Throne of Magical Arcana
chapter-120

Staring at the street outside of the window, Lilith and Sala couldn’t and dared not sleep.

"I heard that, from time to time, there were people missing in this small town, and it has been happening more and more often in recent years." Lilith asked her elder brother, "Do you think it’s because of the magic lock?"

Sala shook his head, "I’m not sure. After all, I don’t even know what kind of magic lock this is. I know the Church once sent several pastors here before, but they found nothing suspicious. In the end, they guessed that some monsters or creatures in the mountain took them."

Then, Sala pointed at the small house on the other side of the street, "That house once belonged to one of the few literate country gentlemen here in Bonn. Ten years ago, on April tenth, his seven-year-old daughter was missing, and he never found her. Finally, he moved eastwards with his wife, away from Bonn, because they were too sad to keep living here."

"April tenth…" Lilith murmured thoughtfully.

...

The girl, who seemed to be a figure coming out of a black-and-white photo, smiled to Lucien. Slowly, she raised up her arms and then started to run toward Lucien, as if an innocent and lively daughter was running toward her dad.

However, the scenario was very creepy in Lucien’s eyes: The little girl’s body was floating in the air, and her eyes were hollow.

Lucien started to cast a spell, but he couldn’t even hear his own voice. The air surrounding the little girl began to stir and turned into several invisible robes trying to constrain her.

Apprentice spell, Wraith Shackle.

As soon as the little girl realized what was going on around her, her face contorted with hatred and viciousness. She opened her mouth and started to scream.

Lucien was prepared, since he had some experience with the revenants before during his experiments. Right after he cast Wraith Shackle, Lucien activated Silence Wall to protect himself from the attack of sound waves.

In a real fight, knowledge still mattered a lot.

Lucien could see the ripples crashing against the invisible wall surrounding him. Even before he had a second to be proud of his foresight, the wall suddenly collapsed into small transparent pieces!

The rest of the sound waves, although they had been weakened to some extent by the invisible wall, hit Lucien right in his chest.

Feeling the sky and earth were spinning, he fell on the ground and almost threw up right away. Lucien’s guts were trembling inside of his body.

Fortunately, a layer of gray light instantly covered Lucien’s skin when he was attacked. His Moonlight Blessing was activated on its own in order to protect him. Without the ability of dematerializing into moonlight, Lucien might be dead already.

Lucien realized that this was a revenant as powerful as a real knight!

Quickly analyzing what kind of revenant and how powerful the little girl was, Lucien swiftly shifted to the other side of the revenant, then his lips moved.

Lucien cast Illumination.

Even the weakest revenant was immune to most of the Element spells. Only light, fire and sound waves could hurt them.

However, Illumination did not work very well in this world. The grayish light ball in the sky looked rather dim and faint.

The little girl paused a bit and then directly jumped onto Lucien.

With his Moonlight Blessing, Lucien barely dodged away, like a gray shadow. At the same time, he grabbed his sword and hacked toward the little girl, after which he started running.

Lucien knew the attack was in vain, but he did not have another choice, since he was still during the buffering time for casting.

Seeing the sword did not hurt her, the little girl tipped her head a little bit and smiled.

Then, she suddenly disappeared, and several seconds later, she showed up right in front of Lucien, with her arms wide open.

Lucien reacted fast. Pressing his foot against the ground, he changed his direction and started to cast Homan’s Oscillation.

This time, the little girl was injured. Lucien saw her etherious body ripplling like disturbed water.

The great anger appeared on her face again, and it became more and more vicious. She raised her head, screamed silently, and then directly rushed at him.

Once again, although Lucien avoided the frontal attack of the sound waves with Moonlight, his ankles suddenly felt weak and his movement paused for a second.

The revenant had reached him. For a second, Lucien’s consciousness faded, and then he felt extremely tired and flimsy. The heat in his body was escaping. He felt cold.

The little girl went directly through Lucien’s body and stopped on the other side. Raising her hands, she looked shocked and confused.

The ring Lucien was wearing, Ice Revenger, helped him to stay focused. Without any hesitance, Lucien cast a spell again.

A blast of cold wind blew around them. A revenant was summoned by Lucien.

