The Archmage’s Destruction Strategy - Chapter 39

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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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#039. Negotiation Table

‘Does he really intend to fight? Against this level of military force?’

Watching Sung-jun emit killing intent with an aura that suggested he might start fighting at any moment, Zhao Xin couldn’t hide his bewilderment.

The situation unfolding was 180 degrees different from what he had originally expected.

‘I thought someone who risked his life fighting a Corrosion Entity alone without any support would be reluctant to antagonize humans, but it seems that was my mistake. Moreover, despite defeating a Corrosion Entity, he doesn’t show much sign of exhaustion.’

Zhao Xin, who had originally planned to bring his opponent to the negotiation table with a mix of appropriate threats and persuasion after they would have been exhausted from fighting the Corrosion Entity, ordered his subordinates to stand down from their combat readiness upon seeing his opponent’s condition.

Then he bowed respectfully and spoke to Sung-jun.

“I apologize if we have caused any misunderstanding. Our Tianwu Guan warriors will not commit any hostile acts against you, and we promise to treat your companions with the utmost respect. Would you please calm your anger?”

Even after seeing Zhao Xin bow, Sung-jun glared at him silently for a while before retracting the magical waves he had been emitting around him, his stern expression unchanged.

Then he spoke to Zhao Xin in a coldly chilled voice.

“Withdraw your subordinates and release my companions. And never approach this area again.”

“Bringing your companions to you is possible, but prohibiting access is beyond my authority. Since we don’t know your purpose, the Chinese Government also needs to gather as much information as possible. Could you give us some time, even briefly?”

When Sung-jun nodded, Zhao Xin signaled his subordinates to withdraw.

The Corrosion Entity horde that had lost their leader changed strategy and was retreating quickly after the Tianwu Guan warriors joined, so cleaning up the remaining creatures didn’t take very long.

Shortly after, Zhao Xin, who had completed an encirclement at some distance within Sung-jun’s line of sight, leaped toward Sung-jun’s location and bowed.

“If necessary, I will order the Tianwu Guan warriors to guard the vicinity until you achieve your desired goal. Although the remaining Corrosion Entities have withdrawn for reorganization, there’s no guarantee they won’t swarm back again.”

“Should I take that to mean you’ll cooperate with my goal?”

“That’s correct, but we would like you to hear one request from our side.”

Seeing Zhao Xin use the expression ‘request’ rather than ‘condition’ to avoid offending him, Sung-jun let out a deep sigh.

Anyway, to achieve his purpose, cooperation from the Tianwu Guan warriors was inevitable.

However, the reason Sung-jun had taken such a hostile attitude until now was all part of a strategy to maintain control of the negotiation.

“I’ll decide after hearing the content of that request.”

***

“Hmm… Good tea. Does this mean that even in times like these, the lives of those in power don’t change much?”

After D-day, people’s lives collapsed faster than Sung-jun had expected.

Unlike South Korea, which was able to seal the Corrosion Entity ‘Silermantis’ that invaded Seoul Airspace from the first day thanks to Sung-jun’s Teacher’s power, the collapse rate of North Korea, which could only receive an extremely small number of Awakened through cooperation with the Chinese Government, and China, which lost more than half of its Awakened forces from the first day, was beyond imagination.

The moment power supply was cut off, major cities became not places to live but scenes of carnage where bloody massacres took place over scarce resources.

Stores with anything that could serve as food became targets of looting, and crops that weren’t even ripe yet were plundered excessively by attacks from starving people.

In a situation where all resources necessary for human survival – medicine, drinking water, food, fuel, clothing – were consumed instantly, the threads of reason and conscience that people held onto couldn’t last more than six months at most.

‘While some risk their lives for a single meal, others continue living luxuriously as they did before D-day…’

Of course, the gap between rich and poor, between classes, wasn’t a problem that only arose after D-day.

What Sung-jun worried about was that if the current situation continued, humanity might not have much time left to endure.

Sung-jun sat at an Outdoor Table far from the Location of the Fight with Yejigwi, waiting for the negotiation partner who was coming to meet him.

The corpse of Yejigwi, which had been his target, was merely a waypoint; in Sung-jun’s mind, numerous complex plans to prevent humanity’s extinction were intricately intertwined.

While organizing his future plans, Sung-jun asked Zhao Xin to clear the surroundings before the full-scale negotiations began.

Then he started a meeting with his disciple Seoa, temporary party member Hyeon-jo, and Shirasaki Miyu, who was a necessary member for future plans.

“First, we’ve achieved one of the two objectives of this journey. We succeeded in killing Yejigwi and secured its corpse. The problem is the second objective. If we don’t achieve that, the Yejigwi corpse we worked so hard to secure will become useless.”

Then Hyeon-jo, recalling his previous conversation with Sung-jun, asked him.

“Are you talking about Teacher’s dagger embedded in Seo Moo-gyeol’s weapon ‘Blood Chain’?”

“That’s right. Actually, all the Pioneers who visited Earth are comrades who fought against Corrosion Entities alongside Teacher in the previous world, and Teacher gave each of his comrades a magical artifact as a gift. That dagger is also one of those artifacts.”

“I heard it’s a dagger that reduces an opponent’s abilities to less than half just by grazing them…”

“The original name of that dagger is ‘Seven Veins’.”

Upiteus, the 8th Demon Lord who was one of the Previous Demon Lords, was someone who devoted his entire life to curse-type magic to eliminate Silermantis, which was nothing less than a mage’s nemesis.

