Chapter 185: Success
"Including Albedo-sama and the other Guardians?"
Pestonya's ears pressed slightly back.
"Including everyone." Ainz's voice dropped lower. "This matter... I don't want anyone else to know of it."
Pestonya held still for a moment. Her gaze lingered on that skull face.
She had questions. But her responsibilities as head maid didn't leave room to ask them.
"Yes, Ainz-sama," she said.
Ainz gave a small nod. He raised one hand, and a current of magic flowed from his fingertips, settling over both of them like a veil of thin silk.
Light and shadow bent for a moment. Both of their appearances changed simultaneously.
Ainz became an unremarkable middle-aged man — thinning hair, sallow complexion. Pestonya became a farmwoman wrapped in a faded headscarf.
"Let's go."
With that, he activated the Tier 7 magic [Greater Teleportation].
The teleportation light flared at the edge of a village somewhere in the Kingdom, then dissolved, drawing no one's attention.
The morning fog hadn't yet cleared, draping the village's low thatched rooftops in a grey-white haze. Distant roosters and dogs were carrying on intermittently. A wooden door creaked somewhere.
Ainz stood in the shadow between buildings, his eyes moving across the houses.
The disguised face showed nothing. Internally, he had already passed sentence on the entire village.
Pestonya stood half a step behind him to his right, indistinguishable from any ordinary village woman. She didn't know what Ainz-sama was planning. She had a bad feeling anyway.
The silence stretched.
"Ainz-sama." Pestonya couldn't hold it back. "You went to such lengths to bring me here away from everyone... what is it you intend to do?"
Ainz kept his eyes on the low rooftops ahead, thinking through how the experiment should proceed. A few moments passed.
"Resurrection magic," he said at last. "I need to establish the specific rules governing it in this world."
Pestonya's bad feeling sharpened. She put the worst possibility into words.
"You intend to use these villagers as test subjects?"
"Correct. In order for Nazarick to obtain complete information on resurrection." Ainz drew on his limited knowledge of experimental principles and did his best to explain. "An experiment requires adequate sample size. Only then can chance be ruled out, and Nazarick avoid making decisions based on inaccurate data."
Pestonya found herself without a clear argument. She couldn't refute his reasoning when it was framed as serving Nazarick's interests.
Her gaze moved away from his profile and settled on the row of low houses across the way.
A woman was pushing open a yard gate, carrying a basket of laundry out to hang. Her movements were practiced, comfortable. Behind her, a barefoot child was shuffling along, rubbing its eyes, barely awake.
Looking at the scene, Pestonya found she couldn't quite bring herself to let it happen.
"...Ainz-sama." Her voice was quieter than before. "I understand there must be good reason for what you're doing. But if the entire village were to disappear, the Kingdom would certainly send people to investigate."
She paused. Then added, softly: "And if that were to draw the attention of that dragon..."
Ainz turned his disguised brown eyes toward her. He seemed to be weighing something.
A moment later: "That's a fair point. Unnecessary noise could expose Nazarick."
Pestonya's shoulders eased very slightly. She was about to say something more —
But Ainz's finger had already risen. Then it came down.
"There is, however, one experiment that still has to be conducted. Don't worry — it won't require many people."
At his gesture.
An almost-invisible transparent outline materialized in the air: one of the Eight Legs. Its body was long and crooked, eight arthropod limbs each ending in a blade sharp as a scythe.
It moved too fast to follow — a dark streak through the air, clearing several low fences, vanishing into the morning fog.
A few breaths later, it returned.
Hanging from its eight limbs were three small bodies. Two boys and a girl. The oldest couldn't have been more than seven or eight. They were still asleep. Not a sound, not a struggle — the Eight Legs had precisely severed each carotid artery and sealed the wounds again in the same instant.
Pestonya's breath stopped. Her ears pressed completely flat. Both hands clenched tight around the fabric of her skirt.
She looked at the small bodies hanging quietly from those limbs, like three pieces of fruit plucked from a branch, swaying gently in the morning light.
"Ainz-sama..." Pestonya's voice had gone slightly rough. "These three children..."
"That's sufficient." Ainz assumed she was worried about sample size. "Three subjects is enough to verify the result. And a village losing only three children won't attract much attention."
He looked at her. "You can begin. Use [True Resurrection]."
Pestonya drew a slow breath.
She raised both hands. Soft light poured from her palms and fell over the three small bodies.
She activated the Tier 9 faith-based magic [True Resurrection].
A moment later, the oldest boy coughed sharply.
He opened his eyes and looked around in confusion, his gaze moving slowly over the familiar rooftops and fences. Then the other two came back one after another, making faint, uncertain sounds.
Ainz was pleased.
They hadn't returned to some unknown point of origin. They had woken up exactly where their bodies were. And Tier 9 resurrection magic could work on children who were probably no more than Level 1.
A thought surfaced: if he killed them again, would they revive again?
But this wasn't the moment to indulge that. He pressed the curiosity back down.
He extended one hand. Magic gathered in his palm and settled over the three still-bewildered children. Whatever struggling they might have done never got the chance to make a sound — they were asleep again before they knew it.
Teleportation light flared.
Ainz, Pestonya, and the three children vanished from the edge of the village as though they had never been there.
The Ninth Floor of the Great Tomb of Nazarick.
Outside Pestonya's room, Ainz had removed the disguise. The white skull was back.
Pestonya stood beside him with her head down. Her mood was clearly not good.
"Pestonya." A faint undertone of satisfaction had found its way into Ainz's voice. "You have another task. Go to the Dragon Kingdom border city and find Sebas — he'll tell you what to do. Complete the task, then return to Nazarick."
