Chapter 137: Thou Shalt Not Plagiarize

Celeste showed the way as Melisandre followed behind her while they made their way to Magna’s room.

Renna and Rowena had already left them, as they didn’t want to make the place crowded.

As they walked, they soon arrived in front of a room with a maid waiting patiently by the door.

"Lady Celeste." The maid immediately greeted them as she opened the door for them without even knocking.

As soon as the door opened and Celeste entered, her face changed at what she saw.

Magna was still lying on the bed, his entire body covered in bandages and lying motionless.

But his entire body was covered with colorful drawings of many flowers, insects, trees, and many more crude drawings of things that were hard to recognize.

Even his face wasn’t spared, as his cheeks were bright red with paint.

There was a huge animal resembling a cow drawn on his forehead, while the tip of his nose looked as if an insect had landed on it.

"Mother?" Faye cried out in alarm, immediately hiding the colored pencil behind her back when she was suddenly caught.

Celeste couldn’t help but laugh when she saw her daughter’s guilty face after being caught red-handed. "Faye, can you give Magna and Lady Melisandre a little private time?"

Faye nodded and scrambled off the bed. She gathered the colored pencils scattered across the room like she was clearing evidence from a crime scene, then bolted through the door.

"Sorry for that," Celeste said apologetically as she looked at Melisandre.

"She is a creative child." Melisandre also laughed as she walked inside.

Before leaving, Celeste stepped inside to introduce her. "Magna, this is Lady Melisandre from the Tower. She’s here to speak with you."

She didn’t ask if it would be appropriate or if he even wanted to speak with the woman who had nearly killed him not long ago.

But the helpless look on her face explained everything, so Magna simply accepted it. "It’s okay."

Celeste gave him a warm smile before leaving the room and closing the door, leaving the two of them alone.

Melisandre began walking slowly around the room, scanning every detail, before abruptly saying. "I heard you like to play games."

’So she learned.’ Magna understood at that moment why she was here.

He didn’t care about that. It was actually in his favor if Melisandre started seeing him as some kind of genius.

Knowing that only talented and intelligent people had worth in the Tower, Magna felt that he wouldn’t be treated like just any slave in that place if he showed himself to be above average.

"I do." He answered simply.

After looking outside at the cemetery for a while, Melisandre finally turned around and started looking at the boy’s bandage-covered body.

"The training you were doing outside when I came. Was that also a game you came up with?"

She had been quite interested in the scene she saw when she first came to Winterborne Estate.

The maids throwing fruits at him while he cut them all with his swords was very similar to the training programs in the Tower for Shadows.

The fact that a child like him had come up with such an idea to train himself was quite amazing.

"Yeah. I call it Fruit Ninja." Magna didn’t deny it, even saying the game’s name.

He actually didn’t think it was a revolutionary invention, as it was an old game from Earth that wasn’t even that popular anymore.

But in this world, even an outdated idea like that would surely still be seen as a brilliant invention.

"Fruit Ninja, huh?" Melisandre murmured while walking closer.

She sat on the edge of the bed, leaning her back against the headboard as she looked at him closely. "Do you have any more games like that?"

She stared at him with intense focus, inspecting every feature of his face before her eyes settled on his golden pair.

Magna felt awkward being examined so closely, but his mind dwelled on something else as he became confused about why she kept talking about games.

Feeling a little tense as she was so close to him, her eyes directly looking into his, he answered a little evasively. "Games for training or fun?"

Melisandre paused for a moment before answering with a laugh. "For training. But if it’s also fun, it’s extra points."

She was actually trying to see if Magna could invent some new kind of training method for Shadows.

He had already proven his brilliant mind with 3 games so far, 1 for Shadow training and 2 for bloodlines, which had proved very useful. So if the boy had more ideas like those in his extraordinary mind, they could surely be used in the Tower in the future.

If he provided more useful ideas for the Tower, he would be used not only for his muscles but for his brain as well, to invent new training methods for future generations.

But what she wasn’t expecting was that Magna instantly understood and exposed her real interest as he asked bluntly.

"You want to plagiarize my game ideas to use them to teach others?"

Plagiarizing was what Magna hated the most, as his game ideas had been stolen more than once by others and published under different names on platforms with little to no changes.

Melisandre, who had been trying to approach Magna while thinking he was just a kid, now understood that she had been wrong. "So you are one of those kinds."

There were many kinds of geniuses she had met and communicated with so far.

The shy type, who was usually hard to speak with.

The obsessive type, who spent all their intelligence on a single subject and wasted their full potential.

The arrogant type, who saw everyone around them as insects, and so on.

But among them, the one she had found most interesting so far was the detached type, who viewed people not as living beings, but as cold numbers and raw variables.

In a way, Magna was someone like that, usually seeing the people around him as NPCs.

He always looked at people first, trying to understand the character lore behind them and the mechanics of their speech, movements, and behavior.

He analyzed them to find the hidden quests they had within themselves and, instead of uncovering them through long monologues, he would simply ask them directly most of the time to get straight to the point.

Magna, though, wasn’t aware of his own personality as he asked in confusion, "What kind?"

Melisandre became more and more interested in the boy as she laughed and answered with amusement. "The kind my master hates the most."