Chapter 142: Chapter 142

After a vial of his blood was taken, Lant’s life sank back into the pit—nothing changed.

He still pushed himself to the limit, but only managed slight improvement; the harder he worked, the heavier his heart grew.

Abella, who doubled as his spell instructor, softened from her initial harshness after seeing him work so desperately, but she often said in a pitying tone that he was a “pitiful worm powerless to change fate.”

Obviously, she already foresaw a future where his talent would limit him and he couldn’t alter his end.

Lant silently endured those taunts and almost never argued. Only when Abella’s words occasionally touched on his dead parents would he stiffen and mutter a weak rebuttal.

At other times, he even began to agree with the Lady Handmaiden.

He really wasn’t fit to be the Lady Witch’s student—he thought so himself.

Just as the Former Demon King’s favor had been but a fleeting shaft of light for the Demonkin, for a grassroots, ordinary Demonkin boy like him, being the Silver Witch’s student might be an unattainable dream.

While Lant wallowed in self-pity, cast under the shadow of “judgment is coming,” Yvette had new work to do in her rune-medicine experiments.

With Sage Core’s analysis, Yvette quickly confirmed that Lant’s blood—or rather the Demonkin genome—did indeed show abnormalities. Some sequences were clearly externally embedded rune chains, coiling around the original genetic strands like ropes—an invisible lock that silenced the normal expression of large swaths of genes, rendering those segments effectively abandoned.

Is this the so-called “Demon God’s curse”?

If those embedded sequences were removed, could the Demonkin’s sealed talents be released?

Her interest was instantly piqued. Rune-medicinal research required abundant practical subjects, but reality rarely supplied suitable “projects.” It was like wanting to be a puzzle-master but having no complex riddles to hone one’s skill.

Those mysterious embedded rune sequences in the Demonkin genome were a perfect scientific subject.

Driven by curiosity and the need for hands-on practice, Yvette began to dissect the Demonkin genetic sequences, setting to work on methods to crack and remove the bindings.

Through repeated study and experiments, a year passed in the blink of an eye.

Yvette had set Lant’s probation at three years, with a final assessment to decide whether he’d become a full student.

With five months left in the probation, mounting anxiety made Lant nearly incapable of quiet meditation. He moved out on his own, built a makeshift corrugated-iron shack beside a thundering waterfall in the dense forest of the Ish Mountains, using scavenged metal sheets.

The place was neither comfortable nor safe, but the deafening roar of the falls brought a strange calm that barely quelled his inner restlessness.

He also had some combat ability now; short of encountering a very strong Stage-2 aberrant, he could probably survive.

One night after finishing meditation beneath the waterfall, soaked through, Lant climbed ashore and saw Abella standing quietly not far away.

His heart tightened, but he still stepped forward respectfully and asked in a humble voice, “Sister Abella, do you need something?”

The Lady Handmaiden expressionlessly handed him a glass vial containing a strangely viscous green liquid.

“The Master’s medicine,” she said coldly. “Drink it. I’ll come take another vial of blood in a couple of days. Be ready.”

Lant stared at the ominous potion that looked disturbingly like poison. Without a moment’s hesitation, he tilted his head back and drank the green draught in one gulp, then croaked, “I understand.”

The noble, aloof handmaiden nodded slightly and disappeared into the night.

Over the following days, Lant felt subtle, hard-to-describe changes in his body. A few days later Abella came as promised, drew another vial of blood, and left.

A few days after that she returned with another strange concoction; the process repeated.

Each potion she brought was a different color, and the bodily reaction each time was different—sometimes a tearing agony, sometimes maddening itching—each ordeal stronger than the last. It was physical and mental torment, and it was hard not to suspect he’d been turned into a lab rat and that whatever probation test there was had effectively ended long ago.

But he said nothing and bore it in silence. Deep down, he half-wished he’d die from these experiments: that way he’d have repaid the Lady Witch’s saving grace and avoided the despair of failing the assessment. It would be a kind of release.

Three more months passed.

During that time, Lant’s body showed no dramatic transformation—those medicines seemed at times only meant to inflict suffering, even approaching asphyxiation.

Then, one night, with the final assessment a month away, an accident occurred at his training spot.

An uninvited intruder—a Stage-2 Mutated Hound—burst in. Having been in frequent contact with corrupted beasts lately, Lant’s nerves snapped tight and he went on alert, trading blows in the pitch-dark forest and countering with spells he hadn’t mastered.

For Lant, Stage-2 aberrants were at the edge of what he could handle. This hound was unusually ferocious, and with his limited mana and poor control—some spells still too slow to cast instantly—he was soon routed, armor flying, forced into a desperate flight.

The hound caught up and lunged to bite. Lant condensed flame to force its jaws shut, then shoved hard, sending himself flying and rolling twice across the ground, crying out.

The blow avoided infection from its fangs, but the impact snapped his ribs. Worse, his mana was exhausted, and in that dim mountain woods nobody would come to save him—this was the consequence he’d accepted by moving here.

Gritting his teeth, he forced himself up, stifling the pain, and poured his last reserves of magic into a desperate bellow. He could not die here—he had great vengeance to seek. He had to hold on until the assessment, at least to see whether this dream would come true, even if it was only a bubble.

The hound leapt again. In an instant, Lant heard a shattering sound, felt a cool force well up within him, and his body found support; he twisted aside with new agility.

Under that force, his body seemed to become a great black hole, drawing in elements from the surrounding space and concentrating them on himself. The spent mana rushed back at an unimaginable speed.

Suddenly, the spells he’d never managed to control could be cast instantly; the unruly magics obeyed his will like extensions of his limbs. Lant had no idea what was happening, but he knew he had no time for wonder in a life-or-death fight. Gale-force wind coalesced around his fist.

He threw a savage punch—and the ferocious hound was blasted away!

The beast’s massive body slammed into a tree, bending the trunk. Confused by how the once-weak boy had become so strong, it howled and then fled into the darkness, disappearing without a trace.

Lant stood there stunned. Only long after did he come back to himself and realize he had actually driven the fiend off.

He looked down and saw streaks of white light on his hands—patterns like Demonkin runes, but usually those runes were deep purple decorations; they’d never glowed .

He went back to the pool beneath the waterfall and peered into the water. His reflection showed pale-white hair, runes, and pupils—everything that had been deep violet now shining white, emitting a ghostly glow in the night. His aura had shifted entirely. Though his face remained boyish, the hair, runes, and luminous eyes gave him a commanding air—almost majestic.

Most importantly, in this special form he voraciously absorbed external elemental energy; his mana flowed without end, and his control and mana-pressure rose another level. The same spells now struck with power that couldn’t be compared to before.

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Lant reached up in bewilderment and tugged at his face. Only then did he notice something else: looking up toward the cliff over the waterfall, he saw the silver-haired Lady Witch and the ink-black-haired Lady Handmaiden—who had apparently stood there for some time—watching him.

He froze and suddenly thought of those medicines—the ones that had tormented him for days and brought so much pain.

Were those drugs the cause? Had the Lady Witch, pitying him, given him those alchemical treatments that triggered this transformation?

In that instant, like a runaway child who discovers their parents had secretly followed them all along, Lant burst into tears. His vision blurred with weeping. He had always believed the Lady Witch had long been disappointed in him—that she’d given him to Abella to experiment on as a bit of useful waste.

He dropped to his knees and pounded his forehead toward the waterfall, sobbing as he struck, even gouging the glowing marks on his brow until they bled.