LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 242
Chapter 242
I opened my eyes to the orange sunlight tapping on my eyelids. Even though I was no longer a mercenary, the habit of waking up at dawn remained. As I rubbed my cheek against the soft fur for a moment, I turned my head to the warmth felt right beside me.
“Sleeping well…”
There lay Leo, sound asleep, hugging me like a doll. His angelic appearance reminded me of him from childhood. I smiled, lost in the memories.
“Mmm…”
After letting out a short groan, Leo rolled over and slowly opened his eyes. His bright green eyes sparkled clearly in the sunlight.
Dazedly rolling his eyes around, he finally met my gaze.
“Is this paradise…?”
With a clearly sleepy face, Leo murmured in a voice still heavy from sleep.
“Get up, you idiot.”
Thinking about the hard work he put in yesterday made me angry, and I slapped his back.
After blinking several times, Leo glanced around the cave once and then looked back and forth between me and himself in the bed.
“Why are you here?”
I could immediately sense from his bewildered question.
‘This guy, his memory is blank.’
A drinking habit full of mixed signals about affection and forgetfulness. Quite the range of drunken behavior.
“No good can come from knowing.”
“No, but there’s another bed; why are you here—”
“Shut up and just get up.”
“Uh, uh.”
As I pulled on Leo’s ear and got him to sit up, he let out a numb groan of protest but eventually rose alongside me. It couldn’t have hurt that much, so it was just unnecessary drama.
“Are you okay?”
“Hmm? I’m fine. But I don’t remember anything from last night after drinking.”
In response to my question, Leo tilted his head. He didn’t even seem hungover, his pale face quite shiny.
‘Should I be relieved to hear that?’
Thinking about yesterday made my face flush.
“I’ll be going back, so get ready. I have somewhere to go.”
“Where?”
While I roughly tidied up my clothes to get ready to leave, an anxious Leo asked. I smiled faintly.
“I’m going to face the disaster you brought upon yourself.”
I was prepared.
“Did you sleep okay?”
“Yes. It wasn’t bad.”
Feisha, who had been waiting outside the lodging, straightened up from where she leaned against the wall. Technically, I couldn’t say I had a decent sleep after accidentally lying down with Leo and falling asleep, but I nodded politely.
“Let’s go right away.”
Feisha, who casually turned her neatly arranged silver short-cuts, gestured for me to follow. I moved my feet after her.
“What kind of person is the shaman you’re introducing me to?”
“Are you talking about Alisha?”
The forest in the morning had a different charm from the nighttime woods. With warm sunlight illuminating the leaves, the village was eerily silent, as the wolves proved the saying of a quiet evening.
“She was one of the biggest contributors during the Beastmen Massacre. With just one of her spells, tsunamis would occur, and earthquakes would happen. So she was a crucial force against human attacks.”
“Isn’t that the definition of a Grand Mage?”
I turned in surprise to look at Feisha. She chuckled softly.
“She’s not the same as a human Grand Mage. They need immense power to reach that level, but she can wield nearly infinite power just by controlling her mana. However, our magic can be learned quickly, but the risks are high. The more you use it, the more it consumes your soul.”
Feisha’s expression was somber. As she walked through the dense cave streets toward a secluded spot, she looked up at the sky.
“She has sacrificed her soul to cast spells for her clan from a young age. She was our hero, but she won’t live long. Because of the side effects of her spells, her sleep time keeps increasing. One day, she’ll fall into eternal slumber.”
I wondered how many beastmen had been sacrificed due to human prejudice. I tried to calculate that number quietly. How many heroes had we lost?
“Today is a day when she is awake, so we should be able to have a conversation without any issues.”
Feisha stopped her steps, her face composed.
In a location quite detached from the village, there stood a tower that was all crooked and zigzagged.
‘What in the world… what kind of building is this?’
I stared at the tower with stunned eyes. The tower deep in the forest looked like it could collapse at any moment. It was clear that the person living there was quite the eccentric.
‘Alisha, definitely seems like a weirdo.’
Maybe I stuck out my tongue in disbelief.
Bang! Bang!
Feisha knocked loudly on the already wobbling door of the tower.
“Alisha! Come out right now!”
Seeming to have a close relationship with Alisha, her thunderous shout echoed with a friendly tone. I anxiously gazed at the trembling tower, feeling it might collapse any moment.
“Looks like she fell asleep again. I told her to stay awake.”
Feisha clicked her tongue and raised her leg. I turned my head in shock.
“Wait, what are you doing?”
“What does it look like?”
Bang!
Along with her kick, the wooden door burst apart. It shattered not just cracked but splintered into pieces. As wooden shards flew through the air, Feisha stepped forward impassively.
“If she doesn’t come out, I’ll just break in.”
I was relieved that she hadn’t resolved to exterminate humans during the Beastmen Massacre with that kind of personality. Dazed, I dodged the flying wooden splinters and entered the tower.
“Whoa, this is…”
“Yeah.”
And I gasped as I looked around inside.
“It’s a total mess!”
The inside of the tower was so disorganized it made me question if a person could live there at all.
