Academy’S Gumiho Is A Magical Genius [EN]: Chapter 263

Academy Gumiho is a Magical Genius – Episode 263

Academy Gumiho is a Magical Genius 263

An Isolated Daily Life (3)

My time in Germany was peaceful.

I ate with the children and took walks in the park.

At night, the children would come to me as I read, asking what I was reading and requesting that I read to them. Of course, since the baby couldn’t speak, Erzebet held her younger sibling and said,

“You won’t understand. Are you sure you’re okay with this?”

“It’s fine. Whether you’re reading a fairy tale or a complex book, it doesn’t make much of a difference if you recite it gently.”

“Well, if you put it that way. Let’s see, when pulling the designed core up and down to prepare for the lower layers of magic power, there are no major issues in appearance. However, if you delve deeper, you’ll see mosaic-like fragments, which indicates a problem with the distribution of magic power during the processing, requiring the effort to revert it.”

A series of sentences that were difficult for a young child to understand.

The book I was reading was about construction methods using magic power.

I was exploring how this could be applied to magic, but as expected, it seemed like a lullaby to the children who couldn’t understand the meaning.

“……Koo.”

“…….”

Both of them fell asleep instantly.

I don’t know if I should be happy that they fell asleep early.

The children fell asleep in my bed, of all places.

“I can’t wake them up.”

“Just let them sleep.”

“Then where am I supposed to sleep?”

“Since they’ve occupied the bed in this room, why don’t you sleep with me like they usually do?”

“I’d rather stay up all night.”

I couldn’t bring myself to move the children who were sound asleep in the bed.

If they woke up while I was moving them, that would be a headache in its own right.

I couldn’t possibly sleep with Baek Hyuna like the children usually do.

‘If I had known this would happen, I would have chosen a house with three bedrooms instead of two.’

It was a temporary house I had found for about two weeks.

If I had known it would turn out like this, I would have been more thorough in finding one.

No, even two beds would have been fine.

“You can just sleep next to them. You usually sleep together anyway.”

“Do you think three people can sleep in this bed?”

“……I guess not.”

One in the master bedroom.

One in my room.

The sizes of the two bedrooms were not the same.

The master bedroom’s bed was larger than usual because three people were sleeping in it.

On the other hand, my bed wasn’t that big. Of course, it was larger than average to support my tail while sleeping, but it wasn’t designed for three people to sleep in.

Whatever the case, I had no place to sleep.

Then I’ll have to stay up all night. What else can I do?

I opened the door and left the room.

Then Baek Hyuna asked in a small voice.

“Where are you going? Are you going outside at this hour?”

I told her as she carefully pulled the blankets up to the children’s chests.

“No, I’m just going to the basement for a bit.”

“The basement? You know you can’t make too much noise down there, right? Even if you’ve treated it with 「Soundproofing Magic」, the kids might wake up if the screams are too loud.”

“Do you think I’m doing live experiments in the basement or something?”

Her eyes were sincere.

Before closing the door.

I added a word to clear up Baek Hyuna’s misunderstanding.

“You can’t call it a live experiment if you’re experimenting on already dead guys. That’s just a lump of meat.”

“…….”

Shouldn’t have added that?

* * *

This house has a basement.

That was the biggest reason I temporarily contracted this house.

A deep and wide basement. An essential space for a magician for experiments.

‘Usually, basements are used for managing reagents where humidity and temperature control are important, or for manipulating magic that changes when used in specific environments.’

In my case, it’s for isolation.

To be precise, I secured a basement to isolate and experiment on the subject.

“I’m glad it doesn’t smell rotten. It’s hard to ventilate here.”

I moved the wooden floor and climbed down the ladder to the basement below. It took almost two minutes to climb down before I could set foot on the basement floor.

Anyway, this space.

‘It’s obvious that this is an illegally expanded space. What was the person who built this house thinking?’

It’s practically a beast’s heart.

It’s so deep that you have to climb down a ladder for two minutes straight to reach it.

Despite that height, the basement was quite large. It was about the same size as the house above.

Maybe the designer was quite the madman.

However, what’s in front of me is no less crazy.

Maybe it’s ridiculous to compare.

I stared at the ‘thing’ that couldn’t move in the basement.

“The person who made this underground space would be horrified if they knew that something like this was brought into the space they created.”

Twisted. A form in which all sorts of shapes, bones, and organs were twisted to the fullest.

Who could look at this and think it was a living thing?

If it didn’t move as if it were breathing, I would have thought it was a grotesque sculpture in a bizarre museum.

“Yeah, who would look at this and think it’s a demon.”

These were demons.

They were now made of a single mass of flesh, but just a few days ago, they were noble-class demons armed with powerful authority and titles.

For reference, their twisted appearance was not intentional on my part.

They changed like that on their own.

“It doesn’t seem like they changed voluntarily.”

The corpses of the demons were neatly stored in the space within the ring.

By eating the demons who were granted the ‘name’ of the nobles of the demons, one can inherit their authority and titles.

That’s why I bothered to transport the corpses all the way here.

When I took them out of the ring, the corpses began to merge like that.

That’s when they turned into something like dough that had just started to be kneaded to make bread.

‘They’re so mixed up that I can’t even disassemble them.’

Surprisingly, the number of nobles I killed in Germany exceeded 10.

Exactly 13.

