Lord: Starting from a Goblin Nest

Although this Spellbook didn’t look particularly special, the Hailan Empire had gone to great lengths to hide it inside a stone slate and lock it with a dedicated Magic Item as a key. There had to be a reason for it.

Ron studied it late into the night and soon discovered its unique property—whenever he opened the Spellbook to the Transcription Magic page, he could effortlessly read any other text he was looking at, understand all its details, like its usage, and memorize everything instantly!

But Ron strongly suspected this wasn’t the full extent of the book’s powers. To use a key that could cast a Three-Ring Lightning Bolt six times a day to guard a book that merely granted permanent First-Ring Language Proficiency and Identification Magic... The value seemed incredibly lopsided.

At this point, Ron still had only a scant understanding of the world’s Arcane Magic. Otherwise, he would have realized that another permanent spell was hidden even within the effects he’d already found: the fourth-ring Memory Modification.

This was the true key to his rapid memorization.

Perhaps these effects weren’t enough for that empire to use it as their last-ditch trump card, but they were more than enough for Ron to claim it as his own Spellbook. He took out a quill and fine ink and quickly transcribed all the cantrips and spells he knew into its pages.

And by leveraging the book’s special properties, the number of spells he could learn would grow rapidly, and the book itself would quickly fill up.

But just then, Ron’s desire to study vanished. He realized the door to his room, at some point, had been opened again. A familiar figure stood in the doorway, arms crossed, a tail swishing back and forth behind him.

”Quest?” Ron closed the book. ”How did you get in?”

”Oh, so you noticed me!” Quest smiled, walking into the room and gently nudging the door shut with his foot. ”I saw how engrossed you were in your reading and didn’t have the heart to disturb you.”

”I’m a Dark Scout, remember? Stealth and Concealment are my bread and butter—but rest assured, I don’t mean you any harm.”

The Tiffling walked to the desk, eyeing the stone slate and Spellbook. ”Weaving Introduction. So you found it. Oh, right, I almost forgot—you have a Half-Elf with you, and she’s even wearing a piece of Hailan imperial Chest Armor.”

”You know about this book?” Ron asked curiously. The Tiffling was unnervingly stealthy, and his abilities were clearly far greater than he let on. If he had meant Ron harm, he wouldn’t have needed to go to such lengths.

”Of course. This was the Spellbook of the Chief Imperial Mage of the Hailan Empire. When the allied forces invaded the imperial capital, they were particularly wary of its owner. They even prepared several contingency plans just to minimize the damage this Legendary Mage could inflict.”

”But for some reason, right up until the fall of the Hailan Empire, no one ever saw its owner. The matter became one of the many unsolved mysteries the empire left behind. To think that while I never met her in person, I’d have the fortune of seeing her Spellbook here in Delusional Land.”

Quest looked like he wanted to reach out and touch the book, but for some reason, he drew his hand back. ”Never mind. For a brute like me to touch such a wondrous artifact would be a desecration. You should take good care of it. Who knows, maybe you’ll become a Legendary Mage yourself one day.”

”That’s still a long way off, but I appreciate the sentiment,” Ron smiled. ”You didn’t come here just to see this book, did you?”

”Of course not. In fact, I came to see about that key, to find out if you were able to open it. As for what was inside or why this book was stored there, I was just as clueless as you.”

Quest’s expression turned serious. ”Furthermore, I came here to tell you something else: it’s about Ming Datiss.”

”He’s dead, isn’t he?” Ron raised an eyebrow. ”You don’t have to be an undercover agent anymore.”

”Oh, you,” Quest shook his head. ”You’re a Mage with your own Spellbook now. You should know a few things. In this world, completely and utterly killing someone isn’t so easy. You must know that, right?”

”Resurrection Magic, Resurrection Magic, Complete Resurrection...” Ron knew of these methods. ”But Ming Datiss’s body—”

”You didn’t have time to take it with you, obviously,” Quest said, perching on the edge of the desk. ”You were all injured—yours were the most severe—so they were busy treating you and completely overlooked that detail.”

”Or perhaps, they simply had no awareness of such things.”

”In any case, Ming Datiss didn’t die so easily. After I finished handling matters in Fromm, I saw him again. Alive.”

”Some mysterious patron behind him saved their disappointing subordinate once again, expecting him to continue his mission. He has now returned to the city-state he ’served’ and is plotting his next move.”

”And I,” he added, ”was sent to gather intel on you, to inform their plans.”

”You must be highly valued, then,” Ron chuckled. ”Being a double agent like this... doesn’t your conscience bother you at all?”

”How can you say that!” Quest’s expression turned deadly serious. ”I bear two critically important missions! I have dedicated the vast majority of my life to a great cause! For the remnants of the Hailan Empire, I feel not a shred of pity—only a wish for their souls to suffer eternal torment in the Nine Floors of Hell!”

In this world, Hell and Heaven were real, existing planes. For Quest to make such an oath was, to put it mildly, quite hostile toward those Elves.

”I’ve actually been wondering something,” Ron said, looking at the Tiffling. ”You all formed an allied force in the past and wiped out their remnant forces. Why not unite and face the enemy together again, just like before?”

’Just handing this off to me, turning me into some gig worker on a subcontracted project... This whole thing is making me very uncomfortable.’

’It felt just like one of those magical girl show tropes: ”No time to explain, come save the world with me!”’

”You might be better suited as a Bard, assuming you have any musical talent. You certainly have a head full of stories,” Quest said, looking at Ron with a helplessly amused expression.

”But you have to understand: that was then, and this is now. Back then, you had an extremely powerful, ever-expanding empire with a radical pro-slavery ideology that threatened the survival of all intelligent races. That’s why everyone united to resist. And in the years that followed, the empire’s fall was still fresh in everyone’s minds. Even the shortest-lived races remembered the suffering it caused.”

”But now... the power of these holdouts is a shadow of its former self, not even a fraction of what it was. On the other hand, the allure of those rumored ’relics’ for everyone else grows stronger by the day...”