Free Web NovelChapter 124: Magicules (Part 1)
A day passed after Victor Shieldman returned from his trip to Naeross Island.
Due to her busy schedule with a patent delivery, Mari Dundragon couldn’t assist Victor until after lunch, which resulted in Victor staying at Selvarum Manor for a while during the day.
After some time away and some time back, the mansion did not seem as gloomy to him as it had on that strange early morning. Still, Victor didn’t feel very accepted in this place by people other than Luisa, so he waited for Mari to finish what she had to do while he wandered around her lab.
"The intruder can’t touch this!" Wiggen said, pulling a crystal out of Victor’s hand.
Victor didn’t fight for the crystal, as it was just a simple heat crystal, so when he let go of it, Wiggen fell on his butt on the table, holding the crystal.
Next, Victor glanced at a bookshelf and felt captivated by a nice, thick book, but when he attempted to remove the book from the shelf, the heat crystal suddenly flew towards him and struck his shoulder.
"The intruder can’t move!" Wiggen reprimanded Victor again. So it was clear that the fairy just wanted to pick on the hunter.
Victor took a deep breath, looked at Mari, who was busy working at a table, and asked:
"This dwarf who mistook himself for an axolotl cub doesn’t know that I can kill him with one finger, does he?"
’Kill...?’ Wiggen was startled.
Mari laughed, obviously thinking it was a joke. "Victor, please be patient with Wiggen. He’s just repeating the behavior I had with him when he first arrived here at the mansion. He was much smaller, then many things could hurt him. Bear with him a little longer. I’m almost done here."
"All right, there’s no need to hurry."
Instead of exploring the lab further, Victor leaned back on a nearby table, crossed his arms, and waited patiently. He didn’t want to irritate Wiggen anymore.
But when Victor looked at Wiggen again, he noticed that he had suddenly disappeared from view. Soon he heard a low growl and found Wiggen under the table where Mari was working, looking at Victor with a mixture of fear and anger. They didn’t get along very well.
Victor couldn’t help but smile wryly. This little mutant axolotl, who had once been so confident, was now hiding like a frightened child. It was kind of cute.
Victor shrugged and tried to find some comfort in waiting. Finally, after a few minutes that seemed like an eternity, Mari stood up and wiped her hands on a cloth.
She turned to Victor with a tired but satisfied smile. "There. Now we can talk."
Victor crossed his arms and approached her. "So, what have you been doing that has kept you so busy?"
Mari put the cloth aside. "I was finishing a very important project for a partner shop of the Selvarum Company. A very complex magical protection amulet to protect a shed containing several expensive artifacts. I had to make sure all the runes were properly aligned before I powered it up, but it should work now."
She reached out to pick up the amulet from the table, an artifact that looked a lot like an old pocket watch. Mari turned the central mechanism, revealing a small fragment of blue crystal inside the object. Then the six small runes engraved on the metal of the artifact began to glow, and a barrier enveloped them.
"Impressive," Victor admitted.
Many mages knew about protective spells that created barriers and were able to use them. However, Victor had never heard of an artifact that could create such a magical barrier; no wonder large cities and fortresses used mages to create them.
If artifacts like the one Mari had created were more famous and studied, a world where small towns and villages were protected by magical barriers wouldn’t be so far away.
"Thank you, Victor. It’s a really interesting project, but it takes up a lot of my time. Well, you have what I asked for, right?"
Victor nodded and pulled a small leather pouch out of his cloak. The pouch was a magical artifact, a bottomless pouch. He loosened the drawstring and dipped his hand inside, feeling the familiar touch of cold glass. freewebnovel.cσ๓
"Yes, I did it," he said, carefully pulling out a glass vial from inside the pouch.
The vial contained a translucent liquid, with a piece of the Moon Squid’s brain, or rather, the dreaded Devourer of Ships, floating inside.
Mari’s face flushed slightly, and she gasped, with her eyes wide with admiration at the sight of the precious item in her hands.
"You really have a Moon Squid brain..." she murmured in amazement as she gently took the vial from Victor’s hands. Her fingers trembled with excitement as she analyzed every detail of the vial. "You’re amazing, Victor!"
Victor smiled humbly. "It was a tough fight, but nothing I couldn’t handle. Besides, I had extra motivation knowing you needed it."
"You have no idea how much that means to me, Victor." Mari said, her eyes still fixed on the vial as if she couldn’t believe she finally had the item in her hands.
Moon Squid brains were so rare that they could be sold for a small fortune each, but since the piece Victor picked up wasn’t that big, it was probably worth a few dozen gold coins, enough for someone to buy a house, for example.
"I’m glad to hear that, Mari. But tell me, what exactly are you going to do with this brain?"
Mari carefully placed the jar on a table and explained:
"Let me start at the beginning, Victor... Well, as everyone knows, Moon Squids are very intelligent and complex magical sea monsters. The seabed is very little explored, there’s still a lot to be discovered about these and other types of monsters, but like all other monsters, Moon Squids are believed to be created by a high concentration of magicules."
"Magicules? What are you talking about? What is that?"
At that moment, Mari turned to Victor with a look of surprise and confusion. "What do you mean you don’t know what ’magicules’ are?"
"I’m sorry. I haven’t heard any academic news about magic in the last twenty years. The only things the hunters who visited my little tavern talked about were the wars in the far south and the monsters they killed the day before."
"I see... So please sit down, hero. There are a few things you need to be brought up to speed on."