Magic circles and mystical tools, papers covered with magical formulas, and daily supplies were all scattered about, precariously balanced between an eccentric mage’s lab and a madman’s home. I wrinkled my face and shook off an unidentified liquid stuck to the sole of my shoe.
“I told her to clean up, but she wouldn’t listen. Oh, watch out; that’s a poison that melts skin.”
I questioned why there would be a skin-melting poison in a home, but I opted to set that aside for now.
As I delved deeper into this jungle of a tower filled with obstacles, I came to a stop.
In the space to halt was a massive bed the size of a room.
In the tower where even the ticking of a clock couldn’t be heard, steady breaths reverberated. On the bed lay a middle-aged woman with pure white hair, eyes closed, silently appearing as if dead.
Her face was a mess of scars, yet she wore a seemingly peaceful expression as if she were dead. The woman exuded an elegance worthy of resembling something out of a masterpiece. Engrossed by her mystique, I continued to gaze at her, but suddenly, Feisha jumped onto the bed and kicked her hard.
“Stop sleeping and wake up, you old hag. You can’t keep sleeping like this; there’s no prince to wake you with a kiss.”
The woman’s body rolled over in a tumble, her tightly shut eyes slowly fluttered open.
The woman’s eyes were dull, not the bright violet of other wolves but rather a dusty gray, as if covered in soot.
“Has this woman gone crazy… treating a hero like this?”
“Hero to your kind maybe, but to me, she’s just an old woman who keeps sleeping.”
Unfiltered words passed between us as the woman sprang up.
“I’m awake, you idiot. What’s going on? Did another magic circle break?”
“No. There’s a guest I need you to meet.”
Feisha grabbed Alisha by the back of her neck and lifted her high, tossing her in front of me. Gliding through the air, Alisha landed gracefully before me.
“Remember Anthea? She’s her daughter. And… it seems our magic is on her.”
The murky gray eyes fixed directly on me.
“Oh? Anthea’s daughter, huh? Come here.”
The woman, showing interest, beckoned me closer. I cautiously approached her.
“Closer. My eyesight isn’t good.”
“That old hag, sightless due to the side effects of her spells, huh.”
“Stay out of this, you useless busybody.”
With her silver hair and violet eyes, which are a symbol of the wolf clan—though not absolute as Julian, unrelated yet possessing silver hair and lilac eyes—her gray eyes looked unsettling, realizing it was due to her blindness. I stepped a little closer, reducing the distance.
“Let’s see.”
In that moment, Alisha suddenly grabbed my cheeks and pulled hard. She scanned me closely from an inch away and chuckled.
“You… your memory has been devoured, hasn’t it?”
Her whisper was what I half-expected and half-dreaded.
“Oh, yeah. I absolutely know. I would never forget the presence of my last apprentice.”
Alisha wandered around distractedly, pulling things out, writing, and muttering, like a scholar facing a tough problem.
“Leisha, that must be the one behind it. She’s clearly cast a powerful memory sealing spell on you. You’re a Sword Master, right? You wouldn’t be able to cast it now, so it must have been done when you were younger. How intriguing… very intriguing……”
Somewhere, she put on glasses, leaning in uncomfortably close to examine me. When Alisha’s large, clear eyes reflected on the lenses, they shrank to the size of peas.
Had I simply been standing there, unable to keep up with her, she narrowed her murky eyes.
“You must have felt that some memories were severed. Isn’t anything coming back?”
“Well… I can’t say anything particularly strange, but I don’t remember anything before the age of 8.”
“Really? Not even fragmented scenes?”
“No. It feels like someone carved it out entirely.”
As I carefully expressed the parts I had felt were odd, Alisha began scribbling something on a messy parchment.
But it was only for a moment. Suddenly, she stopped writing.
“Leisha, she’s a weirdo, but she’s not a bad person who would carelessly erase a child’s memory. Especially not while carrying such a huge risk.”
She murmured with a tone of being doubtful and began writing again. It seemed she was the weirdo.
“So, what’s the situation?”
Feisha, who had been watching Alisha with her arms crossed, furrowed her brows. After finishing her notes, Alisha set down her pen.
“I can confirm it’s a Leisha spell. It was cleverly concealed, but you can’t hide it from your master. For unknown reasons, it seems she completely wiped away this child’s memories before the age of 8.”
Alisha’s pale, unfocused eyes captured mine. Since she seemed to have a connection with Anthea, there was a hint of warmth in her gaze. I didn’t dislike her stare.
“If you want, I can undo the seal that holds your memory.”
I could sense Alisha’s pride in that one sentence. She spoke with the confidence that she could unravel it, as though there was no way she could not. She continued.
“But if Leisha has bound it, there must be a reason.”
Questions arose.
Why did Leisha seal my memories? What does my mother have to do with this? The key to unraveling the tangled knots was right in front of me.
“Maybe it’s better not to unseal it. There could be painful memories too overwhelming for a child to bear.”
There was some truth to that. If what I received was a prescription to avoid a painful experience, it would indeed be wiser not to unravel it.
As various thoughts swirled around, Alisha asked.
“So, what do you think? Do you want to unseal it?”