Memoirs of a Wicked Magician - Chapter 110

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 110
Liriope suddenly recalled what Seraphina had hinted at just before they parted ways.
“I know the easiest way to change Belkiers’s mind, but I wonder—do you already suspect what I’m thinking?”
The moment Liriope met her cold golden eyes, she grasped the meaning contained within them.
It surely meant that Liriope would be driven to a state of irreversible ruin, both body and spirit.
Pushed to the very brink of death, Belkiers would have no choice but to remake her into something like “them” in order to save her.
Yes, just as Caliona had been made.
Belkiers had fallen silent at her question. The heavy air pooled in the room was suffocating.
“It’s not exactly the same. And back then, there was no other way.”
At his belated answer, it was Liriope’s turn to hold her tongue.
Moments later, Liriope lifted her hand from where it touched Belkiers and drew it across her face.
“When the Magic Tower Master said something like that, you were so disgusted with me.”
……
“But if I find out you did the same thing to our sister……”
Of course, Liriope understood as well as Belkiers did that there had been no other choice at the time. She understood, and yet……
“It’d seem like you did something to her you couldn’t do to me.”
According to Od, that power felt similar to the Defiled Sanctuary Core.
Could it be that Seraphina had already stolen a fragment of that power in the past, when she briefly touched the source of the calamity? But unsatisfied with that, was she now seeking to claim the entire calamity to gain greater strength?
The moment she thought this through, Liriope finally understood why Belkiers had reacted with such violent rejection to Seraphina’s words.
For Liriope too felt her breath catch at the thought of that terrible power dwelling within Caliona’s body.
Such a dangerous force, with no way of knowing when some hidden consequence might rear its head. The dread crept over her—that the choice made to save Caliona might instead be the very thing that killed her.
Belkiers gazed quietly at Liriope, who could not hide her emotions, before parting his lips.
“Don’t worry. Your sister isn’t like us yet. We can undo it later.”
“What? You can undo it?”
“Yes. The process will be complicated, but your sister—I can manage it one way or another.”
Liriope’s lips trembled at his soothing words, and before she could help herself, she asked something slightly foolish.
“Then our sister… won’t die?”
“She won’t die.”
Belkiers’s final words tickled her ears.
“You can’t live without your sister. So no matter what, I’ll keep her alive.”
The curtain drawn beside the bed darkened her view, and she could not see Belkiers’s expression clearly.
Yet his voice remained calm, and his hand smoothing her tangled hair was gentle.
“What about you?”
For some reason, something felt strange, and Liriope found herself speaking without thinking.
“Don’t you die either.”
At that, Belkiers laughed.
“What are you saying? I’m the kind of being who can’t die easily even if I wanted to. Isn’t it about time you learned that for yourself?”
Whether to lull Liriope to sleep, Belkiers’s Mana began to trace a Sleep Magic Circle in the empty air.
Liriope resisted, but in her weakened state, she found it difficult to oppose him.
As consciousness dimmed rapidly, Belkiers’s low murmur flowed in like a lullaby.
“I wish time would pass faster.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to grow up sooner.”
Liriope wanted to tell him there was no need to rush. Even if one were willing to pay a fortune to stop it, time was the one thing that could never be held back.
Children grow in an instant, and boys become young men before you know it. But she had no chance to say such things before she sank into peaceful sleep.
And Liriope dreamed.
“You again.”
The dream’s setting was the past before time’s reversal—a summer when she was sixteen.
In the dream, Liriope fled from Evangellin and by accident stumbled into a secret space within the Northern Magic Tower.
“By this point, I’m starting to suspect you deliberately linger before my eyes……”
A dark space reeking of something rankly fishy.
The room lay in utter disarray as though a tempest had swept through it, and a tremendous Mana still lurked savagely within.
There stood a boy—whether monster or specter, none could say.
“But your expression suggests that’s not it.”
Half his face was startlingly beautiful, while the other half was hideously grotesque, and the sight stirred a primal terror.
What clung to the boy’s skin, writhing blackly, resembled both a repugnant swarm of insects and the filth of demons.
Each time it convulsed violently as if trying to burst through the outer layer, the boy’s form twisted horrifyingly.
“It seems Evangellin has been up to his usual despicable tricks. No matter what, this is not a place a girl like you should carelessly enter.”
Liriope realized this was a forbidden space.
The thought that she had fled the fox only to blunder into the tiger’s den left her sight spinning.
Golden eyes that gleamed eerily even in the darkness fixed upon Liriope as she trembled with fear.
