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A box of smelted, high-purity Magic Stones , a pity Luo Wei couldn't use any of them right now.
She packed them back in, pressed down the burlap cloth underneath, and pulled out a handkerchief to wrap the wooden box.
Whatever was written on that burlap couldn't be leaked yet. If this world's order collapsed too quickly, it would only serve the purposes of those beings up above.
She set the box aside, picked up the mouse cage, and placed it on the table. These mice were her best experimental assistants, the key to helping her better understand Magic Runes.
Luo Wei pulled on her gloves, reached into the cage, and selected one lucky volunteer at random. She set it down on a small Magic Rune iron plate.
ZZZT—
A thin curl of scorched smoke rose slowly into the air. The lively little mouse was electrocuted into a lump of charcoal, leaving behind only the sharp, pungent smell of burnt fur.
Luo Wei couldn't bear it. She turned her head away.
It was a life. She'd just electrocuted it to death with a Magic Rune.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I really didn't mean to."
Once the rune lost its charge and went dark, she turned back, tipped the iron plate over the trash bin, and moved on.
This one was too thoroughly charred to be useful. She'd hoped to leave the body for the Raven's dinner, but there wasn't enough left worth saving.
Luo Wei worked through the remaining runes in one sitting. By the end, not a single mouse was left alive. The whole cage, gone. Each death its own particular kind of awful.
Ten of them died the exact same way.
That was the part making her anxious. One of the smaller runes should, by her analysis, increase the concentration of magical elements within the academy. She'd tested it ten times. Every time, the rune devoured the mouse's vitality instead.
The mouse died the instant it touched the plate. And the more carefully she'd drawn the rune, the faster it died.
After checking her work over and over, she reached the only conclusion that fit: the problem was her.
This particular rune gathered earth elements. The earth-attribute magic inside her body seemed to carry an innate decomposition ability , something that could strip any living creature down to its base components. Carbon. Basics. Gone.
She crossed Magic Rune Apprentice off her list for class selection. That profession was out, full stop. She'd never be able to explain why her runes seemed to vacuum the life out of anyone who got close.
Deconstructing the small runes took a month. Her magic power had grown enough by then that the intermediate runes went faster , just over two weeks.
During that same stretch, she finished all her assigned community service. Cleaning the stables. Chasing escaped chickens around the academy dining hall. Hauling mountains of waste material out of the alchemy Storage Room. The tasks were trivial, tedious, and nearly impossible to handle with magic, since the apprentices' reserves were all still low.
Along the way, she noticed something that had been nagging at her: magic in this world was remarkably static. Development had stalled completely. The spells and Magic Runes currently in use were the same ones passed down from two thousand years ago.
Two thousand years. Not a single meaningful innovation.
Take the cleaning rune the professor had taught them. It could protect a clean surface from getting dirty , but it couldn't make a dirty surface clean. Backward. Useless.
The incantation class was the same story. Pure formula recitation. The students memorized poems without end, but no one was writing new ones.
That was strange. There was no industry in the world that didn't evolve , except, apparently, this one. Magic hadn't just stagnated. It was regressing. Advanced spells and runes that had been lost over the centuries were simply gone, with no one capable of recreating them. Artifact forgers had dwindled; most could only cast swords, with no one left who could design magical machinery. The potion catalogue hadn't changed either , the same handful of formulas, unchanged for a thousand years.
Luo Wei had a growing sense that this world's magic was running out of road. A few hundred years, maybe less, and it would disappear from history entirely.
She turned the question over in her mind. Was that good or bad for Galan?
On the good side: human power would even out. No one would be inherently superior by bloodline or talent. Ordinary people, through effort, could actually claim a stake.
On the bad side: magic would be gone, but gods and dark creatures wouldn't be. In a cold-weapons era, if something massive showed up — a behemoth, something in that class — humanity would have no way to fight back. That was a road to extinction.
But none of this was really her problem. Twenty years at the outside, and she'd be home.
In late March, Luo Wei returned to Demon Island.
More than two months of construction had changed the place. Over a hundred new buildings had gone up. The undead and humans were living side by side in relative order, roads cutting through in all directions, and dozens of acres of farmland had been cleared. It wasn't a city-state by any stretch, but it had the bones of a real settlement.
The mercenaries and undead had built log cabins, following the blueprints Luo Wei had provided to the letter. They looked good , neat, cohesive, like a small town out of an old storybook.
The slaves had built earthen houses. No planning, no layout. The structures were scattered and uneven, the fences and footpaths outside thrown together carelessly. From a distance, it looked like a slum.
In barely two months, the island had already sorted itself into a clear rich quarter and a poor quarter , even if no one had actually moved into the rich quarter yet.
What caught Luo Wei off guard was what stood between the two zones.
A group of people were constructing something in the middle ground. The framework, from what she could see, looked vaguely like a church. They belonged to neither camp , not slaves, not mercenaries. A third faction she hadn't accounted for.
She watched for a while before she recognized one of the women. She was moving in and out of the structure, directing others to lay bricks, face flushed with the effort. It was Norma , the believer Luo Wei had pulled from the edge of the ice plains.
The woman looked like a different person. Energetic. Purposeful. Her face was thin but healthy, color riding high in both cheeks. Nothing like the hollow-eyed woman who had lost two children and looked like she'd already given up on living.
Luo Wei cast an invisibility spell and slipped in among them to listen.
They were building a temple for her.
Norma had appointed herself its priestess. The people around her called her Priestess without hesitation, because she was the woman who had received direct guidance from a divine messenger.
Luo Wei almost laughed.
Back when she'd told Norma her soul wasn't free enough to enter the temple of the God of Death and Time, she hadn't expected the woman to solve the problem by coming to Demon Island and building a new one from scratch.
Not bad. That was initiative.
She counted the people present. Aside from the slaves who had come to help with construction, there were more than twenty others. She remembered rescuing only about a dozen herders from the Seco people. The extra faces needed an explanation.
She flew to the undead graveyard and called Patrick out.
[Master. What are your orders?]
His voice was as feeble as ever, like seedlings beaten flat by a storm. Luo Wei had very clearly just seen him perched on a branch at the cliff's edge, swaying his head along to the birdsong.
"There's a woman named Norma building a temple for me," she said. "Were you aware of this?"
[I was.]
Patrick bowed. [I assumed you had permitted it. She told me she was guided here by a divine messenger , a demon with wings.]
"I did have someone bring her here." Luo Wei waved that off. "That's not what I'm asking. Did you register the people she arrived with? There were about a dozen when she came, but I'm seeing more now."
Patrick answered without hesitation. [Reporting to Master , yes, all registered. The additional individuals are believers Norma recruited from elsewhere. She leaves the island to preach every two weeks and returns with a few more each time.]
"Believers." Luo Wei already knew the answer. "Believers of what?"
[They worship a deity they call the God of Death and Time. Several people already on the island have joined them as well.]
Luo Wei nodded. The island residents who had joined were probably the slaves helping with construction.
"And Zachary? How is his reform through labor going?"
➤ Next: My Kingdom is in the Misty Plains
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