ITIWAFRBIAHS Chapter 27

7. Misunderstanding

The rose garden blooming luxuriantly in May.

Regardless of the ugliness of the being that tended it, the exterior alone was filled with romance. However, the only emotion the man wearing Lucas Moore's appearance felt as he crossed the garden was mild irritation.

'Too far.'

This massive rose garden was nothing more than a giant trap in itself. It was like a spider's web woven with persistent and greedy determination not to let any escaped sacrifice slip away.

Traces from the era when human sacrifice flourished in the mansion.

Though now it only lingered like a vestigial organ, it seemed ready to come alive again at any moment. The ancient malice stirring to life could be felt piercing the skin at every corner of the garden. Even after long years of festering wounds and devastating downfall, the boiling hatred seemed to remain undiluted.

But now it was none of the man's concern.

Whether the Moore family ancestors had directly built this mansion in ages past, reveling in pleasures through endless human sacrifices, or whether at the end of that interminable golden age they had ultimately met catastrophic ruin through one human's self-destructive assault, or whether even after their downfall they had lingered as spirits, still parasitically inhabiting this place while changing hosts and awaiting their chance at resurrection.

And even the fact that a descendant of the very human who had brought about their destruction had walked into this mansion of his own accord, hastening his own ordained doom.

All of this might have brought tremendous upheaval to the man's childhood, but it could not disturb even a speck of the clear plan he would carry out.

Thinking of the plan improved his mood. The man headed toward the mansion's entrance with quicker steps.

Even then, he felt no emotion about the fact that he was pretending to be a fiancé in a mansion he had never set foot in before. The binding spell cast the moment he was born and let out his first cry had anesthetized his heart so it wouldn't respond to any psychological stimuli.

That spell was a kind of... quality control brand. A spell to castrate the sacrifice's emotions until that moment, in order to offer the sacrifice's first and greatest fear to the old lord.

In any case, except for the fact that the oath was a sacrifice's oath, it was honestly an extremely useful spell. The man thought of the sacrifice brand hidden beneath his gloves and reviewed his plan once more.

'Nothing needs to be revised.'

The man arrived at the entrance just as he was thinking he should seek out similar spells in other mythological texts once this affair was successfully concluded.

He suddenly recalled the day he had discovered the mythological text in the stable through sheer, incredible fortune. Though it had been half-burned and torn to pieces, the spells that remained within had enabled him to steal survival itself.

The man had used one of the spells recorded in the torn mythological text.

Deep suggestion.

A smile spread across his elegant lips.

"I've come to see my fiancée."

Beguiling one stupid, snot-nosed girl stuck at home was hardly any work at all. The man just needed to continuously give suggestions to Rose Aubert, who couldn't take her eyes off his face. As a very affectionate and trustworthy fiancé who couldn't visit often due to work.

"Have you eaten? If it's before mealtime, there's a decent restaurant nearby."

"I, I have..."

"I see. Understood."

While the ancestral spirit focused all its attention on offering that girl to the old lord here in the most brutally satisfying way possible, the man just needed to wait leisurely until the moment to realize his plan.

Should I give her a little scare?

Just then, a strange idea popped up somewhere in his head.

Had he felt annoyed with the woman who had so clearly shown that she liked the appearance of Lucas Moore from their first meeting, even before applying any suggestion, because of her bizarre taste?

Or was it because those eyes, filled with vitality that seemed disproportionate to her thin body, were strangely... unsettling?

In any case, just by stirring up a little more of the fear that anyone but a complete idiot would already be feeling in this mansion, the woman would become more dependent on him as the only outsider.

Then should he end up having to sacrifice her himself, the efficiency would be far superior. The old lords who received such offerings were invariably more pleased when the one performing the sacrifice presented something they conventionally regarded as 'close' to them—whatever the nature of that bond might be.

How that naked malice had driven its worshippers to pursue such debased efficiency.

The man himself was living proof of this.

The descendants of the Moore family who had fled to other regions after the downfall couldn't abandon their old habits and continued making human sacrifices to other old lords in those areas. However, since their family fortune had declined and there were supply problems, they began producing sacrifices in-house.

For convenience and efficiency, they mainly produced many illegitimate children, and the man was one of them. The old lord the Moore family had served until recently judged that even illegitimate children were still blood relatives, qualifying as a 'close relationship.' The illegitimate children for sacrifice were managed by numbers without names, and his number was already in the triple digits.

Of course, it was all past tense now. Now the man used the surname 'Moore,' and he was the only person who could use that name.

Emerging from his brief recollection, the man immediately put his idea into action.

