MPBAGS Chapter 55

The children thought the director would have gone upstairs, but in reality, the director was standing in front of a man entangled in chains. After continuously scratching his arms, drops of blood formed and flowed down his arms.

"It's already been ten days. Aren't you hungry?"

"I'm always hungry."

Especially now, with the scent of blood wafting right in front of his nose, how could he not feel his appetite stirring? Melech swallowed his saliva.

"Then why don't you eat?"

The director tilted her head as if she couldn't understand at all.

"I don't eat people, especially not children."

"You don't eat them?"

The director's lips curved up grotesquely. Soon she burst into laughter at this joke.

"Hahahaha! That was really the funniest thing I've ever heard."

She laughed so hard that tears formed in her eyes.

"You're a demon. Twenty years ago, you enjoyed chewing children alive and burning them in fire, so why are you refusing offerings now?"

Back when the director was still called Merai, 20 years ago, Merai was an orphan at Ainoa Orphanage.

Merai was a particularly cunning child, and the director at the time was very fond of Merai, who acted like a tongue in her mouth.

So much so that she shared her filthy deeds with Merai.

The first day going down to the basement was when she saw that hateful child who had been bragging about being adopted by a wealthy elderly couple two days earlier, now barely clinging to life in the underground torture chamber. Besides him, other children who were supposedly adopted from the orphanage were suffering in agony underground.

What drowned out all the screams, moans, and gasps was a single sound of laughter. The demon that the director served devotedly was smiling as if watching a comedy while witnessing the terrible scene.

The director held Merai's head so she couldn't look away and said,

"Merai, that's a demon that grants wishes. If you please the demon, you can receive compensation. The food you eat and the clothes you wear are all obtained with money the demon gave us."

And when the one-act play just for the demon ended, the demon would tip the theater owner.

"You know well that I think of you specially, don't you? Merai, you should help the director from now on too."

After that, Merai helped the director serve the demon. For a full two years. By then, there was no child older than Merai in the orphanage.

The praise that seemed like it would continue forever ended when the great temple began arresting sorcerers.

At that time, countless people were executed on charges of being sorcerers or collaborating with them. Ainoa Orphanage couldn't escape the crackdown either.

The director locked the door leading to the basement and hurriedly destroyed all sorts of materials.

"Merai, did you report this? It wasn't you, was it?"

But somehow they found out, or perhaps someone was planning to frame her - the director was sentenced as a sorcerer and burned at the stake.

Merai inherited the orphanage and the useless children. She was legally the director's adopted daughter. Merai operated another orphanage in that building. The children who had lost their guardian clung to Merai, the eldest, so she had no choice.

"I'm hungry, big sister."

"Sister, what do we do now?"

At first, she could manage a decent orphanage with the money the director left behind. But as the money gradually ran out and she gave birth to Troy, everything went wrong. The children were starving and cold. There wasn't enough money.

One day, when Merai was wracking her brain and remembered the director, she opened the basement door with a faint hope. The demon wasn't there. Since he couldn't stand boredom, there was no way he would have stayed.

Without the demon, Merai chose the next best option. She sold the children to slave traders.

Someone might be watching, so very secretly, without the children noticing, and to avoid following the director's path, she even bribed temple priests to bring them in. As time passed, rather than being a middleman, she developed a main customer base through word of mouth.

Merai fed and raised the remaining children with money from the ones that were sold. But the price of just one child could barely sustain them for half a year. Even that was disrupted several times because Troy kept interfering with the deals. She had never told Troy the truth, but somehow he noticed.

When he was young, it stopped at that level, but Troy's rebellion grew worse, and recently he threw a tantrum saying she had borrowed a large sum using the orphanage as collateral and demanded she hand over the building. He said to stop running this damn orphanage immediately.

What a wicked son - didn't he worry about the children who would starve to death immediately without Merai?

Merai told the loan shark that her son had put up collateral without permission and she couldn't hand over the building, but she was only slapped and driven away.

She needed money. She needed a huge sum that couldn't be repaid even by selling all the children.

She visited the nobles who had bought children before, but was rejected every time. Merai even went to the temple to ask for help. One of the priests was Merai's good customer.

And there, the moment she encountered a very beautiful and enchanting picture, Merai was thrilled. It was as if an angel had taken her hand.

In the picture was drawn the sorcery circle that the director had disposed of in the past to avoid crackdowns. Thankfully, the stupid temple people didn't even recognize that it was a sorcery circle.

Merai postponed her appointment with the priest and returned to the orphanage.

She had heard all the sorcery processes from the director verbally, and fortunately remembered everything clearly.

After drawing the picture with blood from cutting her arm, Merai summoned a demon using a child as sacrifice. That demon was the very idiot in front of her who refused the numerous entertainments Merai provided.

"That demon said his name was Melech."

She had succeeded in summoning the demon from the past again. Merai was relieved, but the problem was discovered in an unexpected place.

"Sorry, but that wasn't me."

The demon denied the past. The demon summoned by the same method had the same appearance, name, and even voice, but he said it wasn't him?

"Pitifully, you're still bound to the past."

The demon even pitied Merai. Who made me like this? Merai was swept by a strange sense of betrayal and declared,

"In the end, you'll devour children like you did in the past."

Demons love flawless pure white souls.

For some unknown reason, the demon she encountered after 20 years was suffering from hunger. Since he looked hungry, she thought it would be more appetizing if she put it right in front of him.

Merai brought down all the food the demon had so loved to the basement, but damn it, the demon had tremendous patience.

In the end, before the demon's patience ran out, didn't her beloved son come to the orphanage leading some guests? Guards? Or maybe priests came like 20 years ago? Or the people who lent money to Troy? Either way, it wasn't welcome.

Merai became impatient.

If the demon refused to hunt on his own, there was another way. Merai sometimes directly fed picky children vegetables by spooning food into their mouths.

So now, couldn't she just pour well-cooked food directly into his mouth? Merai grabbed the chain around the demon's body.

Melech began to walk following Merai. The direction they were heading was the torture chamber where the children were confined.