mix of historical records, some hypothetical and some true.

Erik, however, had an idea as to why things were so incomprehensible.

“Could these be…erased experiments?”

The owner of the missing red book claimed that the continent was a testing ground, and that the books chronicled experiments that had been erased from history.

If these were records of such experiments, it meant that history had been repeatedly overwritten. It seemed like these experiments had ended about three hundred years ago, as only one version of each historical event was reported from that point onward, but even if it had happened in the distant past, it was unsettling to think that history had been manipulated.

Staring at a spell diagram on the page, Erik let out a frustrated sigh. There was no record of a forbidden curse like that in Farsas’s archives, and according to the version of history he was familiar with, it wasn’t even supposed to exist.

“There’s one other thing that’s bothering me…”

If he hadn’t been paying such close attention, the overlapping versions of history would have hidden it from view, but the table he’d made to check the time and location of each of the records had helped him realize something.

The number of “omitted sections” began to decrease after a certain period at the beginning of the Dark Age. Until that point, Erik estimated that the book included about a third of all historical accounts, and if Shizuku’s claim about there being three books was correct, one could surmise that the accounts were distributed equally among the three books.

After that, however, the book seemed to chronicle about half of everything that happened.

Why was that? Erik racked his brains, trying to remember what had happened on the continent at that point in time: the establishment of what would become the magic kingdom, the appearance of spirit sorcerers, the turmoil in the east of the continent, the development of weapons, the improvement of sailing ships, the creation of highways, the spread of belief in Aetea, and—

“…Is that it?”

The next thought that entered Erik’s head, as well as the deductions that followed, left him at a loss for words.

He felt vacant, almost dazed. The conclusion he’d come to was hard to believe. Any ordinary person might have been crushed by the emptiness Erik was feeling, but he just tamped it down.

Erik sighed and took out the portrait wedged into the book after the last page. It had been there when he’d borrowed the book from Shizuku. It depicted two people, likely a husband and wife. Erik knew who they were.

“They look a lot like…Lyshien and Oscar.”

The princess of a fallen kingdom and her protector. Why had their picture been inside this book? Apparently, Lyshien had spent a while in Rozsark after her country crumbled. This book had also been in Rozsark, so it was certainly possible the portrait been drawn during that time.

Still, the version of Lyshien in the picture looked several years older than she did in real life. A spell had been placed on the picture to stop it from deteriorating, so it was probably pretty old. It made more sense to assume that the portrait was of one of Lyshien’s ancestors.

Why would someone go out of their way to put a picture like that in this book? Erik wondered to himself.

“She said not to let Farsas get hold of it, huh…?”

The clues led Erik to one conceivable possibility—but not only did he lack the resources to prove it, the risks were huge. It was probably wise to leave it alone for the time being. First, he had to verify his hypothesis regarding the accounts it contained.

After putting the portrait back in the book, Erik put it on the shelf and set a barrier to prevent anyone from touching it. He gathered up his notes spread out on the desk, then trotted out of the room.

Shizuku awoke at the same time every day, even when nobody woke her up. She’d been like that for as long as she could remember.

After washing her face with cold water, she started to comb her hair.

Ever since the day she’d asked Erik for advice, Shizuku had stopped “staying up late.” This came as a relief to Mea, too, who had woken her master up the past few days by saying, “It seems you slept well.” Shizuku was probably the most well-rested she’d been since arriving in her new world. Thanks to that, she’d been feeling pretty good.

Shizuku looked at the list of things she had to do that day as she quickly dressed herself and got ready for work.

“Okay, I’m off! See you at lunch.”

“Have a good day.”

Shizuku left the room, carrying a bundle of documents under her arm. In the past, knee-length clothing had felt easier to move in, but lately she’d found herself more comfortable wearing ankle-length skirts, likely as a result of the formal clothing she’d had to wear in Kisk.

She looked up at the sunny sky through the window and stifled a yawn. Shizuku had been back in Farsas for a month and she’d already produced a range of learning materials, including several flashcard sets and picture books. Most of these were inspired by her successes in Kisk, but she’d started to wonder whether the flashcards, initially targeted at young children, could be adapted to help older children learn compound words, too. Moreover, when Shizuku had asked if there were any tools she could use to record and play back audio, she was told that there was a magic implement that could do this, so she’d started thinking about those kinds of learning resources as well. With only one month left on Erik’s contract, she wanted to try everything she could think of.

When Shizuku arrived at the lab, she was surprised to find an unexpected person there.

“Lera. What’s the matter? Is there something wrong with the picture book?”

It was the first time Lera had come to Shizuku’s lab, so her presence startled Shizuku. She wondered whether there was a problem, but Lera just smiled.

“No. I have some good news… We might have found a potential treatment for the disease.”

“What?! Really?” exclaimed Shizuku, eager to hear the details.

Lera gave her explanation, a slightly troubled smile on her face.

They still didn’t know the cause of the disease. However, after Erik had suggested that the soul and language might not be related, Lera and the other researchers had started taking a different direction with some of the experiments. Working under the assumption that the disease might be caused by some sort of infection, one of these experiments had involved gathering children around the age of ten—an age when kids had already acquired more than half of their innate language skills—and having them interact with younger children.

As these experiments were repeated, some changes were observed in the children. More specifically, the younger children who were symptomatic began to regain their innate language skills.

“Wait, are you suggesting that this change isn’t because the younger children learned from speaking to the older ones?”

“Obviously, that’s one possibility. But we also instructed the older children not to use certain words, and even got them to sit in the same room without speaking at all. In both cases, the younger children got their language skills back. We’re currently investigating whether the magical force field placed in the room during the experiments had an effect. Still, this is a significant breakthrough in itself, right? We hadn’t found any clues until now.”

“That’s amazing… Congratulations!”

Was this the first step in unraveling the mysteries of innate language? Shizuku was eager to know more.

Lera noticed Shizuku’s enthusiasm and promised she’d give her a summarized report of the results later on. Then she explained her main motive for swinging by.

“Could you pass on my gratitude to Erik? I’ve gone to thank him in person, but he never seems to be in his lab lately.”

“He doesn’t?”

Now that Shizuku thought about it, she hadn’t seen Erik since the night she’d gone to ask for his help. She didn’t realize he hadn’t been in his lab; that was incredibly strange.

Shizuku nodded, agreeing to pass on the message.

Once Lera had left, Shizuku couldn’t help but frown. It felt for a moment like something she couldn’t recall was threatening to resurface, as if there was an amorphous anxiety looming in the back of her mind. And yet, like sand slipping through her fingers, the feeling was quickly buried deep inside her.

All she was left with was that desert landscape. Shizuku thought back to when she’d looked up at the sky, having first arrived in this world, and could almost feel the heat. Her head felt hazy, and she vigorously shook her head to try to clear it.

2. Piles of Dust

At first, it was his intense curiosity that motivated him.

The idea that she’d come from another world was fascinating in itself, but it was the peculiarity of her writing that truly enraptured him. How were the sentences structured? How were the words formed? He wanted to work out the writing system and study it for himself.

Yet their relationship had gone past being merely transactional. He’d helped her, impressed by how strong and positive she remained despite the incomprehensible situations she’d been thrown into. She didn’t curl up and cry or give up and abandon everything. Instead, she stayed determined to move forward, even if that meant taking baby steps. She didn’t lose faith in people’s good nature and the decency of the human spirit, and she was also determined to remain sincere. That was what he admired about Shizuku.

At times, he wondered if this was how it would feel to have his younger sister by his side, who he hadn’t seen in so long. Perhaps he could have spent days like this with the princess had she survived.

But Shizuku was her own person. There was no one like her—the speed with which she grasped new ideas, her earnest attitude toward studying, her consideration for other people, her unwavering warmth. Most importantly, though, she’d become someone who didn’t give up or accept defeat.

Although she was powerless, Shizuku refused to surrender, and she valued her dignity more than her life. In that sense, Erik found her stubborn and foolish. He’d once warned her not to lose sight of the bigger picture, but in reality, that wasn’t what she did. She saw the whole picture, then chose the one thing she couldn’t compromise on.

Her own free will meant so much to her that she’d reach into flames to grasp it.

Her stubbornness also undoubtedly caused her pain.

The world and its people weren’t kind enough to meet her expectations.

Still, Erik wanted to make sure that he did—even if he was the only one.

He knew perfectly well how much she worried and how hard she worked. He wanted to support her through all of that.

He enjoyed their time together, so he was also doing this for himself.

That was why he’d taken her hand and come on this journey with her.

But could he make it to the end without betraying her?

“You have cocoa?!”

“Of course we do. Those bitter beans, right? You dissolve the powder in water and drink it. They use it a little in the south, but it’s a medicine… Is something wrong with you?”

“Y-you mean…you can make chocolate…?!”

“What’s that?” Leuticia asked, looking confused.

The two of them were enjoying a casual chat after Shizuku had shared her latest report.

This topic had come up because, on this particular day, there happened to be a plate of fruit on Leuticia’s desk. The two of them had begun to share the fruit and decided to list plants and animals that were common to both their worlds, leading to the discussion about cocoa.

Her boss seemed curious to know what chocolate was, and Shizuku began to think seriously about the topic. Although she knew how to make cakes using baking chocolate, she didn’t know how chocolate itself was made. She often knew the raw ingredients for things, but not the production process. It was the same with miso and soy sauce.

“When chocolate’s seventy percent cocoa, it’s bitter… So what’s in the remaining thirty percent? Wait, is it even okay for me to introduce a recipe from another world? If I don’t know what I’m doing, maybe I can experiment…”

“Uhm, Shizuku…?”

Leuticia was looking at her subordinate—who’d started muttering under her breath to herself—with a puzzled expression. Shizuku raised her head.

“I’d like some of those beans so that I can make some sweets! Could you get them for me?!”

“I—I should be able to.”

For some reason, Shizuku was much more enthusiastic about this than her progress report. Overwhelmed, Leuticia nodded and said, “I’ll send away for some…”

Shizuku’s face lit up, but she quickly remembered her manners and bowed subserviently.

“I’ll make a start on my next manuscript, then,” Shizuku announced.

“Y-yes, please do. Your picture books with the talking animals are very interesting. The children seem to love them.”

The new picture book Shizuku had just completed was about a lost child who encounters different animals in the forest and receives their help. The goal was for children to learn the names of the animals that showed up in the story, so Shizuku had put a lot of effort into the illustrations.

“It doesn’t seem like anthropomorphized animals are very popular in this world. I’ve looked through a lot of picture books since taking on this job, but I haven’t found any examples.”

“In the past, talking animals tended to be mid-ranking demons. That’s probably why.”

“Oh. Maybe putting them in picture books isn’t such a good idea.”

Shizuku didn’t want her picture book to make children less cautious around demons, but Leuticia just laughed and shook her head.

“Such demons are almost nonexistent nowadays. Most were exterminated during the Age of Witches, so it’s rare for humans to encounter them now.”

“Oh, I see…”

That sounded like a pretty interesting slice of history. If any research had been done on it, Shizuku wanted to see it.

Leuticia gently snapped her fingers at Shizuku, who seemed fascinated.

“By the way, do you mind if I borrow Erik for a while?” she asked.

“Erik? Sure, I don’t mind. Why are you asking me, though?”

Leuticia was his boss, not Shizuku. She couldn’t fathom why the princess was asking for her permission, but Shizuku agreed anyway. Her response seemed to come as a relief to Leuticia.

“You two really are… No, never mind. We’re leaving the castle city the day after tomorrow. We’ll be gone for a little while, so if there’s anything you want to say to him, now’s your chance.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the north. There’s been a spate of demonic spirit appearances, so we’ve decided to set up barriers around all towns and villages there. It’ll take about a week, and it’s only a stopgap measure, but it’s better than nothing.”

“Yeah…”

Shizuku didn’t really understand what these demonic spirits were like, but she was worried about Erik heading off on such a mission. She hadn’t conveyed Lera’s thanks to him yet, so she made a mental note to go and see him before he left.

Leuticia gave Shizuku a beguiling smile.

“We’ll also do some research into the woman with the red book, since we’re going to be in the north anyway… Oh—and if my brother causes you any trouble while we’re away, report it to Royal Chief Mage Truce. I’ll tell him to expect you.”

Shizuku wasn’t sure if Leuticia was giving her a work instruction or not, but she listened with the same serious look the princess was giving her. And with this warning, Shizuku’s meeting with Leuticia came to a close.

After leaving Leuticia’s office, Shizuku headed straight to the lab where Erik worked—but he wasn’t there. It seemed Lera’s comment about him not coming to his lab for a while must have been true, so Shizuku decided to head to his room instead.

Shortly after knocking on Erik’s door, she received a response. The door was also unlocked. The fact that he was there brought Shizuku a strange degree of relief.

“Do you have a moment, Erik?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“I heard you’re going away for work, so I wanted to say goodbye.”

Erik was acting like his normal self, but his desk, which was usually tidy, was covered with a shocking number of books and notes. Erik began to sort out the mess, creating a set of piles. Thinking it was best not to interfere, Shizuku stayed one step away and watched him work.

“You’re headed to the north, then?”

“Yeah. Do you remember the border gate we passed through when we entered Farsas from the west? It’s north of there.”

“That’s super far away. Is it cold up there?”

“Yeah. The area’s really high up, even by Farsas’s standards. It’s probably getting cold.”

Erik sounded calm. Knowing him, he’d probably handle the work just as he always did, no matter how cold it was. Shizuku wasn’t particularly worried about that.

“I heard there are demonic spirits. Will you be all right?”

“Yeah, probably. The princess will be there, and we’ll have guards.”

Shizuku couldn’t sense any tension or fear from his monotonous comment. Feeling somewhat reassured, she passed on Lera’s thanks and shared the results of her experiments with Erik. He seemed surprised by how the experiments had progressed. Once Shizuku had finished explaining, Erik asked whether the younger children and the older ones had spoken to one another. Like Shizuku, he’d suspected that that was the source of the kids’ progress. The similarity between them made her chuckle.

“I knew you’d suspect the same thing. That’s what I asked her.”

“It’s the first thing you need to check… But I see.”

Erik pondered to himself. Then he glanced at his pile of notes, looking as if he’d remembered something.

“Oh, by the way, don’t touch anything in my room while I’m away.”

“Okay. I probably won’t come in here anyway, though. Who goes into somebody else’s room when they’re not there?”

“I know, but I thought I should tell you just in case. If I die, leave my belongings to someone else to sort out. There are some dangerous things in here.”

“Well, this conversation took a morbid turn all of a sudden.”

“It’s just a what-if scenario.”

Hypothetical or not, it left an impact. Still, Shizuku grasped that some of his possessions were dangerous to touch. He was probably referring to magic implements.

Erik lowered his eyes slightly and flashed Shizuku his signature bittersweet smile. His ordinarily clear voice now held a tinge of melancholy.

“If, one day, you find that red book and it is the interlopers’ cursed artifact, but it contains no clues as to how to return home…what would you do?”

It was an unexpected question—yet at the same time, it felt overdue.

It surprised Shizuku slightly. She wondered why he was asking this question now, of all times.

Still, as astonished as she was, the answer was already inside her.

Shizuku closed her eyes, as if she was falling asleep, and smiled.

“If it turns out that going home truly isn’t a possibility, I’ll draw a line under the issue.”

“You’ll carry on with life in this world?”

That still wasn’t a future that Shizuku was able to come to terms with. She knew what lay on the other side of that river, but she wasn’t able to cross it. At some point, however, she’d realized that the river was gradually narrowing. She was slowly adjusting to a world that had once seemed so distant, just as her journey had shaped the present version of herself.

“…I’m not sure yet,” Shizuku said with a shake of her head.

Erik didn’t speak. The silence seemed to weaken and melt away Shizuku’s sorrow, and in its place, her throat began to burn with emotion.

Maybe I’d feel better if I verbalized things…especially the things that haven’t taken shape inside me yet.

The moment she did that, however, her thoughts would become something else. Something different, no matter how similar or connected it was to now. It was a point of no return. She wouldn’t be able to take it back.

So Shizuku decided not to say a word.

How much time must have gone by?

By the time Shizuku came to her senses, Erik was standing right in front of her. He stretched out his hand and carefully touched her cheek.

Her gaze was drawn to the seemingly vast depths of his familiar dark-blue eyes.

“Well, you don’t have to give up just yet. The continent is massive. We can go to another country next.”

“That would mean so much to me… But at this rate, we’ll be able to write a guidebook.”

“What’s that?”

“A book full of sightseeing information about different places.”

The time they spent together was so enjoyable, Shizuku wished it would last forever. They could travel across countries, learning new things as they went. They could write what they’d learned in a book, then move on to their next destination. Perhaps that was one path Shizuku could choose.

She thought about the diary she kept from time to time. Shizuku used it to write about her travels and her day-to-day life, and she planned on swapping it out for a new notebook after a year.

As it turned out, however, her journey would come to an end before she replaced her diary—something Shizuku was just about to discover.

An icy wind blew through the air.

The castle stood on barren land shrouded in an eerie silence, as if it had been forgotten by all. The only sound that could be heard was the wind swirling through the air.

This was a place where an ordinary person would freeze within minutes—yet a man and a woman were walking through the castle unperturbed. The man, tall and dressed in black, led a woman with strikingly bright red hair. She didn’t bother hiding her non-human hair color and looked at her limbs in frustration.

“Having a body is so awkward. Why did you summon me to such a low-level realm, Elzard?”

“I’ve signed a contract with a human. I’d like you to meet her.”

“A human?” The woman’s eyebrows shot up. Her words, tinged with disdain, pierced Elzard like a knife. “One of those worthless beings? You summoned me to this lower realm for one of them?”

“Yes,” Elzard replied, glancing back at her.

The woman’s beauty almost made her look human, but her vibrant hair and eye color gave her true identity away. They were common features of high-ranking demons, a race that often dismissed humans as insignificant—and this demoness harbored a particular disdain for them. Elzard, who was also a high-ranking demon, had summoned her for this exact reason. He smiled, his face angled so she couldn’t see.

“You should meet her. I summoned you because you’re the ideal person for the job.”

“Ideal in what way?” the woman demanded.

“The ideal person for me to choose.”

This wasn’t entirely untrue, but neither was he giving her the full picture. Regardless, Elzard’s statement seemed to have aroused her prideful nature. The woman nodded, albeit with a discontented expression on her face. She fiddled with her ruby pendant as she followed after him.

Elzard’s comment only kept her quiet for a moment, however. She soon asked another question, an irritated tone in her voice.

“What am I supposed to do when I meet this human?”

“Nothing,” Elzard replied firmly.

The black-clad man looked out of the castle window that was coated in frost. He gazed down at the frozen landscape below.

“You don’t need to do anything. It’s Aviella who will make that decision.”

The first of the demon’s victims was found in a small village at the northernmost point of Farsas.

One day, at the edge of a forest on the outskirts of the village, a young woman was discovered in a peculiar state. She was unconscious, her body frozen from her feet up to her waist.

When she was found, her upper body was still warm, and she had a pulse. Despite receiving treatment for her frozen legs, she never regained consciousness and died three days later.

The woman’s unusual death sent shockwaves throughout the small village, but it soon faded from conversation when recurrent demon attacks began to occur.

The villagers evacuated to a nearby town, but the demons appeared there as well. The string of attacks began to weigh heavily on the people’s hearts, and before long, the woman became just one of a long list of victims.

“Northwest Farsas is massive, but the region doesn’t have all that much history. Its climate is unique, and most of the towns are relatively new. Well, I say that, but even the oldest is over two hundred years old.”

“After two hundred years, I don’t think it counts as new anymore,” Shizuku replied.

Her comment drew a chuckle from Harve, a royal court mage. For the magic kingdom, whose origins stretched back to the beginning of the Dark Age, two hundred years was no time at all. Shizuku glanced at the map beside her as she colored in her sketch.

Leuticia had left the castle with Erik the day before, leaving Shizuku behind. Harve had come to check in on her, so Shizuku was asking him about the towns in the north as she carried on with her usual work.

Harve was Erik’s friend, and it seemed he would be keeping an eye on Shizuku in Erik’s absence. Harve’s area of expertise was history, so he’d briefly explained the backstory of the northwestern region to her, which, it turned out, had once been inaccessible due to a forbidden curse.

“There’s no country above northwest Farsas, then?”

“Nope. Just tall mountains that’d be challenging to live in, and in some places, there’s a dense miasma. There used to be a country called Helginis that circumvented the miasma using powerful magic wards, but I doubt anyone lives there now.”

This sounded like an incredible story. Shizuku cocked her head in curiosity.

“I don’t really get what you mean by ‘demons’ and ‘demonic spirits.’ What are they exactly?”

“Hmm. Generally speaking, ‘demonic spirits’ can be largely grouped into two categories. One type meddles with us from the realm below this one…close to the Sea of Negativity. They take shape by imbuing miasma with Negativity or possessing animals in order to change form. That’s what we’re usually talking about when we mention ‘demonic spirits,’ which are also sometimes referred to as ‘low-ranking demons.’”

“Oh, I see.”

Shizuku nodded, recalling the giant snake she’d encountered at Candela Castle. It probably fit into that category. She really hoped she wouldn’t have to see one again.

“The other type resides in the realm above this one, where magic configurations are assembled. These are high-ranking demons. They rarely appear in the human realm or interfere with it.”

“Weren’t they revered as gods in the past? Like the water god of Lake Nevys?”

Shizuku glanced at the small green bird perched on her desk.

“They were. The creator of that bird and Princess Leuticia’s spirit, Silfa, are two such demons. From what I’ve heard, high-ranking demons have their own hierarchy, but I don’t know much about it.”

Harve had started patiently stacking the wooden blocks scattered across Shizuku’s desk. As Shizuku watched his tower getting taller and taller, she let out a sigh.

“So both types are called ‘demonic spirits,’ but they’re entirely different? Even the place they come from is different?”

“Yeah. Basically, all creatures that originate from different realms get lumped together as ‘demons.’ Some people even refer to fairies and magical creatures as demons. It has a pretty vague definition.”

“I see…”

To ordinary people, any monster they couldn’t quite identify seemed like a “demonic spirit.”

When you sorted them based on the world’s realm structure, it became clear that there were significant differences between them. The creatures from the upper realms and those from the lower realms were literally worlds apart.

Shizuku stroked Mea’s head and back with her finger.

“If high-ranking demons come from the realm above us and low-ranking demons come from the realm below us, does that mean that mid-ranking demons originate from this world?”

“Oh. I see your logic, but no. Mid-ranking demons are the most diverse type. Extraordinary low-ranking demons who’ve gained power and knowledge are referred to as mid-ranking demons, as are some low-ranking demons that are created by high-ranking ones. The term has more to do with their strength than from where they originate. Your assistant demon, for example, is a mid-ranking demon created by a high-ranking demon, which is incredibly rare. In the past few hundred years, mid-ranking demons that spawned from low-ranking demons have been exterminated. No one sees them anymore.”

“Oh, Princess Leuticia mentioned that, too,” said Shizuku, recalling the “talking animals” the princess had told her about. They must have been mid-ranking demons.

It made sense to her now.

Harve smiled.

“All this talk of demons must be unsettling, since you’re staying here by yourself, but if you ever find yourself in danger, I’m sure Erik would come back immediately. You can communicate with him using magic whenever you like. Do you want to put in a request?”

“No, it’s fine. I don’t have any new information to share with him. I wouldn’t want to disturb his work, either.”

“…Shizuku.”

Harve slumped his shoulders in disappointment—but at that very moment, there was a forceful knock on the laboratory door.

“Excuse me! It’s an emergency! We have an injured person, so if there are any mages in there, please come and help!”

“Someone’s injured?”

Shizuku and Harve exchanged glances, but only for a moment. Harve swiftly rose to his feet and dashed out of the room. Shizuku found herself following him.

When Shizuku joined Harve in the treatment room and saw the woman lying on the bed, she was left speechless.

She was a young woman, probably around Shizuku’s age, but the color had already drained from her face. Her body looked healthy, and she was wearing the sort of outfit you saw most city girls in. As far as Shizuku could see, she wasn’t bleeding, and she had no external injuries.

