Academy’S Gumiho Is A Magical Genius [EN]: Chapter 130

Academy Gumiho is a Magical Genius – Episode 130

Academy Gumiho is a Magical Genius 130

The Dead City (5)

Life is crueler than you think.

Humans survive within the confines of society and family, buying time to shield themselves from the harsh realities of the world.

But if you were to ask whether children abandoned by society, who have even lost their parents, possess the ability to protect themselves…

Most people would deny it.

This world is too unforgiving for a child to navigate without assistance.

It’s harsh enough alone, but it’s nearly impossible for two young children to survive in a world where human rights and ethical considerations are practically nonexistent.

Yes, just like the scene unfolding before me.

“P, please help me! My sister…!! My sister!!!”

“Bring her here and let me see.”

“Wait. It might be the work of a rebel…!”

“Get a grip on the situation.”

Two children in tattered clothes stumbled toward us.

More precisely, the older brother was carrying his younger sister on his back, approaching me with a desperate expression. The moment he saw Termia standing next to me, his face registered terror, but he grabbed my hand as if he didn’t care about the risk.

“There’s nowhere to treat my sister…!”

“Where is she hurt?”

“Near her leg. She was stabbed by something like a flying needle.”

“Is the needle still stuck in? Or did it just graze her?”

“It grazed her.”

Let’s take a look.

The girl on the boy’s back looks pale.

Her pulse is weak, the wound near her leg is unlike a normal stab wound, and there’s a peculiar odor to her breath.

“It’s poison.”

I can roughly identify the type just by observing the symptoms.

Thanks to my habit of chewing on poisonous herbs every day.

It’s not exactly a deadly poison.

Just a common poison that can be concocted by weaving together a few strands of common weeds and boiling them thoroughly in a pot.

But can a child who doesn’t even look old enough for elementary school withstand it?

“P, poison? Th, then my sister… what will happen….”

“Enough with the nonsense. Do you know when she was poisoned? I need that information to determine the best course of treatment.”

“T, time? We don’t have a clock, so I don’t know exactly, but roughly….”

The boy’s explanation was too vague.

After filtering and interpreting his account, it seems they were attacked around sunset.

They were attacked shortly after performing a ritual.

Unfortunately, the siblings were in a waterway, making it impossible to estimate the time by observing the sky.

I was curious as to why they were in the waterway in the first place, but the girl’s condition took priority.

“Do you remember the order or sequence of the ritual?”

“We both know it roughly.”

“Then recite it quickly. Tell me how far you got before you were poisoned.”

“There are two stone statues in that waterway. One is called a god statue, and the other is called a saint statue. First, we pour alcohol on top of them….”

I suppose it’s due to their age.

The boy didn’t provide specific details about the ritual.

It’s all the order of the ritual viewed from a subjective perspective.

But coincidentally, it was something I recognized.

“Sealing God Tathagata [a magical ritual to seal those who have reached transcendence].”

A magical ritual to seal (封) those who have reached transcendence (如來) by following the god (神) and truth. In other words, the ritual and order of Sealing God Tathagata is based on apostasy.

“Looks like you know the ritual?”

“I don’t know the details. I only know a passage from a book I read at the library yesterday.”

“Library? Are you talking about the one inside the mansion?”

“There’s no other library on this land besides that one. By the way, why don’t you, who seems to be a native of this land, know about it?”

It’s obviously in the library books.

At my words, the knight commander blushed and looked away.

A knight should be skilled in both martial arts and literature, but she seems ashamed that she doesn’t even know the contents of the books in her mansion.

While she was silent, I held the girl, whose body temperature was dropping, in my arms and recalled the contents of the book.

It wasn’t a very important part, so I don’t remember the details, but I managed to recall the main points.

Let’s see.

‘You said you were poisoned around the time you were dancing with a sword while pouring alcohol on the floor. That was probably the sixth step of the ritual.’

Most of the steps take about an hour and a half. Six times would be 1 hour and 30 minutes.

If the ritual started around sunset, and she was poisoned 1 hour and 30 minutes later, then she came to me in about 30 minutes, give or take.

That means the poison hasn’t reached her heart or lungs yet. If it’s in the early stages of poisoning, it’s easy to treat.

“If it’s about 30 minutes, I won’t have to cut open her flesh to remove the necrotic tissue. In that case, I can just do a simple detoxification.”

I dripped a little of my blood on the girl’s wound.

My blood is close to a deadly poison, but I can control its properties and form according to my acquired resistance.

I neutralized the girl’s poison as much as possible, synthesized a poison that loses its effect as soon as it’s neutralized in her body, and after dripping blood on the wound, her expression improved a little after 10 minutes.

“Was your name Mary? If you rest well for just one day, Mary won’t die.”

“Thank you! Thank you so much!”

“If you’re so grateful, can you do me a favor?”

“What is it?”

“Tell me how to get to that waterway where Mary was attacked.”

