Chapter 190: Rules

Being rejected by Saul, Victor actually smiled. “Don’t worry. Even if your big brother is stuck in this cursed place forever, I’ll still help you find the treasure.”

Saul resisted the urge to roll his eyes and slipped into the next room.

The moment he pushed the door open, his vision suddenly brightened.

Sunlight poured into the room, and the windows were wide open. The sheer curtains billowed high in the wind.

There were three people in the room. One woman and two men.

All of them were huddled in a corner with looks of sheer terror.

As Saul stepped inside, one of them instinctively pulled the trigger of the crossbow in his hands.

Whoosh!

Whip… Crack!

Before Saul could even react, a black tentacle flashed into view like lightning, opening a gaping black mouth and biting down on the arrow.

Little Algae had popped out of nowhere, crunching the arrow to pieces in a few quick bites before spitting it out with a ptooey a moment later.

Although the arrowhead it spat out was already deformed, Saul could still see the faint dark green sheen glinting on the metal.

“Poisoned?”

Saul glanced down, then looked up and fixed his gaze on the three people.

They returned his stare with expressions of hopeless despair. Two of them turned and bolted for the open window, while the woman reacted even more dramatically—she dove under the bed.

Did she think Saul was too bulky to chase her in there?

Saul cast a glance at the woman’s foot still sticking out and instead walked over to the window to check on the two men who had jumped.

But after they leapt, he didn’t hear any landing sounds.

This was the second floor. Judging by their gear, the two were probably adventurers—this height shouldn’t have posed any difficulty.

Saul rested a hand on the windowsill and looked down.

Outside was a garden bathed in dazzling sunlight, and directly below was a neatly trimmed, lush green lawn.

But there was no sign of the two men.

With his level of hearing, Saul should’ve caught something—even if they had somehow slipped into another room midair. Yet the silence was unnaturally complete, as though the two had never existed.

“Did they traverse time and space too?”

Saul lingered by the window for a moment. “It can’t be that simple. If it were that easy to traverse time and space, then Tower Masters capable of teleportation wouldn’t be so feared as elite Second Tier wizards.”

He stepped away from the window and began carefully inspecting every detail of the room, trying to find any clue that would explain this warped time-space situation.

As he searched, his eyes fell on a foot sticking out from under the bed.

Ah, the foolish woman.

Saul walked over, grabbed the slender ankle, and gave it a sharp yank.

But instead of pulling her out, he got nothing but the ankle.

The woman who had crawled under the bed had vanished, leaving behind a severed foot with an uneven cut.

As though something had eaten her.

Frowning, Saul casually tossed aside the still-bleeding foot.

“Jumping out the window makes you disappear. Crawling under the bed does the same. Did they act so decisively because they feared me or because they’ve figured out the rules for traversing this time-space situation?”

Saul squatted to peer under the bed, then cast a glance back at the window. Finally, he chose… to leave through the main door.

Outside was still the spacious corridor, but now illuminated by sunlight streaming in from the balcony opposite, making it feel much brighter and lacking the eerie atmosphere of the rainy world.

It was as if the world had been torn in two.

One half, a stormy world of thunder, lightning, and oppressive clouds.

The other, a sunny world of clear skies and gentle breezes.

“My first time crossing between the rainy and sunny worlds was something like this. The first time I walked through a door, I entered the sunny world. The second time through that door, I was still in the sunny world, and I saw the knight who’d just entered. But the third time, I was back in the rainy world.”

Using both his eyes and his spirit perception, Saul still couldn’t spot any flaws.

It was likely that the rules of this place were stronger than his current power level.

Breaking through by brute force would probably be extremely difficult.

“Does walking through a door really allow you to switch between worlds? If I hadn’t walked through the same door a third time but picked another room instead, would I still have returned to the rainy world?”

The rainy world had that mysterious Victor.

Saul wasn’t sure of his strength or motives, so he wasn’t eager to reunite with his “brother” just yet.