Instead, frost covered her body from the waist down.

“…What’s that?”

It was as if her lower half had been put into a freezer. Two mages were touching her legs and chanting spells. Although the frost was gradually melting away, there was no change in her complexion. One of them noticed Shizuku and called out to her.

“Oh! A girl? Perfect timing. There’s some hot water over there, so soak a cloth in it and rub her legs!”

Shizuku was the only other woman in the room. She hurried over to the basin, took a cloth soaked in hot water, and, as the mage had instructed her, started rubbing the parts of the woman’s legs where the frost had melted. The water was hot, and the woman’s legs were as cold as ice, but she couldn’t worry about things like that right now. Shizuku put all her strength into warming up the woman’s skin. Beads of sweat appeared on her forehead.

But no matter how much Shizuku rubbed, the warmth didn’t return to the pale skin. The frost had disappeared, but the woman’s body remained chilled to the core. Shizuku’s hands trembled with anxiety as she wrung out the cloth, and at that moment, she heard Harve’s voice.

“Oh…”

Everyone’s eyes, including Shizuku’s, turned to Harve.

“It’s no use… Her soul has been taken.”

He was effectively pronouncing the woman dead. His statement caused the atmosphere in the room to freeze over, dispersing the effort that everyone had put in like tiny bubbles on the wind.

About twenty royal court mages had accompanied Leuticia on her journey north, meaning there weren’t many mages left in the castle. Still, even if the king’s sister had stayed behind, there was nothing she could have done.

When a soul is stolen from a living being, the body eventually dies unless the soul is recovered. However, since nobody knew who’d taken the woman’s soul, they had no way of dealing with the situation.

“So her body was found in an alley in the castle city… Who do you think did it?”

Harve frowned, hearing Lars’s question. The king was doing a handstand on the courtyard lawn. Unpacking her lunch nearby, Shizuku found it hard to tell whether Harve was stumped by the king’s question or troubled by his strange behavior, but she figured it was probably the former. Harve had been involved in treating the victim and investigating her case.

His brow furrowed deeper.

“To tell you the truth, we have no idea who the perpetrator is. Taking a soul from a living person is no easy feat.”

“Why? Can’t you just pull it out?”

“If it were that easy, we’d have a problem on our hands. There are spells that can do it, but obviously, they’re forbidden curses. Apparently, they don’t work very well if the target struggles, and the soul doesn’t come out neatly if they’re unconscious or dazed… To put it bluntly, it’s easier to kill the person first and then take their soul.”

Harve had obtained his knowledge of these forbidden curses via magical communications with Leuticia and Erik. Lars finally righted himself and snatched a pork-wrapped vegetable roll out of Shizuku’s lunchbox.

“If it wasn’t a forbidden curse, could it have been the work of demons? It wouldn’t be the first time they’d done such a thing.”

“The previous victims were all men, and it was succubi and water spirits extracting their souls… But that hasn’t happened in two hundred years. Besides, demons that target women consume them whole—flesh and blood included. Women are more stable in terms of magic, which makes it more difficult to extract their souls.”

“Maybe the victim was actually a man.”

“It was a woman.”

When the female victim was found unconscious in an alley near the west gate of the castle city, there had been no sign of anyone suspicious in the area and nothing to suggest there’d been a struggle. Her legs had simply been frozen to the road.

Lars kept snatching away more of her side dishes, and Shizuku—having initially put up a fight by moving her lunchbox out of his reach—eventually gave in and handed the whole thing to him. His arms were just too long for her to stop him.

With her lunch disrupted, Shizuku instead decided to join in the conversation.

“Do you think they froze her legs so that they could extract her soul?”

“I wondered that, but I suspect it takes a pretty long time to restrain someone with ice. The victim would usually escape before the job was done, wouldn’t they?”

“Hmm. Something about this doesn’t sit right with me. What would they even do with the extracted soul?”

It was a basic question, yet a pensive look crossed Harve’s face. The man who’d stolen Shizuku’s lunch, on the other hand, sounded unfazed as he gave his response.

“If a human did this, it must be for a forbidden spell. You can get more power from a living soul than a dead one. Or maybe it’s just for fun.”

“Ugh, I don’t like either of those options,” said Shizuku. “By the way, Your Majesty, if you want a lunchbox, I can make you one of your own. Just don’t take mine.”

“But you sneak in carrots when I let you make my food.”

“Of course I do. You’ve got to stop being so picky. You’re twenty-seven.”

“The food you make has a really interesting flavor.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?!”

The conversation had gone totally off track. Harve let out a sigh, making sure that the other two couldn’t hear it.

Neither of them seemed bothered by this mysterious incident. Maybe that was because they had thick skin, or maybe it was because Erik and the princess were due back in a week.

The next day, however, both Lars’s and Shizuku’s expressions had turned bitter.

In the time between that conversation and the following afternoon, ten more victims were found in the castle city.

Eleven victims had now been brought to the castle, including the first one. They were of varying ages, and they all looked different. The only thing that linked them was the fact that they were female.

Emergency medical treatment was carried out on their bodies, which were being kept inside the castle, but unless their souls were retrieved within three days, they’d all die anyway. Over ten search parties—four-member teams consisting of both mages and soldiers—had been dispatched since the incidents began to occur, but no perpetrators or stolen souls had been tracked down.

“What a creepy story…”

Inside the bustling, agitated castle, Shizuku was talking to Mea as she added color to her picture book.

There was nothing Shizuku could do about incidents like this. She knew that, but the fact remained that her anxiety was weakening her concentration. Having accidentally dropped her paintbrush on the edge of her paper by its point, she let out a deep sigh.

She reached out to the little bird, who was sitting on the table pecking at candies.

“Can you extract people’s souls, Mea?”

This question prompted Mea to return to her girl form and take a seat opposite her master.

“No, I can’t. I have been blessed with a great amount of magical power, but I don’t know complicated spells like human mages do.”

Having been created as a type of magical equipment by a high-ranking demon, Mea was powerful when it came to simple attack or defense magic, but complex spells like those required for healing weren’t her strong point.

“I see,” Shizuku replied, then after a few moments asked, “Do you think it’d be out of the question for other demons, too?”

“I’m not sure. I know there are some female demons who have successfully extracted souls, but I doubt they’d go after women. Female souls are hard, and I’m sure they take a lot of time. I think it’s highly likely that this is the result of a man-made spell.”

“Hmm. I guess it really must’ve been a human.”

It was easier for Shizuku to imagine this being the result of a human’s evil deeds than the work of a “demon,” a being she didn’t fully understand. The possibility that a person was using a forbidden curse was likely the cause of the unrest within the castle.

The magic kingdom of Farsas was famed worldwide for its lack of tolerance toward forbidden curses. The string of incidents that had occurred within its castle city was definitely a test for the country. If they didn’t solve the case before more victims appeared, it would raise doubts about the nation’s competence.

Shizuku frowned.

“There are five whole days until Leuticia gets back.”

The princess and her team had their hands full skirmishing with demons and helping the local residents in the north of Farsas. Shizuku also found herself worrying about Kisk, where the people’s suspicions still hadn’t been completely cleared.

Mea noticed her master was distracted and gave her some hard advice.

“You should focus on your work for now, Master.”

“Ugh, you’re right.”

Shizuku could only do what she was capable of. That was how she lived her life in this new world.

Following Mea’s advice, she picked up the brush she’d put down and carefully started painting again.

That same day, Shizuku ended up having lunch outside the castle. Harve had come to pay her a visit and invited her out.

“I’m going back to my parents’ place to pick up some stuff. Want to come and have lunch with me?” he’d asked.

Harve’s family ran an inn in the castle city. Shizuku had stayed there before. It was the perfect spot to go for a change of scenery, only a short distance away from the castle.

“Sure. Lately, whenever I make my own lunch, the king just steals it from me.”

“He only does that because he enjoys winding you up. Just ignore him.”

“Easier said than done…”

The streets of the castle city were less crowded than usual, presumably because of the ongoing incident. Most of the people around were travelers and merchants, and there weren’t many young women about.

Shizuku ran her fingers through her loose hair. Every so often, there was a strong gust of wind, which threatened to tangle it.

Harve, walking beside her, suddenly asked a question.

“Your assistant demon didn’t want to join you today?”

“She said she wanted to do a deep clean of my room. Besides, Mea doesn’t really need regular meals.”

“I see. Being a demon, she must be powered by her own natural magical energy.”

“You make it sound like she runs on solar power…”

It was an overcast day, and the sun was hidden behind the clouds. Shizuku closed her eyes as the wind sent a swirl of dust into the air.

Once the familiar inn came into view, Harve cocked his head to one side.

“Huh? It’s closed.”

“Why’s that?”

“Maybe we’re early. I’ll go around the back and open up. Wait here.”

Harve left Shizuku at the front of the inn and disappeared around the building. Alone, standing before the door, Shizuku looked up at the sky.

The town seemed normal enough, but the criminal who’d been stealing women’s souls was still at large, presumably lying low somewhere. Shizuku glanced back at the door. The curtains were drawn.

At that moment, she heard a faint scream.

“Huh?”

Shizuku looked around, but she couldn’t see where the scream had come from. She knocked gently on the closed door, but there was no response. Just as she was about to call out for Harve, there was another scream, clearer this time.

It was the cry of a little girl.

Shizuku wavered for a moment—but there was no time to hesitate.

She took her notebook out of her pocket, left a note by the door, and started running in the direction the sound had come from. She turned a corner, entering a narrow alley.

As she ran down the branching alleyways, Shizuku felt something strange brush against her ears, almost as if the air pressure had changed. She grimaced as she searched for the source of the scream, peering around every corner she went past.

“Help…!”

It was a feeble cry. If it had sounded more like a grownup’s voice, Shizuku might have been more cautious.

When she finally found the person sobbing in a dead end, it turned out to be a girl around the age of five. She had long blond hair and a slender frame. Her small feet and the red shoes covering them were frozen to the cobblestones.

The child’s face was contorted in fear. As soon as she saw Shizuku, she started to shriek.

“It hurts! It hurts so bad!”

“J-just give me a moment!”

Shizuku hurried over to the girl and took a closer look at her feet. Her frost-covered calves were icy to the touch, just like the first victim’s had been. Trying to put the girl a little more at ease, Shizuku forced a smile.

“You’ll be okay. I’m going to help you.”

Shizuku tried to take the girl’s frozen feet out of her shoes, but they wouldn’t budge. She wasn’t fastened very firmly to the ground, though. If Shizuku melted the ice a bit, she would probably be able to yank the shoes free from the cobblestones.

“I’m going to go get some hot water… Wait, maybe I should stay here. Can anyone hear me?!”

It was dangerous to leave the little girl here by herself. Still, despite Shizuku’s shouts, nobody seemed to be coming to help.

Shizuku quickly came up with a new idea and placed her palms on the thin layer of ice covering the ground. It was so cold that it was slightly painful to touch, but nevertheless, Shizuku began to melt the ice with her body heat. She continued to wipe her wet hands on her clothes as she melted the ice.

“M-miss…”

“It’ll be fine.”

The ground itself seemed to be frozen solid, and Shizuku felt a chill gradually seep into her body as she knelt on it. She began to lose feeling in her toes, but this was no time to complain. The little girl’s foot seemed to be getting looser, so she clung onto that hope. Shizuku kept calling for help as she rubbed her hands on the ice, trying to melt it.

The dizziness hit just as the girl’s foot was about to come loose.

Shizuku placed a hand on the ground to keep herself steady. It was a familiar sensation—one she felt she’d experienced before. Something was writhing around in her body. She looked up at the child, her vision blurred.

The young girl wasn’t crying anymore. All traces of fear had disappeared from her face.

Instead, she was staring at Shizuku, her eyes crimson and inhuman. Once again, something shifted inside Shizuku.

“It’s…like that…huh?”

Shizuku was on the verge of collapsing, using her hands to hold herself up. Her lower legs were now covered in multiple layers of frost where they touched the ground, cutting off the sensation. The moment she realized this, an icy pain surged through her veins.

How had the women’s souls been extracted? Had a human used a forbidden curse, or was it the work of a demon? The answer was the latter.

Shizuku tried to force blood into her frozen legs. Extracting a woman’s soul took a while—so the “child” pretended to be a victim to buy herself time.

Fastened to the ground, Shizuku felt nauseous as the force groped around inside her, attempting to extract her soul. She slapped her hands against her legs, which were beginning to go numb from the pain.

“You hurt me. You tricked me… Why don’t you just give up?”

There was a note of defiance in Shizuku’s voice. The demon’s expression had been blank until that point, but her eyes widened, surprised by her prey’s unexpected shift in attitude.

Shizuku gave her a caustic smile.

“Having trouble pulling it out? I can’t say I’m surprised—my soul’s a little different from other people’s. Sorry to disappoint.”

“…What are you?”

“An anomaly. Mea!”

An intangible force appeared, ready to fight back in response to Shizuku’s cry. The demon sensed it and leaped away, confused. The small bird hidden in Shizuku’s bosom transformed into a young girl and stood in front of her.

“Your orders, Master?”

“Capture her, if possible. Do you think you’ll be able to?”

“I’ll try.”

Mea unleashed her power, not even needing an incantation. The frost covering the ground shattered, and Shizuku staggered back to her feet. Her legs hadn’t completely frozen, and she rubbed them, facing straight ahead.

“It’s your job to act as the bait.”

That was the concise command Shizuku had been given earlier that day.

A person whose soul had been stolen could only survive for about three days, meaning that Farsas needed to catch the perpetrator as soon as possible if they wanted to prevent the victims’ deaths.

Lars had made the decision to get Shizuku to walk around as bait. At the same time, he would increase the number of people on patrol and keep ordinary citizens off the streets. It was a dangerous plan, designed to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Harve had been against it, worried it might fail—but after careful consideration, Shizuku had agreed to go along with it.

She’d have Mea with her. Since she possessed no magical power of her own, she would seem defenseless. Plus, her soul was unique.

If everything went according to plan, she could catch the culprit off-guard. Yet by no means was it a low-stakes gamble.

“…When I saw you, I felt the urge to help—but I also suspected it might have been a trap.”

And so, Shizuku had tried to save the child on her own, keeping Mea hidden to avoid revealing her trump card to any lurking enemies.

“Now this is your chance to surrender. Give back the souls you’ve stolen.”

Shizuku’s confident demand made the red-eyed demon step away, grasping the white beaded necklace she’d been hiding beneath her clothes. Shizuku’s eyes were drawn to the murky pearls, which were glowing from the inside.

You don’t think… Are they the human souls?

This was just a hunch for Shizuku, but Mea seemed certain. She took a big step forward.

“I’m going to get them back.”

The red-eyed demon turned away and leaped high into the air, landing on a rooftop. Shizuku’s eyes bulged with shock at the girl’s inhuman movements.

“Mea! Lift me up onto the roof!”

Shizuku was enveloped by a floating sensation, which made her feel as though she were on a roller coaster. By the time she’d instinctively hunched over in a ball, Mea had already let her down on the roof. When the demon saw Shizuku, she leaped onto the next rooftop.

I can’t let her get away.

Shizuku forced her unsteady legs to move and started running. With Mea’s assistance, she leaped from roof to roof.

“Eek, this is scary! Wait up!”

There was no way the demon was going to comply with Shizuku’s command. Shizuku took out the knife she’d been given to capture the demon with and hurled the magic implement toward the fleeing demon’s back.

The silver blade whizzed gently through the air, homing in on the demon—but just as it was about to pierce her narrow back, the girl dodged to the side, causing the knife to bounce off the roof with a thud. However, dodging the knife had caused the demon to become unsteady on her feet, creating an opening that Mea wasn’t going to miss.

“Here I go!”

Mea kicked herself off the roof and leaped through the air. She held her right arm up above her head, then cut down her enemy from the side. The small, red-eyed demon was sent flying, crashing into the roof with such force that it made the entire building creak.

“Agh…!”

She looked just like a human child as she writhed around, letting out pained cries. But Shizuku repressed the swell of sympathy and rushed over to the demon, reaching out for her neck. She located the white pearl necklace and pulled it directly upward. The necklace was too big for a child’s neck, so it slipped off into Shizuku’s hand easily. Before she knew it, Shizuku had started running her eyes across the white pearls, counting them.

“Master!”

Shizuku heard Mea trying to warn her—but by that point, she was already aware of the threat. The demon whose necklace Shizuku had taken was transforming, her childlike hands changing into giant, reddish-black ones.

Shizuku saw it, but she wasn’t going to be able to get away. She instinctively took a step back, but the massive hand came crashing down toward her at an alarming speed.

Don’t close your eyes, Shizuku thought to herself—but she didn’t want to see herself getting crushed, either.

She closed her eyes and shielded her head with her hands.

A huge sound reverberated around her, like something being deflected by the air. The impact made Shizuku lose her balance, and she thumped down on her backside.

She couldn’t help but let out a small shriek—but then someone pulled her by the arm.

“Well done keeping her pinned down.”

Shizuku heard someone speaking to her, their voice familiar and pompous. Shizuku let out a sigh, having realized her work was complete. She opened her eyes to discover two men standing beside her.

“Are you all right?” asked Harve, who’d cast the protective barrier around her.

The king had also shown up with him. Wielding Akashia, he made a single elegant motion to sever the arm of the demon, who’d penetrated the barrier.

“Gyaaahhh!”

Still holding the necklace in her hand, Shizuku instinctively covered her ears at the sound of the demon’s shriek.

As Lars stepped forward, however, the screaming soon vanished into thin air. The demon turned and fled, seeing the king of Farsas preparing to strike again.

“Hey, come on. Don’t run away,” he complained.

Nobody would obey an order like that. The demon, still in the form of a little girl, was unsteady due to her missing arm, but she still managed to jump onto the next rooftop.

Lars began chasing the demon himself. Harve had been holding Shizuku up, but he quickly hurried after his master. This movement must have acted as a signal, as more mages and soldiers began to appear on the ground.

Relieved, Shizuku examined the stolen necklace.

“It’s…so warm.”

The white beads were warm to the touch. It almost felt as though they were alive. Shizuku counted more than thirty pearls. If the souls were returned to their respective bodies, the people who were being cared for at the castle were sure to wake up.

She turned to Mea, who was standing beside her.

“Mea, could you take me down to—”

But before Shizuku could finish her sentence, Mea suddenly disappeared from sight.

“Huh?”

Her demon assistant slammed into the glass window of a neighboring house and vanished.

With Mea gone, a man reached out toward Shizuku.

His hand appeared out of nowhere, grabbing the necklace she was holding.

“I’ll be taking that back.”

His voice was low. As he tugged hard on the string, Shizuku pulled it back in a panic.

“N-no!”

Shizuku’s defiance made the man smile. Dressed entirely in black, it wasn’t clear how he’d appeared on the roof. He elegantly raised his empty left hand.

“…”

Shizuku was instinctively distrustful. The predator’s intense gaze made her cower in fear.

Yet, despite this, Shizuku still refused to let go.

With a casual snap of his fingers, the air transformed into several blades. Shizuku could hear the king shouting furiously in the distance.

“You fool! Let go!”

A barrier formed in front of Shizuku’s eyes.

Truce, the royal chief mage, shoved her aside.

A moment later, he collapsed, fresh blood spurting from his body.

The same blade that had sliced his skin started descending toward Shizuku’s right hand—the one she was clutching the necklace in.

Time felt like it was passing at a crawl.

Shizuku stared at the white beads in her hand.

Each of those beads must contain a person’s soul.

She couldn’t let someone snatch those lives away.

So Shizuku refused to let go.

And without a sound, her five fingers were sliced off.

“Aaaaaaaaahhh!”

Shizuku’s scream echoed throughout that corner of the castle city.

Overwhelmed by confusion and agony, her mind went blank. Her fingers had been severed and the string of the necklace had been sliced through, leaving the beads to scatter across the rooftop. The vision of the white balls and her fingers seemed to merge into one.

However, only the white beads gradually moved toward the hand of the man in black, as if pulled by invisible threads.

Shizuku’s mind was close to breaking point. She was about to pass out from the pain—but her fear of having the beads stolen jolted her into action again.

She raised her left hand and stretched out her arm, trying to grab the white beads floating away from her, but her body wasn’t moving the way she wanted it to. Several of the beads collided with her hand and fell to the ground.

“What a boring attempt to interfere…”

The man looked displeased as another blade formed in his hand. Before he had the chance to use it, however, he leaped out of the way, and Akashia’s blade sliced through the spot where he’d just been standing.

Without saying a word, Lars moved a step closer, swinging his sword at a remarkable speed.

Having taken a big step back to avoid the weapon, the man looked down at the dozen or so beads he’d drawn into his hand. He flashed a sinister smile.

“This is all, huh? Oh well.”

The man vanished into thin air, not even using an incantation.

All that remained was pain, confusion, and the smell of blood.

With that, the inexplicable chain of events that occurred in the castle city drew to a close.

“How much damage was done in the end?” Leuticia asked with a sigh.

The king, sitting at his office desk with his chin in his hands, couldn’t conceal his bitterness when he heard his sister’s query. He ruffled up the front of his hair with his hand.

“Nineteen souls have been retrieved. Of those nineteen, we only saved eight of the bodies. The rest are being searched for in nearby towns, but if these incidents happened in an ordinary town, the victims are likely already dead.”

“That’s true. There were some similar cases in the north a while ago, and the victims died within three days.”

Through her investigation into the incident in the castle city, Leuticia had discovered that cases involving people having their legs frozen and their souls extracted stretched from the northwest of Farsas all the way to the castle city. In all, there had been a total of about a hundred cases.

This major incident hadn’t come to light before now because it had gotten lost amid the chaos of demon attacks in the north, and any other town had only had one or two casualties. The people who discovered the victims were suspicious of the circumstances, but since there were such few cases, they didn’t think it was worth reporting to the castle.

Over a dozen people had been attacked in the castle city, but that was probably simply because its population was far larger than that of those other towns.

Lars let out a deep sigh, the report lying in front of him.

“According to that girl, there were about thirty soul beads. The rest were taken away.”

“They probably hired several water spirits for the job. What did the one we captured say?”

“Not much. It’s hard to interrogate demons.”

“Let’s have Silfa do it, then.”

The mention of the royal family’s spirit brought the conversation to a pause. Leuticia shook her head decisively, then picked up a piece of paper.

“Putting that aside for the moment…the man who attacked Shizuku is a high-ranking demon, according to everybody’s testimonies. It’s fortunate there were no casualties, whether you were there or not. It’s a shame we couldn’t get all the souls back, but there’s nothing we can do about that now. If a demon like that was serious about escaping, he would be impossible to catch.”

“Don’t soften the blow. I’m the one who messed up.”

Leuticia looked troubled by her brother’s unusually curt tone. She wasn’t trying to make him feel better—she genuinely believed the situation was inevitable. Even so, Lars probably had his own thoughts on the matter. He was the only one at the scene who could have taken on the high-ranking demon, so he should’ve had his subordinates capture the fleeing demon and focused on retrieving the necklace himself.

They’d never expected a high-ranking demon to intervene, however, and he had them completely at his mercy. As a result, Truce and Mea had been severely injured and Shizuku’s fingers had been cut off. While their wounds had been healed with magic, it was far from an ideal outcome.

Lars kicked his desk and leaned back in his chair. He rarely let his true feelings surface, but they were coming to the fore now, tinged with self-recrimination.

The expression on her brother’s face was one Leuticia hadn’t seen for a long time. She puzzled over what to say to him, but ultimately chose to remain silent. She just waited quietly, neither interfering in the matter nor consoling him.

It wasn’t a difficult thing to do. Even if he needed a long time.

After all, they’d ignored this distance between them for over twenty years.

The curtains in her room were drawn, blocking out the daylight.

It was silent. On a small sheet near the window, a little green bird was asleep.

The woman to whom the room belonged, meanwhile, sat on the bed clutching her knees against her chest.

Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t sleeping. She only looked up when the door opened.

