Trading Sorcery Spirits

Shattered Lake Prison, treatment room. "If I kept my mouth shut, would you just pretend I haven't woken up yet?" Yaxiu opened his eyes and stared straight at the medical sorcerer who was fussing over his face. Pinned to the medical sorcerer's uniform was a badge with the number 222—clearly the same medical sorcerer as last time. "Close your eyes if you don't want your face to rot off!" "Right away." After tinkering for a few more minutes, the medical sorcerer finally let go of his face. "All done. You can get up now. Here, the apples you asked for last time." Yaxiu hastily sat up, touched his face, and let out a sigh of relief. On the nightstand sat a plate of apple slices carved into the shape of rabbits, complete with toothpicks stuck in them. Yaxiu picked them up and popped them in, one bite at a time. "Whew, not bad. Two eyes, one nose, one mouth—not a single piece missing. I was worried I'd be forced to contribute to the diversity of species." "I was performing surgical treatment on you! How can you doubt me?" The medical sorcerer crossed her arms, trying to strike an indignant pose. But she was wearing a crow mask and her voice was processed through it, so Yaxiu wasn't intimidated in the slightest. In fact, he even held out a hand. "What?" "Didn't you say that if I let you do plastic surgery on me, you'd pay me?" "Oh." The medical sorcerer obediently pulled out her coin pouch, but then immediately caught herself. "I did say that yesterday, but you never agreed to it!" "Well, did you perform plastic surgery on me or not?" "Plastic surgery is very complicated. It's not as simple as you think—" "So you did?" "Just a tiny bit! Honestly, it was just a teeny-tiny minor procedure... How much do you want?" "Give me one silver coin." The medical sorcerer visibly relaxed. She looked down, rummaged through her pouch, and looked back up. "Will a gold coin do? I don't have change." Having lived off the state's dime the entire time, Yaxiu had zero concept of this world's economic system. He was inwardly astonished: *Are silver coins treated like spare change tossed to beggars in this world?* One was bold enough to give, and the other was bold enough to take. The moment Yaxiu took the gold coin, he felt a flutter of jubilation deep within his consciousness. As warmth spread across his palm, Yaxiu could almost see a human toddler in pajamas patting a round, swollen belly, flopping backward, and falling into a deep slumber. He looked down at the gold coin and vaguely felt it had shrunk by a fraction. At this rate of consumption, it would probably last a year. *Well, what do you know? Feeding a sorcery spirit is actually pretty simple.* Though Yaxiu was the sort of person who would shake someone down whenever an opportunity presented itself, he had an actual reason for asking for money this time. After all, the Sword Princess had told him that sorcery spirits were fed on money. Since he didn't have any, his only option was to find someone of lower intelligence and fleece a bit of cash for emergencies. Satisfied, Yaxiu slipped the gold coin into his pocket and asked casually, "So what kind of plastic surgery did you actually do on me?" "Dru's Forehead Skin-Stretching Wrinkle Elimination Rite. In short, it removes forehead wrinkles." The medical sorcerer paused, slowly straightened her posture, and looked down at Yaxiu through her crow beak. "You should be kneeling and thanking me that I was willing to perform this rite on you. You know how much forehead wrinkles hurt someone's looks? On the outside, getting a Dru rite costs a fortune—" "What?! You actually got rid of my most handsome, most masculine forehead wrinkles?!" Yaxiu was furious. "An unscrupulous medical sorcerer disfigured a patient in his sleep, robbing him of his most radiant, dazzling beauty! Is there no law here? No justice?! This is medical malpractice! This is murder for personal gain!" The medical sorcerer was utterly stunned by Yaxiu's counterattack. After standing dazed for a moment, she opened her pouch again. "How much do you want?" "Hey, don't be like that. I'm not that kind of person," Yaxiu refused self-righteously. "I'm not the sort of criminal who uses leverage to coerce, bribe, and work people into the ground." The medical sorcerer pondered for a moment. "Sit here for a bit. I'm going to look up news reports about you..." "In! Short!" Yaxiu hurriedly pulled her back. "I just want to ask you a few questions." "You're not allowed to ask my name, you're not allowed to take off my mask, and you're not allowed to touch my skin!" Startled, the medical sorcerer quickly slapped Yaxiu's hand away, crossing her arms defensively over her chest—finally giving Yaxiu a taste of the respect due to a death row convict. Still, Yaxiu was a bit curious. "Why isn't it allowed?" "It's a rule of Shattered Lake Prison. Medical sorcerers aren't allowed to communicate privately with inmates. If caught, you get stripped of your title, and in severe cases, you might even be thrown in prison!" "So what you're saying is... we'll be cellmates soon?" "If you have questions, hurry up and ask. Once you're done, get out." The medical sorcerer didn't seem all that concerned about the rule; Yaxiu suspected she was hoping for an unpaid long vacation. "The elf I fought in the death match—is he still alive?" "His injuries were lighter than yours. He left a long time ago." "Lighter injuries?" "His throat was just slit open. What's a minor injury like that? Someone patched him up in a few minutes. To make your flesh grow back, I spent over an hour!" The medical sorcerer threw her hands out, not looking like she was lying. Yaxiu looked at his intact thigh and shoulder, wondering if medical costs here were weighed by the jin. *The more flesh you lose, the harder it is to treat, while getting your throat slit or head blown off is nothing?