Memoirs of a Wicked Magician - Chapter 49

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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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Episode 49
“M-Mark! Ahhhhh!”
“Jed, what are you—what are you doing!”
As the flames died down, the boy still clinging to life convulsed on the ground.
Jed dragged him away toward some unseen destination.
Splash!
Jed’s incomprehensible behavior continued until, finally, he plunged the mortally wounded child into the Lake.
He pulled the boy out just as he was suffocating, then thrust him back down again—repeating this several times over.
But each time the boy’s head broke the surface, something writhed and clung to his body in thick, churning waves.
And when it finally covered the boy’s form in darkness…
Whoosh!
A roaring inferno blazed up again, leaving a scarlet afterimage in their vision.
Just as it had in the Blue Flower grove, fine Black Ash streamed like smoke, smearing across Jed’s wrist.
The diamond-shaped gauge rose visibly higher.
“I… Jed… huff…”
Those glassy, grey eyes—eyes belonging to something wearing human skin—bored into the rigid children, paralyzed by shock and terror.
“How… much… time… left.”
His gait was unnaturally jerky, like some incomprehensible thing that had donned a person’s flesh and moved within it.
“Exit… can’t… reach it.”
They knew they had to flee, but their bodies locked rigid as if caught in a snare, unable to move away from the approaching Jed.
“When I… finish you… I’ll… I can… complete…”
Milena was no different.
She stared at the boy before her in disbelief, her entire frame trembling, her head shaking violently from side to side.
“J-Jed, you’re joking, right? You’re joking right now?”
The voice that escaped her lips, wrung from her throat, quavered pitifully.
“You said you’d see us through to the end. You said we’d all go to the Inner Estate together. So why, why—?”
Primal fear threatened to devour her mind entirely, but sometimes desperation cuts through even instinct itself.
As if Milena’s voice had unlocked some invisible constraint, the other children’s trembling voices began to break through at last.
“Right… we never heard anything like that…”
“Say it’s a joke… We came all this way!”
“He’s… he’s completely insane!”
Among them, Milena’s eyes waiting for Jed’s answer remained fixed, unblinking.
Yet in that gaze, now visibly wavering, lay the suspicion and realization she could no longer deny—even to herself.
But if Jed offered any plausible excuse now, Milena was ready to believe in him again.
She would try with all her remaining strength, just as she always had.
Because she needed it so desperately—more than anything.
But Jed, as if mocking her very existence, seized another nearby child and dragged them away.
Perhaps it would have been kinder if he had mocked her outright.
Jed seemed to have forgotten Milena entirely.
“Aaahhh!”
“P-please! Help! Ahhhhh!”
He attacked any child who tried to draw a weapon or turn to flee.
Dragging the wounded children behind him, Jed walked forward once more.
He submerged them one by one in the Lake water—the very source of the Contamination that had warped the Blue Forest.
The things writhing within surged toward every open wound and crawled inside.
Those children, now covered in Black Spots, Jed disposed of in the same manner.
“N-no… no… no…!”
Milena, watching with vacant eyes, suddenly convulsed and screamed.
Her hands trembled violently as they clamped over her face.
But covering her eyes did not silence the sound.
The horrific noise of the Contaminated children and their agonized shrieks poisoned her heart, paralyzed her spine.
Soon enough, it was Milena’s turn.
Brutish hands devoid of all mercy seized her and dragged her forward.
“No, no, no…! Jed! Don’t do this!”
She thrashed violently, gasping for breath, pleading—but such pleas would never reach him.
If anything, the grip crushing her ankle only tightened further.
Milena, fragile as paper, was dragged helplessly toward the place where the other children had met their ghastly end.
Soon she too would be submerged in the Lake, becoming a vessel for black creatures, before turning to ash in Jed’s inferno.
“N-no, noooo!”
A piercing wail of despair tore through the air.
Thwip!
It was precisely that moment.
A dark shadow, scarred as though slashed repeatedly by a sharp blade, cut across the ground in a single sweeping motion.
“G-ugh…”
A strangled, gurgling breath settled over the dark wound—one that began as a thick line and spread outward in a radiating network of cracks.
Upon closer inspection, the shadow came from a stem bristling with thorny spikes.
Black blood flowed down the verdant stalk, feeding a bud that now slowly unfurled into bloom.
The fully opened plant bore a striking resemblance to the Blue Flower grove they had passed through earlier—the guardian of that forest, the harbinger of nightmares.
A seed, already planted within those who had inhaled the scattered pollen.
Meeting Milena’s Mana, it sprouted at once, its stem surging upward, tearing through the boy’s rotting flesh.
Crack-crack-crack.
As the thick stalk burrowed deeper into corrupted flesh, Jed’s body twisted and warped into increasingly unnatural angles.
Milena’s anguished sobbing drowned out Jed’s feeble gasps.
“L-liar… You’re a liar.”
Milena wept endlessly, as she had when her family abandoned her long ago.
“I believed you, sobbing. I believed you’d take me out of this hell…”
In truth, Milena had always known that what she saw in Jed was nothing more than an empty shell—a hollow facade with no substance.
But she had desperately wished for even that much to exist in that place.
Because even a false comfort was far better than none at all.
But no matter how she struggled, the truth she had tried so hard to hide always surfaced in the end, leaving only emptiness.
Milena wept for her own pathetic, wretched self.
Footstep.
Then, a sound of footsteps approaching from ahead.
Milena, burying her face in her hands, did not respond.
Perhaps she had not noticed the presence, or perhaps nothing mattered to her anymore.
“Milena.”
The approaching footsteps halted just before her. Then a young girl’s clear, steady voice broke through the heavy silence.
“Get up.”
“Sob… sniff…”
“The exit is just ahead.”
Milena lifted her head without thinking.
In her tear-stained eyes reflected the familiar, cool face of the girl.
“Come on, Milena.”
Liriope extended her hand calmly, as if all that had transpired here were none of their concern.
Milena nearly reached for it reflexively.
But before she could, she caught sight of her own soiled hands.
Dirty, scratched in places where she had clawed frantically at the ground while being dragged.
At the sight of them, despair welled up anew, and she shook her head without thinking.
“You’ll just abandon me too, won’t you?”
Liriope recognized that she stood at a crossroads.
Her hesitation was brief; her choice was clear.
“I won’t abandon you.”
And Milena realized anew that the young girl before her had always possessed eyes so unwavering, so resolute.
“I will never abandon you.”
The lie, sweetened with deceitful tenderness, spilled from the girl’s soft lips like a sacred vow made for Milena alone…
“So come with me, Milena.”

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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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