“Shizuku.”

The man who’d called her name paid no mind to how dark the room was. He lit the lamp and stood in front of the bed. Then he reached out and took her right hand. There was no sign that her fingers had been sliced off. They were just trembling slightly. Once he’d checked that she was fine, he let go.

“Looks like you still have your fingers. That’s a relief.”

“Erik…”

“I heard what happened. That was way too reckless. You mustn’t underestimate demons.”

He was reprimanding her, but his tone was neither warm nor aggressive. His words just showed that he cared.

Upon hearing this, Shizuku felt the tension inside her dissipate. She closed her teary eyes and buried her face in her knees.

“I—I wanted to get their souls back.”

“I know,” Erik replied.

“But I couldn’t. So many of them got taken away…”

“What’s done is done.”

Shizuku hadn’t been able to retrieve the souls of three of the women whose bodies had been kept in the castle.

She was relieved to see some of the victims regain consciousness, but she’d also witnessed the ones they couldn’t save being handed back to their families. “Why couldn’t you save her?” a boy had cried as he clung to his mother, who grew colder by the second. That was something that would stay with Shizuku forever.

The regret of failing to grab the white beads bothered her much more than the horror of losing her fingers.

Erik sat next to Shizuku as she shed silent tears. He lowered his faraway gaze, then gently patted her small head.

“If you’re spending time thinking about the lives you couldn’t save, you should think about the ones you did save, too. You need to look at the whole picture if you’re going to learn from the experience.”

It was hard to tell whether he was trying to encourage or scold her.

This form of consolation was very characteristic of Erik, and Shizuku couldn’t help but bite her lip. After an extended moment of silence, she finally strained a raspy voice from deep down inside her throat.

“It’s difficult,” she said.

“I know. Well, hopefully you never encounter a high-ranking demon again.”

What would she do if there was a next time?

Shizuku didn’t know the answer. Still, she was grateful that the pain had dulled a little. And that she wasn’t alone.

The corpses were piled high.

Their arms were bent. Their legs had turned dark and discolored. Their wings were tattered, and their eyes had clouded over.

Countless destroyed bodies were haphazardly tangled together, creating a grotesque scene.

Nothing moved. There was no sign of life, no sense of individuality. Occasionally, a cold wind from outside would come through, gently ruffling an unidentifiable person’s hair.

The cold space resembled a temple hall. A lone woman gazed down at the atrium of the abandoned castle.

The corpses of both humans and demons were piled up inside the room, which stretched across multiple stories. Confronted with the stark reality of death, the woman’s eyes were devoid of emotion. She simply saw the scene for what it was: a mound of dead bodies.

“—Aviella.”

The man’s calm voice made her turn around. Having returned to the castle, he opened his hands to reveal a dozen white beads. Aviella nodded magnanimously.

“Oh. You got them back? I appreciate the effort.”

“I don’t mind. But those would-be low-ranking demons are a liability. It was fine to have them roam the towns, but they ended up going all the way to the castle city of Farsas.”

“I see. Does that mean the Farsasian royal family has caught on?”

“The wielder of Akashia chased after me.”

This blunt report made the woman burst out laughing. Sensing there was no danger in her response, the man shrugged his shoulders.

“You’re pretty calm. Is it because you’re a witch now?” he teased, peering over the railing at the pile of corpses below.

They were the bodies of the summoned demons and the humans who had tried to defeat them.

The demons who’d been drawn to power, and the people who’d been abducted.

By now, the bodies that formed this small hill were nothing more than a chaotic jumble of broken remains.

It was a gruesome yet solemn picture of the end, where the barriers of species were well and truly meaningless. The woman smiled weakly, then looked down at a necklace that had fallen at her feet. The large ruby pendant had a deep crack running through it.

“I’m not exactly a witch. I’m no different from you at the end of the day. Just to be clear, though, I had no particular desire for magical power. The woman you brought here simply insulted humans too much, so I decided to trap her within the prison of her own body.”

There was a certain affection in her elegant smile, but no pity. The man responded to her predictable response in a haughty tone.

“I knew my comment would irritate you. I brought her here to feed her to you.”

When a high-ranking demon dies, they don’t leave a body behind. After all, they are inherently conceptual beings.

The woman thought about the demon whose power she’d taken. She was gone now.

Aviella let out a small snort.

“I don’t care if Farsas has caught on. All possibilities are equal. In fact, they need a test. We can see whether the power and bloodline they’ve inherited are necessary for the era to come.”

Her firm, powerful voice made her sound like someone who oversaw and controlled everything from above.

The man looked amusedly at the master he’d contracted himself to.

“Do you intend to be the touchstone for that test?”

“No. I’m just going to teach them a lesson. They need to learn that this continent and its humans have fallen into an idle slumber in which they have forgotten the many cruelties of the past.”

The woman extended her right hand toward the atrium below her and started reciting an incantation.

The complex spell rained down upon the pile of corpses, gradually turning their decaying remains into a dry powder.

The breeze blowing through the open castle doors swept away every last vestige of the dust.

By the time the atrium was empty, the man and woman had vanished.

3. Twilight

“It’s gone… It’s not here.”

Shiron had grown tired of hearing this complaint.

Ignoring his elderly father’s distress, he flipped through the letters he was holding, skim-reading the pleas people had made.

“It’s gone! Shiron! Don’t you know where it is?”

“I don’t. The thieves must have sold it off to someone.”

“Without it, our family is finished!”

“It’s been over a year since you started saying that, Father, and nothing’s happened yet.”

“Demonic spirits have appeared! How are we supposed to apologize to His Majesty…?”

Shiron frowned, no longer hiding his annoyance as his father continued arguing back. His father truly did have a retort for everything. Shiron was impressed with his own patience for enduring it for the last year and a half.

Once he’d finished reviewing all the letters from the western part of the country, Shiron moved on to his next task. The old man was still muttering to himself, hunched over in his chair; although Shiron wanted nothing more than to throw him out of his office, he couldn’t. His father, the previous prime minister, still wielded considerable influence over the castle. If Shiron did something rash, it was him, the young, inexperienced one, who would be on the receiving end of the criticism.

Struggling to fully hide his irritation, Shiron went through the texts that had been offered to him. One of them was a thin bound book. Picking it up, he suddenly went still.

“This is…”

Why did something like that exist? Shiron sat frozen in shock, but after a few moments, he hurriedly began drafting a letter, hoping to change the situation.

Inside the thick-rimmed cup in front of her was a viscous, light brown liquid.

At first glance, the foamy surface looked suspicious. Even a magic potion would have looked more normal.

Leuticia sniffed it warily. Then, having steeled herself, she lifted the small cup to her lips.

Bitterness, richness, sweetness, and fat spread throughout her mouth. The princess swallowed the drink, her beautiful face devoid of expression. After a short pause, she spoke.

“It’s peculiar.”

“Riiiiight?!”

Having drunk the same thing, Shizuku let out a groan of anguish and thumped the table with her fist.

Leuticia had sent for some cocoa beans, as Shizuku had requested, but since Shizuku had no idea how to make chocolate, she’d experimented and ended up creating a cocoa-like drink.

“It should taste better than this,” said Shizuku. “I wonder what I did wrong…”

“Can’t you do something about this fat? Even if you just strained it a little.”

“Ah… I’ll try that next time.”

It seemed like she had a long way to go until she could make chocolate. When Shizuku thought about the people in her original world who’d gone to even greater lengths to create new foods and dishes, she couldn’t help but feel a deep admiration. Shizuku had been eating all of her failed experiments so she wouldn’t waste any ingredients. She slumped her shoulders dejectedly and got the conversation back on track.

“We still haven’t worked out why the kids got their innate vocabulary back, have we?”

“No,” replied Leuticia. “We don’t even know where the innate language originates from, though, so that’s no surprise. That said, even if there was a realm for innate language and some kind of issue causing an obstruction between that realm and the soul, it’s still hard to investigate matters involving other realms. They’re usually impossible for us to perceive.”

“I understand… Oh, but I heard that magic spells exist on higher planes of existence. Can’t you interact with other realms that way?”

“A mage can only come into contact with the realms of magical power and spells. Perhaps you could define a mage as someone who can perceive the realm where spells are found. Any other realms are impossible for them to reach, even if they exist in the same space. It’s just like how spells are invisible to people who aren’t mages. That is our limitation as humans.”

Leuticia threw her hands in the air as if to say that she was at a loss.

In short, there was no way of checking whether a realm that controlled innate language actually existed.

Conversely, the possibilities were limitless if you claimed that something was “in a different realm.” The vast nature of the topic made Shizuku sigh.

“Still, the main thing is that, for some reason, people are starting to recover from these language impairments.”

“Yes, you’re right…”

They had repeated the experiments under various conditions, but the cause of the children’s recovery still hadn’t been identified. Only the children who’d been brought to the castle had seen an improvement, and the same hadn’t been observed across the entire castle city. This implied that some aspect of the experiments was having an effect.

Shizuku gazed absentmindedly at the ceiling.

“Come to think of it… Erik told me there’s a record of a fishing boat picking up a person from another continent a long time ago. Was that person from the eastern continent?”

“Hm?” replied Leuticia. “…No, I don’t think so. They were from a continent we had no contact with.”

“Did that person speak the same language?”

This simple question made the princess’s eyes widen. Shizuku was wondering whether people on completely unconnected continents shared the same innate language. If, as Erik suggested, innate language was triggered by some sort of infection, it wouldn’t make sense for it to have spread to a continent that people hadn’t interacted with.

Leuticia didn’t know what to say. She must have realized what Shizuku was hinting at.

“I’m…not sure. I think records were made about the castaway’s home continent, so it’s likely that people understood their language.”

“Ngh, good point…”

It felt like they were going around in circles. Shizuku adjusted her grip on the prototype picture book she was holding. Leuticia, who seemed intrigued by the cocoa-like drink, took another sip and looked up.

“Anyway, we don’t know what causes this impediment, so we can’t be sure that another outbreak won’t occur. I’d like you to continue with your work.”

“Understood.”

“If you stay, Erik might stick around, too. How do you feel about staying in Farsas forever?”

“I-I’ll have to think about it…”

Leuticia, who’d valued Erik’s talents for a long time, seemed genuinely disappointed that his contract was nearing its end. He hadn’t been spending a lot of time at his laboratory lately, but that didn’t bother Leuticia. She’d once said to Shizuku on the subject, “People like Erik, their talent comes from their ideas. It’s best to let him do what he wants.”

The princess was the perfect boss in a sense, and she concluded the exchange by handing Shizuku a piece of paper. Shizuku took it and read out the words that caught her eye. She couldn’t read the whole thing.

“A language, invitation, request…in Medial?”

“Yes. A while ago, I sent a report on our measures in response to the epidemic—basically, the nature of your work—to the other major countries. Since Kisk is approaching it in the same way, I thought sharing some information would minimize confusion.”

“Okay.”

“Medial responded by saying that they wanted to look at your learning materials and ‘receive an explanation directly from the person who created them.’ That wouldn’t be a problem for Farsas as a country…but how do you feel about that? If it’s a nuisance, I’ll decline their request.”

“Whoa, a business trip?”

Shizuku had never expected a job like this to come her way. The map of the continent unfolded in the back of her mind.

Medial stretched out across the north of the continent. It was even further north than northern Farsas, where Erik had gone some days earlier. Under normal circumstances, it would have taken a long time to get there, but since this was state business, she’d probably be able to teleport.

Shizuku thought about it for a moment, then asked a totally unrelated question.

“The person with the red book was last sighted in Medial, weren’t they?”

“Yes. We haven’t heard anything since.”

“I’ll go, then.”

The Farsasian investigation team hadn’t been able to track down the book, so Shizuku was under no illusions that she’d manage to. Still, if she had the opportunity, she wanted to see the problematic country with her own eyes. And if Erik quit his job at the castle, the pair of them might end up going to Medial together, so it would be wise to check things out now, while she had the backing of Farsas.

When she saw how quickly Shizuku accepted the invitation, Leuticia gave her a teacherly smile.

“I’ll be counting on you. Oh, and I’ll assign Erik as your chaperone, along with a few other people.”

“Erik? Isn’t he busy?”

“Don’t you worry about that. Given what happened the other day, he’ll probably volunteer to go,” she said. “Besides, he’s strong now.”

The king’s sister, a woman famed for her beauty, gently tapped an elegant finger against her right ear.

And so, it was decided that Shizuku would visit the Great Nation of the north as a researcher affiliated with Farsas, with Erik by her side.

The power was moving around.

It used the souls of women as its driving force, tracing a circle in an area of barren land surrounded by tall, rugged mountains. Flowing counterclockwise, it increased the concentration of magic in the land and transformed that desolate place into the underworld.

The air was filled with miasma and a bitter cold.

The sunlight was obstructed, and the ground was decaying.

In a silent, abandoned capital with a cursed history, a towering castle stood in solemn grandeur. Now the castle existed in the company of death, in a state of deep slumber.

The day when its massive, tower-like presence would be exposed to the public was drawing near.

Farsas was a temperate country. Kisk wasn’t quite hot, but it was warm.

It was, therefore, understandable that Shizuku had assumed that everywhere on the continent would have warm weather. But, of course, that wasn’t true.

“It’s s-so c-c-cold…,” Shizuku said, her teeth chattering.

Erik stood next to her, a look of exasperation on his face. He glanced at Shizuku, who was freezing underneath her thick shawl.

“I assumed you were trying out some kind of health regimen, dressing so lightly.”

“Well, I’m not. Why didn’t you warn me?”

“How’s Mea?”

“She’s bundled up in my bag so she won’t get cold…”

“Good thinking. If only you’d applied some of those smarts to your own well-being.”

“Haha…”

Shizuku felt like crying, but her tears would probably freeze if she did. She looked around the castle hall. It had columns and a ceiling, but no walls.

“Why are there no walls here? It’s like it’s on stilts.”

The view was spectacular. The castle must have been built on a very high spot, and the land sloped gently toward the castle city, where brightly colored buildings could be seen. Past that, the walls and forests that surrounded the castle city stretched out into the distance.

To her left, Shizuku could see steep, rugged mountains, exhibiting the harshness and beauty of nature in its best light. The striking contrast of black and white which dominated her field of vision would make for a popular postcard. As Shizuku was using these thoughts to distract herself, Erik responded to her question.

“I don’t know why there aren’t any walls, but it seems as though the castle city was built here to make it harder to attack.”

“Even Napoleon considered retreating in the face of General Winter.”

The open hall, which the cold wind blew directly into, had no unnecessary decorations. Just a black stone floor and white pillars.

Shizuku pressed her hands against her frozen ears. She was wearing her formal attire from Farsas with an extra coat and a shawl on top. Erik, meanwhile, was just wearing a coat over his usual mage’s outfit. And he didn’t look cold at all.

“E-Erik, can I huddle up to you?”

“…You’re here as an official envoy and scholar from Farsas.”

“Gaaah! Just let me go insiiide already!”

“We are inside.”

This exchange brought confused expressions to the faces of the soldiers escorting them. They weren’t sure whether to take Shizuku and Erik seriously or not.

Fifteen minutes had passed since they arrived at the castle hall. They had traveled there using a teleportation ring, then gone through the castle gate. Erik might have been okay, but if they didn’t move to a room with walls soon, Shizuku was going to reach her breaking point. However, no one from Medial had shown up yet.

“Can I just run around a bit to warm up?”

“Let me say it again: You’re an envoy of the state. If you start running around, your sweat will freeze on your body and make you even colder.”

“I’m gonna die!”

At that moment, the door at the far end of the hall finally opened and an official appeared. He bowed, then signaled for them to proceed through the door.

“The king is ready for you. This way, please.”

Never before had a stranger’s words made Shizuku so happy. Overcome with relief, she stood up straight and stepped into the royal court of Medial.

Of all the castles Shizuku had visited, this stone one felt the oldest. Some of the timeworn floors had holes in them, and drafts were coming through the windows. These things made the place feel a little unsettling.

“Uhm, I was just wondering, why didn’t that room have any walls?” Shizuku asked the official as they walked down a corridor of the castle.

“So snipers can aim from there, should they ever need to,” the official explained calmly.

“Whoa… Thanks for explaining,” Shizuku said, feeling deflated.

She didn’t ask him why snipers might be necessary.

King Vicas of Medial was a small old man in his sixties.

The average human lifespan in this world seemed to be around seventy, so this made him quite an old king.

Standing in the audience chamber, Shizuku politely looked up at the elderly man, who was seated on his throne several steps above the ground. The king began to speak, his raspy voice emanating from beneath his white beard.

“Welcome. It has been long since I last met a foreign guest…especially one as young as you.”

“It is an honor to meet you, Your Majesty. I have come to answer your questions regarding the education that serves as a substitute for innate language abilities.”

“Very good. Naturally, I am also very interested; however, it is my prime minister who was keen to hear from you directly.”

The king gestured toward a man standing nearby. He appeared to be over a decade older than Shizuku, and he gave her a slight bow.

“My name is Shiron.”

“I’m Shizuku. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Shiron had a gentle-looking face, but he seemed to be sizing Shizuku up with his gray eyes. Noticing his glare but feeling it would be rude to pay it too much attention, Shizuku remained stoic.

After exchanging initial greetings, everybody sat down at a table to begin a more in-depth discussion.

Shizuku did some subtle digging before starting her presentation, but it seemed as though children had regained their innate language abilities only at Farsas Castle. Ostensibly, Shiron’s tone seemed regretful.

“We are also isolating children who have shown symptoms and conducting experiments on them here in Medial, but the results haven’t been promising.”

“Farsas has started incorporating older children into our experiments, too. This has a positive effect on the younger children, but we’re yet to find out why.”

Was their success the result of an infection or the effect of education? Shizuku glanced sideways, but Erik’s face was blank. He didn’t tend to be very expressive, but in this situation, his poker face was even more unreadable than usual.

“Now then, let me tell you about my educational materials.”

Shizuku spread the materials she’d brought out on the table. She explained how they were used, their visual and auditory effects, and what kind of outcomes had stemmed from their implementation. As she explained each main point, the king’s face lit up with the curiosity of a much younger man. He took the initiative of asking more questions about Shizuku’s work.

“This magic implement is fascinating. You’re telling me it produces different images and sounds depending on the angle you look at it from?”

Vicas had picked up a small silver box.

The beautiful box had glass windows on each side. Pictures would appear when you peered into it, and when you touched the crystal button embedded in the corner of the glass windows, the name of the image was read aloud in a recorded voice. It wasn’t cheap to make, but the children loved it.

“The rest of the materials are made on the assumption that adults will read the text aloud. This is the only one that we tried incorporating a voice function into. After all, listening is the quickest route to language learning. By having a magic implement play the audio, the children can continue learning even without a grown-up’s assistance.”

“I see. What a useful tool.”

“Still, it’s best for the child to have an adult by their side to patiently attempt to converse with them. As long as you don’t give up on talking to them, the child will eventually learn to speak, even without these educational materials.”

Shizuku’s words weren’t overly forceful, but they offered a glimpse into the confidence she had.

Vicas nodded thoughtfully in response to her explanation. His sharp gaze from earlier was gone, replaced with a serene look that he fixed on the young woman.

“Truly fascinating. Listening to you makes me think this ailment might not be something to fear after all. How very peculiar.”

This was exactly the reaction Shizuku had been hoping for. She gave him a shy smile, slightly embarrassed.

“When it comes to educating children, teaching language itself is certainly not a roundabout method of doing things,” Shizuku explained. “Language is used to form coherent thoughts, even if the words aren’t spoken aloud. We only recognize things as distinct concepts because we give names to them. Language is both a tool to express thought and the foundation that greatly influences it. I think that getting children to build that foundation inside their own minds significantly aids their cognitive development.”

“I understand. If you become aware of the role language plays as you learn it, you can improve your thinking skills, too,” the king said with a satisfied smile.

With that, their meeting that day concluded without a hitch.

“That was interesting.”

Erik was the first person to speak once he and Shizuku had been shown to a guest room—one with walls. Shizuku turned around from her position near the semicircular fireplace and glanced at her companion.

“What was interesting? The room without any walls?”

“What you said. About words making you cognizant of the subject, and how language affects thought. That really made sense to me.”

“Oh… In my world, the origin of words is something we study. I learned the basics of that stuff in my classes. I’m sure I’ve discussed it with you before—that thinking is really difficult without words.”

Why is sadness called “sadness”?

It didn’t just refer to a single emotion. It was only because several feelings were grouped together and labeled “sadness” that they were seen as one thing, or viewed as similar.

An ache in the chest, the urge to cry, a sense of loss, pain—some or all of these things were lumped together under the word “sadness.”

Amorphous ideas only became something when a name was given to them.

In other words, although language was a product of thought itself, it was also a key to forming more complex thought.

“Even words from different languages that are ‘roughly equivalent’ to each other might have differences in nuance. And when foreign loanwords are incorporated into a language, they can bring new concepts with them,” explained Shizuku.

She moved away from the fireplace, got out her notebook, and went back over to Erik. In her notebook, she wrote down the word “dream” in both Japanese and English, then pointed to it.

“For example, the Japanese word for dream, ‘yume,’ used to only refer to the illusions we see when we’re asleep at night. However, when the English word ‘dream’ was imported into Japan—which signifies both the dreams we see when we’re asleep and our hopes for the future—we started to use the word ‘yume’ to refer to our hopes, too.”

“…Huh. So ‘yume’ acquired a second meaning later on.”

“Exactly. In Japanese, we use kanji characters to write, so writing the same word with different kanji can change its nuance. Like ‘ishi’ and ‘ishi’… Does that make sense?”

Shizuku wrote these two kanji compounds in her notebook. Although they sounded the same and both meant “will,” one used the kanji for “mind” to refer to a person’s internal resolve, while the other used “thought” to mean the determination shown through their actions. Since her speech was being translated into a common language, she wasn’t sure whether Erik would fully grasp what she meant—but when Erik saw the difference between the two kanji compounds, he nodded.

“Basic definitions can vary, so I guess this is a way of specifying the meanings more precisely. To put it bluntly, the amount of meaning packed into a single word tells us something about history and culture… Am I right?”

“You probably are. New words and usages continue to emerge as time goes by. Even during my lifetime, some words have gained new meanings over the course of just a few years.”

Erik picked up the notes Shizuku had scribbled down and stared at them intently.

Shizuku suspected that he might have become fascinated with kanji again, but what he said next was something entirely unexpected.

“I’d never really considered how much language could influence thought.”

He spoke in a nonchalant tone of voice, but his handsome face held a hint of sadness.

Shizuku recognized this look. It was the expression he wore when he was deep in thought. Still, she couldn’t help but think he seemed glummer than usual. Despite her confusion, she replied, “It’s only natural that you wouldn’t notice things like that in this world, right? Here, language is something that comes naturally, like body language or hand gestures… It’d be like speculating whether how you move your hands affects your thoughts, right? That’s too big of an ask. It’s easier to study this sort of thing in my world, where there are multiple languages and they evolve.”

Erik didn’t agree nor disagree, but simply gave a slight, self-deprecating smile when he noticed Shizuku looking at him.

Outside the windows, everything was covered in white. Heavy, oppressive clouds filled every inch of the sky. Before they realized it, snow had begun to flutter down from above.

They planned to stay in Medial for three days.

Once Erik had gone back to his own room, Shizuku took out her notebook so she could write a diary entry before dinner, and Mea, in her girl form, brewed some tea.

As Shizuku was writing the date on a new page, she suddenly realized that the numbers looked familiar.

“Oh, it’s been a year…”

“What has?”

“Since I came to this world. It’s gone by so quickly.”

In this world, each month was exactly twenty-eight days. While a year was still a year, it didn’t completely line up with her old world.

Still, the fact remained that an entire year had passed. As Shizuku recalled her travels throughout the continent, she became lost in thought for a while.

“I need to buy a new notebook… Maybe I’ll go into town once we get back.”

“I’ll come with you.”

Smiling at her assistant demon’s reply, Shizuku began writing in her white notebook, her pen racing across the page. She wrote about the open hall without any walls, the snowy scenery, the questions King Vicas had asked her and her responses, and the conversation she’d had with Erik.

