Chapter 214: The Secret Scroll of Lesser Malignancy

I hesitated for a brief moment before making a decision.

Then I raised my hand and gestured toward my basilisk.

— Go over to that corner.

The enormous basilisk obeyed immediately. It crawled toward one end of the cave and, under my command, began spitting out an absurd amount of dirt, gravel, weeds, broken vines, roots, and all kinds of debris that had accumulated inside it.

Before long, a huge pile of filth had formed in front of me.

I rolled up my sleeves and began searching carefully.

Raticati had already woken up some time ago and, to my surprise, was crouching beside me, using his tiny hands to move aside dirt, stones, and roots. He seemed quite skilled at that kind of dirty work.

After rummaging through practically everything, I finally found three objects that caught my attention.

The first was a magical ring capable of instantly releasing a powerful beam of light.

The second was a magical glove that increased the efficiency of meditation related to the light element.

The third was a magical wand made of Arnystone.

I picked up all three objects and examined them carefully.

All of them were pieces of equipment intended for acolytes of the light element.

In other words, they were perfectly suited for me.

The problem was that I already possessed the Staff of the Brightest Light.

After obtaining that staff, the benefits provided by these three objects had decreased considerably.

Still... I had no intention of simply throwing them away.

I gritted my teeth and carefully placed the three items on top of the Draconic Spirit Book.

Then I heard the voice of the draconic spirit.

I needed twenty.

I was only one point short.

I quickly began rummaging through my storage belt and waist pouch.

There were a few items that could be used as substitutes, but none of them seemed suitable enough to reach the required value.

As for the others...

I simply couldn’t bring myself to hand them over.

Just then, something fell onto the pile beside me. It was a blue object, shaped somewhat like a goose egg, which had just fallen among the stones.

My gaze locked onto it.

I picked up the object and placed it on the book.

— Twenty points.

— You have reached the upper limit required to open the Draconic Spirit Book.

— The book will now begin to open!

An ancient and majestic aura emanated from the book, and countless magical matrices began to appear across its cover.

The matrices began to disintegrate.

Crack...

One after another, they shattered and disappeared.

When their presence finally vanished completely, the true magical book appeared before my eyes.

Now I finally understood why it was called the Draconic Spirit Book.

The book itself had never truly been the Draconic Spirit Book.

The draconic spirit was merely the guardian who had hidden the book’s true contents.

To read it, I had to fulfill the requirement established by the ancient contract.

Now that I had reached the maximum requirement, the draconic spirit had received what was owed to it.

And, after fulfilling its purpose, it had disappeared from this world.

The true book was finally in my hands.

Despite containing no more than thirty pages, it was surprisingly heavy.

It weighed somewhere between three and four kilograms.

I slowly ran my finger across the rough surface of the cover.

Then something unexpected happened.

White draconic flames began to condense over the leather.

The flames slowly gathered together and formed words.

I immediately recognized that they were written in the ancient language.

The Secret Scroll of Lesser Malignancy.

Since I had opened the book by fulfilling the maximum requirement, a strange sense of familiarity began to fill my mind the moment I held it.

I connected my mana to the book.

Flap.

The pages began turning on their own.

The further I progressed, the more incredulous I became.

The Secret Scroll of Lesser Malignancy was not simply a spellbook.

It was practically a complete encyclopedia of curse magic.

It recorded everything from the origins of curse magic to its evolution and spread throughout history.

There were detailed records of ancient ceremonies, methods for constructing curses, and even complete procedures for creating cursed dolls.

But that still wasn’t the most terrifying part.

The book also contained an absurd number of ancient curses.

Some of them were so bizarre that even I felt a shiver run down my spine.

Vessel of Torment, Blood Blight, Exorcism of the Great Contagion, Reaper’s Touch, Genius of the Epidemic.....

Those names alone were enough to make anyone uncomfortable.

But the real problem lay in the required materials.

They weren’t rare treasures or precious minerals.

They were... humans. More precisely, a huge number of humans, their souls, and their flesh.

The Scroll seemed to teach, step by step, an extremely simple method for creating the Vessel of Torment.

It then explained how to use the Exorcism of the Great Contagion to produce a pestilence capable of exterminating every living being on an entire continent.

But it didn’t end there.

The different variants of the pestilence could be gathered together, refined, and fused.

And, at the end of this process, something even more terrifying would emerge.

The Ruin Dragon was a warrior created specifically to serve the owner of the Scroll.

A creature capable of carrying the pestilence wherever it went.

Wherever it was sent, death would spread.

Living beings that did not possess adequate magical defenses simply would not be able to resist.

And the most frightening part was that the pestilence contained a small percentage of the very Origin Rules of Lesser Malignancy.

That wasn’t simply a disease.

It was a weapon of mass destruction.

In the ancient era, the Ruin Dragon had been used as one of the Mages’ greatest weapons of war.

When a Lower World was considered too problematic for conventional intervention, the Mages would often simply send a Ruin Dragon.

After that?

They waited for a month.

That was all they needed.

When they returned, the entire world would already be consumed by death.

Wandering souls would roam the land.

All living beings would have disappeared.

And the Mages could simply collect whatever resources and materials they wanted.

It was far more efficient than sending a massive army of Mages to confront their enemies one by one and spending months or years suppressing rebellions.

My throat went dry because this was so terrifying.

But there was a consequence.

A consequence that the ancient Mages apparently did not ignore.

This method was simply too evil.

By completely exterminating all living beings in a World, they would also destroy that World’s very Will.

After all, the World’s Will was formed from the union of the wills of the material world and the living creatures that existed within it.

If everything died...

The World’s Will would die as well.

And when that happened, those who possessed the Ruin Dragon could receive the curse of the destroyed World’s Will.

They would be marked as enemies of that World.

And that mark did not end there.

A Mage who was recognized as an enemy of a World would begin to receive the hatred of the very World Wills themselves.

Even the World where he had been born could reject him.

I imagined the situation.

I entered some random world.

The next instant, everything would be trying to kill me.

Wave after wave of enemies would advance without fear of death until one side was completely destroyed.

I slowly closed the book and remained silent for several seconds.

For the first time since finding the book, I could no longer hide my excitement.

I needed to study this.

Not to simply copy all those atrocities.

But because knowledge of that level could contain something extremely valuable.

— Biochip.

[Beep.]

— Make a complete copy of the book’s contents.

— Store everything in my memory.

— Then organize the data and begin a detailed analysis.

The Biochip began working.

It was then that I discovered something that surprised me even more.

The Scroll could be used as a spellbook.

I discovered that there was a secret space within it.

And that space could store six spell models.

This meant that, while holding the book, I could use six spells stored inside it almost instantaneously.

Of course, there was a condition.

I would need to store the spell models in the book first.

Isn’t this practically a cache?

My Biochip possessed a similar function.

I could solidify spell models and store them for later use.

The difference was that the book accomplished something similar by using an independent magical space.

I couldn’t help but smile in admiration.

The ancient Mages were truly impressive.

I had imagined that the technique of storing spell models was something only I possessed.

But this world had already developed a similar technique in an ancient era.

The main difference was that the models stored in the book would disappear after being used.

Even so... I had just obtained an extremely useful magical piece of equipment.

After all, without needing to spend my own mana to cast the stored spells, I could unleash an instantaneous sequence of six attacks.

...

1530 Words