The Sorcerer's Handbook

Iger had discovered that in a dream, imagination was the only currency required. As long as his mental image was rich and detailed enough, he could create a phantom capable of interaction without needing a real person to assist.

He had conjured a ”cow-horse” phantom to accompany him through dangerous ruins and mysterious realms. When danger arose, the phantom went to face it, and when the coast was clear, it handled the chores. The past few days had been surprisingly enjoyable.

As for the romance tasks Annan had assigned, Iger planned to go through them half-heartedly. He intended to wait for the second ranking to appear and then explain to the Lady that he could not distinguish his love from his killing intent and that whenever he fell in love, he tended to kill the other person.

After finishing tonight’s dream, Iger crawled out from under the bed. Just as he intended to bathe and ease his nerves, his heart gave a violent, sudden thump.

The first heartbeat is the final warning.

The revelation he’d had while brushing his teeth that morning remained vivid. Before his senses could even register the threat, Iger activated Heart of Stone and Iron Will. He forced himself into a state of absolute calm, enduring the violent chemical imbalance triggered by the sudden withdrawal.

He didn’t need to look out the window to know the white mist had thinned to a level inhospitable for survival. If the entirety of Vanmura hadn’t been struck, the Senheiser Family District certainly had. Living at the very heart of the district, he wouldn’t have plunged into withdrawal so abruptly otherwise.

In such a volatile moment, a disaster of this scale was no coincidence. It was, without question, a consequence of the outsiders’ arrival.

If I were the attacker, my first target would be...

Before Iger even finished the thought, he had tightened his robe, kicked off his slippers, and pulled on the emergency escape gear he had staged for this exact moment. Barefoot, he slipped out of the room while summoning the Book of Gospel to open the Funeral Agency’s chat group.

Mr. Perskin: I’m heading to meet up with Ashe. Where is everyone?

Death Artist: I’m on my way to him as well.

Butler: Same here.

Butler: Miss? Miss?

Butler: Why hasn’t Miss checked the chat?

Mr. Perskin: Is the Lady struggling to handle her withdrawal symptoms on her own?

Butler: Impossible.

Iger narrowed his eyes. As he suspected, Pankey and Annan had been prepared to abandon Vanmura at a moment’s notice.

While Iger was forced to use Mind Class Miracles to suppress his own symptoms, he knew the Necromancer likely hadn’t suppressed the withdrawal at all. Instead, the man was probably chain-smoking and gorging on sugar to dull the edge of the craving. The Necromancer had supposedly been trying to quit lately, but that effort was surely a casualty of the crisis.

Pankey and Annan, however, weren’t Mind Class sorcerers and didn’t smoke. If they managed to recover instantly, it only meant they had come equipped with specialized counters.

As Iger reached the elevator shaft, he passed several members of the Senheiser family slumped against the walls. Their gazes were vacant, their consciousnesses wiped. They looked like cheap toys with broken springs. He hurried past, relieved to find the elevator car free of any ”breathing corpses.”

But the silence from Annan, Lys, and Ashe was deafening. Iger’s heart sank. Has Ashe finally been broken by the cravings?

Mr. Perskin: Why hasn’t Ashe checked the chat either?

Death Artist: Ashe, run!

The warning from Harvey was no empty threat. Iger frantically stabbed at the elevator buttons, canceling the stop for the 72nd-floor gaming level. Stopping there now would be walking into a slaughterhouse. Instead, he punched the button for the 73rd floor.

Iger commanded the Book of Gospel, ”Show personnel activity within a 100-meter radius and provide a 3D perspective with real-time monitoring for ten seconds.”

The Book generated a glowing map at the cost of fifty Gospel Points.

Green dots clustered across the gaming floor. Most stayed still in neat rows, representing the Senheiser family members still in their pods. Near the windows, a group of active dots moved with predatory precision. These outsiders had breached the district as soon as the mist failed. The map showed them cornering a single quivering dot. That was none other than the ”primitive man” who had failed to check the chat in time.

Mr. Perskin: Ashe has been captured on the 72nd floor. I’m heading to 73. Where are you?

Death Artist: I’m going to the 71st floor.

Butler: Climbed down the outer wall to the 72nd floor. Got eyes on them. Eight Red Hats, including two Sacred Realm sorcerers, Weeping Sand Cliose, and Deadshot Light. It’s too late for Ashe.

Two Sacred Realm sorcerers?!

Iger felt a sudden chill, as if he had plunged into an ice cave. We couldn’t even handle a single Sacred Realm sorcerer before; how could we possibly take on two now? Deploying two entities of that caliber just to capture a petty criminal like Ashe... Is that really necessary? Such an absurd, wasteful display of power felt downright criminal.

If Senheiser were still functioning normally, Quinna would have helped them escape out of sheer contractual obligation. As the local authority, she could have used official channels or brute force to make these Red Hats deeply regret crossing her.

Now, with the white mist dispersed and Senheiser nearly paralyzed, they were entirely on their own. Iger even feared that Quinna herself had been reduced to a broken toy. If that were the case, her Sacred Realm power merely made her a more advanced version of a ruined hybrid, a mix of part sorcerer, part toy, and part elf.

Worse still, the withdrawal triggered by the mist’s dispersal had already left Iger and the others nearly immobilized, even though they had only been in Vanmura for a few days. Ironically, their lack of adaptation was their only buffer, granting them a few seconds of emergency ”power-down” protection to handle the shock. For those born and raised in Vanmura, whose bodies and souls had been steeped in this environment for decades, the withdrawal was likely frying their fuses instantly, stripping them of all reflexes without even a fraction of a second of protection.

Or perhaps the locals didn’t die instantly. Perhaps they just experienced a brief system crash, leaving them as black screens awaiting a reboot. If so, it at least suggested that the Family Reincarnation Dream had preserved their original human essence, keeping them from degenerating entirely into creatures dependent solely on the white mist.