As Shizuku continued to write, she remembered Shiron, the man who’d been introduced to her as the prime minister. Although he’d expressed a strong desire to speak with her in person, he’d only asked one question and hadn’t made much of an impression. Had he been polite because he was in the presence of his king, or was he simply not the type to take the initiative when asking questions? Unable to work out which was the case, Shizuku simply noted down the one question he had asked:

“How did you come up with the stories in these picture books?”

The dinner they were served consisted mostly of stewed dishes, but each one was delicious.

Shizuku scooped up some of the green leaves floating in the golden soup with her spoon. It looked like cabbage, but was that really what it was?

When she took a bite, the leaves melted in her mouth, exuding a gentle, sweet flavor. The natural, vegetable-like sweetness brought a smile to her face. As she took another spoonful, Shiron, who was hosting the guests on behalf of the king, posed Erik a question.

“I’ve heard rumors that demons have been showing up in northern Farsas lately. Is that true?”

“It is indeed,” Erik responded calmly.

Shizuku rarely had anything to say about such questions, so this left her free to focus on her meal. The main dish—a beef and vegetable stew with cheese on top—was particularly delicious. The local cuisine of Farsas tended to incorporate a lot of herbs and spices, so it packed quite a punch, but the underlying flavors themselves could be pretty bland. Medial’s food, on the other hand, was simple yet rich in flavor. The melted cheese that oozed down over the sliced meat made for a very appealing sight.

While Shizuku was enjoying her meal, Shiron and Erik continued their conversation.

“We’ve seen an increase in demon sightings in the western part of Medial for some time now. At one point, someone hired mercenaries, and a considerable amount of extermination squads were assembled, but it seems most of them were killed.”

“Fighting demons is a unique challenge. It’s hard to drive them off unless you’re in a large group or at least used to dealing with them.”

“You’re right about that. In this day and age, there aren’t many people who have experience fighting demons—even among the castle staff.”

Reading between the lines, Erik stopped eating and furrowed his brow. His aloof gaze turned toward the prime minister of Medial.

“If you’re hoping for help from Farsas, I’d advise you to formally request it from the king. Other than serving as Shizuku’s escort, I hold no authority here. There’s not much I can offer in terms of answers.”

“M-my apologies. I wasn’t trying to take advantage of your position.”

Shiron was rattled. It seemed Erik had hit the nail on the head with his admonition.

Shizuku had watched the conversation out of the corner of her eye. She didn’t think Lars was the type of person who’d accept an off-the-cuff request, but she couldn’t see a genuine appeal working, either. Although the king appeared to act on a whim, he could also be uncompromising. Shizuku knew that better than anyone, and she reached out for some decoratively sliced fruit. It seemed like you were supposed to eat it with your hands, so she carefully bit into it, paying attention to the dripping juice.

She ate more like a well-mannered girl than a scholar from a Great Nation. Shizuku suddenly noticed that Shiron was staring intently at her, his gaze almost piercing, and she tilted her head slightly.

Medial was the only country on the continent where the position of prime minister was hereditary.

Generation after generation of kings had had a prime minister to assist them, but that didn’t mean they were relied on to provide an heir. By law, prime ministers were forbidden from marrying or having children of their own. Although the position was technically hereditary, in reality, the prime minister would adopt a promising child and educate them, maintaining non-emotional ties that spanned generations.

Shiron, the current prime minister, felt no special sense of affection toward his father. Naturally, he was thankful that the man had recognized his talent and given him a proper education, but that was just gratitude—not the kind of sentiment you might hold for a biological parent.

Until recently, Shiron had respected his father for serving as an excellent prime minister for over forty years. However, his respect had been crushed when he’d learned about the existence of that.

One of the emotions he’d started to experience from that day on was disappointment. Shiron was disappointed by the fact that his father—a man who had a deep knowledge of history and understood other nations like the back of his hand—had been relying on that.

Another emotion that arose was doubt. He couldn’t believe that something like that could even exist.

These conflicting emotions occupied his mind, fluctuating in proportion depending on the moment.

Then, about a year and a half earlier, that had been stolen from their estate, and Shiron’s feelings toward his father were set in stone.

Its loss left Shiron’s father deranged with anger, and he started to vent his desperation to Shiron on a daily basis. “We’re done for,” he’d say, his cool-headed, thoughtful nature that had earned him his reputation as a great prime minister gone. He would wander the estate, muttering deliriously to himself, and at times, Shiron even found himself wishing his father would just hurry up and die. Shiron felt disgusted with himself every time he noticed himself feeling that way.

However, as these gloomy days dragged on, he found a clue regarding the unexpected whereabouts of that.

On the second day of her stay in Medial, Shizuku found herself using her educational materials to teach the children under the watchful eyes of the royal mages and scholars.

That said, since her pupils were so young, it just looked like she was playing. When Shizuku lined up several small animal figurines in front of the children, one of the mages quietly sneered and said, “A child playing with other children.”

Shizuku, however, refused to react to this remark. If it looked like she was playing, that was perfect. The children wouldn’t learn much at all if she didn’t attract their interest.

“Okay, do you know what this is?” she asked.

“A rabbit?” one of the children said hesitantly.

“That’s right. Rabbit. Can you say that for me?”

The children all repeated “Rabbit!” in unison. Shizuku placed the rabbit on her hand and moved it around, making it look as though it was alive. The children’s eyes were instantly drawn toward the figurine, and their tiny hands reached out to touch it.

Shizuku laughed as she put the rabbit back. Then she picked up another figurine.

She got the kids’ attention, made them say the animals’ names, played around with the figurine a bit, then moved on to the next one. Occasionally, she’d come back to one she’d already used.

After Shizuku patiently repeated this process for an hour, all of the children were able to name the twenty different animals.

Shizuku ended up spending three hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon—interspersed with breaks—showcasing her work and answering questions. Once she was done, she collapsed onto the bed, understandably drained. The fatigue of working under pressure in an unfamiliar place washed over her like a wave.

The scholars of Medial seemed curious and interested in her methods, but it appeared that not all of the mages were as accepting. Judging by their expressions and remarks, it was obvious they saw Shizuku’s approach as nothing more than a shallow, short-term solution. Yet she just calmly ignored them.

No matter what people said, she didn’t think she was in the wrong. After all, she was acting as a representative of Farsas. If she came across as servile, it would make Lars angry and Leuticia would end up having to apologize to her. It was best to act confident.

Still, the stress was starting to get to her.

Shizuku lethargically sat up and gazed out the window, her eyes half-closed.

“Ugh… I need to let off some steam,” she murmured.

“Why not go outside and let off some body heat, instead?” Erik said unenthusiastically.

“If I did that, I might lose all my body heat.”

The man smiled a little, but he didn’t look up from his book.

Shizuku got up and walked over to the window. There, she peered down at the snow-covered courtyard.

“…You could build an igloo out there,” she remarked.

“An igloo? Is that a kind of fortress?”

“Oh, good guess!”

The courtyard was piled high with snow. It looked as though no one had stepped foot in it for a long time.

After thinking to herself for a moment, Shizuku put her arms through the sleeves of the coat she’d taken off. She smiled and waved at the man as she headed for the door.

“Okay, I’m gonna go play around a bit!”

“Hang on.”

Predictably, Erik brought her plans to a halt.

The court ladies of Medial had been puzzled when Shizuku asked to borrow winter clothing, but they were still kind enough to lend her a thick outfit and gloves. Erik, dressed in his usual mage’s uniform, looked at Shizuku in dismay. She was bundled up like a snowman.

“Sometimes I just can’t grasp how your mind works.”

“But we never get this much snow where I come from. What’s wrong with having a little fun?”

With a gloved hand, she patted the head of the child standing next to her. The person in charge had happily agreed when Shizuku asked if she could take the kids outside. The other adults all seemed to have their hands full, so it worked out perfectly. After that, they’d all made their way to the courtyard.

“Okay, let’s play!” Shizuku called out to the children.

She began building a mound using a snow shovel. Large and concave like a spoon, the shovel was on the heavy side, but the snow was easy to dig in since it wasn’t packed down yet.

As Shizuku’s mound of snow grew bigger, the children attempted to climb it, but ended up slipping down its smooth, semicircular surface.

“I’m going to make a hole in it. Just give me a moment.”

It was smaller than a typical igloo, but since she was the only person working on it, that was the best she could manage. Erik was standing in the corridor facing the courtyard, still reading his book, with Mea by his side in her girl form.

Shizuku didn’t want to get so carried away that it gave her muscle pain. She crouched down and started digging a tunnel into the side of the mound, then carefully began scraping out the snow, keeping an eye on the children around her.

When Shizuku was that absorbed in something, she looked like a slightly overgrown child.

Erik, who’d simply put up a protective barrier and was watching the fun from the sidelines, looked up from his book and gave a wry smile.

“She really can’t sit still, can she?”

“That’s just the way my master is,” replied Mea.

“Maybe you’re right.”

Shizuku had started making small snowmen out of the snow she’d scooped out, putting them in a row in front of the children. At this rate, she was never going to finish carving out the hole. Erik finally decided to lend a hand and closed the book he had been reading—but just as he went to stride across the courtyard, he sensed someone’s presence and turned around.

Shiron was standing behind him, holding some documents under his arm. It wasn’t obvious if he’d just happened to be passing by, or if he’d come over on purpose, but his gaze was clearly fixed on Shizuku.

“What exactly is she doing?” he asked, still staring at her.

“She’s playing,” said Erik.

If Shizuku had heard his frank response, she probably would have said, “Couldn’t you have phrased that better?” Erik, however, had no intention of sugarcoating things. Shiron, the young prime minister of Medial, looked perplexed.

“Please be careful. It will be dark soon, and there have been reports of demonic spirits appearing in this area lately.”

Medial’s capital was located near the northwestern highlands of the large kingdom. The mountains blocked out the sun, making the nights longer. Due to its location, demonic spirits from the northwestern part of the continent would occasionally make an appearance there.

Erik simply said, “Understood,” and watched Shiron walk away.

He couldn’t really tell what the prime minister was thinking. It was probably fair to label him as suspicious, but he didn’t want to jump to conclusions.

“Every castle has its share of unique characters, doesn’t it?” remarked Erik.

After leaving his book with Mea, he took the snow shovel from Shizuku. She was clearly having a hard time, so Erik started expanding the opening for her. Fifteen minutes later, the small igloo was complete.

“M-my arms are trembling…”

Having said goodbye to Erik and returned to her own room, Shizuku hung her head dejectedly, her arms drained of all their strength.

She hadn’t intended to overexert herself, but nearly two hours of shoveling had taken its toll on her body. She tried to write in her diary but soon realized that her hand wasn’t steady enough, so she gave up and lay down.

“I knew it’d be unbearably cold, but it’s actually pretty fun being in a snowy country. I imagine living here would be tough, though,” she said to Mea, who was tidying up.

“I suppose the summers would be pleasantly cool,” the young girl replied.

“A place to escape the sweltering heat, huh? Farsas is way too hot.”

Just remembering the scorching heat of summer in Farsas a few months earlier made Shizuku feel drained. She raised her tired arms straight up into the air and let them sway back and forth. Shizuku was just considering taking a bath and going to bed when she heard a knock at the door, so she hurriedly threw on her jacket and went to open it.

“Yes, who’s there?”

The court lady standing at the door gave her a deep bow.

“By the order of the prime minister, you have been invited to a nighttime tea gathering.”

“Like, drinking tea at night?”

“You will enjoy a diverting conversation as you gaze at the snow and the moon. Your companion has also been invited.”

“Oh, how elegant. I’ll come right now.”

If Erik was also going to be there, there shouldn’t be any problems. Shizuku turned around and beckoned Mea over, who was deep inside the room and had transformed into her small green bird form. She fluttered over to perch on Shizuku’s shoulder, and with that, the two of them began making their way down the castle’s hallways, following the court lady.

The castle hallways were fully submerged in the darkness of the night, illuminated by the light reflecting off the snow outside the windows. The intricate window frames created shadows on the floor like paper cutouts, and Shizuku found herself avoiding them as she walked, choosing only to step on the areas where the light fell.

Soon after, the court lady guided her into a small hall on the third floor. Shiron was already waiting inside, but there was no sign of Erik.

“Please, take a seat,” Shiron said with a serene smile. “Your companion will be here soon.”

“Okay… Uh, where’s everybody else?” Shizuku asked, remaining standing.

Shiron was the only other person in the room.

“They’ll be here momentarily,” the young prime minister said, still smiling.

“In that case, I’ll wait in the corridor until they arrive,” replied Shizuku.

She felt slightly unsettled. Getting entangled in the power struggles surrounding the throne in Kisk had sharpened her instincts.

Shiron’s expression didn’t change. He simply poured some tea into his cup from a nearby pot.

“Please, don’t be like that,” he urged her. “I have some questions for you.”

“Other than what we talked about earlier today?”

“Yes. That story in that picture book—where did you learn it?”

“The picture book?”

Why was he bringing that up now? Shizuku had created six picture books so far. Three of them were adaptations of fairy tales from her original world, two of them were based on stories from this world, and the last one focused on the names of animals.

“Sorry, which picture book are you talking about?”

“I see right through you,” Shiron spat contemptuously. “Don’t play dumb. That story…is one nobody else is supposed to know. But you know it, don’t you? Where is the item that was stolen from my estate a year and a half ago?”

“Something was stolen?”

None of this rang any bells, but even so, Shizuku tried to respond to Shiron’s interrogation honestly.

“I don’t know which of the picture books I’ve drawn you’re taking issue with…but I know nothing about any stolen items. Don’t you think you might be mistaken?”

As Shizuku spoke, she remembered what her last picture book was about.

It was the tale of a poor blind girl. The true story it was based on left many questions unanswered, so Shizuku had removed the mystery from it to make the story suitable for children. In Shizuku’s version, the honest young girl was saved by her good nature. If this was a story that nobody was supposed to know about, where had Shizuku learned it? No matter how hard she tried to remember, she wasn’t sure.

Shiron’s gaze was knifelike.

“There’s no way I’m mistaken. Listen—I’m not accusing you of stealing anything. I just want a lead on it. No matter how much of a ruckus my father made, we weren’t able to search for that item in public.”

What exactly was “that item”? Shiron sounded completely serious, but Shizuku had no idea what he was talking about.

The prime minister ignored her confusion and continued to speak.

“I don’t plan on using it myself. I’m even starting to doubt whether it’s real—but if we don’t get it back, I’m going to be tormented by my father’s ramblings forever. That’s why I’m asking you: Where did you hear that story?”

“Where…?”

Why did she possess knowledge that had no traceable source? Shizuku didn’t know what to say, but Shiron assumed she was just trying to dodge the question.

He lowered his voice.

“I won’t let you leave until you tell me.”

“Huh?”

Shizuku suddenly felt something push against her back. She stumbled, almost falling over, and heard the door close behind her. Turning around, she saw the court lady standing in front of it, blocking her exit.

Shizuku frowned and looked back at Shiron.

“This kind of behavior will harm diplomatic relations,” she warned him.

“I don’t plan on hurting you, as long as you tell me what I want to know.”

“I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. What are you looking for?”

“…It’s an item that contains hidden historical records.”

“Huh?”

Shizuku knew what he was referring to.

She felt slightly dizzy, but it was so subtle she might have been imagining it. She stared into the man’s gray eyes.

“Do you mean…?”

The red book that mysterious woman had in her possession. Was he talking about that tome, which contained forbidden spells and chronicled the royal family’s major secrets?

Seeing he’d finally garnered a reaction from Shizuku, Shiron’s expression changed, and his tone grew firmer.

“Do you remember it now?!”

“I think so… I’m looking for it, too. A certain woman has it, and she was last spotted in Medial—”

At that moment, the castle they were in shook violently.

They heard a deafening boom from outside.

Shizuku didn’t know what had caused it. Shiron didn’t seem to know, either. Having almost toppled over, he regained his footing and rushed to the windowsill. The glass had frosted over, and Shiron opened the window to look out at the night sky.

“What’s that…?”

Even from where she was standing, Shizuku could see a swarm of creatures flying in the dark sky. They looked like birds, but much bigger…

“Dragons?”

“N-no. They’re…demons.”

“Demons?!”

Shizuku’s discordant exclamation was interrupted by a distant scream.

The castle was under attack by demons. Shizuku could hear something collapse. In the blink of an eye, the calm night had descended into chaos. Shizuku swiftly spun around and thrust aside the court lady blocking her path. She placed a hand on the door—but at that very moment, she heard the window behind her shatter.

Shiron’s scream intermingled with a strained, high-pitched cry. Shizuku automatically looked behind her, and her gaze landed on the strange figure there.

“…You’ve got to be kidding.”

Those sharp talons were presumably what it had used to kick in the wall and the window.

It most closely resembled a bird, yet it was around a meter tall. Its body was covered in black and brown feathers, and one of its three gawking eyes was fixed on Shizuku. Shiron, who’d fallen over onto his backside at the demonic spirit’s feet, looked up at the ominous creature, his breaths coming in strained gasps.

“H-help me…”

His plea didn’t inspire any sympathy in Shizuku. Still, after she’d thrown open the door she was touching, she turned back around to face the demonic spirit. The bird on her shoulder chirped.

“Mea. I want to help the man sitting there and meet up with Erik. Do you think we can manage both?”

Hearing her master’s question, the little bird changed form.

A green-haired girl now stood in front of Shizuku.

“Please don’t go anywhere, Master,” she said. “I’ll push it back.”

As soon as the words out of Mea’s mouth, the giant body of the demonic spirit was flung outside. Shizuku seized the opportunity to rush over to Shiron and grab him by the arm.

“We have to run! Now!”

“R-right…”

Shiron somehow managed to get to his feet, and Shizuku pulled him along, heading for the hallway. The court lady was nowhere to be seen. She must have run away or gone to call for help.

Shiron himself had said that there were very few people in the castle accustomed to fighting demonic spirits. If the distant shouts and screams were anything to go by, chaos was unfolding everywhere.

“Erik’s room is—”

The moment Shizuku stepped out into the hallway, she came to a halt, startled.

A monstrous black bird, just like the one she’d seen earlier, was blocking their path. Under its claws lay the court lady, motionless on the floor. A pool of blood had spread out beneath her body.

“…Uh.”

“Master, it’s too late. She’s gone.”

Mea was just pointing out the facts, and Shizuku suppressed the scream rising in her throat. She instantly noticed a large shadow on the floor below her and instinctively jumped back, just as the window in the hallway shattered.

A third monstrous bird had appeared, glaring at them with its bulging eyes.

“Get down!” Mea shouted.

Shizuku dropped to the floor, and a split-second later, a gust of wind surged down the hallway.

The wind had likely been unleashed by the monstrous bird. It shattered window after window of thick glass, and as the shards rained down over her head, Shizuku felt a chill run down her spine. When she glanced up, she saw the bird trying to peck Shiron, who’d fallen to the floor.

“Mea!”

The body of the demon was flung down the hallway. Its giant form slammed into the window, destroying the wall around it, and it fell outside. But it wasn’t long before another monstrous bird entered through the gap. And another giant beak emerged from the door to the room they’d just left.

“Ugh, we’re in trouble here.”

Shizuku had said that she didn’t really know what a demonic spirit was, but she’d never imagined ending up in a situation like this.

There were demons in front of her and behind her. She could have had Mea get rid of the birds and bulldozed her way through, but from what she could see out the window, there weren’t just one or two shadows flying in the sky.

Shiron, who’d been dragging himself along the floor, looked up. His eyes found Shizuku.

“What should we do…?” he asked, his voice trembling. “You must know, right?”

“Not really…”

Shizuku wasn’t a mage, and she’d never encountered a demonic spirit before. While she was puzzling it out, the giant birds on either side of her were inching closer. So she made up her mind.

“Let’s keep going. We need to force our way ahead.”

The castle was unfamiliar to her, but she did remember the corridors she’d been down. It was a fair distance away, but she was pretty confident she knew which direction Erik’s room was in. Once she was reunited with him, they could escape using a transportation ring.

Mea nodded when she heard Shizuku’s plan, then positioned herself in front.

“Understood. Tell me when you want to stop.”

“I’ll do my best to keep up. Let’s run to Erik’s room.”

Hearing this, Shiron hurriedly stood up. Shizuku nodded, and Mea lifted her hand toward the monstrous bird in front of her.

“Let’s go.”

At the young girl’s words, the three of them set out at a run. The birds blocking the hallways were knocked sideways by an invisible hand and tumbled through the gaps in the walls, letting Shizuku and her two companions race past them. The wind blowing in through the gaps was cold enough to freeze her breath, but Shizuku couldn’t let that bother her. She sprinted down the stone hallways, making sure she didn’t get separated from Mea, who kept exterminating the demonic spirits that appeared before her.

Suddenly, they heard Shiron’s scream echo from behind. Shizuku looked over her shoulder. It looked like Shiron had tripped and was staggering precariously, falling toward a gap in the wall.

“Watch out!”

Before giving it any thought, Shizuku turned around and reached out to grab him. Mea realized something was amiss and looked over her shoulder.

At that moment, the stone floor that the three of them were standing on collapsed with a loud crash.

Erik felt the ground shake a little.

He looked up from his book, confused. Had there been an avalanche nearby or something?

He looked at the book in his hand. The mysterious, untitled tome had far more pages than it seemed at first glance. He’d been reading it alongside the thesis, but decided to pause to check on what was happening.

The very next moment, however, there was a forceful knock at the door. Erik opened it without responding, to reveal a pale-faced court lady standing there.

“W-we’re in trouble. Demonic spirits…”

“Demonic spirits?”

Had the recent spate of demon attacks in the northwest of the continent finally reached the castle?

Erik ran out of the room. First, he needed to make sure Shizuku was safe. He headed to her room, which was just around the corner.

“Shizuku!”

The door was unlocked. Erik peered inside, but there was nobody there. There was no sign of the little green bird, either, although her belongings had been left behind. Erik called Shizuku’s name again, but there was no response, so he went back out into the corridor.

Another rumble shook the castle, followed by the sound of something heavy collapsing. Distant screams echoed through the halls.

At that moment, the guards from Farsas came rushing toward him.

“Sir Erik! Demonic spirits are attacking the castle! What should we do?!”

This was Medial Castle. Erik and his companions were just guests, so it was Medial’s responsibility to repel the attack. If they carelessly intervened, Medial might expect further assistance at some point in the future, which would prove bothersome for Farsas.

As such, the safest option was to teleport back to Farsas.

However…

“We’ll join in the defensive effort. Shizuku’s missing. She might have gotten caught up in some sort of trouble, so prioritize searching for her.”

“Yes, sir!”

The most important thing was to make sure Shizuku was safe. That was the very reason Erik had started working for Farsas in the first place.

Erik cast a protective barrier over himself and his guards, and they hurried down the drafty corridor.

Yet an hour later, after the demonic spirit attack had been repelled, there was still no sign of Shizuku or Mea.

Shizuku had vanished without a trace in the castle of a foreign land.

The unforeseen demon attack left over thirty people dead, injured, or missing in Medial Castle.

Much of the building was destroyed, and the bloody scenes where the victims had met their end in the hallways, on the castle walls, and in the outer garden were horrifying to behold.

Prime Minister Shiron was among the wounded, having been caught up in the destruction of the castle. He’d fallen down into the outer garden and managed to survive due to the piled-up snow that softened his landing.

“It was due to our inadequate defenses that your companion has gone missing. We are deeply sorry for that. She was likely abducted by the demons. We’re investigating the matter to find any potential witnesses, but so far, nothing…”

Listening to Shiron’s apology and report on the situation, Erik fell silent for a short while.

Having been the target of an unexpected attack, Medial Castle had been thrown into a terrible state of confusion—yet not one person had admitted to seeing Shizuku while it was unfolding. Medial was justifying that by saying she’d been kidnapped by the demons.

When Erik replied, there was no emotion in his voice.