Should I arrange for her to encounter the ancestral spirit that's currently parasitizing someone?

"Every time I visit, there hasn't been a day when this mansion's roses weren't beautiful, but today the garden seems especially beautiful and full of life. Is there some special method?"

He babbled about the worthless 'beauty of the garden' while provoking Rose Aubert. Thinking that this weak little snot-nose might faint if she met that spirit currently parasitizing a boy and playing at being a gardener.

And to deepen the suggestion of being her fiancé, he showered her with personal questions in an affectionate manner. Then, immediately afterward, something quite interesting happened. Rose Aubert confessed her memory loss with a troubled expression.

"Come to think of it, my memory lately... I forget many things and don't remember much from when I was young either."

At that moment, a strange inspiration flashed through the man's mind. While memory loss symptoms or madness from extreme stress and fear were common, this time it felt like an interesting opportunity.

'Should I try a drug that clouds judgment?'

A drug that would make the user misinterpret situations and make wrong choices. And with a few additional props and phenomena, she would become suspicious of everyone in the mansion.

The man quickly formulated a plan as he parted from Rose Aubert. And he began selecting words one by one to put into the letter.

Since it had started with faint malice, he didn't notice, but it was the first emotional impulse the man had ever experienced in his life.

The man could only check on Rose Aubert's condition the next night.

He had deliberately avoided crossing paths with the woman called Madam Sawyer to minimize complications. That woman appeared to be an archaeologist who had proven quite troublesome in the past.

During her travels for exploration, she had come across family records that the surviving Moore family forces had set down in the mines during the period of their downfall.

The woman was completely bewitched, having become a follower serving for the revival of the ghostly family ancestor. She probably believed she could escape from that terrible bondage by offering Aubert to the spirit.

That vain fantasy was somewhat amusing, but in any case, her very existence was nothing if not troublesome.

Should I just kill her?

After brief consideration, the man reached a conclusion.

Let's wait a little. I'll sacrifice that woman to the old lord here anyway. Having more sacrificial offerings wouldn't be bad.

Right now, he was more interested in Rose Aubert's reaction. The man deliberately called her to the garden at sunset to check her response to fear.

But Rose Aubert was... surprisingly fine. She even jumped from the second floor to the garden with her bare body and felt proud about it.

"..."

This couldn't be right.

The man showered her with all sorts of probing words and suggestions, but Rose Aubert just spouted nonsensical things. It seemed the judgment-clouding drug had worsened her memory loss symptoms. He had turned her into an idiot with no learning ability or fear.

The man became very displeased that the page containing spells to thoroughly examine another's mind was missing from the mythological text he had found. He couldn't tell what part of this girl's head was broken.

He needed to observe more closely.

The man reached that conclusion. So it would be better to get rid of the archaeologist bewitched by the spirit.

That night, the man immediately ransacked Madam Sawyer's hiding place in the mansion's largest library, turning it into a mess of traces from various spells and bizarre artifacts. When he confirmed at dawn that the woman had frantically fled the mansion for her life, a strange satisfaction came over him.

Now he was the only person in this mansion who could stimulate that stupid girl.

That satisfaction reached its peak when Rose Aubert came to him with a discolored teaspoon.

"I was drinking tea when I accidentally dropped some leftover medicine, and the color changed. I think the tea and medicine become poison when they mix."

Looking into those eyes filled with nothing but vitality and free of any suspicion, he was suffused with a strange euphoria from head to toe. It was an emotion different in nature from the satisfaction that came when things proceeded as expected, yet the man failed to perceive that subtle distinction this time as well.

And riding that momentum, when he promised Rose Aubert to provide meals using the poisoning attempt as an excuse, the man felt no sense of incongruity.

"Rose, if it's alright with you, I'd like to handle your meals separately from now on. Just in case."

This mansion was declared territory of the old lord's altar, so staying here would cause transformation into the old lord's minions, whether slowly or quickly. Performing rituals related to that old lord would speed up the transformation, but the problem was that some actions people considered very ordinary were also judged as rituals.

For instance, consuming anything that had vocal organs before entering this mansion.

Once transformed, one would lose value as a sacrificial offering at the altar, so such management measures were no different from his sacrifice brand. It was just maintenance for efficiently proceeding with the plan.

Thus he reasoned that such measures were simply to preserve her value as a sacrifice.

"But I don't want to seem suspicious, so could you give it to me secretly?"

"...Yes."

He also thought the unpleasant feeling when this girl still showed signs of wanting to get along well with the mansion's people came from anger at his plan being disrupted.

Those emotions passed over him like dull echoes.