Ch.372The First Miracle. Ainsess Plains (2)

“My lord…! My lord!”

“Huh!”

Victor awoke to the urgent voice calling him.

He remembered being thrown unceremoniously through the air by an immense flash and repulsive force, but after that, his memory failed him. Victor took the hand of the honor guard reaching out to him, stood up, and looked at the massive rock supporting his back.

The boulder was cracked from the point where his spine had impacted it, suggesting how powerful the collision had been.

“How… how long was I unconscious?”

“Not long, my lord. Perhaps 3-5 minutes at most?”

“I see… Damn… My head hurts.”

As Victor clutched his head, the commander pulled out an unopened bottle of premium apple brandy from his chest and offered it to Victor with both hands.

For a moment, Victor wanted to ask why he was carrying such a thing, but he simply sighed, accepted the bottle, uncapped it, and gulped it down before tossing the empty bottle to the ground.

“Ahh. That’s better…”

As Victor felt his head clearing, he gazed at the distant, faintly visible ruins.

He could see them without using his divine eyesight, so they couldn’t be too far, but he had definitely been thrown at least several kilometers.

“What’s the status of the ruins?”

“Well, they’re… completely unaffected.”

“Unaffected even though I was thrown away?”

“…Yes.”

“Hmm…”

So he had been thrown by a mere stone structure?

Feeling slightly deflated, Victor shook his head and levitated himself and the honor guard back to the front of the ruins.

“The lord has returned!”

“Victor!”

“You’re back!”

The rest of the honor guard, the dwarf brothers, and Simon were waiting at the ruins. Simon had planted his staff in the ground and was muttering some kind of incantation.

As the spell was completed, Simon’s eyes began to glow purple, and with those violet eyes, he started examining various parts of the ruins.

“What’s that?”

“I don’t know either. I’m hopeless when it comes to magic.”

Victor turned to Berkman instead of Haukman, but Berkman was no different from Haukman.

Victor gently patted his wife’s bottom as she clung tightly to him, then decided to wait until Simon finished his work.

It was always best not to disturb spellcasters when they were working.

The dwarves seemed to know this too, as they merely watched with suspicious eyes, while only the guardians of this land were fidgeting anxiously.

“Aren’t you worried?”

Victor asked the honor guard member who maintained a calm demeanor despite the sentinels beside him sweating nervously.

“What is there to fear when you are with us, my lord?”

“Didn’t you see me get thrown just now?”

“But you returned, didn’t you?”

“Hmm.”

That was true.

He hadn’t died, and they had seen with their own eyes that he was safe, which explained their composure. Just as Victor was thinking this, Simon’s eyes returned to normal, and then he collapsed, sweating profusely.

“Simon!”

A nearby honor guard quickly supported him to prevent injury, but when Victor examined his body, he found Simon’s back drenched in cold sweat and his body temperature exceeding 41 degrees Celsius.

Whatever he had done, Simon, who was physically much weaker than an ordinary person, would die in this condition.

“Bring a doctor! Hurry!”

*

The honor guard’s medic and the sentinel’s physician arrived almost simultaneously and began working to lower Simon’s temperature.

They removed his clothes, wiped his entire body with cold wet towels, orally administered antipyretics and painkillers, and placed ice water packs on areas with high blood flow.

These were things anyone could do, but with high fevers, even doctors could only wait for the temperature to drop.

Victor wanted to step in and lower the temperature himself, but he feared he might reduce it too much, and with Simon unconscious, something could go wrong. Moreover, infusing divine power into a spellcaster’s body might cause complications, so he could only pace anxiously.

He himself had encountered “something” when he touched the ruins, and he had no idea what beings a spellcaster who used mana instead of divine power might encounter.

“Damn it! I’m supposed to be a god, yet I can do nothing…!”

Victor exclaimed in frustration, running his hands through his hair.

He could build a city or save a village, yet he couldn’t save one old sage—what kind of disharmony was this?

It was as if the world was deliberately testing him to show that “even divine power has its limits.”

“My lord, please calm yourself. The sage is strong. He won’t fall to something like this.”

It wasn’t the right thing to say about someone who had already collapsed, but the Sun understood it was a figure of speech.

Besides, Victor’s anger wouldn’t improve Simon’s condition. Spellcasters’ bodies were much weaker than ordinary people’s due to their mutation to accommodate mana, making them vulnerable to much lower threats.

Victor had no idea what Simon had been trying to find.

For three days, Simon remained unconscious. On the fourth day, when Victor heard that Simon had regained consciousness, he jumped up and rushed to Simon’s quarters.

*

“Please eat. You’ve become very weak.”

“I appreciate the advice, but I know my own body.”

Simon, barely able to sit up, had indeed become much weaker.

If before he had been a skinny old man, the Simon who had awakened now looked like a middle-aged alcoholic.

“If you know, then eat without complaint.”

“Nnngh…”

Simon looked at the soldier attending to him with displeasure as he drank the thin rice porridge he’d been given.

It tasted like bland water, worse than proper porridge, but his weakened body desperately needed this nourishment.

As the saying goes, the body is honest even when words are not—his empty stomach vibrated violently as calories entered it.

“Ugh…”

The medic silently refilled the empty bowl with warm porridge, and only after Simon had emptied three bowls did Victor open the door and enter.

“Simon!”

“Victor. You look like you’ve been quite anxious. Haven’t you?”

“Of course… I… I was afraid of losing you…”

Victor said, wiping away sweat he hadn’t realized he’d shed, and sat down.

The medic, with no more porridge to serve, took the bowl and quickly left the room. Victor’s expression then changed.

“So… what exactly did you see? Did you see what I saw?”

“Well… first, let me ask… what did you see?”

Victor told him what he had seen.

Simon nodded and then explained what he had seen.

“As I thought… What I saw were the remnants of the vengeful spirits you helped find peace.”

“Vengeful spirits? Remnants?”

“Yes. What dwelled there was humanity’s primal desires… specifically, the accumulated desires of children too young to even speak their own names. Such a weak force needed a million years to take that form.”

“Children’s desires…”

“Indeed. People often bring children to such places, don’t they? For educational field trips. It couldn’t absorb the souls of adults or passionate adolescents, but it slowly absorbed the instinctual desires of infants who couldn’t even walk yet.”

“I see…”

Victor finally understood why it had such a strange appearance and why, despite its grotesque form, it had behaved like a child.

It made sense that it would look like melting jelly, given that it was formed from the limited imagination and underdeveloped thinking of infants. And being composed of infants’ instinctual thoughts, it naturally approached and clung to an unfamiliar adult.

“Then… what did you encounter?”

“I told you. Remnants. Not even proper desires, but torn and detached fragments that clung to my consciousness. You know how when you remove tape incorrectly, sticky residue remains? That’s what was clinging to my consciousness.”

“Ah…”

Hearing this realistic analogy, Victor sighed deeply. He had thought it was over when he destroyed the entity, but that wasn’t the case.

“So… is the problem resolved now? Can we leave this land?”

“Of course. My body is weakened, but that’s from being bedridden. With proper food, I’ll be fine.”

“Good. Then we’ll depart tomorrow morning.”

Victor smiled as he left Simon’s room, then instructed the soldiers to prepare for departure the next day.

After staying for four days, there was no reason to remain any longer.

*

The next day, however, the departure was unexpectedly postponed until the following day.

The reason was that Victor was unable to move, having been thoroughly exhausted by his wife Raisha.

The cause of this torturous 24-hour, 1300-ejaculation marathon was simple:

He had gone to see Simon before her.