Kazar had told him to wait quietly, but Ernolf could not stay still.
He was going mad with curiosity about the cloudy white liquid being fed to the slaves who had received Living-Tissue Transplantation.
‘If it is an elixir that raises the success rate of Living-Tissue Transplantation, it will be of great help to the future world.’
Even if only to satisfy his intellectual curiosity, Ernolf had to go to the farm and identify the drug.
After waiting for the sun to set, Ernolf slipped out of the temple. He then used the body-lightening spell that Kazar had repeatedly begged him to cast, lightly vaulted over the wall, increased his movement speed, and headed straight for the farm.
In the middle of a vast rye field, livestock sheds and warehouses stood clustered together.
After examining the buildings one by one, Ernolf found the communal lodging where the slaves slept together.
Several large water barrels and a sack had been carelessly left right beside the lodging.
Ernolf approached a wooden barrel filled with the cloudy liquid, smelled it, and lightly touched the drug to the tip of his tongue.
‘Surely......’
Uneasily, he opened one of the sacks and found familiar herbs and dried monster tissue. The cloudy liquid had been made by diluting their extracts.
‘It was not an elixir. This is poison.’
It was a potent tranquilizer used to dull consciousness and suppress resistance.
It was not meant to prevent the side effects of Living-Tissue Transplantation, but rather to conceal and control those side effects.
‘They were feeding it to them so they could not rebel.’
As Ernolf covered the sack and stood, a woman’s scream came from inside the lodging.
Drawing in mana, Ernolf peered through a gap in the wooden wall.
At the entrance to the shabby lodging, which was no different from a livestock shed, a young slave was giving birth with an old woman’s help. Perhaps it was a difficult birth; the pile of straw on which the woman lay was soaked in blood.
“Aaaah!”
The laboring woman’s scream was harrowing, as though her living flesh were being torn apart and her bones crushed. Her gasps, as though her breath might stop at any moment, continued until the midwife finally lifted the baby.
Hearing the baby’s cry, two overseers approached and hurriedly peered inside.
“Damn...... Again. She gave birth to another monster!”
“Ugh, it’s disgusting. Get rid of it, quickly!”
“You do it!”
The two overseers grimaced at one another as they argued over who would take the newborn.
Ernolf was deeply shocked when he saw the baby’s appearance.
The newborn had two layers of teeth in its mouth. Its skin was bluish like a reptile’s, and one of its five fingers was attached to its wrist.
“SKREEK! SKREEE!”
Its cry sounded exactly like the noise a viper made when it tried to frighten someone.
‘That is not a human child!’
It was a monster.
At the baby’s ominous cry, that thought instinctively rose in his mind.
CLANK, CLANK, CLANK.
The slaves began murmuring, and in the darkness, the sound of heavy chains striking the floor grew steadily louder.
“What is this? Why are those things acting like that?”
The overseer backed away in fear. As though reacting to the baby’s cries, the slaves began growling strangely. Their eyes shone dully, and their faces twisted horribly. It was as though another being sleeping inside them had opened its eyes.
As he staggered backward, the overseer inspected the chains binding the slaves and the posts to which they were fastened.
The slaves wore iron chains on all four limbs, and the chains were firmly fixed to several posts. However, once several slaves stood up at the same time, he could not feel safe just because they were bound.
“H-Have those things gone mad? What is wrong with them?”
The terrified overseer muttered in a trembling voice. The monster baby he was holding upside down screamed shrilly.
The mother suddenly rose and charged at the overseer.
“Aaaah!”
The overseer screamed and ran away with the baby in his hands.
“Take me with you!”
The midwife followed behind in horror.
Her body drenched in blood, the mother pounced on the overseer and tore at him indiscriminately as he fell.
“Aaaah! Someone save me!”
The other overseer saw this and quickly splashed the diluted drug over the mother’s body.
“Urgh......”
The mother, drenched in the liquid, staggered backward. Like a beast, she held her child in one arm while bracing herself against the ground with her other hand and both legs.
“SKREEE!”
The baby in the mother’s arms bared her teeth and growled at the overseer.
“Get back. Can’t you hear me? I said, get back!”
The bloodied overseer picked up a shovel. The mother made a threatening sound when she saw it.
“SKREEK!”
“You little—!”
The mother was struck by the shovel the man swung and screamed.
As though responding to that sound, the chained slaves thrashed their bodies even more violently.
At last, several of them snapped their chains and rushed out.
“Help!”
One slave pounced on the midwife as she fled screaming, then tore at her throat like a starving beast.
PEEEEP. PEEP!
The man who had brought the water container fled into the rye field while blowing a small whistle.
The overseer who had been striking the mother with the shovel also fled after his colleague. Soon afterward, three or four slaves broke the posts and ran out of the lodging, pursuing them.
