WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 549

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Finding a Sacrifice Is Also Work

Monkeys are masters of tree-climbing. The Hanuman tribe are not beastkin proper, but in ages long past they made a contract with the Monkey King and received a share of his power, enough to run through the treetops as easily as flat ground.

Moving through the jungle at speeds no one else could match, they put that talent to very good use. In ordinary times they lived up in the canopy, taking what they needed by theft and slipping away before anyone noticed.

This raid on the Mortal Village was no different. The soil-kin were strong, sure, but they were sluggish and slow. The Hanuman tribe were confident they could shake them off without much trouble.

They were also certain that kidnapping a child from the Mortal Village, rather than a child of the immortals, would pass with nothing serious happening.

"Squee-yak! You said nothing serious would happen!"

The monkey mask leapt and shrieked.

"It's a wind spirit! A wind spirit has turned its wrath on us, and we're going to suffer horribly for it!"

"We came ready to make enemies of the stubborn soil-kin, but a spirit on top of that?!"

"If we'd known it would come to this, we never should have raided the Mortal Village!"

It was not actually a wind spirit, of course. It was the regressor with Skywarbler drawn. To them, the distinction was meaningless. If the regressor was furious with you, something horrible was going to happen either way.

Maybe something worse than a wind spirit, even.

"Forget the sacrifice, we need to run right now!"

"What about this? We lost five of our own just to bring this one offering here."

The one who had asked pointed to the child stuffed inside the bag. The one who looked like the leader, a monkey mask trimmed with a lion's mane, shouted without hesitation.

"Why are you even asking that?! Kill it and hang it somewhere!"

"B-but what if the wind spirit gets even angrier?"

"Cut our losses and run! Hee-kee-kee. Once we leave this area, wind spirit or no wind spirit !"

The leader hurled the bag aside with a rough throw. The child inside, terror-stricken and barely breathing, let out a small moan.

"Ow... ow-ow..."

"Leave it, and a leopard will tear it apart!"

The leader reached out with both hands toward the child's throat, meaning to snap its neck with that iron grip.

The monkey mask should have given the wind spirit more thought. No matter how cold-blooded the regressor, she was not about to stand still while a kidnapped child was being killed.

Not that she was particularly cold-blooded to begin with.

"Keee-eek!"

Blood shot out as the leader's arm was knocked sharply aside. An invisible sword-wind had struck it away. The regressor shot forward like lightning, shielding the child and kicking the offending mask away.

She fixed the leader with a hard stare.

"Looks like the tail-following ends here. No complaints, Hughes?"

"How could I complain? Isn't this exactly where the Holy Maiden's blessing has led us?"

She raised a light wind against the monkey masks as they scrambled back in a panic. The bag holding the child floated slowly down on the breeze.

Rashy leaped up in a single bound and caught the child. He cradled the terrified little thing, stroking its head with an expression of deep sorrow.

"You are mortals, yet you treat a fellow mortal's life like nothing? Has the Hanuman tribe lost all pride and all decency?"

"Squee-git. What would someone like you know, someone who got lucky and picked up power from the soil-kin..."

The leader clutched his freely bleeding arm and cried out.

"You immortals don't understand! To survive, we have to offer sacrifices! We offer sacrifices to the great spirits and the beautiful Warrior, we receive power, and only then can we live!"

"There are many ways to live without sacrificing other children. I have seen them, on the far side of the Great Steppe."

"The far side of the Great Steppe? That's only possible because it's the far side of the Great Steppe! Not here!"

The leader kept talking, fidgeting with his fingers.

"This land is territory ruled by witches, beasts, spirits, and the Warrior. Without power, without something to lean on, you get abandoned and eaten alive in the most pathetic way imaginable! You two got lucky and gained immortality by offering your bodies, you don't understand what it means to just be trying to stay alive!"

And then, in an instant, the leader pulled a leather bundle from inside his clothes. A pouch of venom harvested from insects. He crushed it in one squeeze and threw it straight at us.

"Kee-kee-kee! Ant poison! Drown in it and die!"

But the leader's trump card accomplished nothing at all.

Click. The regressor sheathed Skywarbler. Dozens of branches were severed at once and fell in a single instant. Among all those countless falling leaves were the monkey masks' hands, soaked in blood.

The wind came sweeping in a beat later, and the monkey masks clinging to the trees flailed and tumbled to the ground.

Even the venom pouch, their great trump card, fell quietly to the earth, sealed inside Skywarbler's whirlwind.

"Poison? How dated. Who falls for that sort of thing anymore."

After energy came into the picture, asymmetric weapons like poison and curses had nearly vanished. An energy practitioner's body simply could not be infiltrated in the first place, and even if something snuck through by luck, taking control of the body was another matter entirely. Feed someone a heart-stopping poison? An energy practitioner could just squeeze their own heart using energy-sensing ability. Poison had no place in the age of energy.

Still, in these Wildlands where energy had not properly taken root, people were still relying on it.

