"Tell me, why did you help her? Sympathy? Boredom?" a female voice sounded—she was clad in a revealing black dress whilst long ebony hair flowed down her back. A black veil covered her face. 

"Neither," I answered. 

"Then why? Why would you save her from those humans? It's her own fault for falling in love with that foolish man. Even I'm disgusted. A witch together with a human—bleh. She was totally underselling herself. I would've let her die!"

"Should a mother talk about her children like that?" I asked her mockingly. 

"Pshaw! What are you even saying? Why should I see them as my offsprings? And what about you, huh? Eternal is about to create those filthy creatures, Nari wages war with the spirit-kins on another continent, and don't forget about Lyra and her fanatic followers of the Holy Sea."

I leaned my head to the right for a moment and then to the left. "I'm more like a creator. I didn't really raise them like a mother would. You, on the other hand, breastfed them, told them stories, gave them love, and so on and so forth."

"Oh, um, well...yes, I did that. Nonetheless, they don't even know who I am, so it really doesn't matter in the end. But yours know who you are...at least your current fo—"

"You talk too much, Calypso," I replied and cut her off mid-sentence. "After all this time, you're still blabbering non-stop. So lemme finally answer your question before you talk even more: It's about spicing up this little game of ours a tiny bit. She will loathe humanity now and, in the long run, do things that will work out in my favor. 

"And then," I continue my explanation, pirouetting in between, "step by step, humanity will be wiped off the face of the world. What could be more enjoyable than that?" I asked and began to laugh hysterically.

Calypso rubbed her temples. "You're totally mad; you grasp that, right?"

I stopped every motion and turned—void of any expression—to her. "I'm highly reasonable, thank you!" 

She just shooked her head. "Whatever. Anyway, you should lay low for a while. The others aren't too pleased about your direct interference. You remember our rules?"

"Yes, yes. Will you lot ever stop being buzzkills? But oh well, ok. After all, they're not only spoiling my fun. I promise you, one day, I'll find a solution to this little stalemate of ours."

Even behind her veil, I could feel her eyes sparkling at me. Then, a rift in space appeared behind her. She slowly floated in backward, still gazing at me as she did so, and stated, "I'm looking forward to it, my love."

 

---

 

I walked down the right corridor of the third floor of this fifth-story mansion to one of the library entrances. It had more than one entrance because it stretched from the first to the current floor and took approximately thirty percent of this whole building. So, by human standards, it was rather large for something built into a living area. I'd heard that this library was placed first among every other private mansion in the royal district but only ranked sixth in the entire city. The fifth went to the Grand Public Library, in the south-eastern of the town. But the head maid had also told me that the administration couldn't choose between the one in the academy and the castle when it came to the first place. Both apparently contained secrets that should always be hidden to puny peasants—that info could definitely be useful to me one day. 

Honestly, I was surprised by how professionally the head maid worked. Even when left alone with the other maids, she maintained her working attitude and admonished everyone who even slightly slandered one of my girls. This didn't stop them from doing so as soon as she left, but at least she tried earnestly. Still, she couldn't hide her contempt completely. Not for the three demonesses, no, for the other maids themselves. It didn't matter how hard she tried to hide it, but I knew her little secret—wouldn't spill it, of course...at least not till it became a good way to blackmail her. 

As I reached the door, two knights—who stood guard in front of the entrance—blocked it by crossing their halberds. They glared at me with blatant disdain. Oh, I forgot. Those are new knights that just got assigned here today, so nobody probably briefed them yet—what a headache.

"Halt!" the right-standing one commanded. "This place is only permitted to the Lord of the house or his distinguished guests."

With a sneer, the younger one added, "Not for filthy whores like you. Go to the others downstairs and stay there. We do not want to use force."

I sighed. "Sometimes, I wonder where this arrogance of you humans comes from. It doesn't matter how lacking you are; you still try to elevate yourself unjustly."

"Huh!? What was that you runt? Did your Madam never teach you how to act respectfully in front of potential customers?" the young one stated. 

"Looks like we need to educa—" the other knight began but stopped after hearing the shouts of someone behind me. 

"Mistress Asche, I'd forgotten to give you the list of books I was supposed to find in advance," exclaimed the head maid, slightly out of breath after her short sprint. 

She handed me the list and took a sight-glance at the knights. Then she asked, "Did they do something wrong? They seem somewhat freaked out."

"I think they mistook me for someone else, I guess. I don't know who manages the security of this mansion, but tell the one responsible that they are dead if this kind of blunder happens again. Replace these two with competent ones and kick them off my property."

 

Shocked, the head maid stepped a few feet away before she bowed down and apologized for their rude behavior. After ordering them to follow her, I was left alone in front of the library. The only reason why they didn't die on the spot was that all floors were only recently cleaned. Even if I loathed humans, I still had a certain respect for the maid's profession. Anyway, let's finally enter. 

-------

It took a while to find the exact location of all the books on the list. Most of them were tales, folklore, or simple romance stories. They probably held no relevant information, but this wasn't their purpose. The earring required patterns of written languages to finally work as intended. The documents I saw in the old man's room and in my own office already created a frame of the overall language but were still far from enough. 