That’s a significant number removed from the 72 nobles that exist.

It’s a good thing that I killed many future enemies. However, even if I wanted to experiment on specific reactions from the corpse of 「Purson」, I can’t tell what his flesh is because his limbs and organs have moved everywhere.

‘No, should I just assume that there is no flesh of his?’

The fact that the corpses are twisted and mixed means that their bodies have become a new ‘individual.’

To put it simply, what I want is the flesh of 「Purson」, but as 13 demons mixed together, the flesh also became one.

The flesh of 「Purson」 no longer exists.

There is only the jumbled flesh of the twisted dough.

“It’s hard to proceed with the experiment like this, should I just give up?”

This mass is no longer 「Purson」 or 「Vepar」.

Just a mass that used to be a demon.

I couldn’t find any more value in it.

In this case, I should incinerate it, though it’s a waste.

Tuk, tuk.

I walked around the basement and lit a small spark at the tip of my finger.

Pong─!

A very small spark.

Just as I was about to incinerate the mass with a spark the size of a fingerprint.

───────!!!!

A strange sound was heard.

It wasn’t a sound that affected the eardrums.

It was just a strange sound.

The problem is that it keeps being heard.

“……What is it?”

I looked around.

At first, I thought I had misheard.

Nothing was caught by my extremely developed senses.

But the strange sound kept coming.

Nevertheless, my senses couldn’t find the cause. This isn’t someone’s prank or voice.

It wasn’t a strange sound like when closing an old door, or a sound from the aging basement facilities. If it were such a sound, there’s no way I wouldn’t have found the cause.

That means.

“Did this lump of flesh make the sound?”

No way.

A guy who hasn’t even made a single breath sound so far because all the sound-producing mouths are mixed up is making a sound.

That’s impossible.

───────!!!!

“……That makes sense.”

As if to shatter my thoughts head-on, a strange sound was heard again. This time, I properly sensed where it came from.

Because it was mixed with an unpleasant breath.

‘……Nasal cavity. It was a sound made with the nostrils?’

I looked up at him with a dumbfounded expression.

I already knew that he was breathing.

It was a mass of corpses that had been combined, but it contracted and expanded periodically as if the lungs were moving.

It was proof that he was breathing.

But even plants breathe.

The fact that he’s breathing doesn’t mean that things are happening as we think. The foundation of that mass was a corpse that had already died, so the brain and muscles were all dead.

There was no magic power or demonic energy.

So I was just leaving it alone.

‘If that thing is breathing and making sounds that didn’t exist before with its nostrils.’

The story changes slightly.

There’s no reason to leave him alone.

But there’s no reason to experiment, and there was something wasteful about incinerating him.

“─There’s a reason to experiment.”

Swish.

I stretched out my hands to both sides as if I were receiving a scalpel from a doctor.

At the same time, a wave of red magic power arose from my whole body.

The wave had a considerable heat, and the moment it brushed against the surroundings, it eliminated miscellaneous germs and dust with heat.

Cheok, the outstretched hand was folded back, and the moment it was folded back, a blade that looked like a small carving knife was held in my hand. It looked like a scalpel at first glance, but it was an object made with magic.

The moment I cut the flesh with that blade.

Chiiiik─!

The smoke that spewed out when the flesh was cut.

It wasn’t coming out by cutting the body of the thing, but it was smoke that came out at the same time as the flesh was cut and cooked.

I thought while cutting the outside of the mass.

‘When I think about it carefully, I’ve never seen the inside of him.’

Until now, I’ve only been looking at the grotesque parts of the outside and thinking about confining him in the basement.

I was thinking of preserving and studying him as a specimen someday, but I never imagined that he would make such a sound.

‘I wonder what the inside looks like?’

Holding the inquisitiveness as a magician, I cut the inside.

As I removed all the parts that barely maintained the shape of the limbs, like the limbs of a degenerated human, the stagnant blood flowed out.

Gurgle, gurgle.

The black blood poured out like a fountain.

I wondered if it was because the corpse had been left for too long that it became like this.

Or if the corpses of demons were originally like this, but the moment I checked the space inside the mass after all the internal blood had drained, a current flashed through my mind.

This unidentified mass and strange sound, black blood.

I realized what these meant.

“……The demons’ titles are inherited by ingestion.”

But let’s think about it the other way around.

If you can’t eat it, can’t you inherit it?

The answer to that is clear.

……Inheritance is impossible.

However, I have no choice but to express my difficulty in the question of whether what can be ingested is limited to the body.

Because this is a land where magic and mystery exist. It is also a place where souls exist. That is to say.

“……You’re thinking of forcibly squeezing out and ingesting these guys’ souls.”

The traces of the soul left in the body, Baek (魄) [In Taoism, the *Po* are the corporeal souls associated with the body and death].

He’s planning to stimulate this from a distance and forcibly bring it in, and then inherit the title by ingesting that soul.

I don’t know who did it, but you thought well.

The idea is good. But conversely, did you consider that this idea might inspire me?

The shadows rippled and began to envelop the huge mass of flesh. Soon the shadows transformed into sharp thorns and teeth.

The shadow itself seemed to have turned into a huge mouth.

“If you’ve set the table like this, it’s only natural to eat deliciously.”

The souls that you’ve prepared to ingest.

I’ll taste it first.

“I will enjoy the meal.”