Until then, curse magic had such poor efficiency that thousands of sacrifices had to be offered to kill just one person, so no one properly researched it, but Upiteus, fascinated by the ‘unique characteristics’ of curses, created seven daggers through research bordering on obsession.

An artifact that built seven massive magic towers solely to amplify curse effects, and dramatically improved the efficiency of curse-type spells that were no better than trash through daggers linked to those towers.

It was a mythical-grade weapon that could significantly weaken even Corrosion Entities if used properly, but the Pioneer ‘Kwon Hwang’ Drenex who received this weapon was treating Seven Veins like a simple poisoned dagger.

Without knowing anything about the true power of the artifact he possessed.

Sung-jun’s plan was to use Yejigwi’s corpse as a sacrifice to awaken the ‘true power’ of Seven Veins.

“The problem is that we couldn’t find the dagger even after searching Yejigwi’s corpse. After hearing Hyeon-jo’s story, I judged that Yejigwi would be the one possessing the dagger, but it seems the Chinese Government side recovered it.”

Hyeon-jo, who had been listening to Sung-jun’s story, felt puzzled by something in Sung-jun’s explanation.

At least in the bloody battle between Yejigwi and Seo Moo-gyeol that he had witnessed, he didn’t feel that Yejigwi had become particularly weakened.

When asked about this point, Sung-jun smiled and explained the reason.

“Basically, Seven Veins is an artifact closer to an altar than a weapon. To use it properly, you need to set up sacrifices and insert the seven daggers in designated positions in a designated order. Of course, you can achieve similar effects against a single target even when used as a weapon, but the problem is the opponent’s precognitive ability.”

In any case, the artifact called Seven Veins had the prerequisite that you must wound the opponent’s body in order to place a curse on them.

To fulfill the condition of ‘curse’ which basically required a sacrifice, one method of using the artifact was to stab the dagger into the opponent’s wound and turn the opponent itself into a ‘sacrifice’.

The reason Seo Moo-gyeol used the chain-type weapon ‘Blood Chain’ as his armament was precisely for this reason.

Using the power of chains that had long range and moved unpredictably, wounding the opponent’s body with any one of the seven daggers wouldn’t have been very difficult.

The problem was that the opponent who needed to be wounded was precisely that Yejigwi.

Due to Yejigwi’s characteristic of being able to avoid all futures where attacks would hit, no matter how complex and fast the attack, it was impossible for any Awakened who attacked enemies using ‘techniques’ to defeat Yejigwi.

“That’s the most troublesome part when dealing with enemies who have future precognition. Whether it’s magic, curses, or martial arts, it’s impossible to hit Yejigwi with techniques that target and attack specific points.”

“…So it was a fight with absolutely no chance of winning from the start.”

“That’s the method they use.”

‘Silermantis’, the ‘nemesis of mages’ that even the Previous Demon Lords, who could be called the essence of magic, couldn’t defeat over so many generations; ‘Yejigwi’ with future precognitive abilities that no Awakened using weapons could defeat no matter what means they employed.

Sung-jun estimated that the Corrosion Entities that appeared in other regions with Awakened Ability Training Institutes like Japan and the United States would also have abilities that the Awakened of those regions couldn’t overcome.

From the beginning, this entire situation was the result of Pioneers from Otherworld using the planet Earth as a sacrifice to save their homeland.

“But there isn’t absolutely no method.”

Originally, Silermantis, as a mage’s nemesis, should have eliminated Minastrias, Sung-jun’s own Teacher, and devastated South Korea, but by being sealed, it became possible for Sung-jun, a mage, to leave South Korea and hunt the Yejigwi that appeared in China.

This enabled his plan to move to the next step, which itself became the starting point for the enemies’ plan to crumble.

“Of course, it’s hard to think that the next Corrosion Entity we face will be as easily caught as Yejigwi, but we must somehow accomplish even seemingly impossible tasks. If we can’t hunt the next target quickly even by pushing ourselves, the human species itself might disappear from the planet Earth.”

“Easy… You’re saying Yejigwi was on the easy side?”

“The ability of future precognition itself is excessively overpowered, but Yejigwi’s own combat ability is quite inferior compared to other Corrosion Entities. If we could somehow seal just the precognitive ability itself, even other Awakened besides me could handle it.”

“But if it weren’t for your ‘magic’, sealing its precognitive ability would have been impossible in the first place.”

“That’s right.”

Hyeon-jo’s words were true.

The biggest reason Sung-jun could defeat Yejigwi wasn’t due to the firepower of his attack magic or the defensive power of his defensive magic, but thanks to the Coin of Fate spell that could seal Yejigwi’s future precognitive ability.

The most powerful force of magic that Sung-jun believed in wasn’t in the power of attack spells that dropped meteors from the sky and changed terrain with a single spell, but in the miracle-like ‘mystery’ that bypassed rules and created incomprehensible contradictions to bring about the results the caster desired.

And now was the crucial moment to take the first step of the massive spell bundle Sung-jun had created – the ‘Humanity Salvation Magic’.

‘I must somehow activate that spell in this negotiation.’

Just as Sung-jun was making this resolution in his heart, several cars that had driven from afar arrived at the location where Sung-jun’s group was sitting.

It was a car carrying Chinese Communist Party’s Top Leaders who had come to somehow incorporate the ‘mage’ with tremendous power to change humanity’s fate at this point in time into their nation’s sphere of influence.

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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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