“No. I’m the one who was assigned as her escort. I failed to fulfill my duty.”

If Shizuku’s whereabouts were unknown, then he was the one who was accountable. If Erik had foreseen this, he would have carved protective sigils into the floor to strengthen the barrier—even if they were in another country’s castle.

That said, there was something else that didn’t sit right with him.

Shizuku’s assistant demon was always with her, but why had she also disappeared? There was no way the demons would kidnap one of their own. And if Mea had died, Erik would’ve been able to tell, as his name was also on her contract.

Yet Mea had vanished along with Shizuku. Erik used magic to search for her, but it didn’t detect anything inside the castle.

With a blank look on his face, he directed his analytical gaze toward Shiron.

“Do you know where the surviving demons fled?”

“West, most likely. They tend to show up in towns near the border.”

“Thank you. Would you mind if we inspected the castle first?”

This swift request made Shiron’s expression tense up. Erik was essentially accusing Medial of concealing information. The young prime minister stared daggers at Erik, but the mage simply met his stare, unperturbed.

They glared at each other for only a few seconds.

Shiron looked away and responded to Erik’s request in a polite tone.

“That shouldn’t be an issue. Do as you please. However, please refrain from making such statements again once you are satisfied with your investigation. I am terribly sorry about what has happened, but my country intends on building a longstanding relationship with yours.”

Shiron bowed and left the room. Erik watched him with an icy look in his eyes.

Once he was alone again, he went back to his room. He wanted to get in touch with Farsas before commencing his search of the castle.

“What a disaster,” replied Leuticia, sounding appalled. Erik had just summarized what had happened at the castle.

The magic implement that allowed him to communicate remotely via audio didn’t have a video feature. Despite this, it was easy for him to imagine the princess’s expression. She continued speaking, her dismay evident in her voice.

“I sent you with her so there wouldn’t be any trouble. Honestly, you two need to stay in the same room.”

“We’ve tried to do that as much as possible. Still, this is my fault.”

Unsurprisingly, Erik hadn’t expected a country’s castle to be subjected to such a devastating demon attack. It never could have happened in Farsas, where they had defensive wards surrounding the entire castle city.

Leuticia let out a soft sigh.

“So? Do you think Medial had nothing to do with it?”

“No. Many aspects of the situation are still uncertain. Shizuku’s room was untouched. If she left the room of her own accord, she must’ve had a good reason to do so. Yet there are no witnesses at all, which is also clearly suspicious. And if it is true that nobody saw her, it’s odd that their conclusion is that she was kidnapped by a demon.”

“Well, yes. But what could be Medial’s goal?”

“A simplistic answer would be that they’re trying to avoid having to take responsibility. Something happened to a guest they invited from Farsas, and they don’t want to be interrogated about their mistake. That’s why they’re feigning ignorance.”

“But they already admitted their defenses were lacking.”

Medial might have wanted to deny playing a role in Shizuku’s disappearance, but if Farsas criticized the country for not protecting their guest, there was no way for them to evade responsibility. In that case, they’d be better off asserting that Shizuku had gone missing as a consequence of her own actions.

What other motive could Medial have?

Erik glanced at the book in front of him. It had a black cover on it, but it was the interlopers’ cursed artifact he’d taken from Shizuku. After her disappearance, he’d checked the final section of the book, but he hadn’t found what he was looking for.

Erik thought to himself for a moment, then recalled his conversation with Shiron.

“…Maybe they’re pretending Shizuku was kidnapped to encourage Farsas to dispatch troops to take care of the demons.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Shizuku was, in a sense, an irreplaceable asset, but Farsas would never mobilize an army for her alone. Lars had chief authority over the military. Nobody who knew what the Farsasian king was like would come up with such a stupid plan.

However, even if they couldn’t get the army to mobilize, there was still a possibility that individuals would take action.

Erik, one of the best mages on the continent, and Leuticia, a member of Farsas’s royal family, were two people who seemed likely to help. If Medial had come to this conclusion after seeing Erik protect Shizuku from a careful distance over the past two days, then his efforts had worked against him. Erik flicked the pen lying next to the magic implement he was communicating through. It fell off the desk, but he didn’t make any attempt to pick it up.

“Have you searched the castle to find out whether or not she’s really there?” Leuticia asked.

“Not yet. But they’ve told us we can go ahead and look, so if they are hiding her somewhere, she’s probably not somewhere she’ll be easily found.”

“That, or she actually was kidnapped by a demonic spirit.”

That was the biggest issue. It was true that there had been a demonic spirit attack.

And what if she’d met an even more tragic end?

“…No.”

It was too early to consider that possibility. They needed to work on the premise that Shizuku was still alive.

That said, if she was actually missing, kidnapped by a demon, there wasn’t a moment to spare. Erik started recalling all the towns in the west of Medial that were equipped with teleportation rings.

The voice of the princess resonated through the magic implement as she asked Erik for his judgment on where Shizuku had gone and what he thought was right.

“What do you want to do, Erik?”

There was no time for dilly-dallying. He was going to narrow down the possibilities, starting by eliminating the most dangerous one first.

As soon as he heard Leuticia’s acknowledgement, Erik left the room hoping to use the teleportation ring, with only the black-covered book in hand.

When Shiron returned to his office, he summoned his most trusted soldier.

“I wonder if this issue regarding that girl will work out okay,” he asked in a low voice.

“I’m confident that it will,” replied the soldier. “We dumped her in a section of the forest that’s off limits. It’s near the castle, but nobody will set foot in it until the snow has melted.”

“Good work.”

Even if someone were to find her, the location made it easy for them to claim she’d run away from the demonic spirit by herself and gotten lost in the woods. Shiron sensed what felt like a throbbing pain in his side, where his wound was supposed to have been healed, and he covered it with his hand.

When the three of them had fallen through the collapsed floor, they’d ended up in the castle’s outer garden.

Shiron must have lost consciousness for a while. When he finally sat up, he had a horrendous pain in his side. It seemed like he’d come down hard on something when he fell. Looking around, he saw Shizuku lying a short distance away.

There was a chance she hadn’t passed out. Several dead demonic spirits were on the ground around her. But in the middle of them all, Shizuku hugged her chest as if trying to protect something, unconscious.

This is bad, Shiron thought to himself.

If Farsas discovered what had happened, he’d lose his position. He’d been the one to separate her from her chaperone and interrogate her, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to blame him for what had occurred.

Shiron surveyed his surroundings, but luckily, none of her guards had arrived. No demonic spirits were nearby, either. His soldiers stuck their heads through the hole in the third floor, likely having come to look for them.

“Prime Minister Shiron, you’re alive!” one of them exclaimed.

“Don’t make too much noise. Hurry down here. There’s something you need to do.”

Shiron pointed at Shizuku.

“Dump her somewhere nobody will find her.”

The castle was surrounded by nothing but forests and cliffs. There were plenty of places that even the nation’s citizens were forbidden from entering and, better still, it’d be almost impossible for Farsas’s citizens to initiate a search.

It was all over now. It hurt that Shiron still didn’t know the whereabouts of “that item,” but not even the person who’d made those picture books knew where to find it. The only information he’d gleaned was that it was in the possession of a woman who’d last been spotted in Medial.

It felt like he was clutching at straws, but he’d half given up anyway. At least he hadn’t lost his standing.

Reminding himself of that, Shiron set about dealing with the aftermath.

And all the while, he turned a blind eye to the ever-increasing demonic spirit appearances in the northwest and the fact that the attacks had finally reached their castle.

Belb, located in the northwestern corner of Medial, was a town built on mountainous terrain. Apparently, it was impossible to reach by foot or on horseback during the winter season, but to make up for this, the town had plenty of teleportation rings linking it to other parts of the country. This turned Belb into a key hub that many traders and explorers passed through.

Cold air flowed down from the northern highlands. Only the main street had been properly cleared of snow, likely due to the number of people that used it, while the snowdrift piled up on the roofs and alleyways had frozen solid and wouldn’t thaw until spring.

The travelers on the street were bundled up in thick winter clothes. If you walked around outside without any extra layers, you’d be chilled to the bone in no time, and maybe even suffer lasting consequences.

Despite this, Erik was strolling along with nothing more than a cloak imbued with warming magic over his usual mage uniform.

After meeting up with the soldiers who’d come with him from Farsas, Erik received a brief situation update on the demonic spirit attacks in the western part of Medial.

“I knew it; they’re more frequent than what we’ve seen in Farsas. Are there any cases of people being kidnapped?”

“Yes, but only women. A large number of them have been taken away. Numerous cases like those in Farsas, where the women’s souls have been extracted from their bodies, have also been confirmed.”

“Oh. They have, huh?”

They’d found out that it was difficult to extract Shizuku’s soul during the incident a few days ago, but that didn’t mean it was impossible. Erik stroked his chin pensively, then asked the most important question.

“Do we know where to find the demons’ headquarters?”

“Not for certain. However…when the demons first started appearing, mercenaries were hired and large-scale extermination squads were assembled. While the extermination efforts ended in failure, the few surviving fighters claimed there was a castle in the mountains.”

“A castle?”

That sounded odd. There were no castles or castle remains in the area aside from Medial Castle itself. Most crucially, the mountainous region that lay further to the west was a stateless, barren area. You could find small nations if you traveled west or north to the coast, but their borders didn’t touch Medial’s. They were countries “beyond the void.”

After hearing the soldiers tell him about a few taverns and lodges, Erik started making his way toward one of them.

That was when he ran into someone unexpected.

“Oh. You’re alive, then.”

This nonchalant comment was the first thing Erik heard upon entering the tavern. Unsurprisingly, he was taken aback. Once his eyes adjusted to his dim surroundings and he knew who he was dealing with, he responded.

“It’s you, huh? I didn’t know you survived.”

“I have you to thank for that.”

He’d only met the person once, but there was no way he’d forget the mercenary who’d attacked Candela Castle during the forbidden curse incident, taking Shizuku along with him.

The tall, muscular man—Tarkis—sat there grinning, bottle in hand. He glanced up at Erik, who’d remained standing.

“How’s Shizuku? I’m sure she’s fine, right?”

Shizuku and the man didn’t know what had become of one another after going their separate ways at Candela Castle. Yet in the same way that Shizuku thought Tarkis must have escaped unharmed, Tarkis seemed to presume the same about Shizuku. Erik suppressed his emotions and replied to this sarcastic question by saying, “She was until yesterday.”

“Yesterday? What happened?”

“She’s gone missing. That’s why I’m gathering intel.”

This succinct but ominous-sounding response made Tarkis scowl.

Erik sat down opposite him and immediately got to the crux of the matter.

“I want you to tell me everything you know about demons.”

It may have been an unfamiliar foreign castle, but they couldn’t leave any stone unturned.

Harve, the mage, and Yura, the military officer, had been dispatched to Medial under Leuticia’s orders. They had been conducting a search of the vast castle, giving instructions to their respective subordinates as they did. It had taken them about half a day to inspect all the conspicuous areas of the castle, but they still couldn’t find Shizuku. Evading the suspicious glares of the people from Medial, they reconvened in a small meeting room to exchange information.

“How did your search go?” Harve asked as he brewed some tea.

“It was useless,” replied Yura. “Honesty, this castle is a real maze, and if she’s outside the castle, we’re never going to find her.”

“I feel the same way. The king of Medial seems genuinely clueless, too…”

Before he traveled west, Erik had left a message saying that the prime minister was suspicious, but there wasn’t any decisive evidence against him.

Harve took a sip of his tea and let out a deep sigh.

“Maybe she really is in the west. That’d be terrible.”

“It’s a possibility, but this castle is suspicious.”

“Huh? It is?”

Seeing Harve’s shocked expression, Yura nodded and started sharing the findings of the investigation she’d conducted alongside her search.

“There’s one spot where the walls and hallway were destroyed in the attack yesterday, but judging by the state of the debris, both were wrecked from the inside—using magic. And yet, none of Medial’s royal mages fought in that area. There are very few of them, so we were able to verify this from their statements.”

“Are you suggesting that Shizuku’s assistant demon was fighting?”

“It’s a strong possibility. It’s strange that there are no eyewitness accounts at all, though. There were signs of combat in the outer garden right outside the hallway in question, and several sets of footprints had been left behind. Not only that, but a whole lot of blood had seeped into the snow.”

“Do you think the people who witnessed the conflict were killed?”

A silence fell between them. If Shizuku had been kidnapped during such a fierce fight, it was unlikely that she was safe. However, Yura was considering a more realistic possibility.

“I think the witnesses were silenced. Several individuals were acting suspiciously.”

“If that’s the case, then Medial knows something about Shizuku and is hiding it.”

“I don’t know why they’d do that, though,” Yura said offhandedly.

She poured some tea into a new cup and took a sip. She didn’t even try to force a smile, and deep creases had formed across her brow.

The plot was thickening. If Medial was involved in Shizuku’s disappearance, it was going to be a tough search. It might not be as big as Farsas, but Medial was still a large country. If Shizuku was outside the castle, it wouldn’t be easy to track her down.

“Dammit… Why her, of all people?”

“They specifically asked for Shizuku by name, right? At the request of the prime minister. If all they wanted to know was how she taught language, would they really ask for her by name? You’d usually request a magical researcher if you wanted to speak to someone from Farsas.”

Yura’s misgivings made Harve’s eyes widen.

Why had they asked for Shizuku?

It was a question that neither of them had given any thought to before. They both fell silent for a moment, then reported in to Leuticia as planned, who ordered them to leave Medial.

“That’s what they told me, Lars.”

“Doesn’t it seem like our country’s being mocked lately? Who’s to blame for this?”

“You, I believe.”

“Well, whatever. If Farsas doesn’t scare them, I’ll send someone even more frightening.”

So…cold.

That was the first thing Shizuku felt as she opened her eyes slightly.

She couldn’t see a thing. It was cold. She was cold. She let out a shallow breath.

Her body hurt. She was freezing. Half-conscious, she tried to move her hand, but it wouldn’t do what she wanted it to, as if it was restrained. She dragged herself out of her hazy state of consciousness and raised a heavy arm. After what felt like an eternity, she brushed away the snow that had fallen on her face with her free hand.

“…Where am I?”

The sky was almost light, but Shizuku’s surroundings were far from well lit. A thick cluster of trees stretched upward toward the heavens. Shizuku moved her face, which was almost numb, and she realized she was lying in the snow.

Her body was soaked and frozen to the core—which was only to be expected, since she was half buried in the snow.

Dazedly, Shizuku retraced her memories.

“I… I was…”

She’d fallen into the garden after being attacked by demonic spirits in Medial.

Outside had been the ideal battleground for flying demonic spirits, but Shizuku had resisted with Mea by her side. The endless stream of enemies left her exhausted and seriously wounded, but she’d still continued to—

“Ah! Mea…”

Shizuku could hardly move her hands, but she managed to use them to feel around her chest. Her fingertips came into contact with the soft feathers of a small bird. Mea’s tiny body was ice-cold, but it twitched slightly at the touch of Shizuku’s fingers.

“You’re…still alive…”

Mea had been fighting alone, but once she started to reach her limit, Shizuku had ordered her to turn into a bird and shielded her in her chest. At that point, they’d tried to escape, but a monstrous bird had grabbed hold of her from behind. She couldn’t remember anything after that, so she figured she must have lost consciousness.

“I need…to find Erik…”

Her body was so cold it hardly even felt like it belonged to her anymore, but Shizuku forced it to move. She sat up and took a look around, only to realize that she was deep inside a forest with no clue as to where she was. That monstrous bird must have carried her there and left her behind.

She had no idea which way would lead her back to the castle. But then again, was it even safe to go back there? She’d been separated from Prime Minister Shiron in the chaos, and he suspected her of being a thief. If she went back, she might be placed under house arrest. She couldn’t let that happen.

Where could she find Erik? The castle was on top of a mountain, so if she went downhill, would she find herself in the town?

Shizuku tried to stand up, but her legs were trapped beneath the snow. After thinking things through for a moment, she rummaged around for a handkerchief, took it out, and wrapped it around her right hand with its broken nails. Once she had dug out her legs with her hands, she finally managed to stand up.

“Where am I…?”

She looked around at the gently sloping ground. After deliberating over which way to go, she began to descend the hill.

With every step Shizuku took, her feet got buried in the snow. Her strength was being drained from her. She was so tired, she just wanted to go to sleep. Still, she had no choice but to keep walking. Her entire body was in pain, but she urged it to keep going.

“B-but it’s…so cold…”

The snow captured her feet as she continued trudging deeper into the dark forest.

She was extremely tired. She staggered from side to side, feeling like she was about to collapse at any moment.

“So…tired…”

Her feet were sinking into the snow. Everything was hurting. She was finding it hard to think.

She continued making her way through the snowy forest and down to the foot of the mountain, albeit somewhat unsteadily.

Her back, meanwhile, was soaked with bright red blood.

A towering castle loomed over the dark land. In one of its rooms, a woman closed her eyes.

The icy cold that permeated the outside world and the miasma that ate away at people’s minds couldn’t get inside. Enclosed by gray stone walls, the room felt like it existed beyond the bounds of reality.

Sitting in a chair, the woman opened her eyes and glanced out of the window.

Her silver hair shone so brightly that it put the snow to shame, and her face, as unchanging as if it had been carved from stone, exuded a sense of calm. She didn’t say very much, especially when she was with him. She simply lay her pale fingers atop the red book that had changed her life, while Elzard looked at it as if it were totally alien.

“I’m starting tomorrow, Aviella,” he said.

The two of them were the only people who knew what this statement meant. She smiled at him as though he were a child.

“So impatient. I thought high-ranking demons were more lenient with time.”

A human like Aviella and a conceptual being like the demon had significantly different lifespans.

“Do as you please,” said Aviella. “There will always be someone eager to challenge you.”

“Will any of them amuse me, though?”

That was the reason he was obeying her. She let out a small, melodic sigh.

The most powerful of all high-ranking demons was a group called the Twelve Kings, and among them was a heretic who was fascinated with humans. It was something all Elzard’s kind were aware of.

Usually, demons saw humans as little more than dirt. It was absurd for a demon to take an interest in them. The heretic, however, was the sole exception. For nearly a thousand human years, he’d descended to the human realm to involve himself with them. He’d forced his way into places where the powerful gathered and had fun controlling minds and causing disputes.

He’d been acting on meaningless impulses. It was a childish game gone too far.

But before he knew it, he’d stopped just playing around.

In the end, the man fell in love with a powerless human. He protected her and supported her, and after she passed away, he left the human realm. Ever since her death, he’d shut himself inside his own territory, refusing to show his face in front of his fellow demons.

Elzard couldn’t understand why someone so powerful had been so mesmerized by humans. He couldn’t see the point.

It did make him a little curious, though. He was intrigued by the unstable, ever-changing nature of the human realm, which was a far cry from the consistency of his own. He was also curious about the humans who spent their lives creeping around inside it and the emotions that developed while living among them.

That was why he’d responded to the woman’s summoning. He’d lent her his power as they traveled the world and built the castle together.

It had only taken a decade or so. He still didn’t know what was so interesting about humans.

“Humans are so beautiful, Elzard.”

She’d often say this to him with a smile on her face, but he didn’t agree. Humans were weak, stupid, and ugly.

He was happy to keep a human company for a little while longer, though. He didn’t understand the things she said, but her actions were fascinating. Before long, the humans would be thrown into a panic, and a huge commotion would spread across the continent. It would be like a little festival.

Aviella, the witch who was bringing that turmoil to the continent, spoke to Elzard in a remonstrative tone.

“Elzard. If something no longer exists, does that mean it never did? If it is forgotten, does it cease to be? When humans focus solely on the peace of the present, what becomes of the corpses buried beneath that tranquility? If they turn a blind eye to the countless things that could happen and retreat into their tiny little worlds, then they’re nothing more than lumps of mud lacking the spirit that makes them human.”

“Weren’t they always lumps of mud, though?” responded Elzard. “They’re weak, fragile garbage.”

The corners of Aviella’s lips curved into a smile. Pride and affection appeared in her reddish eyes. Aviella looked at him that way whenever he pointed out the fragile nature of humanity, but Elzard could never understand why.

But if he ever uncovered the reason behind it, he had a feeling it would fill in a few of the gaps of the burning curiosity inside him.

When he heard that Shizuku had gone missing, Tarkis was eager to hear the details. He must have understood how urgent the situation was, because he agreed to tell Erik everything he’d learned during the two months he’d spent in Medial so far without demanding anything in return.

Clutching the drink Erik had bought him as compensation, Tarkis noticed that the mage hadn’t even touched his own glass.

“I feel bad drinking alone.”

“It’s fine. Just hurry up and tell me what you know.”

“Gimme a sec. It’s hard to talk about this sober. It was one of the worst jobs I’ve ever been involved in.”

Tarkis was a brave mercenary with a wealth of experience, so the severity of this claim made Erik frown. There had been demon attacks in Farsas, too, and Erik had gotten the opportunity to fight in them himself, but the battles hadn’t been that horrific.

The man in front of him, meanwhile, had a gloomy look on his face. He lowered his despondent gaze to his glass.

“It was over two months ago now. I came to this country because I heard there were plenty of demon-hunting jobs going around. I don’t exactly specialize in that kind of work, but the woman I was traveling with preferred it over warfare. We found work almost immediately after arriving in the city. A woman was hiring a large number of mercenaries to lead in battle against the demons throughout the region.”

“A woman? Was she from the castle or something?”

“No. She wasn’t a lord or a member of the nobility, just a private citizen. She was a pretty impressive mage, though. She was opening teleportation gates all over the place, transporting the mercenaries around.”

Shiron had mentioned that lots of mercenaries had been gathered to fight back against the demonic spirits when the attacks first began. Yet now, most of them were nowhere to be found. Tarkis had witnessed the bloodshed firsthand, and after seeing him, Erik had a rough idea of what that signified. He felt a heavy sense of gloom inside of him, but he didn’t let it drag him down.

Sensing that Erik wanted him to continue, Tarkis set his glass down on the table.

“After defending the town a number of times, we finally crossed the border and headed to the highlands to the west. Our boss guessed that the demons were coming from somewhere in that mountain range, and as it turned out, we encountered demonic spirits unlike anything we’d ever seen before.”

“Were there many of them?”

“Heaps, and all of them powerful. We fought them in a barren land surrounded by mountains, and most of us didn’t make it out alive. It was a horrific sight, even just thinking about it now. The battered corpses of countless humans and demons were piled up on top of one another. The bodies of women who’d been kidnapped from the city were mixed in among the dead, too. They’d started to decompose, so the stench was unbearable.”

His eyes took on a faraway look for a moment. It was as though he could see something that nobody else could. He must have witnessed some truly horrifying things.

Tarkis closed his eyes and smiled.

“After that, those of us who survived retreated as quickly as we could, but a few people insisted on going back into combat. The woman who’d hired us was dead, so we all told them it was a bad idea. In the end, about ten people ignored us and went back to that barren land—but they returned almost immediately, their faces pale with fear.”

“Because there was a castle there?”

That was the thing Erik was most curious about. It wasn’t just a concern of his, but a serious suspicion—one he hoped Tarkis would deny. To his disappointment, however, Tarkis nodded without hesitation.

“Oh, you know about that? Yeah, that’s right. A castle had appeared where, only a short time earlier, there’d been nothing. We went back to the town with the mercenaries who’d been scared away, but they refused to say anything else about it. Who was gonna believe that a castle just appeared out of nowhere?”

There was a heavy sigh, but it was impossible to tell which of them it had come from. Erik pressed his fingers against his forehead and responded with bitterness in his voice.

“I would’ve believed them. A high-ranking demon is able to do something like that.”

“A high-ranking demon?!”

During the Dark Age of war and betrayal that had once engulfed the entire continent, some people referred to high-ranking demons as gods. Tarkis’s big mouth fell open with shock.

Erik didn’t have time to explain further. He gently snapped his fingers to get Tarkis’s attention, then asked the question that had been weighing on his mind.

“Can I ask you something else? What kind of person hired you for that task? Do you know why she was trying to take on the demons all by herself?”

