The Villainess Is My Cute Daughter

It was already late nighttime, and the few people that still lived in the village were already securely locked inside their houses.

The reason was extremely simple. It was thanks to a local legend that formed just two decades ago about there being a Devil in the woods that ate your head. A monster that would bite your head clean off if you went out in the night after sunset.

And thanks to this specific, carefully planted rumor, the villagers didn’t even dare to come out at night. Of course, if it wasn’t for those brave ones who went out at night to challenge the rumor, the other’s wouldn’t have learned their lesson by looking at others making dumb decisions.

Apart from that, they did know that this Devil would randomly take some of their cattle every few months. And it was always the exact same pattern. It would either be one single cow or a buffalo, along with one pig. And then they would collectively lose exactly ten chickens. And it was always taken from a completely random farm.

In total, the village would collectively lose one big animal, one medium-sized one, and ten small ones.

And that was exactly what happened this night.

Roderick first walked to a random, house and walked silently to the back where they kept their cattle in a shed.

It was an open shed which basically just had a thatched roof and nothing else. And the cows were tied to thick stone pillars that were also used to keep the roof up.

Roderick casually walked towards one of them, cut off the thick rope with his knife, and firmly grabbed it by the piece of rope that was still tied securely around its thick neck.

While the rope that he had cut still dangled down, he pulled.

The massive cow resisted a little bit, digging its hooves in, but at the end, it just easily got pulled by hi. It mooed loudly in the quiet night, but no one came out to save it. And it soon just gave in to its fate, just hoping that this man wasn’t anyone too dangerous.

Roderick casually took it all the way back to his cave in the woods.

He brought it to the carved altar and made it stand directly on top of the array before he took out a large steel machete from his spatial storage ring and brought it down on its neck.

The cow fell heavily, its hot blood rapidly seeping into the altar, filling up the deep grooves steadily.

Roderick looked down at the massive cow that had its head almost a full meter away from its body. He bent down, grabbed it by its hind legs, and just lifted the massive carcass up as much as he could.

The blood drained rapidly like a waterfall, and he stood there like a statue for five whole minutes, just patiently holding it up, before he casually dragged the drained carcass to the side and walked out of the cave once again.

There were a lot more things he needed to quickly bring back here.

It barely took Roderick slightly more than an hour to cleanly transport all of the remaining animals and sacrifice their blood.

He looked down at the altar that now did not have any corpse currently on top of it. It looked like it was filled and the dark red blood came all the way up to the very top of the grooves.

And he had one extra, squirming chicken in his hand. The eleventh chicken, in fact.

And he had always brought an extra one because thel rules explicitly stated that the final volume of blood that he had to use had to be exactly on the same level as the altar itself. Which meant that it had to be precisely in a state where it was right on the cusp of overflowing, but not spilling.

And it was pretty close to that exact state right now.

Roderick swiftly beheaded the chicken and held it out, letting its blood drain exactly like he normally did. And once the blood started to pour slightly out of the grooves, he quickly tossed the chicken to the side.

Its legs twitched and its wings fluttered but Roderick didn’t really care about the mess, of course. Since it had already been quite a while, it was just a few seconds of him holding the chicken above the altar before it died. It had struggled a lot more at the start, but by the time he had tossed it to the side, there were barely two to three twitches left in its nervous system.

Roderick took out a clean cotton cloth from his storage ring before he carefully used it to wipe the excess blood that spilled over to the flat top of the altar.

And once he was done cleaning the edges, he sat down right in front of the array and took a deep, steady breath.

He put his pale hands inside his pocket and took out a small pouch which was made of premium quality leather which was extracted from an high rank monster. He carefully untied the rope that kept the pouch closed and looked into it.

There were multiple glowing mana crystals inside.

They were small, just exactly like the ones Adrian used, but they were slightly smaller and they had multiple cracks in them. But at the end of the day, they were still highly potent mana crystals.

Roderick carefully grabbed three of the bigger ones and precisely placed them on the three outer corners of the triangle.

The whole array immediately began to glow with a sickly, dark purple light. The pooled blood inside the grooves began to boil, and the three mana crystals began to shrink as their energy was rapidly consumed.

The thick steam from the boiling blood went up, but it stayed right there hovering directly on top of the altar, getting thicker and thicker like a cloud. The raw mana from the shrinking crystals also went up to the exact same place in the air, mixing with the steam.