A child was poisoned in the waterway where the Revolutionary Army is.

That fact inspired me, and as a result.

“Bingo.”

I arrived near the waterway.

But the entrance was actually in the lawn, not the waterway.

It’s really like what the boy said.

They covered the entrance with grass and dirt, but it’s not enough to fool my eyes.

The 「Yoma Eye」 shimmering in purple.

Even if a wall blocks the way, the magic eye that sees through anything made of magic showed me the big picture of this city.

─Can you see something?

“Look with your own eyes. It’s too bad to see this alone.”

─Show me……? What is this?

Tamamo’s mystic eyes, which are comparable to my eyes that read the fluidity of magic and the ‘gaps’ associated with it, instead of losing the colors of the world.

No longer human or Gumiho, her eyes, whose race was close to divine power in the process of falling into a ghost, were wide open.

I can tell because they are connected.

Her eyes are better than mine.

That’s why, the moment she opened her mystic eyes, she was able to observe a more specific and accurate sight than I could.

─What is that?

“Are you seriously asking?”

But even though she has such eyes, I don’t know if she’s less able to analyze what she’s witnessed than I am.

Or maybe she just doesn’t want to deny what’s happening in front of her.

“Don’t you know the person who created the idiom ‘juji yukrim’ (酒池肉林) [a lavish feast; literally, ‘a pool of wine, a forest of meat’]? That’s more unexpected than I thought.”

─What is it?

“It’s a pile of corpses. Can’t you tell no matter how you look at it?”

─Really……?

A pool of blood, a feast of meat hanging on skewers—it was juji yukrim in its own way.

However, the difference from the original idiom is that what was originally for people has been changed to target people.

‘It’s not a big difference.’

In the end, the privileged play as they please.

The main context of exploiting the commoners is the same.

If King Zhou and Daji filled the pond with alcohol and satisfied their appetite and lust with meat and people, this world was soaking the land with blood and performing some kind of ritual with raw flesh by Lord Epots.

The subject is obvious without even looking.

“Then those people… could it be?”

“They must be the citizens of this land and homeless orphans.”

Thud!

A huge door leading to the basement.

I went down below.

The closer I got to the basement, the stronger the smell of blood filled my lungs.

The stench of blood and corpses.

It smells like my familiar hometown.

The only lights illuminating the dark basement were a few torches that were about to burn out.

Moreover, the road was rough and it wasn’t easy to walk forward.

Just as a salmon instinctively jumps up a waterfall and heads to its birthplace, just as someone who comes to their birthplace for the first time in decades feels an inexplicable longing, I also instinctively moved forward.

There is no hesitation in that step.

If I reach the end, I will surely see what I wanted.

A week of hard work.

The conclusion and ending I will reach at the end will surely be sweet.

“Now… show it to me.”

The secret that the lord, the frontier, hid.

Without missing any of their flaws.

Show it to me, naked and pure.

* * *

Late at night, all the students had left the mansion long ago.

Meanwhile, the beastman man who seemed to be the instructor had not returned since morning.

At least the young students came and went to the mansion several times.

The people inside the mansion were worried.

“Does anyone know where Lord’s guests went?”

“I don’t know. Even if they are guests, they are people I’m meeting for the first time.”

“Damn it, it’s a good thing Lord is locked up in the workshop as usual. If he finds out that we didn’t treat the guests…!”

“We’re dead. He’s usually gentle, but he’s so picky and scary in those areas.”

They were worried about themselves, not Seungwoo.

They were not close people, nor were they guests who had deep connections with the Frontier family.

There was no reason for the mansion’s servants to worry about them.

However, Lord Epots, the only aristocrat in the North with a strong sense of elitism, felt a deep sense of kinship and favor towards the man who was also an aristocrat like himself.

If Lord finds out that he didn’t take care of that aristocrat, he might be severely punished.

In fact, treating a guest you’ve never met before isn’t that important, and it’s extremely forced to be afraid of being punished for such a thing, but that’s the difference between aristocrats and commoners.

“I heard that handsome man who seemed to be the instructor was an aristocrat from the South.”

“The South… the Great Forest? That’s where only elves and beastmen live. Isn’t the class system a culture only for humans?”

“How would I know? Even if it doesn’t exist, his gait, demeanor, and etiquette made me think he was an aristocrat.”

“Honestly, that face is the end. Would an ordinary commoner be able to handle and manage that face?”

Commoners must not even dare to doubt the aristocrats.

Aristocrats can do anything if they don’t like it, but commoners can only be victimized.

That’s why those at the bottom have to prostrate themselves when the blue-blooded owner passes by.

That is the class system.

It was different in many ways from the current nominal aristocrats who only had honor and wealth left.

That’s why the servants who cleaned the mansion looked up to the existence of aristocrats, but they were afraid of them. So they had lived huddled up, no matter what they did.

“S, save me…!!”