So, while I sat down on one of the many comfortable chairs—or would it be more reasonable to call them armchairs—I opened the first book and began to read. It was an old collection of Märchen. I couldn't understand all of them, but I got the gist. One story was about a young girl that played with matches. Her cats warned her about them but to no avail. In the end, she burned to ashes, and her cats—Maunz and Munz—mourned about her death. Another was supposedly about two mischievous young boys who played many hoaxes. As a result, both of them got ground in the mill by an angered farmer, and their remains were eaten by his goose.

I closed the book and took another one.

After I repeated that action for some time, my magical device finally made some progress. But, unfortunately, those books slowly bored me out. The last three I've read were about reincarnated girls reborn as the villainess of the last love novel they'd read. I honestly liked the concept, but those girls always turned out to be stupid and naive. Always falling in love with some kind of second male lead or the supposedly 'evil' antagonist. As soon as he entered the stage, the female lead transformed into a weak damsel in distress, always needed to be rescued—over and over again. Even if she was, according to her backstory, totally bad-ass and way stronger than anyone in this world, she stood no chance against the actual male lead of the story. I tried to figure out if these stories were written by a male or female author, but their names never revealed anything. 

A change of pace was called for, so I browsed randomly through the bookshelves. Among all of those books, I somehow found a hidden gem that looked relatively old. It was wrapped in a special type of leather, which had the old elvish words 'Mysteries of the ancient World' engraved in black letters on the spine. I flipped through the book's pages till I saw a particular section—'The Old Ones'.

I cleared my throat and exclaimed, "In a world o' scary beast, where every creature is a feast, the elders lurk asleep, in the ghastliest endless deeps.  

—The Watcher of the Evergreen Forest"

I already could tell that this so-called Watcher barely knew anything at all about them. But I kept reading nonetheless.

"The elders, more commonly known as the Old Ones, are the most ancient creatures known to us. It is said that they have unparalleled power and wisdom. However, it is a mystery where they came from or how old they really are. Some historians rumor that they might even have existed since the beginning of the world." Not entirely accurate, but oh well, who cares. I'm positively surprised that they didn't erase every trail of them after those gods and goddesses came.  

I turned to the next page and noticed that they actually created a name list. A hint of nostalgia filled my soul. How long hadn't I thought about the others?

The first written name was Leviathan, 'The one that rivals gods'—so Levia earned a new title, huh? The Dragon of the Endless Storms was the next one. He had the same name as always and probably still resided on his flying island with his zealots. Then there were the twins Rialla and Dira, who once created a whole island during one of their quarrels. After them came the Mother of Origin, also known as the First Elemental or how I called her: the stuck-up bitch. Xiezhi, that justice-loving bastard, and Amaroth were listed next. I had to chuckle at the following name because it got changed as well. Calypso, 'The Witch of Cataclysm'. What was wrong with her first title, 'Witch of the End'? Did she angered the new divine beings, or what? As I looked at the last name, my mood began to darken. Those bastards...they really did it. The last name I had in front of my eyes was 'The Forgotten One'.

Ok, ok, don't freak out about a name change in a totally unimportant stupid elven book. Admittedly, my presence as an Old One was never that prominent. Sooo, it's only natural that those  fucktards lovely people forgot my name, but not my existence. Yes, yes, this must be it, and there will never ever be another reason for me to look into this book again. My, oh my, the book just randomly burned to ashes. What a coincidence!

With the book out of the way After this minor accident, I continued to read through the pile of books that still lay where I left them. I didn't know why, but the progress of the transcription magic advanced very slowly. So I decided to fasten up the pace by simultaneously open two hundred books with magic and read them all at once. Well, what I was doing couldn't be called reading anymore, but rather merely recognizing the outlines of the words. So from that perspective, I wouldn't have had to read the words from the beginning. However, I preferred the whole procedure to be done in a relaxed manner. Unfortunately, the device probably got a bug over the millennia, which is why the transcription and memorization of the written language required so much time. Still, even with this method, it took nearly an hour to wrap things up.  

Finally able to fully understand even more complicated books, I reached for the first one on my pile, which had to do with magic. Already on the first page in the summary were terms I'd never heard of, like sorcery. 

Supposedly, people who practiced magic are called sorcerers. They are trained at an academy or other places that offer magic courses. In order to cast spells and the related magic at all, they must first learn how to create the appropriate formulas and calculate how much mana must be simultaneously infused into the spell for it to be successfully cast without causing problems. Since sorcerers couldn't create mana themselves or accumulate it in one place, they needed a source or medium to accomplish this. 

Mages, on the other hand, have the ability to manipulate mana, but in order to convert it into magic, they must learn, create and chant spells. It could also happen that certain ingredients are needed to cast certain spells. For example, the summoning of a skeleton required either a beforehand created rune or a bone. Rune mages were apparently in another category unto themselves. Mages are also taught differently than sorcerers. While a sorcerer will never really learn the art of magic, a mage could always become a sorcerer. There also seemed to be a Class called 'wizards'. Unfortunately, there were no more detailed descriptions of them. 