He decided to use a revenant to fight against the other revenant, since he noticed that, in the weird dimension, while light magic was largely weakened, the undead creatures were strengthened by a lot.

Being controlled by Lucien, the summoned revenant launched its attack toward the little girl.

Wrestling together, their arms pierced each other’s "body". However, it seemed like the revenant Lucien just summoned was weaker than the little girl, since within a couple of seconds, it already started to get less and less visible.

It would not even take the little girl ten seconds to completely wipe it out.

Hoever, it was enough time for Lucien to turn the tables.

Lucien took a few steps backward, reached his hand into his pocket and threw out a handful of reagents toward the two revenants who were wrestling, and a white fire wall enveloped them as Lucien finished casting the spell.

This was Lucien’s invented spell, Sulphur-fire Wall, which was just an inspirational flash when he was facing the aquatic zombie, and within the past couple of months, Lucien turned it into one of his regular spells.

The only problem with Sulphur-fire Wall now was that the structure of its magic model was not simplified enough, so it took Lucien more time and spiritual power to activate it.

Being burned by the sulphur fire, the revenant Lucien summoned immediately disappeared, and a couple of seconds later, the little girl started to show signs of being in pain.

However, the apprentice spell could not cause a great damage to her, but only contain her within the fire wall. It seemed she was very afraid of fire, and instead of trying to force her way through the fire, she stayed in the center.

Lucien was a bit relieved and was about to run away from the little girl. Facing a revenant as powerful as a knight, the top priority for Lucien was to stay away from her, instead of attempting to eliminate it.

As soon as he turned around, Lucien took a glance at the place where the little girl showed up. Through the open door Lucien saw a small skeleton with thin bones bending over a wooden table.

The scene reminded him of what he had read about revenants. All of a sudden, Lucien changed his direction and ran toward the house as fast as a shadow.

Watching him approach the house, the little girl suddenly panicked. Without any hesitance, she rushed toward Lucien through the fire wall.

By the time the little girl broke through the fire wall, Lucien was already standing in front of the small skeleton. Sprinkling a handful of sulphur powder on it, Lucien lit the skeleton on fire.

The white fire immediately covered the bones.

In the fire, Lucien saw a drawing on the wooden table, carved by something sharp, like nails. It was an awkward drawing of a family of three, but then, like an illusion, it shifted into a little girl waiting beside a door.

Under the drawing, there were a few crooked letters: Daddy… Mommy… Home…

The little girl slowly stopped when she saw the skeleton on fire. She was a bit surprised at first, but then lowered her eyes, looking rather sad.

Then, her body became more and more transparent. She started to gradually disappear.

From the pictures, the letters and the ever-changing entrance of the magic lock, Lucien had a rough idea of why the little girl was here in this world. His sympathy instantly took over his fear.

"Daddy… Mommy… Home," Lucien silently murmured.

His heart was softened. Lucien turned to the little girl, who was almost gone, and said to her, "I’ll take you home."

In this world of black and white, the world of silence, the little girl had tears falling down her face, but she smiled sweetly, as if she read the movement of Lucien’s lips and understood what he said.

In the last second before she disappeared completely, the little girl nodded to Lucien gratefully.

When the skeleton was burned into ashes by the magic fire, the little girl also disappeared. The wooden table was gone together with the burning skeleton.

Lucien carefully collected the ashes and put it into his pocket.

Now he was even more confused with this world, since it seemed less and less likely to be the Grand Cross he was looking for. The whole place was just too creepy.

Lucien started to feel very uncomfortable with the great silence in this world. He felt himself dumb and deaf. Grabbing his sword tight, he started to walk toward Elsinore Lake.

When he was about to leave the small town, he noticed that the cemetery that he saw when he arrived in Bonn disappeared, and instead, a piece of wasteland was in front of him.

"The magic lock world is actually not a copy of the original world?" Lucien asked himself in his mind with great surprise.

Picking up the pace, Lucien turned around the corner with overgrown weeds. Then, what he saw instantly shocked him.

The scarlet Elsinore Lake in this world was like a huge pool of blood, and it reflected the inverted image of a grand cross consisting of nine bright stars shining in the sky, whose light lit up the whole lake.

That was the first time Lucien saw another color except black, white and gray since he came into this world.