“You cry over your sister all the time anyway, with or without that fellow.”
And yet, strangely, the unfamiliar boy seemed already to know of Liriope’s plight.
“Shall I do away with them for you? Your sister and Evangellin, the ones making your life so hard?”
As the boy’s soft whisper echoed again, Liriope’s body shuddered.
The words themselves were vicious, and his tone was indifferent, yet remarkably, it was an act of goodwill on his part.
“Besides, once you leave this room, you’ll forget that you ever met me, so you won’t have to feel any guilt.”
He whispered that she need only nod, and everything would be finished.
Of course, what Liriope’s answer would be was entirely predictable.
His voice that followed carried a note of mockery.
“You don’t want that? Then next time we meet, don’t cry. It’s getting harder for me to hold back.”
The boy spoke coldly and cast Magic upon Liriope.
Liriope thought he meant to harm her. But after the Black Mana lifted, her swollen, twisted ankle was instead healed.
“Your sister is looking for you, so go now. Evangellin too—everyone just lives so troublesomely.”
Black butterflies fluttered into the space around Liriope.
They multiplied to ten, then dozens, encircling her.
“Forget everything that happened here. You never came to this place, and you never met me.”
Through the narrowing field of vision, the boy’s parting words reached her.
“Let us not meet again, Liriope.”
The moment she realized he knew her name, understanding struck Liriope’s mind.
Ah, this was a dream.
And it was not the first time she had dreamed like this.
The waking Liriope knew his name from having seen him in this dream before.
But the instant she was about to call out to the boy with raven-dark hair and beautiful golden eyes, her mind flooded with black mist.
And that dream was completely erased from Liriope’s memory, as though it had never existed at all.
Not until Liriope lived through that same summer at sixteen again in waking life did she ever recall that dream.
As Liriope thought, time flowed like sand through her fingers, ceaselessly, carrying her toward a future both distant and near.
Now Liriope was sixteen, and Belkiers was seventeen.
The timeline had advanced to late summer, mere months before Belkiers’s death—foretold in the past.
About a week before the cruel cold of August arrived, counted among the worst Flooding Periods on record.
11. Sixteen Years Old, the Cruel Cold of Midsummer
“Liriope?”
At the sound of someone calling her from behind, Liriope turned her head.
The season when the sun burned hottest in all the year.
Yet in Belegoth, set far to the north, midsummer was scarcely different from spring.
Her long golden hair, undulating like waves brimming with sunlight, fluttered in the air like a gentle spring breeze.
At sixteen, Liriope had grown half a span taller than two years prior, and the soft curves of her body had begun to define themselves more distinctly.
Most notably, the roundness had begun to fade from her face, and her delicate features were now thrown into sharp relief.
In the eyes of a boy fallen in love, Liriope’s lilac-purple eyes shone like a beautiful dream, and her lips, a pale scarlet like tender buds, seemed to exhale a sweet fragrance.
Liriope confirmed that it was a neatly dressed boy with a tense expression who had called out to her, and she greeted him.
“Hello, Samuel.”
“Oh? You remembered my name?”
“Yes. We passed each other in the Recovery Chamber not long ago, and I saw you assisting in Instructor Daphne’s class as well.”
That she had remembered him was merely the result of Liriope’s keen eye; there was no romantic interest whatsoever in her recollection.
In fact, anyone with a sharp eye would have noticed that despite her spring-like beauty, Liriope’s gaze was remarkably dry.
“Ah, ah! You remembered all of that? Those were all such unseemly moments. B-but still, I’m honored to have caught your eye.”
Yet the oblivious Samuel seemed only delighted and flustered by her words.
“But what brings you here?”
“Ah, well, you’ll be choosing a Guiding Mentor soon, won’t you? And Instructor Daphne mentioned she really wants to take you as a disciple and would like to have a word with you soon.”
Currently, Liriope was staying on the 41st Floor of the Magic Tower alongside Caliona.
Unlike the lower floors, the upper levels housed instructors who specialized in cultivating disciples.
The sisters Liriope and Caliona were promising young mages expected to break through to the 50th Floor in record time, so many instructors wished to take them as disciples.
“And incidentally…… at the banquet this week, um, I’m also personally curious whether you and your sister will both be attending.”
Yet Samuel’s true purpose lay elsewhere.
“Shouldn’t you two start going your separate ways soon? Then I could introduce you to some instructors I’m close with, and maybe slip you some useful information on the quiet…… that sort of thing.”
He glanced sideways at Liriope, his face slightly flushed.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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