Ch.82Mask (1)

*

Tap, tap,

The sound of raindrops lightly drumming on leaves began to fall one by one, then suddenly poured down in torrents.

I looked up at the sound of rain relentlessly beating against the roof of the modest wooden cabin built beside the lake.

The raindrops were leaking through the ceiling.

With practiced movements, I pushed a large clay bowl with my foot to catch the dripping water.

This was something I’d experienced many times before.

“Whoever built this place did a terrible job,”

I sighed, voicing criticism to no one in particular.

Of course, my criticism wouldn’t hurt anyone’s feelings.

After all, I was the one who built this house.

“They say Mallis was called a sage for good reason.”

I muttered quietly while scratching the back of my head.

Mallis, the great sage and great magician from about two hundred years ago.

He was a famous historical figure known for the tale of building an enormous castle overnight.

According to the Green Lady, he was a spirit mage like me.

To be honest, building a castle in a day would be entirely possible with the help of various spirits.

Having worked with spirits countless times during my brief period living alone by this lake, I fully understood that possibility.

But one thing was certain: this Mallis fellow must have been a genius of mind-boggling proportions.

The difference was painfully obvious when I compared his feat of building a castle overnight to my own achievement—a shabby two-room cabin that took me a whole week to construct.

Not to mention that this wooden structure couldn’t even properly keep out the rain.

They say that when someone makes something look effortless, it’s evidence of their accumulated expertise.

From my personal experience, Mallis, the spirit mage of the generation before mine, must have been such a genius that he carried castle blueprints in his head.

Despite being fellow spirit mages who even shared the surname Staff, the gap between that historical hero and myself was enormous.

It was like comparing a lizard to a dragon.

This wasn’t humility—it was downright intimidating.

I sighed as I stared at the bowl collecting rainwater.

I had a feeling that once this rain stopped, the weather would turn properly cold.

While I could somehow manage to create things like buildings or desks, I couldn’t possibly replicate textiles like clothing or mechanical devices like braziers, which left me shivering.

Despite this being my first attempt at building a house, I had stupidly forgotten to make a chimney, meaning I couldn’t even light a fire inside.

In the end, my only source of heat was the burning fox curled up beside me, sleeping with its tail as a pillow.

Not that this fox was specifically a fire spirit.

It was merely a spirit in fox form that I kept aflame by continuously burning my magical energy through it. Due to the cold weather, I had kept it in this form constantly by my side, and naturally named it Pia, after the magical character for fire.

I reached toward Pia, warming my frozen fingers.

“…I built this place unnecessarily large, so it just lets in more cold air,”

Though it was a small cabin, it had one more room than the hut where I had lived with Silvia.

I had built it that way on purpose.

I thought there should be a storage room, or perhaps a dressing room for her, in case Silvia came to live with me.

Of course, it would have been better if I had considered a chimney, a hearth, or at least a sturdy roof that didn’t leak, before thinking about that.

Moreover, I hadn’t even fitted doors yet, so it was essentially one large open space.

As a result, cold winds entering through the windows swept through the entire house.

Naturally, I lacked the skill to make glass, so the windows were just openings.

In truth, I had planned to repair various parts of the house together with Silvia when she arrived.

But,

“…When will she come?”

Silvia had not appeared.

*

When the rain stopped, the temperature dropped noticeably, as expected, and began to envelop the forest.

Despite the Green Lady’s assurance that the hero would come soon, I had already been staying by this lake for over a month.

In just that month, autumn had passed quickly, and now my breath was starting to fog in the air.

Until now, I had been able to sustain myself with plants and fruits growing around the lake, but it was clear that even those would become scarce as winter approached.

I had blocked the windows with wide wooden planks and created a small hearth by tearing up part of the floor in the middle of the living room.

Knowing that gathering firewood would become difficult once winter truly set in, I needed to prepare in advance.

I was growing increasingly anxious.

Silvia still hadn’t appeared.

“…”

While literary clichés suggest that people who live alone tend to talk to themselves more, in my case, I actually talked less.

Except for Pia, I had no one to speak to, so my overall amount of speech had simply decreased.

With only a slight exaggeration, I was almost forgetting the sound of my own voice.

Yet despite this, her voice—the one I was desperately waiting to hear—remained vivid in my ears.

Today, as usual, I was silently going through what had become my daily routine.

My routine consisted of testing how far Pia and I could venture from the lake, gathering and drying wood to use as firewood during winter, and fishing in the lake while gazing at the tree that had once been the Green Lady.

None of these tasks were particularly difficult, but if there was one that posed more of a challenge, it was definitely gathering wood.

After all, I didn’t even have proper tools like an axe or saw.

Fortunately, I could manage somehow thanks to Pia.

It was quite a remarkable spirit.

My still-awkward spirit-handling skills hardly did it justice.

It could easily dispatch one or two wolves we occasionally encountered and use mysterious power to fell large trees.

The problem was that this tiny fox spirit had no way to drag those trees back to the cabin, so the task of hauling them back while grunting and straining fell to me.

As a result, I was suffering from physical labor that I had rarely done even when living with Silvia.

The constant muscle pain made it difficult to sleep at night, with my knees aching so much that I could barely rest.

Still, I was grateful even for this much—without Pia, I might have frozen to death.