* *Does that mean butts are high-risk organs here? Butts are more important than heads?* "Any more questions? Hurry it up." "I also wanted to ask if there's a place in prison to trade sorcery spirits. A man living on his own gets a little lonely, so I was thinking of raising a few pets..." The medical sorcerer fixed her gaze on Yaxiu. "I'm going to report you for harboring malicious intentions and attempting a prison break." "I'm already on death row. Even if you report me, what could they do—increase my sentence?" "Sure. Resurrect you after you die once so you can die again." "What?! You can actually do that?!" "Of course not. That would be a huge waste of taxpayers' money, and it's inhumane. Repeated executions were outlawed a hundred years ago." "So that means death row inmates a hundred years ago might have had to die multiple times..." "Anyway, I'm not answering that question," the medical sorcerer said, crossing her arms. "Death row convicts like you should obediently serve as our medical practice material, and then obediently go die whenever you're no longer of use." "You have a surprisingly upright worldview..." "What makes you think my worldview wasn't upright?" "Well, you chatted with a death row convict like me for so long. I figured you were one of those rebellious kids who are fascinated by criminals." "I—I'm not curious at all! If I were really curious, I could just go read the news reports!" As the medical sorcerer spoke, she packed up her medical instruments. Yaxiu jumped down from the bed and stretched his thigh and shoulder. The surgery was a complete success. Aside from the patches of skin on his thigh and shoulder being a shade paler than the surrounding skin, there was nothing wrong. "If I said I was innocent, would you believe me?" "Don't take me for a fool," the medical sorcerer scoffed. "Ever since the memory evidence system was introduced, there hasn't been a single wrongful conviction. The Sin Hunting Hall must have discovered the criminal act in your memories before convicting you—" "Nope. The Sin Hunting Hall never extracted memory evidence from my brain." "That's impossible—" "You can look up the reports yourself, but the Sin Hunting Hall really didn't extract my memories, and I really was wrongly accused." Yaxiu spoke with righteous confidence. Setting aside that the culprit was Heath and not Yaxiu, more importantly, he didn't even have Heath's memories, so he felt zero psychological burden saying it. The medical sorcerer eyed Yaxiu suspiciously. "You're not lying to me?" "If I'm lying to you, may I work overtime for the rest of my life without overtime pay." "If you dare lie to me, you're dead meat! You'd better pray you don't get hurt again, because once you're in my hands, see if I don't change your race and gender!" Her words dealt a massive blow to Yaxiu's delicate psyche—he had been hoping to experience the multispecies healthcare and entertainment industry of another world, never expecting that medical technology here had advanced to the point of altering race and gender! If you walked down the street and saw a pretty girl, could you still trust your eyes? Where was the trust between people? "Still, even if that's true, I can't give you an answer," the medical sorcerer said with a shrug. "The sorcery power of death row convicts is restricted. The first step in trading a sorcery spirit is for the seller to use sorcery power to release it, and the buyer to use sorcery power to reactivate it. Without access to sorcery power, you can neither release nor activate a sorcery spirit." *Sorcery power even has something like key authentication?* Yaxiu increasingly felt that sorcery power was truly an all-purpose energy source; he wouldn't even be surprised if someone told him tomorrow that sorcery power had Bluetooth capabilities. No wonder the prison didn't lock down their sorcery spirits. On one hand, sorcery spirits were probably impossible to restrain; on the other hand, as long as their sorcery power was restricted, they couldn't stir up any trouble at all. Yaxiu still refused to give up. "Is there really no hope at all? Isn't there somewhere like the Death Match Club where our sorcery power restrictions can be lifted?" Having experienced Void Realm exploration once, Yaxiu had realized that trying to gather all the sorcery spirits he needed in the Void Realm was like searching for a needle in a haystack. Given ample time, dredging for needles might have been an option, but the problem was that Yaxiu didn't have much time left. While Yaxiu didn't dislike risk and was willing to bet on probabilities, he refused to do so without a hedge. Just like how his old company had made employees work 996 overtime while buying them health insurance so the company came out ahead whether workers dropped dead or not—as Employee of the Year, Yaxiu had naturally internalized this sterling corporate culture, always preparing a contingency plan. If he could find a platform to trade sorcery spirits, even if everything he scavenged in the Void Realm was junk, he would still have a chance to offload it and recoup his losses. "There is. Didn't you know?" Her answer took Yaxiu by surprise. "Why would I know?" "Because it's an experience every death row convict goes through at least once... Oh, right. You only arrived a few days ago, so you haven't had the chance yet." Yaxiu instantly grasped her implication. "The Blood Moon Trial?"