However, there was also something like the Manaborn, who are naturally gifted with the ability to not only manipulate mana and store it, but also to generate it themselves to a vast degree. They had a natural talent to transform their mana into certain affinities with which they were associated and linked and create their own magic and spells without any difficulty. Hemomancers belong within this category, even if they are still somewhat unique in nature.  

The problem is that only half of what is written in these books makes any sense to me at all, since it is all somehow connected to the System. Therefore, I couldn't really make any accurate conclusion about it. Hence, I put the book aside for the time being because the knowledge—as soon as I am actually in the System—made much more sense in the future than it did now.  

But trying to find specific books about the System turned out to be a dead-end because all the books here already assumed that you were in it. So I had to think of a new approach or quickly start my own experiments with souls and explore under what conditions and how someone could gain access to the System. It would probably be easier, in the beginning, to see if I could deny someone's access rather than first finding an explanation that might benefit me. 

I had read in one paragraph that every being was already in the System from birth. However, the question arose whether this would mean that the soul first needed a vessel or if it already had a connection to it before entering a being. Another book struck me at that thought, which talked about the summonings of heroes from other worlds, which were integrated afterward in the System. So there was likely a possibility of integrating a soul—which was already in a body and grew up outside of the System—into this world. But to what extent this had to do with the incantation formula and the influence of the gods themselves wasn't determinable. Nevertheless, I would love to glimpse this so-called hero summoning, but this was a well-kept secret, according to the books. I kinda had the feeling that there was no other choice but to break into either the library of the academy or palace, where it was guaranteed that in some secret high-security section, this knowledge was lying around in a beautiful book.

Although I was already sure of one thing: the way to success was somehow through my soul magic. Moreover, I was curious if I could end up sneaking into the System that way without connecting to it directly. You got the idea...controlling it a little bit from the outside. Even though I could possibly not gain any advantages by doing so, I might spoil the opportunity for others. But the brief look into the book had already shown me possibilities of, for example, improving my inventions. Nevertheless, I couldn't lose sight of my other goal—the liquid. But unfortunately, I hadn't found even an ounce of information about it in any of the books I'd read so far. Maybe a master alchemist might recognize some of the ingredients...I mean, the dwarf managed to identify a component.

-------

As I browsed through the books, already in a better mood again, I noticed one with stories about the Eternal Witch and the heroes. Then I remembered what Sophia had said. So, curiously, I opened it and began to read. I really wanted to know how the story portrayed this witch and if she really were my Eternal. However, the further I advanced, the more my mood soured. 

As it turned out, the witch and Eternal were one and the same person, but the whole construct around her was almost entirely bogus. The sword that sealed Eternal was mine and not created by any divine powers or a collaboration of wannabe protagonists. The so-called heroes weren't really heroes either. Yes, they basically came into this world similarly to me, but the events and occurrences behind them were pretty different. They were also pretty young at the time of their arrival.

Nonetheless, the more I read, the more enraged I became. In the beginning, I thought that they just hadn't found me or maybe simply forgotten about me, but it became clearer and clearer that I'd been completely removed from any story. There was no entry, no mention or allusion.

Raged, I threw the book aside and searched through others to see if I could find references to the matriarch. It would have been enough for me to read a small section about someone who united and ruled almost the entire continent. But nothing. It was as if my past had been completely erased in order to hide the truth of what really happened, but for what purpose? I mean, I disappeared only after those so-called events that ushered in the era of the gods. Nothing really made sense. What the fuck were they trying to hide? 

I could feel the fury bottling up. I tried to reason about it, but the thought that all my work accomplishments, my whole existence, were wiped out just like that didn't let me reason rationally. I wanted to vent my anger, but the beings who were clearly responsible—those charlatans who called themselves gods and goddesses—were not here. And it was pointless to just let the rage run free because I wasn't foolish enough to torpedo my own plan so early in its infancy stage. So I allowed the hate to flow through me and continuously eat me up.

With feigned composure, I put down the book I was currently holding. As I did so, though, I noticed something—my hands were transparent. 

"FUCK, YOU DAMN CHEESEDICKS!" I shouted into the room. 

I heard the echoing laughter of voices in my mind. Those bastards had set me up and used the opportunity to drown out the other signals. 

Welcome Wrath.

WeLCoMe.

WHICH HALF?

HaLF!

Wraith?

WrAITh!

ThE sIlEnT OnE.

One that thou wilt never see. 

One that thou shouldest always fear.

Hahaha

hAhAHA

...

I hate them all. I maintained those freaking seals for such a long time, and not even one full day after I left my domain, nearly two of them got broken. It's ridiculous. The world itself changed, and with it, something in it, and that something was trying to influence me. It was one hundred percent the fault of the gods, literally. Oh yeah, they will pay for all the shit they'd done. Argh, the list of beings I wanted to destroy only got longer again. 

But for now, I had another problem. This form—the Wraith—was freaking tricky to handle. I need to be careful not to break the other half of the seal. The 'Oni' was way more problematic and chaotic. The thing is tha-

A tremor went through the building and snapped me out of my train of thoughts. I smelled blood. 

WHAT.

THE.

FUCK?!