Typically, mercenaries were paid upfront, in full. It would have cost a lot of money for one person to employ such a large team.

Why had that woman gone to such lengths to exterminate the demonic spirits, instead of leaving the task to the state? How had she acquired intel about where their base was located?

There were too many questions that Erik didn’t know enough to answer.

Tarkis folded his arms and tilted his head.

“Hmm. I dunno what her motive could have been. I never asked. She didn’t seem driven by revenge or a sense of duty—she always had this carefree air about her. She was a real beauty with silver hair, probably in her late twenties. Her eyes were…reddish brown, I think. Like I just said, she was a powerful mage. She was pretty strong, but she ended up disappearing in the chaos of battle. I reckon she probably got eaten alive, a young woman like that.”

“What was her name?”

“Aviella.”

Something was stirring.

A sense of foreboding rustled through the air, like waves lapping against the sand.

It felt like a blustery night. Like darkness untouched by moonlight.

There were plenty of women who looked like that.

And yet, his thoughts whispered to him:

“We’ve found her.”

Erik picked up the book he’d set aside and placed it on the table. Stripping off its cover, he revealed the navy-blue binding underneath.

“Did that woman have a book like this, but in red?”

This question was tied to the very fabric of the continent.

A mixture of fear and anticipation filled the air as Tarkis peered at the book.

“…She did, now that you mention it. Leather-bound, with some embellishment but no title. I didn’t get a good look at it, though.”

It was a book without a title, its navy-blue cover revealing nothing. There were no clues about its contents until you turned its pages.

Despite this, the mysterious artifact granted immense knowledge to those who desired it. When Erik realized just how fraught the situation was, he covered his face with one hand and let out a sigh.

After almost a minute of contemplation, he raised his head.

“I want to go to that castle. Tell me where it is.”

“Huh?! Are you out of your mind?”

“I couldn’t be saner.”

Tarkis gaped at Erik, who’d begun to spread out his map on the table at the same time he’d made his outrageous request. He began to suspect that Erik hadn’t believed his story about the two hundred mercenaries that had been killed, but one look into Erik’s blue eyes told him that wasn’t the case. Not only did the man fully comprehend the situation, but that was precisely why he’d made his declaration.

Tarkis frowned in response.

“Shizuku’s not there, is she?” he asked.

“I don’t know. They’re saying she was taken by demons, but it’s unclear whether that’s true. That’s why we’ve split up the search, with me checking the most urgent places.”

“Urgent… What if you’re wrong? You could die, you know.”

“I’ll call for backup before it gets to that stage. I’ll be fine,” Erik said lightly. But it wasn’t that simple.

Tarkis still had a bitter expression on his face as he raked his fingers through his hair, turning it into a mess. Then he let out a heavy sigh.

“If she was kidnapped, it might already be too late.”

“Maybe,” Erik conceded, “but if the woman you mentioned is involved, I doubt she would have killed her.”

“Why not?”

“Shizuku is valuable to the owner of that book.”

Tarkis had no clue what Erik meant by that. Even Erik himself knew it was just speculation.

Still, all the dots connected—Shizuku’s uniqueness, and everything else.

Whether Aviella realized it or not, this wasn’t an opportunity Erik was willing to give up on.

“Tell me. Where is that castle?” Erik firmly asked again.

Tarkis hesitated for a moment, looking at the map of the northwestern region of the continent. Eventually, he sighed defeatedly and pointed to a specific spot. It was a barren stretch of land surrounded by tall, rocky mountains—a place where a nation had once stood during the Dark Age.

Erik stared at the blank area and muttered the name of the kingdom that had vanished nearly six hundred years earlier.

“…Helginis, huh?”

It was the destruction of Helginis that had marked the end of the Dark Age, after being wiped out by witches in a single night. And it was at that very spot where the man’s rough finger now pointed.

Snow covered the ground, clouds veiled the sky, and the world was dreary.

The man intensified his dissatisfied gaze as he looked at the gloomy landscape that stretched out before him. There was nothing he hated more than the biting cold, which hurt his nose with every breath he took. After reciting a short incantation, he erected a barrier around himself and raised the temperature inside it.

“Dammit… Curse that fool woman for putting me through all this trouble.”

His work was always a bother, but this particular job was proving to be especially annoying. Still, ignoring it wasn’t an option, so he was better off finishing it as quickly as possible.

Everything he could see was white. If his memory served him, the castle would be at the top of the mountain. There was a town at its base, but he’d used his own teleportation coordinates to avoid being spotted. All that was left to do was find the path leading up to the castle.

As he searched his surroundings, the man spotted something in the distance and frowned.

A bright green shape was coming down the snow-covered incline toward him.

Shiron glanced out the window to see that the snow had started falling again.

He put down his papers and sighed. Three days had passed since the unforeseen demon attack, and although his wounds had been healed with magic, the castle repairs still had a long way to go.

The girl who’d come from Farsas was also weighing on his mind, but luckily, it didn’t seem as though she’d been found yet. His soldiers had dumped her in a forest a short distance from the castle. Nobody from the castle would venture there, and the town was quite far, so she should stay missing.

“What an unfortunate girl…”

If she’d answered his questions honestly from the start, things might not have had to turn out this way. She could have returned to her room earlier, and her mage chaperone would have been able to protect her.

In the end, though, she’d just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Shiron hadn’t really wanted her to die, but there was nothing else he could’ve done about it.

And if a girl losing her life wasn’t bad enough, he’d barely made any progress with regard to the item. It left a bad taste in his mouth, and Shiron took a sip of tea to wash it out.

When all was said and done, the secrets surrounding the item had been unveiled while his father was still prime minister. That was when Shiron had learned that the formal inheritance system only existed so it could be passed down. When he uncovered this truth, he’d felt uneasy about his future—but now that it was lost, he had no choice but to do what he could.

Shiron rested his chin in his hands and sniggered.

“I could’ve known the entirety of history, huh…? Did it really have that power?”

Shiron had never come into direct contact with the item, so he couldn’t be sure. Still, when he thought about the godlike insight that his father had displayed, his impatience grew. It was a treasure that couldn’t be referred to by name. Shiron questioned whether he was truly fit to serve as Medial’s prime minister, since he was unaware of the “true history” that had been passed down through generations.

Shiron managed to put his worries aside for the time being and decided to return to this office, but at that moment, an official came barging in.

“Your Excellency! Something terrible has happened!”

“What’s wrong? Did Farsas send a complaint?”

Shiron wouldn’t have blamed them for complaining, but he’d already decided to play dumb.

After all, the Farsasian investigation team had searched the castle and found nothing.

Whatever Farsas said, there was nothing more the prime minister could offer.

Shiron had assumed a carefree stance, but the next words to leave the official’s mouth made him drop his pen. Refusing to let his shock show on his face, he asked the man for confirmation.

“Is that true?”

“It is! The envoy has already—”

“Excuse me.”

Their conversation was interrupted by a man who’d appeared at the entrance of the room.

There was a cynical look in the mage’s eyes, and he smirked when he saw Shiron. He proceeded to convey his messages, taking the words right out of the mouth of the official he’d cut off.

“I’m here as an envoy of Queen Ortea of Kisk. We have received word that a woman in this country has gone missing.”

“Wh-why is Kisk involved…?”

Kisk was Farsas’s neighbor and one of the Great Nations.

Shiron knew that there’d been a small conflict between the two countries recently, but he had no idea why Kisk would bother to dispatch someone here. When he recalled the callous reputation of the newly crowned queen—a reputation that reverberated all over the continent—his face grew tense.

The mage watched Shiron’s unsettled reaction with a look in his eyes that dared Shiron to react. Yet he still maintained a polite demeanor, stretching out his right arm with feigned politeness.

“Oh, weren’t you aware of the situation? The woman who went missing was handed over to Farsas as per a formal contract with Kisk. It’s quite inconvenient that she disappeared after only a month, so the queen has requested a thorough search.”

“Well… Demons took her. The investigation team from Farsas has already searched the place fairly exhaustively…”

“Their search might not have been extensive enough. In fact,” he said, lowering his voice, “I found something shortly after arriving here.”

The mage held out his left hand, which had been hidden behind his back.

When Shiron saw what the man was holding, he was left speechless.

It was a green handkerchief with a few bloodstains on it. And wrapped inside it was the green bird that always sat on Shizuku’s shoulder.

The cup she’d held in both hands was so warm it almost brought tears to her eyes. Bundled up in a blanket, Shizuku took a sip of sugary milk and gave another full-body shiver.

“S-so cold…”

“Well, duh. You would’ve died if you’d stayed out there.”

Shizuku looked up in a daze at the man who’d practically kicked the door down when he’d returned. The color still hadn’t returned to her skin, and she raised a pale hand to greet him.

“Thanks, rescue team.”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

Niké, who’d come here under Ortea’s orders, scowled and flicked her on the forehead.

“Ouch!” yelped Shizuku. She sat up in the bed and bowed properly to the man. “Thank you for saving me.”

It was no exaggeration to say she’d narrowly escaped death. After waking up in an unfamiliar forest, she’d started making her way down the snowy mountain. She must have passed out on her way down, though, because when she came to her senses, she’d been in the snow with her former colleague looking down at her, slapping her hard on the cheek.

“I knew you were stupid, but what the heck do you think you’re doing?! You’ll die out here!”

Niké had yelled at her, but Shizuku’s consciousness was so hazy, she hadn’t been able to understand. The arm he was using to support her body felt really warm. It almost felt like she’d finally be able to enjoy a proper sleep, but Niké had other ideas.

“Don’t doze off, you idiot!” he said as he carried her into the lodge at the base of the mountain. Once she was inside, he left to fulfill the queen’s orders.

The proprietress of the lodge had helped Shizuku get changed while he was gone. After that, she’d curled up and waited for Niké to return while her body struggled to regain its usual temperature.

“…I really thought I was dead this time. That was a close one.”

“I thought you were dead, too. You were covered in blood, and you were almost frozen. Are you an amphibian or something?”

“I’m human, as far as I know.”

Shizuku had exhausted her strength as she was making her way down through the trees. However, it seemed that Mea had woken up at the same time that Shizuku had passed out and gone down to the foot of the mountain with Shizuku’s handkerchief as a sign. Niké had happened to spot Mea and gone to search for Shizuku. He’d eventually found her collapsed, buried in the snow, and rescued her.

Niké had used magic to heal her injuries and frostbite, but the cold that had permeated her core wasn’t so easy to get rid of.

Shivering violently, Shizuku asked Niké a question.

“What did Shiron say?”

“I didn’t get anywhere at first. He was just making excuses,” replied Niké. “The branches in the forest where you woke up weren’t damaged enough for a demonic spirit to have dumped you there. When I pointed that out, he finally came clean. He thought you’d died and got frightened, so he left you in the forest.”

“Nope, I’m alive and kicking.”

Perhaps the demonic spirit attacks had left Shiron shaken up, but Shizuku wished he’d checked a little more carefully.

Shizuku put down her cup and took Mea, who was still wrapped in her handkerchief, from Niké. Shizuku’s assistant demon must have been completely drained. She’d fallen asleep right after Shizuku was rescued and hadn’t woken since.

“I hope Mea’s all right…”

“Demons don’t die that easily. She’ll wake up soon.”

“Yeah… Thanks.”

Shizuku needed to thank Ortea later, too.

After searching the castle and deeming their chances of finding Shizuku slim, Farsas had gotten Shiron to lower his guard by withdrawing their search. Then they’d asked Kisk to step in and shake things up.

“I’m known for being lenient, while you’re famous for being ruthless,” Lars had said in his request to Ortea. “Don’t you think you’d make more of an impact in a situation like this?”

Reading this, apparently the queen had been so angry that she’d almost burst a blood vessel. Shizuku silently apologized to Ortea in her mind.

“Still, at least they didn’t bury me yet. Waking up during the cremation would be terrifying.”

“They bury people in this region. They wrap you in cloth and put you in the ground.”

“I wouldn’t like to be buried too deep… I’m not confident that I’d be strong enough to dig myself out.”

Shizuku placed her cup back on the table and flexed her fingers. They still felt a bit numb.

“What’s wrong?” Niké asked, sitting beside her. “Do your fingers feel weird?”

“A little. But I can move them.”

“Your hand was black from frostbite. I thought I’d done an okay job of healing it, but maybe I was wrong.”

Niké casually took Shizuku by the hand. She raised her eyebrows, surprised by how warm his hand was.

“You’re so warm! How are you that warm?! Are you a human-body warmer or something?”

“…You’re just freezing.”

“Oh. Well, still, you’re really warm.”

After holding Niké’s hand long enough to feel normal again, Shizuku finally let go. But at that moment, he grabbed her hand instead and pulled her toward him. The sudden closeness made Shizuku’s eyes widen in shock. She finally remembered what had happened the last time they said goodbye—something that she’d almost forgotten.

A stiff smile crossed Shizuku’s face.

“Um, did you get in touch with Farsas?” she asked.

“The more important question is, are you sure your back’s okay?” replied Niké.

“Yeah, it’s fine…”

He’d asked the same question right after picking her up off the ground. At first, Shizuku hadn’t understood why, but when she got changed, she realized the back of her clothing was soaked with blood. He must have thought that she’d been hurt.

Shizuku had no wounds on her back, though, so it must have been someone else’s blood. If someone had lost that much blood without anyone to help them, they had probably died.

Shizuku casually waved her hand to reassure him.

“I might be cold, but I’m perfectly fine. I’m completely healthy, see?”

“I’m not sure I trust your definition of ‘healthy.’”

“That hurts…”

She couldn’t blame him for saying that, but they were standing so close their bodies were almost touching. Getting lectured at that distance was extremely uncomfortable. Shizuku wanted to make a break for it, but Niké was still holding her hand.

“Would you mind letting go of me, Niké…?” she asked, feeling kind of awkward, but Niké just continued staring at her in silence.

Shizuku felt so uncomfortable she almost broke out in a cold sweat. Won’t he at least say something? she thought, averting her gaze and looking down at her lap.

Just as she was about to speak up again, however, a whooshing sound sliced through the air.

Shizuku looked up and yelped in surprise.

“Aah!”

Niké had tensed up in front of her, a bitter expression on his face. A small, golden arrow was hovering inside the room, having stopped in midair right before it pierced his temple. It was the same arrow that had come for Niké back when they were in Kisk.

“Wh-why is that here…?”

“—I’m so pleased you’re safe, Shizuku.”

“Oh, Princess Leuticia!”

Princess Leuticia—a woman praised by all for her exquisite beauty—had entered the room wearing a flawless smile. Shizuku hurriedly rose to her feet, amazed to see her boss had traveled so far to see her. At the same time, she glanced back at Niké, who was still too scared to move.

“Um, about this arrow…”

“Ahh, yes,” said Leuticia, turning to face Niké. “You must be that mage from Kisk. Thank you for your help. But let me warn you, if you dare lay a finger on Shizuku again, I’ll make you regret it. Oh, and give my regards to the queen.”

“…”

Shizuku sensed there was a cruel threat mixed in there somewhere. She started to understand why Niké was afraid of Leuticia but decided not to probe further.

With a snap of Leuticia’s fingers, the golden arrow vanished without a trace. Now that the danger had gone, Niké finally stood up and offered Leuticia a formal greeting.

However, before he got the chance to finish, another voice cut in.

“You’ve got your sights set on that girl, huh? Good, go ahead and take her.”

“Lars!” cried out Leuticia. “You can’t just give her away! If Shizuku stays in Farsas, Erik will, too!”

“So that’s what you were thinking? As far as I’m concerned, that mage can do whatever he wants with her.”

“Uh, where do my human rights come into this…?”

Why had Lars come along, too?

Having appeared behind Leuticia, Lars patted his sister on the head and pointed out a window in the hallway behind him. Through the hazy, snow-covered glass, Shizuku could see tall, white mountains.

“Has the proclamation of war not reached you here yet?”

“What proclamation of war?”

It was a prayer etched into history.

A trial tainted in blood and despair.

Twilight was only just descending over the castle city, but all of a sudden, the sky was cloaked in darkness. It almost felt as if it had been waiting for Lars’s cue.

Shizuku was stunned by the dark sky.

“An eclipse…? But it happened so suddenly.”

A thick blanket of shadows covered the ground, and a dark mist worked its way toward the sky. In an instant, the dim castle city had been cut off from the rest of the world, plunged into a darkness so deep you’d be forgiven for thinking it had descended into the underworld. Miasma trailed through the air, evading the last remnants of sunlight.

Lars laughed fearlessly as he flung the window open.

“See? It’s here.”

The other citizens seemed to have noticed the sudden arrival of darkness as well. Windows had opened throughout the town, and people were looking up at the sky—the focal point of their fearful, bewildered gazes.

As the apocalyptic scene was unfolding, a woman suddenly appeared in the air.

Her face was unfamiliar, and she was wearing a tight-fitting black dress that covered her from neck to toe. The subtle shimmer of her long, silver hair made it look like moonlight was reflecting off her. It wasn’t clear what color her eyes were, but she was gazing down upon the city below.

She appeared completely surreal. To Shizuku’s mind, she looked like an image projected onto the dark sky. Yet when the woman parted her crimson lips, her voice seemed to echo to the ends of the earth.

“Darkness…is coming.”

At the end of the hidden past, after memory has been lost, people will continue to be born.

The masses are unaware of the reality of their world.

It is because they do not know, because they have forgotten, that trials appear before them.

The threats and mistakes that the continent has overcome are resurfacing.

“Darkness is coming. Conflict is coming. To you humans who have enjoyed your peaceful slumber. The age when humanity will cower in fear of the darkness and tremble at the thought of death has come once again.”

She strung her words together in a resonant voice.

What did she mean?

Lars laughed, and Leuticia closed her eyes.

“The darkness doesn’t care whether or not you’re sinners—it will devour you all and leave you to rot. Unjust endings will flood every corner of your land, and the things you hold dear will slip through your fingers.”

There was once a time when the continent endured seven hundred long years of tyranny.

During this period, war relentlessly scorched both the people and the land, and countless nations were created and destroyed.

It was referred to as the Dark Age—an era when that which had been taken was stolen again, and that which had been lovingly cultivated was trampled upon.

Hearing what sounded like this woman announcing the return of this age, Shizuku held her breath, standing frozen to the spot.

“Death will rain down on you and pile up at your feet. Nowhere shall escape it; all will share equally in the despair. Borders will fade, and the world will become seeped in Negativity… That is, if you surrender to it.”

The woman’s voice, clear and unwavering, carried with it nothing but pure determination.

Her smile was beautiful, yet so sublime it made one hesitate to speak.

“Challenge it, humans, if you have the willpower. Show it how strong you are and defy its attempts to steal from you. Only the person who ascends to the summit of blood and resentment shall seize this continent and become its new king.”

The woman took a breath and smiled softly, looking around at the snow-covered world.

For that brief moment, the sharpness vanished from her eyes, replaced by a light as if she were praying. Her gaze almost seemed to contradict the severe proclamation she’d just made, and Shizuku found herself drawn to it.

Then the woman concluded her proclamation.

“My name is Aviella, the Seventh Witch. I will be waiting for you at the end of one era and the beginning of another.”

The woman vanished from the sky, and once twilight returned to the city previously enveloped in darkness, Shizuku glanced up at Lars.

“What was all that about…?” she asked, her voice trembling at the end of her sentence.

“A declaration of war, obviously. From a witch.”

“A-a witch?”

“They’re only human.”

After the Dark Age came the Age of Witches—a time when five fearsome witches lurked in the shadows of history.

The king, carrying a sword that even witches feared, showed no trace of emotion. His haughty blue eyes looked over the top of Shizuku’s head as he addressed the man who’d appeared at the end of the hallway.

“So? Where are we headed?”

“The ruins of Helginis. A new castle was built there.”

“Erik!”

Hearing Shizuku call out his name, Erik glanced at her for a moment, a conflicted look on his face. Shizuku tried to run toward him, but he kept her away with his hand.

“I’m covered in demon blood. You shouldn’t get too close.”

“I’m sorry! I…”

“I’m the one who should be apologizing. I’m glad you’re safe.”

Erik then turned to Niké and gave him a small nod of gratitude.

“Thank you. You saved her.”

“…You have no reason to thank me,” Niké replied curtly.

Erik thought to himself for a moment, then stepped closer to whisper something in Niké’s ear. The other man scowled deeply.

“I don’t know. They’ve probably taken precautions to avoid being followed.”

“That’s true. Sorry for bothering you. I just thought it was worth asking.”

Before Shizuku had the chance to wonder what they were talking about, Erik turned back to the king and carried on issuing his report.

“I also got to have a bit of a look around inside the castle, but it’s quite large. Being a magic structure, it’s taller than any normal building could ever be.”

“Is that where the witch is?”

“Most likely—along with all the other high-ranking demons that have appeared in the castle city.”

A change was coming.

The return of darkness and the battle to overthrow it were drawing near.

Shizuku felt a silent commotion stirring inside her, prompting her to place a hand on her chest. Without realizing it, she started to hold her breath.

Why did she feel so anxious?

When her wandering gaze met Erik’s, he frowned. It was unusual to see hesitation in his expression.

However, the king’s commanding voice soon broke the tension.

“There’s something else, isn’t there? Spit it out.”

With all eyes on him, Erik wiped the hesitant look off his face. His emotionless gaze met that of the king.

“That witch…is the owner of the red book.”

This was the book they’d been searching for, the one that chronicled events concealed from history, thought to be one of the interlopers’ cursed artifacts.

Shizuku was the only one left speechless by this revelation.

Leuticia sighed, while Niké’s expression grew confused.

Lars, meanwhile, chuckled and looked up at the darkened sky above him.

The sun was setting.

The brief twilight was drawing to a close.

The long night that would follow would be unlike any this continent had ever seen.

The Seventh Witch had declared war, aiming to restore the darkness that had once prevailed.

Shizuku felt everything sway, as if she was dizzy, and pressed a hand against her forehead. She exhaled shallowly as she closed her eyes.

It was the same darkness that had existed in the beginning—one that seemed like it was within reach, yet couldn’t be touched.

It felt as though it was enveloping the entire world.

4. The People’s Prayer

The sharp claw pierced the man’s abdomen, tearing out his entrails and sending fresh blood spurting into the air. The man dropped his sword and collapsed to the ground without a sound.

“Brother!” the girl yelled, moving to run over to her elder sibling—but she soon leaped back, sensing an attack from the side.

Acid doused the spot where she’d been standing, and a pungent smell spread through the air. She could hear a child crying in the distance, awash with the scents of burning flesh and cloying blood.

Yet as she held herself up with her sword, she could no longer see any people moving. The young girl was the only person left in her small village.

She looked up defiantly, meeting the gazes of the demonic spirits targeting her.

“I won’t let you beat me.”

She readied her sword, even though it was far too big for her. She remembered her mother once telling her to stop being so desperate to follow in her father’s footsteps.

However, right now, this sword was the only one by her side. There was nobody else around. The other villagers had all died because of the witch.

She spotted somebody’s misshapen body out of the corner of her eye. A black shadow hovered over it, and she could hear the sound of chewing.

The demonic spirits fluttered their wings above her, waiting for the right moment to strike, poised to sink their claws into the girl’s flesh and devour her.

That morning, despair had fallen on them even more gently than the rain.

With a scream, the girl brandished the massive sword and charged right into the horde of demonic spirits all by herself.

The darkness was closing in. A darkness that had been discarded and forgotten eons ago.

The long night was beginning. A night that would force people to change how they thought.

The powerless who cowered in the presence of the darkness would fall victim to an unforgettable terror.

Death and glory awaited those with the will to fight, even if they lacked strength.

The truth, however, would only be revealed to those with both strength and determination.

In the fallen city of Helginis, where an age had once come to a close, a new age now began.

The castle towered over the land fallen to evil, standing shrouded in silence and exposed to the world.

Where did I go wrong?

Shiron signed the document, his hands shaking, and gave it to his official. The proposal, which consisted of forming an army and advancing beyond the nation’s borders, would be put into action once it passed through the king’s hands.