"Squee-kee-kee..."

"The spirit is furious..."

The monkey masks had lost all will to fight and were crawling across the ground. The regressor held the space with her wind and looked down at them.

"Right. You have one choice. Die quietly, or spill everything and then die. What were you planning to do with the child?"

"Mr. Shei, if you box them in like that and threaten them, will they really talk?"

"Squee-kee-kee... the thousand-eating demon... must be offered on Ankra's altar..."

"They're actually talking?"

Demanding the kind of loyalty that makes a savage throw away their life made no sense. But confessing freely even with death on the table?

The Hanuman tribe savages pressed their foreheads to the ground before the regressor and told her everything.

"We, we were asked too! The thousand-eating demon, Ankra, needs a thousand souls offered as sacrifice. For every one we brought, we would receive an apple tree in return."

"The thousand-eating demon?"

"A powerful ancient demon that devours a thousand souls! It said if we didn't help, it would devour us first. Squee-kee-kee! We kidnapped the children to survive too!"

Leading with complete submission from the very start had softened the regressor's killing intent toward the Hanuman tribe.

They called it a spirit, but showing unconditional submission to a stronger being wielding power they could not comprehend was their own survival strategy.

"That demon must be something to have earned a title like that. It really is the ancient evil Maiél described."

"Just hearing about it sounds terrifying. Can Mr. Shei win?"

"Obviously. Demons aren't that strong. It's been close to fourteen or fifteen centuries since the original era, and by now a demon's power has almost completely faded. Even if you revive it through sacrifice, it only inherits a fraction of what it had, nowhere near what it was back then."

'A demon I don't even remember from any previous cycle can't be that powerful. And there's no way Maiél would send me against an enemy I couldn't possibly beat. Let's wrap this up quickly. I've got no particular business in the old Kingdom of Ten Thousand's territory anyway. The only Demon God there is the Tree of Corruption...'

With a somewhat lighter heart, she turned to the monkey masks.

"Tell me where they are. I'll let you live."

The mention of being let live brought color back to their faces, and the one talking told her right away.

"The bone altar! Squee-kee-kee. The bone altar! It's at..."

That was when it happened. One of the monkey masks that had been crawling feebly on the ground suddenly stood up. It radiated a sinister aura, raised both arms, and snapped its own joints deliberately.

Crr-crack. A sound that made your skin crawl accompanied the simultaneous wrenching of every monkey mask's arms. Their unusually long arms twisted at grotesque angles, making for a horrible sight.

"Kee-eee-eek!"

"Kee-yak!"

The monkey masks shrieked and collapsed, writhing in unexpected agony. In the midst of all that twisting and buckling, only the one that had broken its own arms remained standing, wearing a grim smirk, as though it felt no pain whatsoever.

"Stupid monkeys. I planted poison in them ahead of time, knowing it might come to this."

The regressor raised Skywarbler to cut down that peculiar mask, then sensed something unpleasant and hesitated.

"That's black magic."

The thing most like a human body is a human body. Naturally, the easiest and most convenient medium for magic that harms humans is a human body.

That principle drove the development of black magic: body-medium sorcery. As powerful and convenient as it was, black magic came with the drawback of damaging your own body when you used it, but...

"A puppet? Doesn't look like you have the nerve to show your real body."

"Kee-kee. Naturally. I see no need to expose my true body just to swat these beasts aside."

The monkey mask smiled beneath its mask.

Using your own body as a medium lets you cast powerful magic with ease. But even black mages hold their own bodies dear. So black mages devised ways to wield black magic while keeping themselves safe.

The most primitive of those methods, and the one used earliest, was a sacrifice. The medium did not have to be your own body.

"What a shame. These monkeys were brainless and easy to command, useful servants that they were... because of you, I'm going to lose a puppet I put real effort into making."

"Wasted effort. Rather than making one of those, you'd have been better off just paying someone."

The regressor said it with contempt.

Heard from the outside, black magic sounded convenient and risk-free, but few things burned through resources as wastefully.

Writing with your own hand is simple enough, but making someone else write by controlling their body one movement at a time is near impossible, all the more so if that other person is resisting. So to use a sacrifice properly, you needed drugs and poisons to strip away their will and seize control of their body. The cost efficiency was already ruined at that point.

And finding someone to serve as a sacrifice was no easy thing either. If you could not secure more than one for every one you used, the yield did not work out. On top of that, if the sacrifice sustained damage to their body while resisting, their value dropped sharply.

The common belief was that black mages had fallen to corruption for easy power, but that was said by people who knew nothing. Black mages had hardships of their own. A small-time black mage spent every day scrambling just to survive to the next.

"People like you from beyond the Great Steppe might think that way, but here, people are moved by fear and desire more than money. A puppet is actually far cheaper."

That said, a black mage who overcame all those difficulties and finally hit their stride became a monster that devoured human lives with greedy excess. The black mage controlling the monkey mask before us was one of them.

