Throne of Magical Arcana - Hunt’s experiment
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Hunt’s experiment
Moaning, Hunt was crawling toward Kaelyn, dragging his remaining body with parts of it still being burned by the fire.
Lucien took out a glass tube filled with white ashes and handed it to Kaelyn, and then he carried Kaelyn closer to her husband.
“This is…” Kaelyn’s heart missed a beat. Surprisingly, the ashes in the small glass tube felt familiar to her, and tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Is that… Mary?” Hunt’s voice trembled from both pain and shock, “Kaelyn… It’s Mary… our daughter…”
“Mary was trapped in a magic lock. Before she died, she asked me to take her home.” Lucien explained shortly. He did not mention how Mary spent the last days of her life in the World of Souls, where there was no food, no color and no life at all. That was too much for the parents.
Hunt’s lips moved a bit, but made no sound. Then, he burst into tears.
“The magic… lock…” Hunt cried with pain, not from his body, but his heart, “I knew it was the magic lock…it consumed more than twenty years of my life, and also took Mary away from me.”
Lucien remained silent. He had the feeling that Hunt knew something about Mary’s disappearance, and his guess turned out to be correct.
Kaelyn choked with sobs. Pulling the cork out of the tube, she scattered Mary’s ashes on her chest and pulled the rest of it in her mouth. Then she hugged her husband tightly. The fire on Hunt’s body was now burning her as well.
“Mr. Evans, thank you. At least we can reunite before we die,” said Kaelyn. Then she hugged Hunt’s head in her arms and kissed his forehead with her lips covered with Mary’s ashes.
Looking at the couple in the fire, Lucien’s mood was heavy. He did not know what to say.
“We… we should’ve taken Mary with us… we shouldn’t have stayed in Bonn… We should… should have come back to Djibouti… my hometown.” Hunt hugged Kaelyn, clearly dying.
“I’ve always loved you, all the time,” Kaelyn said to him. “I love you and our daughter, no matter where we are,” she added in a low voice.
“Me… too.” Hunt’s consciousness was fading, “I wish… I’ve never… learned… ma…”
He did not manage to finish his sentence expressing his regret. Kaelyn closed her eyes and hugged him tight, and then ended her own life with a small dagger in her dress.
…
When the two bodies were almost burned into ashes by the fire, a cold wind blew away the smoke. Gleams of white light appeared in the sky, and the light joined together.
The figure of the little girl, Mary, appeared in the night sky, and she was still sweet and cute. Hunt and Kaelyn were standing behind her, although their figures were quite blurry.
Mary’s lips were moving silently, and only Lucien could hear her voice, “Thank you. Thank you for taking me home. Finally, I found my mom and dad.”
Then, their figures turned into gleams of light again and disappeared in the wind. At the same time, some light lingered around Lucien’s left hand and a white tear-shaped mark on it was left on his skin.
Lucien still had the protection from Death Resistance, but he was still surrounded by the rotten gas left by the countless bodies in the area that were affecting him. However, when the mark appeared on Lucien’s hand, he immediately felt refreshed.
It was a gift from the family, a constant protection for Lucien to stay away from the detrimental effects brought by the undead, to some extent.
In order to find some more information about necromantic spells, Lucien decided to find Hunt’s necromantic lab, which, according to Kaelyn’s words, should be right in the cemetery.
“You deal with the rest of the husks in the castle!” Lucien turned around and said to Betty, Joanna and Simon upstairs loudly, “I need to make sure there’s nothing evil left in the necromancer’s lab!”
“Yes, Mr. Evans!” The three of them answered together, as they all regarded Lucien as a powerful Saint Knight who was responsible for eliminating evil sorcerers across the continent.
Although Lucien was quite sure that none of them could tell the difference between sorcerer spells and divine power, he decided to make sure of it by checking his three guards’ mind later using Charm Person.
He could never be too careful when hiding his identity.
…
In the burning cemetery, the door of the lab was open. It seemed that, when his experiment succeeded, Hunt immediately ran outside of the lab to inform Kaelyn of this good news.
Although Lucien was relatively prepared to what he may see inside, when he actually entered the lab, he was still on the verge of throwing up, since the whole lab was like a small slaughterhouse: many human bodies lay around the place, while most of them were babies, young kids and teenagers. The bodies were cut into chunks and the organs were placed in categories on the lab operation table.
Hunt’s desk was beside the operation table, on which an upside down tree was carved, and that was one of the most well-known symbols of the school of Necromancy—Reversed Tree of Life. There were ten circles on the top of the ten branches of the tree, but there was nothing in the circles.
Something that Lucien thought was a rectangular box at his first glance turned out to be a small coffin.
After a careful check, Lucien opened the coffin. To his great surprise, it was Mary who was in it. The Mary inside of the coffin looked around seven or eight years old, and her checks slightly flushed as if she was just sleeping. Lucien gently touched her face, it was soft and supple.