Shiron thought about what had happened the day before.

“So how would you like to deal with the liar?” the king of Farsas had asked, looking down at the prime minister.

He’d appeared from out of nowhere, carrying a woman who should have been dead under his arm. Shiron never imagined things would end up this way. One woman had the potential to spark a clash between two of the Great Nations.

There was a tale from the distant Dark Age about three nations crumbling because of a single woman, but she had allegedly been an exceptional beauty. In contrast, the girl Shiron had discarded was as unremarkable as one could get.

As Shiron wrestled with his confusion, Lars shot him an acrimonious smile.

“Use your army to attack the castle of the Seventh Witch. If you can manage that, I’ll let this incident slide.”

After thorough deliberation, Shiron had accepted the king’s demand. It could even be viewed as a settlement of sorts for Farsas.

Either way, the castle of the Seventh Witch was located just west of Medial’s border, practically in a neighboring country. If that was where the demonic spirits were appearing and attacking from, they’d have to deal with it eventually. The “declaration of war” had come as a surprise, but witches were more than fairytale characters.

Plus, if what Shizuku said was true and the item really was in the witch’s hands, then perhaps this invasion was a chance to reclaim it.

When the king of Medial saw the document Shiron had signed, he appeared to have some questions, but in the end, he issued his approval without saying a word. Three days later, the army formed under royal decree set out for the ruins of Helginis.

This army of twenty thousand, however, didn’t even make it to the witch’s castle.

They had deployed in absolute secrecy to evade the witch’s notice, using teleportation to assemble right before the border—but the moment they were all together, the army was ambushed by demonic spirits and half destroyed. Caught off guard by the sudden onslaught, the soldiers had no chance to defend themselves, and they fled. That very day, the heads of the army’s generals were delivered to Medial Castle, along with a message from the witch:

“Only those who come of their own will shall be welcomed.”

“She must be telling us to come as individuals, rather than mobilizing the army,” grumbled the king, having just finished reading the report in his office in Farsas Castle. He’d pressured Medial into mobilizing an army to test how strong their opposition was, but the result was far less interesting than he’d imagined.

It had been a week since the illusion of the witch had appeared in major cities across the continent, yet there was no news of anyone having reached the top of the castle yet.

The fallen city of Helginis, where the castle stood, was located in the mountainous northwest region of the continent, a place so remote that it was hard for any ordinary person to visit. Many people who made their living by fighting had simply given up after learning of the castle’s location.

That said, a considerable number of people still tried, motivated by the promise of becoming the “ruler of the continent” or intrigued by the existence of a witch, something that was only ever heard about in fairy tales. Nearly a hundred of them had spent several days to get to the witch’s castle, using teleportation rings to travel to nearby towns, yet only a handful managed to escape with their lives—and even then, only barely. The vast majority never returned.

The king of Farsas skimmed through a report stating that they’d lost contact with the small nations to the north and west of the Helginis ruins, then waved his hand lethargically.

“Seems like I’ll never stop receiving pleas for help, no matter how hard I try to wriggle out of them.”

“You’re probably right about that,” replied Leuticia. “When people think of exterminating witches, it’s always the wielder of Akashia who comes to mind.”

“I hate our ancestors for starting that tradition.”

“It’s not just a tradition. It’s been that way ever since the other nations discovered Akashia’s powers.”

His sister’s cool-headed observation made the king stick out his tongue like a misbehaving child. Leaning back in his chair, Lars gazed up at the ceiling.

“Will the wards around the northern towns of Farsas hold?”

“The number of demons is increasing by the day, so I doubt they’ll last long at this rate. It’s only a matter of time. In other countries, entire towns have already been wiped out.”

“Guess we can’t rest on our laurels, then. Besides, that witch has the red book, doesn’t she? It’s one of the interlopers’ cursed artifacts.”

Lars’s gaze shifted to the man standing beside his sister. Erik nodded, carrying several books tucked under his arm.

“It seems the witch hired mercenaries to suppress the demonic spirits before the castle was built. I’ve gotten a witness statement from one of the mercenaries, who claims she always walked around with an untitled red book. From what he says, it sounds like she used that book to gain intel about Medial’s movements that she wouldn’t normally have known.”

“So it’s almost certain she’s the culprit. But why did she summon the demons, then organize her own extermination squad to subjugate them?”

“Probably so she could build the castle. She caused a large number of deaths on both sides, then used the power from those souls and the Negativity to cast a castle-building forbidden curse. That type of magical architecture was tested out at the beginning of the Dark Age, but it was assumed the technique was lost long ago.”

“Isn’t the fact that she constructed the castle enough to prove that she’s behind this, then?”

“Yes. Plus, the location where Helginis once stood has been transformed into the underworld using a forbidden curse. She must have restored and reversed the effects of a purification barrier that once existed in that land. There are no surviving records regarding a purification barrier in Helginis, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was mentioned in her book.”

“She’s exploiting lost knowledge, huh? That’s not something to be taken lightly. Does she have any idea how much of a mess the continent’s history already is?”

Lars’s exasperated comment prompted Leuticia to expand.

“There are many parts that are still secret, even of the history that we know. If you were to add in the experiments that were erased from records, it would be too terrible to process. It’s likely the women’s souls collected from different cities were also used to turn the area into the underworld and construct her castle.”

The anger in the princess’s voice was palpable.

The number of victims was already staggering. There were the women whose souls had been extracted, the mercenaries who’d been hired to be used as raw materials, and the residents of the towns and villages that had been attacked.

The three people in the office paused for a moment, contemplating their own thoughts concerning this huge incident that was sure to leave its mark on history.

A map of the continent was spread out on the desk in the laboratory—a stark contrast to the picture book drafts that were normally there.

Harve pointed to a spot in the northwest and gave Shizuku an explanation.

“Helginis is the name of a country that was destroyed at the end of the Dark Age. In fact, people say the fall of Helginis marked the end of that age.”

“Huh? A country way out in the corner of the continent put an end to the Dark Age?”

Helginis lay to the northwest of Farsas and west of Medial in a relatively small mountainous region.

Harve smiled, appearing to have anticipated Shizuku’s confusion.

“At that time, the entire continent was exhausted from many years of war. People were ready to bring things to a close, but there was nothing that could prompt a conclusion. That’s when Helginis, which had managed to avoid the horrors of war thanks to its isolated position surrounded by rocky mountains, got wiped out in a single night.”

“In one night…? Was it destroyed by a forbidden curse?”

After spending a year in this world, that was the first possibility that came to Shizuku’s mind. But Harve shook his head.

“No. It was destroyed by a witch.”

“…A witch.”

Shizuku had seen a witch in Medial just a short while earlier: the Seventh Witch, who’d just declared war on the continent.

Harve smiled at Shizuku, apparently having read her mind.

“Not the Seventh Witch. Back then, there were five witches on the continent, and none of them had tried to get involved in the chaos. But then, a witch suddenly appeared in Helginis and burned the country to the ground. This made people realize how much of a threat witches actually were…and they stopped fighting one another. Peace reigned after the Dark Age, but the people were terrified of witches. I doubt the witches themselves gave it much thought, though.”

Harve sounded like he was joking. After all, Farsas had a deep connection with witches.

The Age of Witches had ended three hundred years earlier, when the king of Farsas took a witch as his queen. One of their children, the now-deceased Sixth Witch, was Queen Fystoria, hence this was why Aviella was the Seventh Witch.

Harve picked up his tea and warmed his throat.

“I strayed off topic a little, but that’s a basic history of Helginis, the region that’s causing us problems right now.”

“Really? Is the problem the fact that it’s surrounded by tall mountains?”

“No. It’s an area dense with magic—or perhaps you could say that the boundaries blocking us off from other realms are less distinct there. You find places like that around the continent.”

“…Oh. Now that you mention it, the folktale surrounding the lake where Mea lived said that it was originally so full of magical power that no fish could live there. But then, the water god built a castle and purified it, so people were able to fish there.”

The small bird perched at the corner of the table looked up at the mention of her name. Having been weakened from using too much of her power in Medial, Mea now seemed right as rain.

Harve nodded like a proud teacher.

“That’s right. Lake Nevys is a well-known example. Helginis is another place where the density of the magical energy made it impossible to enter. But about eleven hundred years ago, a woman known as the saint came and purified the land at the cost of her own life. She’d been accompanied by her followers, and as they mourned her death, they founded the kingdom of Helginis to ensure her sacrifice wasn’t in vain.”

“Whoa… That’s a pretty amazing story.”

It was hard to understand why someone would go as far as to sacrifice their life to make an inhospitable place livable, but Shizuku figured she must have had her reasons. Harve, who specialized in history, gently raised a finger.

“It seems as though there was a massive magical device that continued to purify Helginis, even after the saint’s death, but since the witch wrecked the town, no detailed information remains. The device was likely destroyed along with everything else. After Helginis was wiped out, the area became shrouded in magic once again, and for hundreds of years, nobody was able to step foot in the area. That is, until recently.”

“And now it’s the focus of the whole continent, and not in a good way.”

Having verbalized it, Shizuku and Harve both fell silent at the severity of the situation they were faced with.

Shizuku took a sip of her tea, which had gone completely cold, and thought back on the events of the previous few days.

Since Aviella unleashed her declaration of war on the continent, people had been terrified, whispering about the “return to darkness” and the “advent of the witches.” Many towns and villages had been attacked by the demons that used Helginis as their base, and the number of victims was growing by the day.

None of the nations knew how to respond, and after hearing about the defeat of Medial’s army, they were all hesitant to act. Although a sense of gloom shrouded the entire continent like a blanket of darkness, some people had set out for the witch’s castle, driven by ambition or a sense of justice. Discussions on how to tackle the situation were proceeding in Farsas night and day as well.

Erik had been to the witch’s castle and examined both its interior and exterior, so he’d been leading these meetings to plan countermeasures. This role left him exceedingly busy, so Shizuku hadn’t had the chance to meet up with him since he came back. Instead, Harve was checking up on her for Erik, so Shizuku was using this opportunity to learn a few things from the history specialist.

Harve let out a heavy sigh as he stood in front of the map.

“According to Erik, the witch has restored and reversed the magical device in Helginis, transforming the land into the underworld… Witches are a real nuisance.”

“Uh, how strong are witches, exactly? Like, how did one destroy a nation?”

When Shizuku had first met Erik, he’d explained that a witch was a term for an extremely powerful female mage, but she still couldn’t quite grasp how strong that was.

Harve forced a smile and sighed as he responded to her innocent question.

“Not all witches are the same, but people say that they’re usually powerful enough to go up against an army of tens of thousands, all on their own. The sheer size and power of the magic they can utilize is unrivaled. They say Helginis was simply burned to the ground by a large-scale destruction spell. That’s not something a human could achieve.”

“Whoa. That’s some firepower…”

Could somebody that powerful actually exist? Shizuku cast her mind back to the side profile of the woman who’d appeared in the dark sky that day.

Aviella had spoken about the return of darkness and encouraged people to take on her challenge, yet her face looked unmistakably human. Or, at least, she had to Shizuku.

What had been running through that woman’s mind as she introduced herself as a loathsome “witch”?

“I guess you’ve gotta be level fifty to defeat the Demon Lord, huh…”

“What are you talking about?”

As Harve and Shizuku struggled to understand one another, they heard a knock at the door and rose to their feet.

Two soldiers had come to see them, bearing a message for Shizuku.

“The king has asked to see you.”

“Me?”

Shizuku was surprised by this sudden invitation, but she had no right to refuse. Harve volunteered to accompany her, and they followed the soldiers to the king’s office.

“I wonder what he wants from me. Do you think he might be craving some carrot cake?”

“Not a chance. Maybe he’s in the mood for another two-hour run.”

“I can’t stand those; they ruin my appetite. I end up puking half the time.”

The pair’s light-hearted conversation continued until they stepped foot in the office. As soon as the soldier opened the door, Shizuku heard Erik shouting sharply at her.

“Shizuku! Don’t come in!”

“Huh?”

As Shizuku stood there wide-eyed, the king suddenly reached out toward her. He managed to restrain her with his muscular arms in no time, and her eyes darted around in bewilderment. Before Shizuku had the chance to protest, Lars’s hand was already on her neck.

The king’s grip was firm beneath her chin, putting pressure on her breathing. Shizuku instinctively held her breath, and the king snickered, his voice right next to her ear.

“Tell me. If you don’t, I’ll snap her neck right here and now.”

“You bastard!”

Shizuku heard the disgusted voice of a woman condemning the king’s behavior. It was only then that she realized Ortea was in the room.

Lars’s gaze wasn’t directed at Shizuku, however, but at a certain young man. The man’s deep-blue eyes glared back at him, brimming with anger.

“Let go of her.”

“Didn’t you hear what I just said?”

This wasn’t the sort of situation that could be dismissed as a joke; the atmosphere was dangerously hostile.

Shizuku froze as she sensed Lars’s grip tighten. Unable to understand what was happening, she looked at Erik.

But at that moment, from the corner of her eye, she spotted a navy-blue book lying on the table—and in an instant, the suffocating sensation was replaced by an inexplicable dizziness, causing Shizuku to become unsteady on her feet.

Two hours before Shizuku was called to the king’s office…

“—Even so, information is getting out far too quickly,” Lars said as he leafed through his paperwork.

He was talking about the incident involving Medial.

Medial was one of the Great Nations, having dominated vast stretches of land for over two hundred years. They’d been swift to assemble and mobilize their army, yet the country’s troops had been ambushed by a horde of demonic spirits and defeated before they even managed to cross the border. Could they have had a spy in the royal court?

Once Erik heard the king express his frustration, he shook his head.

“It’s probably the book. All sorts of things are recorded in it, including the “verified actions” of nations and influential people, which are logged as part of the continent’s history. The moment Medial decided to deploy its forces, that information was likely added to the record.”

Hearing this, Leuticia frowned.

“It was ‘added’? You’re saying the book updates itself automatically?”

“Yes.”

“That has to be against the rules. If there’s a book that keeps track of current events as they happen, then nothing can be kept secret.”

If the red book really did have that power, it would make it extremely difficult for nations and important figures to make any moves.

Lars, the king of the most powerful nation on the continent and a man famed for wielding Akashia, looked understandably annoyed. He glanced at Erik with his arms crossed.

“You seem to know a suspicious amount about that book. Where’d you learn all this?”

“I have a similar book myself. So far, no information from inside Farsas has been revealed to the red book’s owner. That information has been getting added to my book, rather than the red one.”

“What do you mean?”

“It would be quicker for you to see it for yourself.”

As Erik said this, he casually offered the king a book enclosed in a black cover. The sight of it stunned the two direct descendants of the Farsasian royal family into silence for a moment.

From their perspective, this was an object that needed to be eradicated, a cursed artifact that the interlopers had presumably created, yet here it was, right in front of them. After recovering from the initial shock, Leuticia cautiously reached out for it and picked it up.

“Is it safe to look at?”

“I think so. I’ve read it myself, and I’m fine.”

After glancing at her brother, who gave a nod, Leuticia flipped through the pages of the untitled book.

Inside, she found a history of the vast continent they lived on.

It detailed events spanning over a thousand years. The last entry in the book stated that the 30th king of Farsas, Lars, had unexpectedly traveled to Medial. This event had occurred just a week prior. Frowning, Leuticia passed the book to her older brother, who skimmed through it with his elbow propped on the table.

“…So there’s more than one of these? That was an oversight on my part,” he admitted.

“As far as I know, there are two books documenting the history of the continent: this one and the red book the witch has in her possession. The nations covered in each book depend on the era that’s being written about. Currently, this one’s focusing on Farsas, Kisk, Gandona, and other countries in the central to southwestern regions.”

“The other book must cover Medial and the other eastern and northern territories, then.”

Despite his initial surprise, Lars was quick to adjust to this new revelation. Perhaps the knowledge of magical artifacts that had been passed down to him had helped with that.

Erik nodded in response to Lars’s remark, then continued talking.

“When it comes to dividing events by country, the records seem to prioritize where something happened rather than where the people involved were from. For example, although the book says that you traveled to Medial the other day, it doesn’t mention what you did there.”

In which case, those details must have been logged in the red book instead.

Lars tutted as he flipped through the pages. After skimming through about a dozen, his eyes landed on the word “Farsas.” There, he saw accounts regarding the history of his kingdom that weren’t supposed to leave the nation’s borders. His expression twisted into a scowl.

“I’d love to tell this book to stop logging things without permission, but it works in our favor that updates about Farsas are logged in this book. We can make preparations within our own borders and strike Helginis before the enemy catches on.”

“Maybe, but… Do you really believe this is genuine, Lars?”

Leuticia didn’t think Erik was lying to them; she just found it hard to believe that such an item actually existed. Anyone who heard about the book would probably ask the same question.

Lars tilted his head to one side.

“If that’s what you’re worried about, why don’t we carry out an experiment? Let’s do something. Maybe we could erect a bronze statue of a duck?”

“…Is that the best you can come up with?”

Testing the book’s capabilities was a good idea, but building a meaningless statue for such a purpose wasn’t. It would take too long to see results.

Hearing his sister’s objection, Lars tilted his head in the other direction.

“Okay, let’s do something quick and easy. Let me think… I know—go and summon Ortea.”

Ortea was the queen of a neighboring country, and they’d only just negotiated a truce with her. Leuticia’s eyes widened at this suggestion, but she soon nodded and left the room. Once his sister was gone, Lars carried on flipping through the book.

Ten minutes later, the king was staring at the blank last page of the book when words suddenly started to appear.

The new sentence read, “By order of the king, Farsas has invited the queen of Kisk to their nation.”

Lars’s gaze turned icy for a moment after seeing the letters written by an invisible hand, and he silently closed the book.

As one would expect, the witch’s illusion had graced the skies of Kisk’s castle city as well.

Her ominous declaration of war terrified its citizens, who’d just ended their conflict with Farsas.

Kisk hadn’t been subject to any demon attacks yet, though. Their distance from Helginis was most likely to thank for that.

As a result, Ortea continued with her usual admin work while simultaneously preparing for a potential assault. This involved reviewing and signing documents ordering for the detection barriers along the border to be strengthened.

“She calls herself a witch, does she? That’s quite a bold claim to make.”

There had been six witches in recorded history. While all of them had been feared for their incredible power, none of them had openly confronted humanity. Every so often, a witch had shown up and instilled fear in people—with the destruction of Helginis being one such example—but they’d never played a role in belligerent, hostile actions, such as commanding hordes of demons to massacre tens of thousands of people.

What was the new so-called witch planning on doing? Still holding her pen, Ortea began to turn the phrase “declaration of war” over in her head—but her thoughts was interrupted by an unexpected message from Farsas, who’d last been in touch only a few days earlier.

“Farsas again, huh…? Those fools have no qualms about inconveniencing people.”

The queen grumpily picked up the document. When she scanned through it, she was surprised to discover that Farsas’s plea was a respectable one. Apparently, they wanted to consult with her about the witch incident in private.

“A consultation? They must have nerves of steel, summoning me.”

Teleportation would allow her to reach Farsas in an instant, but why did she, the queen, need to show up in person?

Ortea was frustrated, but she knew it’d cause even more of a nuisance to decline the request and have them show up uninvited in Kisk instead.

She quickly signed the documents she’d been going through, summoned a mage, and set off for Farsas.

When she got there, however, she was told about a completely preposterous book.

“A secret history book that was brought here from outside our world? Are you half asleep? Or have you finally lost your mind? Not that you ever were a respectable man.”

After everything was explained to her, Ortea’s initial reaction was to mock Lars.

“I’m being serious,” Lars calmly replied, flashing her a mischievous smile. “And what’s more, the book updates automatically in real time.”

“…Is this a joke? There’s no way such a thing could exist.”

“Want to test it out? Name any event, past or present. What do you want me to find?”

Ortea didn’t know how to answer. Parts of her nation’s and her own personal history that she didn’t want anybody to know came flooding back.

The man held out the book to the queen. Perhaps it was because it had no title, or because of what she’d just heard, but it looked weirdly repugnant. Ortea took it in both hands. The feel of its leather binding resembled the skin of a living person.

Ortea looked down at it as though it were a loathsome insect. Then she opened it to the page indicated by the bookmark.

The young queen immediately froze. A stunned murmur escaped her lips.

“How does it know about Tryphina…?”

Only direct descendants of Kisk’s royal bloodline knew the truth about their nation’s first queen. Ortea—the only person alive who should know what was written on that page—dropped the book in shock. Lars managed to catch the thick tome in his hand right before it hit the floor.

“Do you believe me now?”

“…This is ridiculous.”

“Well, I don’t care if you don’t believe me. Your job here’s done.”

“What did you just say?”

Ortea attempted to intimidate the insolent king, but when he showed her the book’s final page and she realized that she’d been summoned as part of an “experiment,” her beautiful face tensed up. On that same page was another entry stating, Kisk has decided to strengthen its magical barriers at the border. This decision had only just been made, so there was no possible way Farsas could have known. Ortea reread the page several times, experiencing a mixture of anger and mild revulsion.

Ortea wished she could dismiss this eerie discovery as nonsense, but the fear and curiosity that came from something so incomprehensible kept her rooted in place. Ortea was as rigid as a doll, and Lars sat her down in a nearby chair and briefly explained the oral legends that had been passed down in Farsas. Then the king shifted his gaze back to Erik.

“What do you think would happen if we burned this book?”

“My hypothesis is that all future entries would move to the red one.”

“I see. So destroying it now would only play right into our enemy’s hands.”

Ortea gave Lars an exasperated look, shocked at how eager he seemed to throw the book into the flames. As he held that tome filled with numerous powerful forbidden curses, Lars’s expression turned thoughtful. He glanced over at his sister, who was leaning against the wall.

“If entries are split up depending on the location of an event, our enemy will know what I’m doing as soon as I step foot in Helginis territory… What am I supposed to do?”

“The witch says she’s happy to take on individual challengers, but I doubt you’ll be treated like any ordinary swordsman. If you mobilize your army, everything will depend on how swiftly and promptly you can capture the castle.”

“Yeah. Well, we can think about that later,” said Lars. “Right now, the problem lies with you.”

His tone was light—but only as light as a cloth wrapped around a sword.

Erik, the recipient of Lars’s penetrating gaze, furrowed his brow.

“What do you need?”

“Where did you get this book?” Lars asked.

“About a month ago, from a traveling merchant,” replied Erik.

“Don’t lie to me.”

Anyone else would have faltered under Lars’s sharp glare, whether or not it was their first time being on the receiving end of it. Yet Erik calmly met the king’s gaze. There was nothing in his eyes that suggested he was lying. In fact, he gave so little away that asking further questions seemed pointless.

Despite this, Lars just smiled and refused to look away. Ortea and Leuticia appeared puzzled by the hostility brewing between the two men.

The king continued, still glaring straight at Erik.

“You revealed this information because we wouldn’t be able to defeat the witch without knowing the function of these books, didn’t you? But if you were trying to deceive me, you should have ensured that that girl was on the same page. Tell me the truth—this book belongs to her, doesn’t it? I’m right, aren’t I?”

Lars wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Erik narrowed his eyes, meeting the king’s gaze.

The tension in the air was palpable. Erik began to open his mouth to deny the king’s accusation.

If their conversation had continued, he might have won the king over.

But at that moment…an oblivious Shizuku arrived.

It hurt to breathe. She was dizzy.

The pressure of the king’s grip wasn’t fully to blame, though. In fact, Lars’s hand wasn’t even obstructing her breathing. He was just lifting her chin up, his grip soft around her narrow neck.

Shizuku didn’t understand why this was happening. She stumbled and bumped into the king. Lars casually waved a hand to dismiss Harve and the soldiers who’d come with Shizuku, then steadied her to stop her from collapsing.

With that, he resumed questioning Erik.

“Are you still refusing to speak? You wouldn’t want this girl to die in vain, would you?

“She doesn’t know anything.”

“But you were there, weren’t you? You were there when I negotiated with Ortea at the fortress in Kisk. This girl knew about the royal family’s hidden resources—something not even Ortea was aware of. How do you explain that?”

