Chapter 331. The Witch of Greed (11)
It felt as if I had unlocked a latch that was blocking something. Something that had felt tight, even up until yesterday, had disappeared.
The magic that the Witch of Greed had cast on me served to imprison me inside my own mind, in an infinite regression to the past. Death was the only way to break the loop, but you would be unaware you returned? It was a vicious spell. Under ordinary circumstances, it would leave one no choice but to become a puppet.
Anyway, how much time had passed? Because I had just relived my previous life, my sense of time was twisted.
I looked at the fallen Arietta. Fortunately, Arietta hadn’t died yet, so honestly, I was relieved. Even though she had such a big wound, the fact she hadn’t died meant that not much time had passed.
I reached out in the direction of the fallen Arietta and said, "Be healed." Mana moved as I spoke and began to heal Arietta.
In the past, she’d had to be stabilized for months with the help of the workshop, but this time she recovered immediately without cumbersome procedures. To be exact, the wounded area became whole, as if time had reversed and the wound had never existed to begin with.
"What..." The Witch of Greed was shocked to see Arietta being healed. Normally, it wasn’t difficult to remove a scar, but it would be impossible to restore the area to how it had been before the scar occurred.
"Wow, this works?” I commented.
Now such a thing was possible. Death had led to the expansion of my cognition and diversification of my thinking; or, to put it simply, death had made me think a lot. In other words, I had experienced a sense of unity akin to becoming one with the world, a sense of fear and relief from forcibly ceasing to exist, and a desire to find myself again at the end.
That state of mind could be called enlightenment.
Although in truth, rather than enlightenment, I just knew that life was like X[1] through death. It was a realization that wasn’t so great as to be called fate, but couldn’t be explained in words.
It felt as if I had released my shackles, but as a result, the impression that life was still like X remained unchanged.
I seized the Witch of Greed’s body as she tried to escape.
"Kuuuk!"
"Where are you going?" I asked. But the moment I twisted the Witch of Greed’s neck, I frowned and muttered, "Oh, I’m doomed."
It seemed that during the very short time I was being manipulated, the Demon King summons had been pulled from my head. Looking at the mana around me, it seemed that the contents of the Demon King summons had already been sent to the Demon King worshippers.
What could I say to my aunt now? But there was nothing I could do. Who could have thought the Witch of Greed would have been controlling the phoenix from inside it?
It would have been different if my mana had been restored, but because of my depleted mana, my senses had been limited.
"You daaare!" the Witch of Greed exclaimed. Black mana and vindictive souls exploded from her body as she was being choked.
Feeling a burning hot sensation climbing up my hand, I let go. From the looks of it, that power had come at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives. I remarked, "Hmm, did you combine spirits and vindictive souls? You’re crazy."
Purity was power for spirits, but it was poison for vindictive souls. Nevertheless, it was a foolish act to undermine the power of both the spirits and the vindictive souls by combining them like this.
No, wait, was it wise? The Witch of Greed had a disaster-level spirit, and she had needed to weaken the innumerable, powerful vindictive souls in order to properly handle them. The total amount of power had decreased after they were weakened, but the force she emitted was incomparably stronger than it had been a few days ago.
"Ahahahaha! Be buried in the vindictive spirits and die!" The Witch of Greed released her vindictive souls with all her might as she escaped my grasp.
The way she controlled the vindictive souls was simple, as if she didn’t know necromancy well. However, it was as strong and efficient as it was simple. Its simplicity actually left fewer opportunities to penetrate the attack.
"Disappear,” I said simply. Just like that, the vindictive souls that were rushing over like a flock of starving ghosts trying to eat me up were scattered.
"Huh? What?" The Witch of Greed seemed genuinely perplexed.
I calmly looked for cigarettes in my inner pocket... Oh, wait. ‘I’ didn’t smoke.
I am me. I was me in my previous life, but it was Denburg Blade that was living in the present. Seeing that my ego was coming back again, I concluded that puberty had come.
Instead of cigarettes, I poured mana into the Holy Sword and said, "It’s nothing much. I just purified them because there were so many gaps. Who told you to control them like that?” As I took a step closer, the Witch of Greed stepped back, petrified.
But it was still weird. No matter how bad she was, she was still a great madosa. Would a great madosa show such weaknesses? If she wasn’t using complex magic and was just brute forcing it... Was she actually not a great madosa?
"Don’t, don’t come closer!" the Witch of Greed exclaimed.
"But what if I want to?" I approached with a playful smile, and the Witch of Greed reached out toward the fallen Arietta.
"You told me not to come, but you’re coming instead?” I asked as I used space magic to switch places with Arietta, twisting the Witch of Greed’s arm as she rushed at me.
"Argh!" After I subdued her, the Witch of Greed shouted viciously, "We’ll see about that!" Then, she cast magic with her free hand, severing her own neck.
"Where do you keep trying to go?!” I cried as I cut the air with the Holy Sword. To be exact, I severed the thread of the Witch of Greed’s soul, which was concealed somewhere and connected to her body. In other words, I cut what was normally intangible and couldn’t be cut.
"Kaaaaaa!" The Witch of Greed screamed painfully due to her severed neck. "No! Ahhhhh!"
I didn’t care whether the Witch of Greed screamed or not. Surprised by the sensation of cutting what couldn’t be cut, I looked at the Holy Sword and muttered, "I see. A desire to cut... A sincere desire to cut down what can’t be cut. Is this what’s called the Heart Sword?"