The regressor's voice dropped lower.

"Are you planning to resurrect an evil god?"

"Naturally. Isn't it every black mage's dream?"

"Stop. Don't waste your time."

"Kee-kee-kee. Frightened? But what can you do? This is exactly what I've been working toward!"

The monkey mask spread its broken arms wide. Blood poured freely and mangled bones swayed loose, but it let out a mad laugh as though none of that mattered in the slightest.

"I will resurrect the evil god and become one with the divine! I will sweep away the remnants of the Warrior that still linger over this land and rise as a new god! Kee-kee-kee! This land will be great again!"

Despite the declaration brimming with ambition, the regressor answered flatly.

"The evil god you're trying to resurrect, I don't know what it is, but it'll come back weak and just die to me, so stop."

It must have been too unexpected. The monkey mask froze in place, arms still spread wide. It was probably hoping she was joking, but the regressor was serious.

'The thousand-eating? I've never even heard of it in any previous cycle. Right now I'm just the one who got called out, but if Maiél foresaw it, it would have been dealt with eventually regardless. The Sanctum doesn't tolerate evil gods like that.'

The plainer a truth, the deeper it cuts. The monkey mask clutched its own face with blood spilling freely and laughed like something had come loose.

"Kee-kee-kee. Arrogant creature, you who crossed the Great Steppe. You were always like this... you laugh at everything in this land, trample it, destroy it, and then try to correct us, as if we were the ones in the wrong!"

The blood vessels beneath the monkey mask's clothes began to bulge. In an instant, a tremendous force surged up from inside the puppet. Having burned every last scrap of its life like fuel, the monkey mask exhaled blue fire and charged at the regressor like a wild animal.

"I'll kill you and use your corpse as a sacrifice! Let's see if you're laughing then..."

"Funny."

Honestly, the power coming off that monkey mask was not all that impressive.

Too many legendary enemies along the way. Compared to any of them, a black mage, and not even the real one, just a random puppet, was... sorry to say, but even I could have handled it.

Dozens of wind-blades swept over the monkey mask and shredded it. If it had trained in energy, sword-winds like those would not have worked, but black mages rarely trained in energy, and even if they had, you cannot channel energy through someone else's body. The blades carved through the puppet like soft tofu, slicing through muscle and tendon.

"Kee-eee-eet!"

The monkey mask let out one last cry and collapsed. The body was not its own anyway, so the black mage tried to move the puppet, but with the tendons severed, all it could do was twitch.

The regressor spoke with an expression that held neither satisfaction nor joy.

"Wipe your neck and wait. I'll kill you properly."

"Kee-kee... you think you can kill me?"

The blood-soaked monkey mask cried out with surprising defiance in a voice that sounded barely holding on.

"This is just one of many puppets to me. I may have failed to kill you, but the same is true of you! You will never find me, and you will never kill me!"

"Let me tell you something."

The regressor cut the words short and her eyes flashed open.

"I've hunted things like you more times than I can count!"

Three of the Seven-Colored Eyes, the golden eye that sees what cannot be seen.

She drove Skywarbler deep into the puppet. The storm ground the puppet's body apart and gave that poor vessel a certain rest. The black mage's consciousness, unable to remain in a dead body, began to leave...

And the regressor watched clearly with the golden eye as part of that consciousness slipped free. I could not see it, but she could, she tracked a fragment of awareness drifting toward the dark forest beyond.

"Found you."

She murmured it, quiet and cold.

All that remained now was to hunt it down and kill it. Rashy, realizing this was more serious than he had expected, looked down at the rescued child and said:

"This is shaping up to be a tiring fight. What should we do with the child? If we bring it along, it might get caught in the crossfire."

"We should send it back to the Mortal Village. Please take it there, Rashy-ssi."

"I cannot do that. The evil god's priests are vile. An immortal like me might manage, but you or Mr. Shei could be caught off-guard by some nasty trick. Why don't you take the child back, Mr. Shei?"

"I appreciate the concern, but we don't know our enemy, which means our enemy doesn't know us either. Catching someone off-guard works both ways."

And besides, we have what you might call the Holy Maiden's blessing.

You cannot drag out a fight against a black mage. Black mages always stockpile sacrifices and resources, and the moment they sense a threat they start burning through everything recklessly. To save even one more life, we had to leave right now.

"You can go too, Hughes. It'll be easier if I handle this alone."

Oh, a kind offer. Go home and rest instead of working, under normal circumstances I would have taken that in a heartbeat.

But I happened to have a bit of interest in demons and evil gods right now. I declined the regressor's suggestion politely.

"No, I'd like to see an evil god for myself. And I can help Mr. Shei at the same time."

"...Is that so?"

'What's this. That's surprisingly decent of him? Offering to help and everything. What's gotten into him? Is this also the Holy Maiden's blessing?'

What do you take me for? Do you know how much I've helped by now, that you'd chalk it up to the Holy Maiden's blessing?

Well. Half right, maybe.

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