Besides, having something to do helped alleviate my loneliness, so except when sleeping, I kept busy every day with Pia by my side.

I prayed for time to pass quickly.

I desperately waited for the day when Silvia would come looking for me.

*

The Green Lady, transformed into an enormous tree.

One day, one of the many large branches extending from that tree suddenly fell off.

It wasn’t just a small twig that had fallen, but an entire thick, large branch—truly a bizarre occurrence.

Moreover, strangely enough, the branch didn’t appear to have been broken or cut; it seemed to have been naturally extracted.

The cross-section, which looked as if it had popped out like a golem’s joint, was so peculiar that I thought it must be some kind of gift from the Green Lady.

This massive branch, much thicker than my arm and slightly thinner than my torso, exuded a mysterious aura that suggested it contained some special power just by looking at it.

When I picked it up, feeling its substantial weight, I felt as if instructions were flowing directly into my mind.

As if someone had commanded me to do so, I began carving the branch with surprising naturalness.

Life in the forest lacked so many necessities.

From tools to materials, this lifestyle was filled with deficiencies and needs, but fortunately, I still had the dagger Silvia had given me.

This dagger, essentially my only tool and weapon, was also excellent for woodworking.

After all, the first thing I had done when I first held this dagger was carve Laila’s grave marker, not fight.

Thanks to the time I spent in the spirit realm, I couldn’t remember exactly how long ago that was, but it somehow felt like ancient history now.

Come to think of it, Laila’s grave might be overgrown with weeds by now.

I’d like to go tend to it once the magical contamination decreases, but I’m not sure if that opportunity will ever come.

Perhaps I could visit with Silvia.

She can dilute the magical contamination to some extent.

“…”

I shook off the stray thoughts filling my head.

After wrestling with this piece of wood for several days, I was now approaching completion.

If I worked diligently, I might finish it today.

I put down the dagger, dusted off my hands, and briefly looked at the piece of wood I had been carving.

The object I was creating by carving the Green Lady’s body with a knife was a mask.

For reasons I couldn’t explain, the moment I grasped that branch, I realized I needed to make this mask.

If someone had been beside me, they might have found my sudden conclusion strange, but I had experienced something similar before.

That day in the spirit realm when I learned the basics of spirit magic from her.

The sensation of memories and knowledge flowing directly into my mind.

Just like then, instructions and methods for making a mask from this branch naturally flowed into my consciousness.

Could the Green Lady’s consciousness still be dormant in this wood?

She said that the death of spirits differs from that of humans.

If a spirit’s death merely means changing physical form while returning to nature, then perhaps the Green Lady was still with me in a sense.

I briefly gazed at the large tree visible outside my door before picking up the dagger again.

I couldn’t be certain whether this branch was truly part of her body, or if the will commanding me to carve a mask was hers, but I fully understood why I needed to make a “mask.”

After all, I carried a curse that must not be spread.

Whether my magical contamination had weakened, or I had adapted to it, or perhaps I had grown as a spirit mage, I had been able to scout farther than usual in recent days.

Of course, I could still feel my body deteriorating in real-time if I stayed outside too long, but it was much better than before when even opening my eyes or breathing was painful.

However, being able to venture farther wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

As my range of activity expanded, I became increasingly paranoid about the possibility of being seen.

The men I had encountered in the forest before flashed before my eyes.

I vividly remembered that day when my eyes glowed red and I slaughtered them all.

To be honest, those horrific bloody scenes that had been burned into my vision still occasionally replayed in my dreams.

Despite the cold weather, I would always wake up drenched in sweat after such disturbing dreams.

To prevent such incidents from happening again, I needed to cover my face.

Of course, I would still go mad the moment I saw someone else’s face, but at least if a person skilled enough to venture into this forest could maintain their composure, they could easily subdue someone like me who had lost their reason.

I had to believe that.

Some might wonder why I didn’t just stay hidden here instead of making this mask, but honestly, I couldn’t wait any longer.

I wanted to go find Silvia.

Scritch, scratch,

Only the sound of the dagger smoothly carving wood echoed through the room.

Compared to when Silvia first handed me this dagger, the cutting feel had deteriorated significantly, and the blade had dulled considerably.

It was my fault for not maintaining it properly.

She used to repeatedly tell me that weapons needed to be maintained after each use, but honestly, having never handled a sword before, I didn’t know how to properly care for a blade and neglected it.

The fact that it still cut much better than an ordinary dagger despite its poor condition proved that it must be an exceptional weapon.

The more I thought about the dagger, the more I longed for Silvia.

Why hadn’t Silvia come to me yet?

Had something happened to her?

Honestly, no matter how skilled I was at handling spirits, I was pathetically weak compared to her.

I knew it was presumptuous for someone like me to worry about Silvia, but I couldn’t help the unease in my heart.

I didn’t want to just wait around in a daze.

If by some chance she was in danger, I wanted to save her, and even if not, I wanted to go to her if it meant seeing her even an hour, no, even a minute sooner.

And to be completely honest,

In one corner of my heart, I was imagining myself heroically rescuing her from danger…

A tiny bit of masculinity that I thought had gone extinct was urging me to action.

I pictured Silvia, surprised to see me alive, running to embrace me with tears of joy.

For the first time in days, I opened my lips and let my voice flow.

“Silvia…”

The mask was complete.

.