“Vali? What are you doing running in the mansion like that?! If Lord or his family members catch you, you’re in big trouble!”

“N, now! Th, that’s not wh, what’s important!!”

What is he talking about?

One of the servants said to a colleague who was noisy and crossing the hallway.

“Hey, be quiet.”

“S, someone died…!”

“Where? It’s not uncommon for vagrants to starve to death or die from the cold everywhere.”

An era where proper human rights have not emerged.

In the other world that contains the scenery of the Middle Ages as it is, the death of a commoner is not a big deal. It would be different if an aristocrat died.

I wondered why he was making such a fuss about ordinary people dying here and there.

“Hey! Would I have run like this if it was something like that?!”

“Then what, did Lord even pass away?”

“Don’t say unlucky things! The gatekeeper of the mansion, that gatekeeper is dead!!”

“……The gatekeeper?”

The gatekeeper who guards the gate of the mansion is dead.

Those words had the power to stop even the surrounding servants who were cleaning the floor, frames, and paintings.

“What are you talking about? W, we don’t have a separate gatekeeper at the gate of our mansion. Two people from the Knights alternate to guard the entrance, what gatekeeper are you talking about?”

“……Ah, you didn’t know.”

“What, what are you ta, lking about…?”

Stab!

Something sharp and long pierced the flesh.

A clean instant death.

It was so clean that the blow pierced and stirred even the internal organs in one go.

Then, at the same time as the blood gushed out, I heard a sound like air escaping from a balloon.

The remaining servants who were watching the scene from the side did not panic or be shocked, as if it were an extension of cleaning the mansion.

They picked up the body and cleaned it up, and wiped the blood off the floor.

The way they acted so naturally.

I could tell that they had been repeating this many times.

“I never thought my friend wasn’t a compatriot. It’s shocking.”

“Butler Vali.”

“Ah, is that our sister? Do you have something to say to me?”

Frontier is a city that maintains a spring-like weather.

The North outside the city is cold itself, but that doesn’t mean the inside of the city is warm. Every day, the mansion is heated with firewood, but today, organic matter that burns well was crackling instead of wood.

Ah, it’s inorganic now that it’s dead.

“His body has been cleaned up.”

“Well done. I didn’t know there was someone in this area who wasn’t a compatriot.”

“What did you just say?”

“Ah…! Are you talking about the gatekeeper’s death? It’s just as I said. The gatekeeper at the entrance to the underground passage was found dead.”

“……Yes?”

A servant with a dumbfounded look.

She couldn’t believe it.

When it comes to gatekeepers, they are the most powerful warriors born and raised in this harsh land of the North, except for the Knight Commander.

He is a mid-level Sword Expert, two steps away from the realm of the supreme.

It’s been two years since he reached that level.

Who the hell killed him?

“Could it be the Knight Commander? He only moves according to Lord’s words, and he’s not exactly someone who shares our intentions.”

“Yes, originally, there was only one person who could kill the gatekeeper in this land. However, two days ago, I heard that the Knight Commander reached the upper level of Expert through a battle of wits with someone.”

“Could it be that beastman…?”

“That’s probably the case. The gatekeeper and nearby brothers and sisters died as martyrs with the same scars.”

“What exactly is that scar…?”

“It’s a burn mark. To be exact, it would be more appropriate to describe it as a piece of charcoal or charcoal that has been burned. But….”

It’s too extreme to think that a mere beastman did it, which is suspicious.

All the bodies had burn marks around their necks, like a handprint. It looked like a fire spirit with a hand of flames had twisted their necks.

However, the existence of spirits and spiritists had already become extinct 100 years ago, so no one thought of that.

Rather, as the times are what they are, the upper management’s response was quite delayed because the soldiers who believed in a kind of psychic phenomenon or superstition performed a gut [Korean shamanistic ritual] or exorcism before reporting.

In the meantime.

“Now that I see it, the mansion is bigger than I thought. I need to reduce the radius a little.”

─Then a lot of the servants working in the mansion will die, are you okay with that? They’re going to burn to death painfully.

“Well… wouldn’t that be a merciful end for them?”

Compared to what they’ve done.

Across from the mansion.

In a deserted basement.

Whirr, flames rose.

The owner of the fire had witnessed the main clue leading to the ending and conclusion of the other world in the deepest part of this city, so he had no guilt or hesitation in committing arson or murder.

Because he saw the truth about this land.

Because he saw everything about it, and more, there was no mercy in the hands of the man.

He was confident that he could burn anyone in the mansion to death.

By the way, I felt it while walking around the basement of the mansion.

This seems wider than necessary.

I can smell the blood well, so it’s okay, but the students aren’t like that.

So.

It would be nice to burn only about half of the mansion to make it easier to look around, right?

Yes, this is for the students.

So let’s do something about it.

He, who was burdened with overflowing justification, soon decided to become an arsonist.

Whirr──!!