A Secretly Capable Child Is Seeking For Her Dad - Chapter 383
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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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A Powerful Child Searches for Dad Episode 383
Hart still vividly remembered the day he first arrived in Norveldt.
The village had crooked waterways starting from the river estuary.
The dike was half torn away, and throughout the roads, tangled tree branches and broken planks were buried in mud.
“We’d better not think about resting for a while.”
Every time the carriage jolted heavily, the workers muttered like that.
Hart was thinking the same thing.
As they went deeper inside, the even more serious state of the marketplace and village was revealed.
Houses with roofs blown off.
Warehouses with only frames remaining and broken windows.
That day, Hart unconsciously clicked his tongue and looked at Norbert Baron.
He was standing blankly in the ruined square.
As lords who come to the scene usually do, without shouting at anyone or urging work.
‘Has he lost his mind?’
Hart only thought that much.
Perhaps the baron was deliberately acting more gentle and fine to comfort the domain’s people.
So he even thought that made him quite an excellent lord.
But the problem came after that.
“Hart! Please catch this!”
“Oh my, how heavy!”
For the first few days, they really did reconstruction work.
They carried soil to the collapsed dike and rebuilt the foundations of collapsed houses.
Though their bodies felt like breaking from the hard work, they could endure it if the pay was proper.
But not long after, the baron’s soldiers came.
Then,
“From today, you’ll be working somewhere else.”
They took all the workers from the reconstruction site to another place.
“What? But the dike reconstruction isn’t finished yet…”
“What about the houses we haven’t fully repaired?”
The soldiers only gave brief answers to the workers’ questions.
“We’ll pay you more. So stop complaining and follow us.”
As soon as those words fell, a bewildered yet excited atmosphere soon spread among the workers.
“Wow, big domains really are different.”
“Right, right. There must be something more urgent than village repairs.”
“Norbert Baron must be generous!”
“Hahaha! My wife will be happy when I return.”
But that was a mistake.
The work ordered by the marquis castle wasn’t reconstruction.
“Search the forest! There are villains who escaped to the nearby area!”
“Trap them in this fence and bring them here.”
The soldiers first called them ‘beasts.’
Then they called them ‘bandits,’ and at some point, perhaps confused themselves, they just called them ‘those things.’
As the designation for those things changed, Hart’s spine grew colder.
Was this a reconstruction mission?
No, it didn’t seem like it.
Then was it ordinary work?
That didn’t seem right either.
While his mind filled with anguish, the workers wandered through the forest again and again.
People began getting hurt.
Someone had their thigh scratched by the villains’ claws and bled, someone had their arm bitten and flesh torn away.
The wounds strangely didn’t heal well.
They swelled, turned black, and after starting to heal, they burst open again.
Around that time, Hart first heard the word ‘monster’ from the soldiers’ mouths.
He accidentally overheard them muttering quietly while pushing the workers into the dormitory.
“Damn it. We’ve only recovered two! Four more escaped?”
“Ha, at this rate the nearby area will become a monster field.”
“Now, gentlemen. It should be fine. We investigated the entire nearby area, and fortunately there were no casualties yet.”
“That’s not the problem right now! What if rumors start spreading that monsters appeared in the north? Then investigators will come, and then we’ll…”
Hart was confused.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d come to do reconstruction work but got caught up in something strange.
And monsters, no less.
Hart already knew well how frightening and dangerous those beings were.
He had lost both sets of grandparents to monsters.
‘I should go back.’
From around that time, Hart began thinking that way.
Money or whatever, it would be better to return home first.
If those ‘things’ roaming around the nearby area after escaping the marquis domain were monsters, as the soldiers said,
‘I could die if I’m not careful.’
Hart slowly waited for an opportunity.
Thinking they wouldn’t let him go if he just said he’d quit work, he planned to fake an injury and escape the marquis domain.
But unfortunately, around that time the monsters fled far from the marquis domain, and his plans kept going awry.
Meanwhile, mages began increasing inside the castle.
Hart saw them getting off carriages and going straight into the castle several times.
As if doing something very bad, the mages didn’t even make eye contact with each other.
Then one day.
Hart, who couldn’t sleep thinking about Tana, Roble, and Marishan, happened to come outside the dormitory and witnessed it.
The inner courtyard of the castle.
In the darkness beyond the torchlight, two mages were dragging something.
At first he thought it was a large bundle.
But as they got closer, he could clearly hear a low growling sound ‘grrr…’ from inside the wire mesh.
‘That’s it! It’s definitely a monster!’
Though he couldn’t see clearly what was inside, Hart unconsciously followed them.
Even knowing it was dangerous, curiosity about what was happening here made him move.
The place the mages headed to was the basement.
And there he saw it.
“A strange, very strange device was there!”
The child beyond the bars opened his eyes wide.
“A magic circle! Yes, a magic circle was laid on the floor!”
Above a magic circle large enough to cover the entire wide space stood a structure that might have been a machine or altar.
In its center was embedded something like a black stone, which pulsed like a heartbeat – thump- thump- and absorbed the surrounding light.
The mages opened the wire mesh they were carrying in front of it.
As the blue energy surrounding the wire mesh disappeared, something poured out from inside.
“It wasn’t the monster we were chasing, but much smaller. It looked just like dandelion seeds.”
The child’s lips parted.
Hart continued speaking.
“Small and fluffy like it had fur. But there were dozens, no, hundreds of those things in the cage!”
The mages pushed them into the device.
And they activated something to prevent the villains from coming out again,
“…It was just like crushing fruit to extract juice.”
They began extracting powerful light from those dandelion seed-like things.
“They used some kind of tube-like device to extract smoke or light, then sent it toward the machine’s center…”
“…”
“Even someone like me who’s completely ignorant about such things could tell. That it was something tremendous.”
It was a sight that an ordinary worker like him should never have witnessed.
“When they did that, the small creatures inside started screaming. And then…”
Hart squeezed his eyes shut tight.
The scene he witnessed that day was still vivid.
The small creatures began writhing and suffering in agony.
Their round bodies tore apart, and their soft texture became roughly distorted.
Yet the mages didn’t stop.
‘More. This amount isn’t nearly enough for what the Baron wants.’
‘We need to extract even a little more from each one.’
The device’s glass tubes flickered even faster.
When that entire process was finally nearing its end.
“They, they transformed into monsters.”
The small creatures inside the device began turning black.
Inside the iron cages where the mages quickly transferred them, they gradually grew larger and finally transformed into shapes familiar to Hart.
“Grrrrr-“
Bodies that became hazy like black shadows.
Even amid all that, their red eyes and sharp teeth remained clearly visible.
“All the monsters we’ve been searching for came from here, from the Baron’s castle!”
“…”
“For some reason, the mages couldn’t properly control them, so they escaped.”
“…”
“The Baron had the workers recapture them to cover it up.”
Tie unconsciously clenched her fists tight.
After hearing Hart’s entire story, she could understand.
“…It’s Croa.”
Tie slowly looked back at Marbas and Ppupppu.
“The Yellow Belt Baron captured Pompoms and extracted Croa from them! Just like Luciano!”
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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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