Being certain that Mary’s real body had been burned to ashes by him, Lucien realized what Hunt’s experiment was. The purpose of Hunt collecting the bodies of babies and young kids was for making a human body, but clearly he failed.
Rummaging around, Lucien found two books in the corner. One looked like a notes, and the other was pretty thick, on which there were words: Book of Necromancy.
Quickly leafing through both the book and the notes, Lucien first made a copy of them in his spiritual library, and then started to read Hunt’s notes carefully,
“According to the info on the magic tower, Bonn, this small town in Orvarit, is part of a mysterious magic ruin which is protected by a magic lock, and it is possibly related to the whereabouts of the several legendary archmages. One of them was the well-known necromancer Wilfred’s close friend—the Prophet, Waldo · K · Maskelyne. And I bet there’re lots of magic items and treasures!”
…
“Bonn is even more beautiful than I thought. Residents here are friendly and traditional. And the girl named Kaelyn… she is gorgeous.”
…
“Why I just can’t find the magic lock? What kind of magic lock is it? I wonder if it is one that was designed by Maskelyne in person.”
…
“I can’t find any clue, even from the background of the missing town residents. Maybe it’s time for me to give up, but I also don’t want to tear her away from Bonn. Maybe… maybe I shall tell her my true identity.”
…
“I have a baby girl now, and I’m a dad now! Kaelyn and I want to name her Mary. I don’t really care about necromantic spells, the experiment jointly conducted by Maskelyne and Wilfred, or the magic lock and all those kinds of things anymore. Nothing’s more important than my wife and my little girl!”
…
“Mary’s been missing for three days. I’m sure that I’ve killed all the wild beasts in this area. I have no idea where my girl could have gone… I don’t know… whether it was because of the magic lock? Impossible… After so many years… That’s ridiculous!”
…
“My dear Mary, where are you? We miss you so much. Please… please come back, dad is begging you…”
…
“Kaelyn is crying everyday. I think we need a new environment to live. And I need a better environment for studying necromantic power again to see if we can find Mary. If anything bad really happened to her… I shall try to bring her back to life.”
…
“The baron in Fogtown finally killed his own son to prolong his own life! Now both of us get what we want. He can keep his youthfulness for another several years, and I can start my experiment now!”
…
“Why my body start to smell like a corpse? Is this the revenge from the dead? I can hear that bitter crying all the time… I need to hurry… When I become a middle-rank necromancer, the pain in the body will never bother me anymore!”
…
“I can’t make it… Third circle necromancer is a target that I can never reach. I can’t let my body rot away like this. Maybe I shall try the ritual written in the book named ‘Body Sewing’, and I shall start to make Mary’s body as well.”
…
“Making Mary’s body is really costly, and I’ve spent all my money. Although I don’t want to, I have to pledge my only magic item to continue the experiment. Anyway… if I can successfully turn myself into a ‘Sewed Body’, I will be able to use the third circle magic spells directly. I won’t need the item anymore.”
…
“He sent me an invitation, talking about some Feast of Death… the Congress of Magic. Maybe I should go if my ritual turns out to be successful. But where’s Carendia Castle? I need to write a letter to ask.”
…
“The baron is getting greedier and greedier. Now he’s not only targeting at the kids on his territory, but also seeking for a fresh body of an underage knight to replace his own body. What he’s thinking? He thinks it’s that easy to find an underage knight? Nonsense… When my experiment is complete, I’ll take Kaelyn and Mary away from Fogtown, before what the baron’s doing attracts the attention of the Church.”
…
“Carendia Castle… I never expected it would be there. Deep in the mountain named Aronne next to Korsor. Interesting. I wonder why they picked such a place.”
This information really surprised Lucien. He never expected that he would find the location of the castle in Hunt’s notes, and the invitation was also in between the two pages.
The rest of the note was mostly about the Body Sewing ritual and the record of the process of making Mary’s body. The statistics and the records were precious to Lucien.
Picking up the other book, Book of Necromancy, Lucien roughly browsed through it. The book was left by one of Wilfred’s students, the legendary necromancer, and it recorded most of the necromantic spells and rituals taught by Wilfred, but there was nothing related to how Wilfred made the breakthrough and became the legendary archmage, being respected as the Great Master of Paleness, which was quite unfortunate for Lucien.
Finding no other valuable items in the lab, Lucien took the invitation with him and left the place, and then set the lab on fire, burn it to the ground.
Staring at the great flame burning all the dead bodies, including the Mary’s, into ashes, Lucien slowly turned around, and different thoughts filled his mind, “Ancient necromancers believed that the body of a human being who died before coming of age is the best and the purest material for conducting necromantic rituals and spells, that’s why the baron was so obsessed with young human bodies.
“But why Maskelyne, the great legendary Astrology sorcerer, would conduct an experiment with Wilfred, the Great Master of Paleness, from the school of Necromancy? And it seems to be a mysterious and significant one…”
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