The Villainess Is My Cute Daughter

It took almost five minutes for all the water in the blood to evaporate completely.

And once that process was done, a thick smoke began to waft upwards from the grooves. The dried, caked blood just began to turn into vapor. Or in other words, it magically began to form a dense reddish smoke, which also rapidly mixed with the steam that was currently hovering above.

This specific conversion took another five minutes.

And once there was absolutely nothing left inside the deep grooves, and no smoke formed anymore, Roderick quickly stood up, grabbed all the drained carcasses except the first rabbit, and tossed them all directly onto the array.

All of the carcasses immediately began to melt like wax.

It was just as completely unnatural as the dried blood magically turning into smoke. The melted goo of the carcasses rapidly seeped into the array grooves. And once everything was fully melted, it was almost like a massive bunch of stuff was crammed into a small pot.

The grooves inside the bedrock clearly did not have the volume to hold all of that stuff, but it still did anyway.

It was things like this that Roderick just couldn’t logically understand, so he had given up on trying to make sense of any of this ancient magic years ago. He just blindly used it since it helped him achieve his goals.

He took a deep breath, since this was the last and final step.

He shot out a highly concentrated mana strand from his finger and let it seep directly into the nearest corner of the triangle that was right in front of him.

The specific place where he sat... the entire triangle looked almost exactly like an arrowhead which was pointing at his seating spot.

Roderick pushed his mana strand deep into the array and expertly made it move deeper inside the grooves, making sure that it went all throughout the runic circuit. It was, in fact, almost exactly like a maze, but his mana strand still went through all of it.

And once he was finally done covering every single inch of the array, he exhaled.

He had to do all of this in a single, held breath. But of course, this wasn’t exactly a mandatory rule that would kill him if he failed. The only thing the mana strand did was increase the efficiency and accuracy of the ritual.

This was a highly crucial step, at least in his eyes.

And the exact moment that his routed mana strand came all the way back to the starting place; after it traveled all the way throughout the array and cleanly connected back to the strand at the start of the array, the circuit was finally complete.

And at this exact moment, all of the goo that had gone deep inside the array rapidly floated up into the air.

Roderick fully retracted his mana strand and watched closely as the goo magically formed into a lavish-looking, large rectangle in the air. And the dense reddish smoke, rapidly filled it up in the middle.

And it didn’t take it too long to look similar to a massive standing mirror.

The only real difference was this weird-looking mirror looked heavily cloudy and opaque instead of being reflective.

Roderick looked up at the very top of the biological mirror frame and saw one single, massive eye open up and look down at him.

It was always random. It moved between one, two, and sometimes three eyes and the number of eyes only meant one exact thing: the amount of questions he could ask or the amount of questions he would get proper, clear answers to.

One eye meant one question.

The eye looked down at him unblinking, and Roderick nodded as he looked back at it.

”Tell me everything about Baron Adrian Sterling’s army,” Roderick demanded. ”I want information about exactly how many knights he has.”

The cloudy mist inside the mirror aggressively swirled and then suddenly turned completely clear. And now it looked exactly like a proper, silver mirror.

Roderick looked back at his own reflection in the reddish-tinted mirror for a second before his reflection’s eyes suddenly turned glowing red. And his reflection smiled back at him mockingly.

And it spoke in a distorted, overlapping voice.

”Why don’t you see for yourself?”

The mirror surface rippled. This time, it looked much more like an open window, or at least gave the feeling of looking through a window. Because now, instead of looking at his own smiling reflection, all Roderick could see was a massive training ground.

It was almost like he was floating high up in the air and looking down at the people below like a bird.

And down there on the training grounds, he saw two different, massive groups of soldiers. One massive group was significantly slower, and they were all running laps. The second group was also doing the same but the first group was much slower. And the second, smaller group was much faster.

They were slightly faster and the gap wasn’t too wide.

And while this visual didn’t exactly answer Roderick’s direct question in a clear way, he could easily make a guess since he had seen multiple Royal knights train too.

The ones who were slightly faster were clearly awakened knights.

But what confirmed his theory was the fact that the slower ones got tired much faster, they slowed down faster, and they sweated more. But the massive group of thousands who were fast at the start? They perfectly kept their pace without dropping a single bead of sweat.

And this was more than enough for Roderick to completely confirm his suspicions.

”Thousands of knights.” he muttered as he stared at the running soldiers in front of him. ”Adrian has thousands of knights... around four to five thousand.”

He took a deep, shaky breath and exhaled heavily while the massive fleshy eye suddenly crumpled into dust. The mirror frame turned into ashes before falling right back down onto the floor.

Roderick let out a long sigh, and with a highly conflicted, terrified expression on his face, he quickly used a basic water spell.

It was nothing but a highly pressurized stream of water that shot out from his hand. Using that, he efficiently cleaned out all of the ashes from the grooves before he quickly dried the entire array with a blast of a fire spell.

He pulled his hood back up and left the dark cave, his mind preocupied with multiple thoughts.