Indeed, if this was the case, I could see why my great-grandfather and father couldn’t reach the level of Heart Sword. There was nothing they couldn’t destroy with both hands, so there was no reason for them to understand the desire to cut something from deep within.
In that regard, I could be grateful to the trash of my previous life. He had awakened me to the pure malice of wanting to kill with all my heart...
No, was it that he had awakened me to rolling on the floor and screaming?
I magically lifted the Witch of Greed’s head. She said, "Spare me, save me! If, if you let me go, I’ll do anything! I won’t be hostile again!" She prayed desperately with tears in her eyes.
If I left things as they were, the thread of her soul would naturally reconnect. Then it would return to her body, allowing her to come back again with another puppet.
"I can understand that you don’t want to die,” I began. The Witch of Greed seemed hopeful when she heard those words. But I smiled and took a moderately large magic stone off her headless body, continuing, "But if you were going to beg for your life, you shouldn’t have prepared to stab me in the back, right?"
The Witch of Greed grew pale as I finished speaking. In the magic stone, black mana bubbled as if it were about to explode. She had hidden it with magic, but this was evidence that she had clearly been trying to stab me in the back.
I gripped the magic stone firmly and squeezed.
The Witch of Greed exclaimed, "Kyaaaak! No!"
"Yes!" I shot back.
Crack!
The magic stone completely broke, and black mana spread in all directions.
To be honest, I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a waste to scatter the black mana into the air, but it had been contaminated by the vindictive souls for too long. This was the kind of mana you couldn’t use unless you were a black magician.
"Ahh! Ahhhhhhhh!!" When the magic stone was broken, the Witch of Greed, who had only her head left, could no longer survive using its power. She wouldn’t hold out until the string of her soul was reconnected. She cried, "Sa, save me! I don’t want to die! If it’s you, you can save me! If there is anything you want, I can give it to you!"[2]
When I heard her desperate voice, I yawned and said, "Really? What can someone lower level than me give me?"
"My...! In my pocket space...!” the Witch of Greed shouted urgently.
But right in front of her, her pocket space opened as if it had been torn open. I asked, "What about your pocket space?"
The Witch of Greed was left speechless. I could understand her surprise. Normally, pocket spaces were something that others couldn’t open. I had also been very surprised when my great-grandfather had first opened my pocket space.
For some reason, I had thought it might work, so I’d tried to imitate my great-grandfather, but it was easier than I first thought.
"Oh, there’s a lot of useful stuff,” I remarked. As expected of someone that had already been a top madosa 120 years ago, the Witch of Greed had many items in the pocket space that tempted me. Of course, I moved all of them to my pocket space. Then I said, "Now the only things I want from you are disaster-level spirits. But you did something pointless and made them unusable.”
She had done something truly wasteful. How could she throw away precious resources that took hundreds or thousands of years to grow naturally? The Witch of Greed, however, was devastated by my firm statement.
"Well, it’s not as if I can’t save you, but I’m not that evil,” I said.
The Witch of Greed was horrified, as if she could guess what I meant. She must have been well aware of the fact that there were countless things a magician could do if they abandoned their humanity. Leaving the body and going around as a doll was itself evidence that she had been doing research into such a thing. She begged, "Ple, please...!"
"This is my final mercy. There will be no pain,” I said as I flicked my finger and cast a spell.
"No, no!" The Witch of Greed crumbled into ash like burnt firewood and blew away in the wind.
If I had wanted to cause the maximum amount of pain, with the Witch of Greed’s head, I could have destroyed her personality and used it as a tool for magic calculation.
But I didn’t do that, because I hadn’t quite given up on humans to that degree. It wasn’t a waste.
Of course, I did somewhat feel that I had killed the Witch of Greed too blandly compared to what she had done so far. However, I couldn’t be too harsh on my great-grandfather’s comrade.
I sighed as I looked at the fainted elders of the Butterfly tribe around me. "Come on, let’s wake up now!" I yelled, clapping my hands. The black mana that surrounded the elders of the Butterfly tribe blew away, and the elders struggled to come to their senses.
Then, something with great presence flew over from afar.
"Youngest! Are you okay?!” That presence belonged to my father.
I couldn’t help but swallow dryly when I heard my father’s urgent question. I muttered, "My god... How strong are you, Father?”
Was it because my perspective on the world had changed? Now that I had overcome my limit, when I looked at my father, the level of danger I saw was on a different level from when I had seen him before..
"Huh? What are you talking about? How strong am I? Of course I’m the strongest!" my father answered as if it were natural, then looked at me and quickly noticed something strange. He asked, "Youngest, no way... Did you by chance overcome it?"
"Yes, I think so,” I replied. My father just looked at me as if I were a monster. I said, "That gaze is unfair."
It wasn’t just unfair; it was very unfair, considering that my father was stronger than me. I didn’t think I could win.
My father exclaimed, seemingly dumbfounded, "What do you mean unfair? You deserve this kind of gaze if you surpassed the limit before turning twenty years old. I only managed it when I was over forty. Don’t you think so?” Despite those words, he looked sincerely happy.
"By the way, now you’ll finally be fun to fight, Youngest,” he added. It was a pity that I didn’t know whether his joy was due to the growth of his son, or because he finally had a good rival.
1. The author literally uses ‘X’ instead of going into detail. ☜
2. She switches over in the middle from casual to honorifics. ☜
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