After Lady Alsha's guards hauled the prisoners away, Damian finally returned to his residence to rest. Link and the other two squad captains were forced to stay behind to report the exact details of the expedition to Lady Alsha.
"Tina, where's your father?" Damian asked as he pushed open the front door.
He spotted little Tina in the courtyard, deeply engrossed in a game of Wizard's Chess. Damian had gifted her the set just before the expedition into the Winter Forest for her birthday. Enchanted with an auto-play charm, the pieces could move on their own, allowing her to play a full game by herself.
"Brother Damian is back!" Tina jumped up cheerfully. The red braids tied behind her head bounced like a swishing fish tail. "Papa just got home! He caught a really big fish!"
Chris had a lot of free time lately. He originally planned to open a blacksmith shop in White Stone Town, but without a suitable storefront, he had resorted to fishing in the local river to pass the days.
Damian smiled and affectionately ruffled Tina's hair. He pulled a handful of azure seeds from his pocket. "These are colorful cloud grass seeds from the Winter Forest. When they bloom, they look like beautiful, floating colorful clouds. See if you can get them to grow."
Damian had harvested several rare plant seeds during his time in the forest. He had already tried using magic to accelerate the growth of the colorful cloud grass, but magical acceleration only caused the delicate plants to wither within a day.
"Thank you, Brother Damian! I'll do my best!" Tina chirped, happily taking the seeds. Although she grew up in Gem Village right on the forest's edge, she had never ventured into the canyon area of the Winter Forest and had never seen colorful cloud grass.
Stepping inside, Damian found Chris in the kitchen standing over a massive fish, nearly half the height of a grown man. Damian could sense a faint trace of magic radiating from its scales. If the creature had lived a little longer, it might have evolved into a proper magical beast.
Chris looked up and let out a hearty laugh. "Lord Damian, impeccable timing as always! We have quite the catch today."
Damian smiled and nodded. "Then we're in for a treat, then. Link and Anna will be coming over for dinner later."
Retreating to the quiet of his study, Damian finally had time to take stock of his spoils from the Winter Forest.
The greatest prize was obvious: his mysterious metal disc now housed an additional blue crystal. This crystal granted him the authorization rights to control the Wizard Tower hidden within the Gap World.
His second-best acquisition was the Special Consultant position Lilith had promised him at the Gil Merchant Guild. It guaranteed a steady, monthly stipend. Damian had already done the math; the payout was even higher than the salary of a Court Wizard squad captain like Link.
Furthermore, the raw Mithril he needed to forge his alchemical constructs would arrive in just a few days. The rest of his haul consisted of standard spoils of war: various magical creature parts and whatever he had looted from the dead traitors.
He had recovered four magical artifacts from Viktor Hansen's body. Two of them were defensive amulets. Because Viktor had been locked in a trance during his summoning ritual, he hadn't been able to activate them to block Damian's Killing Curse.
The remaining two artifacts were enchanted rings. One accelerated spellcasting speed, while the other amplified wind-based magic. Generally, a wizard couldn't wear too many enchanted items of the same type, as stacking more than two or three caused violent magical interference.
Damian currently only relied on one active buff item: the pitch-black fingertip bone he'd acquired earlier, which also boosted casting speed. By wearing this new ring alongside it, the channeling time for his unique Runic Magic would be slashed in half.
Digging further into Viktor's belongings, Damian examined a strange, pitted ring he had pulled from the traitor's robes. A section of the outer band flared outward unevenly. When held flat in his palm, the extended metal looked exactly like a child's doodle of a solar halo.
Staring at the uneven ring, Damian fell into deep thought. He had definitely seen this pattern before. During Viktor's sacrificial ritual near White Stone Town, every single victim had this exact halo branded onto their necks.
A sudden realization struck him. The pattern perfectly matched the blood-red moon suspended in the Gap World. Whenever Damian exited that dimension, his perspective shifted high into the sky, giving him a clear view of that moon and its strange, tentacle-like halos.
Lord of the Moon Candle. That was the title Viktor had screamed right before plunging the dagger into his own heart. Even the dark magic Damian had extracted from Jack White's memories was formally called the 'Moon Candle Dream Entry Ritual.'
This 'Lord of the Moon Candle' was clearly the entity at the core of their fanatic society. Damian strongly suspected this being was connected to the dark god slain centuries ago by the great wizard Aemon, the Ancestor of Time.
Setting the rings aside, Damian inspected the potions he had scavenged from Viktor. He easily identified most of them as standard brews, except for one vial filled with a thick, dark red liquid. Astonishingly, it pulsed with an energy that his metal disc could absorb.
The metal disc was a notoriously picky eater. Aside from its initial activation, it completely ignored the magic within Damian's body and the ambient mana in the air. It only fed on a specific, unknown red energy, and Damian still had no idea where the disc pulled that energy from during its self-charging cycles.
Yet, this vial of dark red liquid from Viktor was brimming with that exact same energy. The liquid perfectly matched the description of the 'divine brew' Damian had witnessed in Jack White's memories.
Jack White had acquired his 'divine brew' only after projecting his soul into the Gap World via the Dream Entry Ritual. Damian had a sinking feeling that this liquid was a remnant left behind by the slain dark god.
"Could this be a classic dark god resurrection scenario?" Damian muttered, rubbing his chin as he recalled the fantasy tropes from his previous life on Earth. "But the metal disc belonged to the Ancestor of Time. Why would it be able to absorb an evil god's energy?"
He shook his head. There were simply too few clues, and he knew next to nothing about Aemon's true history. Setting the mystery aside for now, Damian moved on to the rest of the loot.
The items stripped from the other three traitors were relatively shabby. Each mercenary only carried a single, low-quality magical artifact—a common reality for rogue Wizard Apprentices trying to scrape by.
All three were offensive amulets containing weak, low-tier hexes. Uninterested, Damian planned to pawn them off in town later. However, another item he'd found on their bodies definitely piqued his interest.
The mustachioed wizard—the one who had left a rather deep impression on Damian during the fight—had been carrying a crafting manual titled Magic Stone Engraving Technique. This was a skill Damian had wanted to learn for a long time, but he'd never found a seller for the required texts.
Magic Stone Engraving Technique detailed the process of binding spells into physical stones for later use. Link had once given Damian a magic stone engraved with Mage Armor.
When Damian had asked him about it later, Link admitted he had simply bought the stone from a shop; he had no idea how the engraving technique actually worked.
This particular manual contained the blueprints for two offensive spells: Flame Blast and Grip of Thunder.
The technique was notoriously complicated because the physical engraving matrix changed entirely depending on the spell being bound. The mustachioed wizard clearly hadn't mastered the art yet, as Damian hadn't found any ready-made blasting or lightning stones in his pockets.
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