He decided to continue down the corridor.

He didn’t bother entering any more rooms. Whatever he was looking for probably wouldn’t be in those places.

Eventually, he reached the end of the hallway and came to a stop before a spiral staircase.

This staircase wasn’t connected to the one he had used earlier to ascend. But it also had a path downward, which seemed to lead to another section of the first floor.

Ralph’s castle wasn’t all that grand—probably four stories tall, with the tallest tower maybe reaching six stories at most.

Saul stood on the steps, hesitating between going up or down.

“Better ask someone with experience.”

He bowed his head and called to the diary in his mind.

“Brother Diary, could you summon Lord Morden for me?”

The diary flew out and flipped straight to the final black page.

Ever since it had absorbed the consciousness of Morden, the Second Tier wizard, Saul would occasionally ask him about general knowledge—not anything too specialized, for fear that gaining knowledge too far beyond his level might bring unwanted consequences.

In fact, it was Bill’s consciousness that had given Saul much of his everyday guidance during study.

But both Bill and Herman of the Land Drifters were merely Third Rank Apprentices, and their consciousnesses were fading quickly.

After Saul’s rigorous experiments, their handwriting had grown as thin as hair.

He no longer dared consult them, afraid a single mistake might wipe out a whole black page.

Only Morden still had enough spiritual energy left. But unfortunately, after becoming a wraith for so long, much of his knowledge had faded.

“Lord Morden, have you heard of the Bloodthorn Family?”

[Bloodthorn? Never heard of them. I do recall the Bloodrose Family, though—they were loyal vassals who fought alongside me in the Battle of Hanging Hand Valley. Oh wait, Bloodthorn might be a side branch of the Bloodrose.]

“The Battle of Hanging Hand Valley? Never mind, probably a total wipeout. Maybe the Bloodthorn Family’s decline started when the Bloodroses fell. Lord Morden, do you know how the Bloodthorn Family rose to prominence?”

A family that could inherit the Diary of Dead Wizard—even if they never figured out its true secrets—shouldn’t have been as obscure as Morden made them out to be.

[How would I bother remembering something so minor? But Bloodthorn… right, they were known for their blood-and-flesh magic within the dark element. Hmph, can’t recall exactly. Am I really getting old? Why can’t I remember so many things anymore? I used to remember even the tiniest detail with crystal clarity.]

Saul wanted to tell Morden, You’re not old—you’re dead.

But he’d never told any of the diary’s residents that they were already dead in the real world. There was no need, and Saul was afraid the knowledge might shatter their consciousnesses.

“What is blood-and-flesh magic?”

[Heh. It’s just a bandit’s path to fortune. Devour your own kind, extract their essence, and use it to boost your power. But such wizardry has dangerous side effects. You can’t devour anything outside your own species—if you do, heh, you might forget you were ever human.]

That didn’t sound related to the Diary of a Dead Wizard at all.

If blood-and-flesh magic was just a bandit’s shortcut, maybe the Diary of a Dead Wizard wasn’t originally the Bloodthorn Family’s legacy.

Maybe they stole it.

“In that case, Lord Morden, if you had to guess—where in their residence would the Bloodthorn Family most likely build their most important lab?”

[Blood-and-flesh wizardly, heh—that’s dark-element stuff. Naturally, the deeper underground, the better.]

“Underground?” Saul murmured.

This castle’s time-space was all jumbled, but the locations of the rooms seemed unchanged.

Ralph’s lab might still be in the underground.

Saul looked down the staircase—below was a small parlor, with areas outside his line of sight. There might be more rooms and passageways down there.

As Saul pondered his next move, suddenly, a hand clapped down on his shoulder.

“Saul, so this is where you were.”

Saul froze and turned quickly, only to see Victor leaning down from the floor above, peering at him from the stairs.

“Brother… You made it to the sunny world too?”

(End of Chapter)

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