Erik was the only one whose expression remained unchanged. Ortea, who’d been there at the time, and even Shizuku, who’d said it, went wide-eyed.

The knowledge she wasn’t supposed to possess stirred inside Shizuku, making her sick to her stomach.

Her head hurt. She felt nauseous. Her whole body was convinced the ground had disappeared beneath her feet.

The king’s voice sounded distant, even though he was right beside her.

“Nothing about the crystal cave in Kisk was mentioned in this book. That means it must have been written in the witch’s book. So how did this girl know about it? Is she a spy?”

Why did Shizuku know something like that?

She wanted to know more than anybody. The information had seeped into her beneath her awareness.

It was as though it had always been there, lurking deep within her.

She couldn’t fight against it. After all, she was unable to recognize its presence.

Someone let out a sigh.

It was probably Leuticia or Ortea. Erik never sighed. He just gazed at Shizuku with a bitter expression.

Shizuku swallowed the breath that kept her alive. In almost the same instant, Erik responded to the king.

“Fine. I’ll explain.”

“Make sure it’s the truth.”

“Of course. Shizuku is nothing but a victim.”

At long last, Lars released Shizuku’s neck. He lifted her up and sat her on a nearby desk.

As Shizuku pressed her hands against her throat, everyone’s eyes turned toward the mage. The room was filled with anxiety. Erik glanced at the book on the table in the center. For a moment, Shizuku thought she saw a flicker of contempt in his gaze, but maybe she was imagining it.

“Both this book and the one the witch has came from outside this world. They indiscriminately record the continent’s history. But that’s not the only power they hold.”

Shizuku knew what he was going to say next.

She knew it, and yet she couldn’t remember what it was. She just couldn’t extract the thought.

She didn’t need to remember anything to understand, though. She could feel it.

Erik was the only person who’d noticed the truth.

He was the only person to reach it.

He must have grasped the situation long before Shizuku ever did.

“This book has the power to implant someone with the innate language of this continent. Humans didn’t always possess innate language skills—the languages were unified so the interlopers’ cursed artifacts could take records.”

“I want you to tell me your name.”

The girl’s golden eyes widened at the sound of the man’s voice, and she cocked her head to one side. She looked perplexed, then pointed at the water jug in his hand and asked him something. When he realized that she was asking whether he disliked the flavor of the water, he shook his head.

“No. I asked you for your name.”

People in this isolated village didn’t seem to understand the language he spoke. The girl looked even more troubled now, continuously glancing back at her village, but the man took her small hand in his and made her look back at him.

“Your name. Do you understand me?”

First, he patted his chest and said his own name: “Aetea.” Then he pointed at the girl and cocked his head to one side.

It was a natural gesture for both of them to make, despite not sharing a common language. At long last, the girl seemed to understand. With an innocent smile, she pointed at her chest.

“Ludia.”

This is a tale from long, long ago, of a god and his goddess.

Erik’s words spread throughout the office like an invisible blaze.

It was clear that the three royals were finding his revelation hard to accept. They all believed to certain extents that innate language was rooted in the depths of human nature.

Erik, however, was indicating that these skills had been implanted by an external force.

Nobody could say a word. Shizuku held her breath and stared at him.

Erik, meanwhile, continued to speak in his usual calm manner.

“I’ve spent a long time with Shizuku, learning about the languages of her world. I’ve reached the conclusion that language is something created by people. In her world, there are countless different languages across many countries and regions, and they even evolve as different eras and cultures influence human thought.”

“Huh? That’s the first I’ve heard,” commented the king.

“I never mentioned it before. In Shizuku’s world, language and thought are closely interconnected, and humans are capable of complex thoughts precisely because language exists. The two complement each other and evolve together.”

That was the answer Erik had reached regarding the natural state of language.

And yet, things in his world were different.

“In contrast, innate language is a fixed skill that people are equipped with. When you compare it to languages that humans created, though, the presence or absence of certain words doesn’t make sense. Why does innate language contain not only words for things from the natural world, but also for manmade inventions? I still haven’t found a clear answer to that question.”

Leuticia propped up her chin with her elegantly shaped fingers.

“Isn’t it just happenstance that we were supplied with that vocabulary? We tend to use compound words to refer to things that people have created.”

“We do, but there’s actually a limit to the artificial objects our innate language can describe. Things that existed before the oldest written records—around a hundred years before the Dark Age—have their own names, whereas items invented afterward are named using compound words. Doesn’t that suggest that our innate vocabulary was shaped around the way things were at that point in history?”

“Created…? But how could something innate be—?”

At that point, Leuticia fell silent. She must have remembered that the interlopers’ cursed artifacts had the unique ability to “make the impossible possible.”

Erik merely glanced at his boss, then continued making his point.

“The unnatural aspects of innate language have been overlooked due to the hypothesis that our souls are connected to a realm that controls innate language. After examining several cases involving defective souls, however, I’ve reached another conclusion: Innate language skills are not dependent on the soul. Which begs the question—where does innate language come from?”

Erik paused to take a breath, then looked around at everyone in the room.

“My conclusion is that innate language was abruptly introduced from outside our world during the unnamed period between the Age of Gods and the Dark Age. When you look at it that way, a lot of things start to make sense.”

“But still…,” Leuticia said, gently shaking her head.

As Erik’s superior, she must have already been familiar with his claim that innate language wasn’t dependent on the soul. Yet even if she’d accepted that, she wasn’t immediately convinced that innate language skills were the product of the interlopers’ cursed artifacts. If Erik’s hypothesis was true, then they’d been at the mercy of the interlopers’ cursed artifacts all along.

They’d been under their influence without even realizing it.

That thought was beyond disturbing.

The princess bit her tongue. Her brother cocked his head slightly and spoke up on her behalf.

“Explain the reasoning behind that claim. In what way does it ‘make sense’?”

“Let me explain.”

Erik pulled out a chart from the pile of documents he was carrying.

“This chart lists the countries mentioned in my navy-blue book, arranged chronologically by decade.”

Leuticia received the chart from Erik, glanced at it, then frowned. The number of countries written about in the book had almost doubled at the beginning of the Dark Age, despite the fact that no significant historical events had occurred during that time. She passed the piece of paper to Ortea and asked her subordinate a question.

“That’s…not because the number of countries exploded during that era, is it?”

“Nope.”

“According to my rough calculations, the book started recording entries for approximately fifty percent of the nations that existed at that time, when it was originally recording only about a third of them,” said Ortea, outlining her observations in her beautiful voice.

While the queen was widely known for her arrogance and sadistic reputation, she was actually quite studious.

“Exactly,” said Erik, responding to the queen of the neighboring nation with a nod.

Lars—who’d taken the chart out of Ortea’s hand—looked at the time periods in question and gave a half-hearted grunt. As Erik watched the piece of paper being passed around, he resumed his explanation.

“At a certain point during the Dark Period, the number of entries changed drastically. That signifies…a change in the number of books.”

His indigo blue eyes locked onto Shizuku.

They’d had this conversation before. Somewhere, at some point in the past.

Captured by that sense of déjà vu, Shizuku spoke up.

“There were three books originally, weren’t there?”

“Correct. Somewhere along the line, one of the books disappeared, so the two that remained had to cover more information.”

When she closed her eyes, Shizuku could sense a hazy image beginning to surface.

Three books were lined up on a white desk.

It felt like a fleeting memory seen through mist, even more elusive than déjà vu.

Just as Shizuku was about to fall into this waking dream, the king’s voice brought her back to reality.

“Was one of the books disposed of?” Lars asked.

“No. There’s actually a document that tells us what happened to the other book. Think about what happened on the continent about one hundred and thirty years after the Dark Age began. Wars intensified, faith in Aetea spread, advancements were made with sailing ships. In other words…”

The mage stared at Lars, silently goading an answer out of him. Erik knew the king would know to what he was alluding—and sure enough, Lars came up with the response he’d been hoping for.

“Emigration. The book was moved to the eastern continent.”

“Exactly. One of Aetea’s followers took it there, calling it God’s Written Prophecy.”

Erik pulled a thesis out of the documents he was holding, eliciting a small cry of recognition from Shizuku. Before everyone’s attention could turn to her, Erik began his explanation.

“This thesis, submitted by a devotee of Aetea, is about innate language deficiency. It starts with an abstract detailing the ‘possible lack of a unified language during the Age of Gods,’ and contains many intriguing observations. There are too many to describe in detail, but one section quotes the journal of a follower of Aetea who was one of the first emigrants. In it, he says, ‘At first, we couldn’t communicate properly with the people of the eastern continent, but once they came into contact with the holy book and understood, they started listening to what we said.’”

“That means…”

All four of them immediately grasped what Erik was implying.

Most people interpreted this passage to be suggesting that the god’s teachings helped the people understand one another. Erik, however, was indicating that it meant something much more straightforward: that the book’s powers had helped the people to understand one another.

Leuticia sighed and leaned against the wall, shaken up by this dramatic shift in the interpretation of the story.

Ortea frowned, her cheek resting on her hand.

“Was that thesis brought here from Kisk?”

“Yes. Is there an issue?”

“It doesn’t matter to me. Niké must have passed it on to Shizuku. Still, I don’t think we can decisively pinpoint the book’s abilities from that one passage. It could have been a different book that was taken to the eastern continent, and maybe the part about language was purely coincidental.”

“I thought the same,” Erik replied, “so I checked every existing mention of the holy book. I couldn’t find many, since the documents were from a different continent, but several of them gave specific details about the book’s contents. The holy book documented the early history of the Dark Age on this continent, the history of the continent to the east, and conflicting accounts of multiple events. The third book probably began recording the history of the eastern continent after it was taken there and, since it described ‘erased experiments,’ people revered it as a prophetic text. One description even stated that ‘history continued to be logged by the invisible hand of god,’ indicating that new entries were automatically added. There’s no other book like it.”

Erik paused to catch his breath. Then he looked around the room and continued.

“As for the effects of the books in question, these three books are likely cursed artifacts, intended for use on this continent. My theory is that all three were necessary to produce their full effect. That’s not because they needed three books to record the continent’s extensive history, though; the fact that the entries were split between two volumes instead of three after the third book went to the eastern continent makes that clear. So then, why did they need all three books? The answer is to ensure that innate language skills were sufficiently distributed. In fact, a minor issue arose on the continent after the number of books went down to two: Certain regions developed accents.”

A long time ago, way back in the Dark Age, a number of people emigrated to the eastern continent.

The continent to the east was hit even harder by the turmoil of war, so hardly any records from the time remained, but in modern times, at least, innate language was commonplace there.

The only notable difference was that many of the regions had heavy accents.

Meanwhile, certain areas of the western continent also began to develop accents following wide-scale emigration to the east.

“It’s unclear whether the primary function of the books was to record history or to make everyone speak the same language. That said, given that language influences the way we think, it’s possible they unified our language to limit our thoughts. In fact, in her world…Shizuku’s world, a language encapsulates a country’s history and culture, making it difficult for foreigners to fully comprehend. For the interlopers, however, disparities between nations were probably seen as unnecessary, so they eliminated any potential issues by making us all speak the same language.”

Is it just me, or is Erik furious? Shizuku suddenly thought, staring at Erik’s characteristically composed expression.

When Shizuku shared her theory regarding language in Medial, Erik had reacted somberly, appearing to be deep in thought. He must have been contemplating the limitations caused by unifying language ever since.

To a man like Erik, who considered introducing technology and knowledge from other worlds to be unnatural, the idea that language—the foundation of thought—had been tampered with by outsiders must have been hard to bear. Shizuku stared into his deep-blue eyes, sensing that his emotions were in a rare state of turmoil, regardless of how calm his explanation sounded.

“All of our continent’s written records from before a certain point were lost. This cutoff point came around a hundred years before the Dark Age, which I earlier theorized was when our innate language was introduced from outside our world. The texts that existed before then were probably in multiple different languages, which is why they were destroyed. The only ancient stories that remain, in fact, are those that were passed down by word of mouth.”

Erik fixed his gaze on Shizuku.

“The influence of the interlopers’ cursed artifacts could only extend to innate language skills, and that’s restricted to spoken language. Once the language we spoke was unified, our written language could be largely homogenized as well. All records from after that point were in this unified language. The outsiders were desperate to ensure that nobody questioned why everyone on the continent spoke the same language, which is precisely why visitors from outside the continent were such a nuisance to them.”

The word “nuisance” hit Shizuku like a hammer.

What came next would be about her. She was sure of it.

Something about herself that even she didn’t know.

What would happen to her as a result?

“A fishing boat once rescued a shipwrecked man from an unknown continent. After reaching the shore, the man was welcomed by the local lord, went on to become his right-hand man, and left behind a memoir about his homeland. According to the fisherman who’d saved him, ‘At first, he was weak and deranged, babbling things we couldn’t understand. He must have calmed down by the time we reached the town, though, because he’d started speaking normally.’ That is to say, the man—unaffected by the cursed artifacts’ power—had initially been speaking a language from another continent, but the artifacts changed the language he spoke when he reached the shore. The cursed artifacts had skillfully identified the visitor and removed the element that would spark concern.”

And so, the man from another continent adjusted to his new life in this closed-off sandbox.

While his homeland remained in his thoughts, he lived out his days on the continent, unable to return.

Did he curse his fate? Was he resentful?

“But then, fourteen hundred years after language was unified, an unexpected visitor arrived on the continent. Not only did she speak a different language, she was from another world—a world that took language diversity as a given.”

Everyone’s eyes focused on Shizuku.

She felt uncomfortable, but she didn’t lower her gaze. Instead, she lifted her chin and gazed at Erik.

For a brief moment, he looked at her in his usual gentle way.

Then, wearing a bittersweet smile that hinted at the mixed feelings he was harboring, he spoke in the language that had been in him since birth.

“The artifacts must have used a considerable amount of power to alter her language and prevent her from noticing anything strange about our continent—and its efforts were successful. She didn’t question why people understood her language. Instead, she simply embarked on a journey, hoping to find a way back to her old world. But then, the strong influence that the cursed artifacts had on her began to produce side effects. She began to subconsciously connect with the books, gaining the ability to read what’s inside them.”

“…Connect…with the books?”

“Even before, when she collapsed, she’d start describing events from history that never happened, saying she ‘saw it in a dream.’ The revelation she came out with during the negotiations with Kisk wasn’t an isolated incident. She has possessed knowledge with no discernible source on numerous occasions. Some of the things she knew weren’t even described in this navy-blue book we have here, meaning she’s probably connected to all three books.”

To Shizuku, it felt as though Erik was talking about someone else.

She knew that wasn’t the case, though. Her legs trembled uncontrollably.

“Naturally, she can’t remember her connection to the books when she’s fully awake. It’s different when she’s asleep. In her dreams, she can get closer to the books…and absorb their knowledge.”

Why and how did Erik know that?

On two occasions, Shizuku had told him she was scared of the knowledge she wasn’t supposed to possess.

Yet now, she couldn’t even remember doing that.

She’d been made to forget it.

She’d been trapped right from the beginning.

Locked in a cage inside a sandbox, all alone—and she hadn’t even realized it.

A white room stretched endlessly around her. There lay three books.

She knew she could read them all. She knew she was connected to them.

She just struggled to remember it under normal circumstances. In other words, she was…

“I’m…!”

Her head throbbed.

Someone screamed in the depths of her memory.

Her world grew distorted. Everything was squashed and slanted—on the inside as well as the outside.

Sitting at the desk, Shizuku let out a wordless scream and fell to the ground.

Collapsed on the floor, she began to sob, clawing at her face with her short nails.

Things that had been revealed to her; things that she hadn’t known; things that she’d been unable to remember—the shock of all of these revelations caused her thoughts to snap, and her mind convulsed as if nauseous.

Yet it only lasted a few seconds.

A man helped her get to her feet. He stopped her hand before she could scratch herself any more as she tried to reject the overwhelming thoughts.

“It’s okay.”

Erik had been standing farthest away from Shizuku, yet here he was holding her up, having basically pushed the royals aside. He opened Shizuku’s dark brown eyes for her and peered deeply into them.

Erik’s actions hinted at more than just concern. He was checking whether any change had gone on inside her. Sensing his intent, she reached out for him, as if she were drowning.

“I-I’m…me.”

“Yes. You are you.”

He took her hand.

Their fingers intertwined.

She held on tight. The feel of him returning her grip was the only thing keeping her tethered, though only barely.

Shizuku had nobody in Erik’s world. Nobody who’d known her as a child. Nobody who shared her blood.

She had no foothold here. If someone accused her of not being a real human, her foundations weren’t strong enough to prove them wrong.

I want to go back.

I want to go back to my old world. To my old life.

I want to see my older sister. I want to look at my little sister’s face.

I just want to be free.

So please, don’t say that.

As Shizuku writhed around in agony like a fish brought to shore, Ortea and Leuticia watched her with a mixture of pity and confusion.

Shizuku did use words they couldn’t understand from time to time. These must have been words that were difficult to translate—ones that didn’t adapt easily to the world they were in.

Everything else, meanwhile, had been altered. It had all been twisted.

The power of the cursed artifacts was lurking within every word that Shizuku uttered and every word she heard.

“N-no… I…”

Shizuku weakly shook her head, and Erik raised a hand, planning on casting a spell that’d send her into a deep sleep. But before the spell could take shape, another man grabbed his hand from behind.

Lars’s frozen eyes were fixed on Shizuku.

“Stand,” he demanded.

“Lars, what are you…?” Leuticia began.

“Can’t you hear me? Stand on your own two feet and look at me.”

There was no trace of the king’s usual easygoing nature in this intense command. The sound of his voice made Shizuku shudder. Her eyes had been on the verge of losing focus, but now they wandered the room in search of Lars.

How was she going to prove it?

How could she prove that she was human, that she had free will, and that she had dignity?

If she was going to do that, and if she had any pride, she’d need to stand up for herself.

She’d prove herself not through her blood or her flesh, but through her spirit.

Lars’s severe reprimand bordered on cruel, and it made the two women frown.

Ortea started to rise from her seat, while Leuticia tried to dissuade Lars as she stood up.

Erik wasn’t going to stop the king, though. He undid his spell and took Shizuku by the hand. His warmth gently calmed her down, helping her pull herself together.

After taking several deep breaths, Shizuku tried to stand up with Erik’s help, still unsteady on her feet.

Lars didn’t rush her. He was just waiting in silence. When Shizuku was finally standing before him, he looked down his nose at the girl. The king had the uncompromising gaze of a strong leader, but Shizuku reciprocated his glare, undaunted.

At some point, somewhere, she’d looked up at eyes like his before.

She remembered how scared she’d been when Akashia’s blade swung down toward her.

It made her want to run straight out of the room, so Shizuku mustered all her mental strength just to stay standing.

The king posed her a question, his voice calm.

“Back then, you jumped from the tower to fight me, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then utilize that life of yours one more time.”

She’d been unable to fight because she hadn’t realized the truth.

What was she supposed to do now?

Was she going to flee? Curl into a ball and hide? Or…

“I’m going to go and kill the witch,” declared the king. “And you’re going to read the witch’s book.”

The book recorded everything, including the king’s whereabouts. The witch’s movements would have been logged there, too.

Shizuku was going to read that book, then take on the witch. They’d use the power in the book against her.

The continent was vast. Shizuku was far too ordinary and insignificant for her path to be recorded in history. Her actions wouldn’t be documented in any books.

It was for that precise reason that she could read the books without the witch knowing. If all three of the books were connected to one another, she should be able to extract the knowledge from the one in the witch’s possession. Aviella assumed that she was the only one who could read the red book, but she’d have the rug pulled from under her feet by none other than Shizuku.

Shizuku thought about the souls that had been snatched away in Farsas’s castle city and the court lady who’d died in the castle in Medial. Those incidents were just the tip of the iceberg. The number of victims continued to grow on a daily basis.

Allegedly, the attacks on surrounding towns were growing fiercer by the day. There were still people who took up the sword to combat the witch, but the bodies were piling up and small villages were getting destroyed, their terrified citizens unable to escape.

It was human nature to feel grief and anger over the situation.

Shizuku glanced at the book lying on the table—the cursed artifact that had controlled her on some level and one of the three books that had long subjugated the continent. Its power was fearsome, but it was just a tool used in somebody’s experiment, and nothing more.

In which case, there was no reason why she couldn’t use it. She could control that tool herself.

Shizuku walked over to the table, picked up the book, and held it against her chest. She turned around and looked up at the king.

“I’ll do it.”

Shizuku’s shaky response earned her a nod from Lars.

A week after the witch declared war, a powerless girl expressed her will to fight.

And with that, the cogs of change began to turn.

They were set to depart two days later, once travel preparations to Helginis were complete.

Shizuku would head there with the navy-blue book and ensure a secure connection was established with Aviella’s red book.

When Ortea heard the decision Shizuku had come to, she bit her lip.

“You fool. You know you could die, right?”

“I’ll be fine, Princess. I’ll be back.”

Shizuku’s life had been in danger many times before. Even so, she’d made up her mind to fight.

She smiled awkwardly at the queen, then put on a brave face and stood up straight.

“Order me to do it, Princess. Tell me to go and deal with the witch. I’ll do as you command.”

As long as someone was supporting her, Shizuku felt like she could stay strong, no matter where she ended up.

Upon hearing her former subject’s wish, Ortea wiped the anguish off her beautiful face. She briefly lowered her amber eyes, then looked at Shizuku again.

There was no longer any trace of anxiety or fear in her expression. Instead, the queen was radiating pure, forceful determination.

In a firm voice, Ortea issued Shizuku a command.

“Go. And make sure you come back.”

“As you command. You can rely on me.”

The things Ortea truly wanted to say were impossible to convey in words, so instead, she simply returned to her country to fulfill her role as queen.

“So the book didn’t contain any clues that could help us send Shizuku back to her old world,” Leuticia muttered as she scanned the papers Erik had given her.

His study of the navy-blue book had concluded that no way of traversing worlds could be deduced from the text. To this he’d added, “It’s likely that innate language skills temporarily returned inside Farsas Castle because the book was brought here.” While the cause of the illness remained unknown, there was a chance it was related to the other book in the witch’s possession.

Hearing his sister let out a sigh, Lars prepared the paperwork to assemble the army. At the same time, he was selecting highly skilled mages and officers who could head to the castle as individuals, but in an unprecedented move, he was planning to give them the right to turn down his royal commands.

He handed the piece of paper he’d finished writing up to Leuticia.

“Okay. I’m leaving this to you. Make sure you do your job properly.”

“Huh? This is…a transfer of military authority! Why are you giving me this?”

“I’ll make a head start with some other people, and we’ll kill the witch and destroy the book. Once that’s done, you’ll lead the army to capture the castle.”

Once the omniscient book was destroyed, Farsas would launch a full-scale attack. The leadership of a royal was necessary for this plan to be fully executed, but Leuticia was sensing an ulterior motive.

“What are you talking about?!” she shouted. “I’m coming with you, Lars!”

“No. You’re staying behind. You can make your appearance at a later stage.”

“Lars!”

The king might be an outstanding swordsman and the wielder of Akashia, but he was only strong in human terms.

The witch, on the other hand, was such a powerful mage that people called her inhuman. If that wasn’t bad enough, she probably had a high-ranking demon on her side. Facing such a foe on enemy territory without any royal mages protecting you was nothing short of reckless.

Just as the princess was about to speak up, determined to change the king’s mind, Lars interrupted her, his voice quiet.

“Leuticia.”

How many years had it been since her brother last called her by her real name?

It had been so long, this simple word had developed the power to remind them both of who they truly were.

As Leuticia sat there, frozen, Lars asked his sister a question.

“Are you refusing to follow the king’s orders, Leuticia?”

The king’s statement hit her hard. It was instilled with unbreachable determination.

Leuticia bit her lip and slowly lowered her small head.

“…Not at all, Your Majesty.”

“Good. Oh, and make sure to prepare a spell that prevents demons from being summoned. Better safe than sorry,” Lars said with a shrug.

And with that, he was back to his usual self.