The slaves’ savage barking, the sharp whistle, and the overseers’ screams rang harshly through the darkened rye field.
Ernolf observed all of this while holding his breath.
Old ruins and dungeons were prone to becoming monster dens, so Ernolf had received much education about monsters from childhood. Yet even these beings before his eyes were unfamiliar to him.
‘Are they a species that went extinct in ancient times? Or......’
There were signs of Living-Tissue Transplantation on the mother’s body, and the other slaves were the same. Suddenly, he remembered the boy named Gilbad, who had violently smashed a toy.
‘Did they implant parts of monsters into human bodies?’
Ernolf intuited a chilling truth. This was not merely biological modification.
It was the trace of a magic forbidden across generations: ‘Cross-Species Biological Fusion,’ the Chimera Creation Art.
If the procedures conducted at the Blue Vine Temple were not human-to-human Living-Tissue Transplantation but cross-species transplantation, and the events unfolding before him were its side effects, then it would pose a grave threat to humanity.
Looking at the half-human, half-beast mother, soaked in blood from fighting the overseer, and the infant born as an entirely new species of monster, Ernolf bit his lip.
***
A short spear narrowly grazed Kazar’s hair as it flew past.
A spear carved from bone was a weapon Goblins often used. However, the one who had thrown it was not a Goblin.
A creature whose appearance was a grotesque mixture of human and monster blocked his path with a fishy grin.
“That one looks tender and delicious.”
The monsters surrounded Kazar in a circle. They snickered, saying that it had been a long time since they had tasted a young one. Though they spoke like humans, their behavior was completely monstrous.
Kazar swiftly analyzed their appearance. They were half-human, half-beast creatures with human reason and monster bodies.
The first time he had encountered this ‘Complete Form’ was eleven years later.
‘These bastards already existed eleven years ago?’
Because he had regressed fifty years, he had been confident that he knew more about the future than anyone else. It had been a major mistake.
Whether fifty years ago or now, he had only one body and could not be in every place at once. In other words, what he knew was not all of history, but only the portion he had encountered.
‘I was too arrogant.’
Kazar adjusted his grip on his blade. Before he could even move, the creature leaped forward first. Its physical reaction speed was extraordinary.
Kazar deflected the incoming spearhead with his blade and drove his heel into the creature’s solar plexus.
The creature’s body slid backward from a single Aura-laced kick.
‘Damn it, I meant to send him flying.’
The moment it regained its balance, the creature immediately counterattacked.
As Kazar redirected the creature’s stone-like fist and tried to drive his blade into its armpit, his body suddenly grew hot, and fury rose from deep within his chest.
Kazar dodged the fist flying toward his temple, drove his blade into the creature’s forearm, and cut a deep gash as he pulled it free.
“GRAAH!”
The creature screamed and clutched its arm. Kazar mocked it.
“It’ll heal in no time, so stop acting like a baby.”
Sure enough, the wound that had been streaming blood soon began to close smoothly.
“You know that, don’t you?”
The creature teasingly spun its wrist back and forth to show its fully healed arm, then smiled faintly.
Kazar smiled back, but the situation was anything but amusing.
‘Hey, Brother. I don’t know what has made you angry, but hold it in until I get there.’
The energy that had heated his body moments earlier was now cold as ice, sinking deep within him. Ernolf’s emotions were being shared with Kazar.
Kazar was worried by how his brother, who rarely ever got angry, had suddenly become so furious that his head seemed to spin with rage.
However, there were still many mountains for him to cross before he could return.
***
Meanwhile, the situation at the farm was hell itself.
“It will be a disaster if those things reach the village. Kill them all!”
The remaining slaves were clamoring to free themselves from their chains, while those who had escaped were locked in a bloody battle with the guards in the rye field.
The blood-soaked mother and the monster baby stood before Ernolf as he emerged from his hiding place.
“I know you’ve been wronged. I’ll certainly find those who made you and your child this way and hold them accountable. So......”
‘Do not resent it too much.’
Swallowing those words, Ernolf drew up mana.
The cloudy drug in the water barrels rose into the air. The liquid scattered into droplets, then compressed densely like bullets.
‘Ice Bolt.’
With a turn of his wrist, the white water froze and rained down upon the slaves and the monster mother and daughter.
As the sharp ice bullets pierced their skin, the slaves abruptly became as docile as lambs. In the place that had grown quiet as though the chaos had been a lie, Ernolf closed his eyes and chanted the next spell.
“Fire Burst.”
In an instant, enormous flames surged up and enveloped those who had fallen asleep.
An explosion rang out, the ground shook, and a hot wind swept through the area.
Staggering from the force of the wind, Ernolf quickly regained his balance and left the farm, walking into the darkness.
His eyes, heavy and sunken, were fixed on the temple blazing brightly with light.