The orb in his hand, once flawlessly smooth, now had a distinct crack he could feel. Wisps of an extraordinary substance drifted out through the fissure before slowly receding. Each time, a small portion dispersed entirely. To his senses, that strange essence seemed composed of the other party's mental power, yet differed slightly.
"What did you do?" the orb demanded.
"Does clutching you like a prized treasure count?" Luge realized this appeared to be a very grave matter for his captive.
Though he did not know what the orb had planned to do earlier, it certainly had not been anything good. Seeing its panic brought him genuine amusement.
"It stinks! How can you reek so badly?!"
The orb suddenly shrieked.
"Wait... how can I still smell anything?"
Just as a perplexed mood rippled through the wildly fluctuating mental power, Luge's arm whipped forward. He flung the orb away, his legs already pumping as he rapidly put distance between them. In his perception just moments before, the cracks on the orb had been widening rapidly.
The orb struck the stone wall with a crisp crack, but despite repeated collisions, not a single shard chipped off. It bounced several times and rolled across the ground, only to continue fracturing bit by bit on its own.
The voice within let out a bloodcurdling scream, though whether from the cracking or from having its sanity broken by the foul stench was impossible to tell.
A gray shadow burst from the orb.
"You could have walked away, but now you have left me no choice!"
The gray shadow's voice sounded far calmer than it had inside the sphere. The moment the words fell, it lunged toward Luge like a streak of gray vapor.
Luge chuckled and cast occasional glances back over his shoulder, using his mental power to roughly monitor the situation behind him.
He had already established a lead. The gray shadow moved considerably faster than he could, but by a rough estimate, he could keep it dancing for a good while.
From the moment the entity had perceived the stench, Luge had ceased to panic. He sprinted at full tilt while using the mental map in his head to veer toward the fallen wizard's resting place, aiming to kill two birds with one stone without wasting a shred of stamina.
"How dare you—how dare you!"
After a stretch of the chase, the gray shadow seemed to see through his intentions. Fury surged within it all at once, and its speed increased by another thirty percent.
"Oh? Do you know where I'm going? That couldn't be your corpse, could it? Hahaha!"
The kobold let out an ugly, mocking laugh, looking far more like the villain of the piece. He had noticed that becoming whatever it was had left the fellow somewhat addled. Tumultuous emotional waves surged through it constantly, uncontainable even with its mental power—making it an easy target to provoke.
"Ah! The stench! How is this possible?! What kind of smell is this... You foolish creature, is this the spell you researched after transforming yourself into a kobold?!"
Pursuer and pursued closed the distance step by step, yet both were slowing down.
Luge could already see his destination.
High on the cave wall, a corpse had been crudely embedded into the stone. Black blood had trickled down the rock face and congealed there like a dark, fathomless doorway.
The corpse wore a simple black robe, adorned only with a ring of patterns around the hood. The hood was pulled firmly over the head, obscuring the features. The most prominent mark on the body was a horizontal slash across the waist—evidently the fatal wound.
"Even as a crude kobold, I can appreciate that beauty—an unforced, natural artistic flair. You truly died like a work of art!"
Luge turned his head to praise it, clapping twice as he ran. Seeing that the gray shadow showed signs of slowing down, he made sure not to spare any encouragement.
The gray shadow flickered, but this time it did not pounce.
"We can cooperate," the shadow said, halting the futile pursuit.
Luge paid it no heed, stopping only after he had pulled a substantial distance away again. He knew the gray shadow was already exceedingly weak.
The shadow simply stood at a distance, watching him. In truth, it had been slowly dissipating throughout the chase.
"You came for that as well, didn't you? I know things about that city. I can also help you wipe the imprint off the storage pouch. It's not as if I can use it anytime soon anyway," the shadow wavered as it spoke, never venturing closer.
"I can tear it open myself."
Luge paced back and forth, seemingly by accident drifting diagonally forward a few steps to bring the gray shadow back within the range of Fetid Skin.
The shadow wavered and silently drifted back.
"I sense that you are merely a low-tier apprentice. Someone who is at most a third-rank apprentice wizard dared to take on Master Niteli's task—a brave gambler. You are no fool, which means you must lack magic stones and spell resources. If you force open a storage pouch, you will lose half the contents even with good luck; with bad luck, ninety percent of it will be banished into the void space." The gray shadow spoke with measured composure, sounding full of confidence.
"I'm a man of simple needs," Luge replied.
He remained on guard, vigilant against a desperate death-struggle.
No matter how enticing an offer of cooperation sounded, he dared not touch it. It all came down to a clear awareness of his own ignorance. Even if a magical contract were placed before him, he had no way of knowing whether the other party had tampered with it or laid some sinister trap. He did not understand the Earth Cave world, nor did he understand spellcraft, but he understood that he only had one life to lose.
The gray shadow swayed silently left and right, like a tiny flame on the verge of guttering out.
"Your hand—just let me stay in your palm. That is my greatest concession. You can wrap me in your mental power. Even a foot will do. Bring me back to the wizard tower, and I will give you another reward." The gray shadow finally lost the composure it had fought to maintain.
Luge merely shook his head, his gaze already shifting toward an opening to a side passage.
A blue-and-white ray suddenly shot from his hand!
It tore through the gray shadow, carving out a hollow void, but the smoky form wobbled and soon knitted back together.
"Just as I thought." He had anticipated that the spells he currently commanded might prove ineffective against such an unusual adversary.
The gray shadow lunged forward, faster than it had ever moved before, like an arrow loosed from a bowstring.
Luge felt a concentrated malice from the dark gray arrow unlike anything he had ever encountered—wholly removed from the simple, instinctual savagery of lizardfolk or kobolds. Churned by mental power, that thick malice radiated intense emotional turbulence. The mere brush of its mental power sent an instant chill down his spine—a towering rage and despair, endless remorse and frantic urgency, bottomless regret, and a hatred that seemed boundless.
It was precisely these emotions that caused the arrow forged of gray shadow to ignite mid-flight. Gray flames violently convulsed, scattering flashes of ghostly light.
Luge prudently retreated several paces.
In the end, the gray shadow never even reached the spot where he had been standing. It disintegrated into ash, leaving behind a pale gray, translucent crystal on the ground.
The cooperation that had never begun was now definitively over.
Luge waited where he was for a good while, approaching only when he was certain there was no reaction left. Though the process of claiming the inheritance had been thoroughly unpleasant, he still intended to honor his promise: once he finished rummaging through the belongings, he would lay the man to rest.
Chapter 29