Pestonya blinked and looked up. "Has Sebas-sama run into some difficulty?"
"Yes." No further explanation. "He'll brief you when you arrive. You'll need to use [True Resurrection]."
She looked at the three children still lying on the floor, seemed on the verge of saying something — but in the end, all she said was: "Understood, Ainz-sama."
Teleportation light swallowed her.
The Seventh Floor of the Great Tomb of Nazarick.
Walking along the corridor with lava flowing on both sides, Ainz slowed his steps.
He turned his head and looked back at the three small figures huddled together behind him.
They had woken somewhere along the journey down to the Seventh Floor. Nobody cried or made noise. They only pressed close together and looked carefully at everything around them.
Dark red firelight from the lava channels on either side of the corridor rose and fell across their young faces.
The oldest boy had the two smaller ones behind him, doing his best not to shake.
Ainz turned back and started organizing, internally, what to say.
How to open this exactly?
"Demiurge, these three children are leftovers from an experiment I just ran — you can have them."
No. Too casual. As a superior, that kind of phrasing suggested he placed no particular value on his subordinate's contributions.
"I heard you've been short on materials lately, so I specifically obtained these for you."
That wasn't right either. He hadn't obtained them specifically — they were simply brought along after the experiment was finished. Saying "specifically" would be a lie.
His finger bones tapped twice lightly against his jaw.
As a Supreme Being, lying was hardly an issue — but he instinctively didn't want to deceive these Guardians he thought of as his own children. And if Demiurge followed up with "How did you come to find these children, Ainz-sama? How much effort did it take?" — what was he supposed to say?
He had, in fact, considered releasing the children. But even with the disguise, that still carried a risk of information about Nazarick leaking out. That was something Ainz couldn't accept.
Well. Go see Demiurge first. Read the room. Handle it as it comes.
Ainz stopped outside Demiurge's room.
The door was open.
He walked straight in. Inside, arranged as a study: scorched stone pillars threaded with dark red cracks, bookshelves along the walls with scrolls and books arranged in precise order.
Demiurge was at the desk, head down over something.
That scheming face wore an unusually focused expression — the corner of his mouth lifted slightly, the look of someone admiring a work that had come out exactly as they'd hoped.
The moment Ainz stepped in, the motion stopped.
Demiurge pressed one hand flat against the edge of the papers. His other hand gathered the stack smoothly and slid the whole thing under the thick open book on the desk, composed as if nothing had happened.
"...Demiurge."
"Ainz-sama."
Demiurge rose from the desk. The elegant smile settled into place as though the quick concealment a moment ago hadn't occurred at all. He straightened the collar of his dark suit.
And then —
Right hand raised before his body. Five fingers together. Spine perfectly straight.
A precise German military salute.
Ainz's jaw came open a fraction. But the green light of forced calm didn't appear this time.
Because the moment he'd seen the gesture, his attention had been pulled somewhere else entirely.
The papers Demiurge had hidden — he'd caught a glimpse of the topmost corner sticking out from under the book. Lines drawn on it. Crooked, diagram-style, the kind used to break down a movement step by step.
Distinctly familiar. Drawn with Pandora's Actor's distinctive hand, using himself as the reference model.
It was a step-by-step instructional diagram of the German military salute.
"Demiurge." Ainz made a concentrated effort to look unaffected. "That gesture..."
"Yes?" Demiurge held the salute.
"You can stop doing it."
Demiurge paused.
Those jeweled eyes flickered behind his glasses. The elegant smile shifted into something grave and contemplative. He lowered his right hand slowly and asked, in a tone that approached genuine contrition:
"Was my form not up to standard?"
"No."
"Then was it the angle? Or the timing of the raise?"
"Neither."
Demiurge's expression grew more serious still.
Ainz felt a complicated feeling rising in him. He wanted to say it was simply embarrassing — but the words made it to his mouth and stopped there.
Pointless. Knowing Demiurge, he'd read a deeper meaning into that too.
"...In any case," Ainz decided to abandon the thread entirely. "Just be mindful of it going forward."
Demiurge raised his eyes.
It had to be that his form still wasn't quite standard enough. He would ask Pandora's Actor to draw a more detailed breakdown at higher resolution next time.
"...Understood, Ainz-sama."
Ainz let out a quiet internal sigh and decided to stop thinking about it.
He stepped slightly to the side, revealing the three children who had been standing half-hidden in the shadow behind him.
Demiurge's gaze followed the movement. It settled on the three figures.
They were standing there. The oldest boy still had the two smaller ones behind him. The youngest — four or five years old at most — was clutching the hem of her big brother's clothes, half her face buried in the worn fabric, one eye peering carefully out at the suited man in front of her.
Against the backdrop of Nazarick's Seventh Floor, the three shapes stood out with jarring incongruity — like small animals that had wandered by mistake onto the banks of a lava river.
Demiurge's brow moved slightly.
"...?"
Ainz stood in the center of the Crimson Temple study and assembled his words quickly.
"Demiurge."
"Yes."
"The existence of that dragon forced you to abandon your plans for the farm. I have kept that in mind."
The words came out with more weight and formality than Ainz had intended.
He hadn't planned for it to sound like that — but once spoken, they had naturally found that direction. Probably because of the briefly frustrated expression on Demiurge's face a moment ago. As a superior, going for a long stretch without giving recognition to an excellent subordinate — that was genuinely unreasonable.
"These children — consider them compensation. Make full use of them as materials."
***
damn
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