Chapter 226 : Chapter 226
Chapter 226. Prove It to Me, Logaris!
The Red-Eyed Duplicate’s expression froze.
That face, identical to Logaris’s in every detail, was now filled with shock and absurdity. It was like an actor in the middle of a passionate speech suddenly realizing that not only had the audience failed to cry, they had pulled out a bucket of popcorn instead.
“You… This is pure arrogance! This is a path to death!” the Red-Eyed Duplicate snapped in frustration. “You have no idea how heavy the truth is!”
Logaris could not even be bothered to look up at it.
“I have no idea?”
He snapped his fingers.
Snap.
That crisp sound was like the activation of some hidden switch.
The lifelike wooden hut around them suddenly split with countless fine cracks, and streams of dark blue light leaked out from within.
The walls began to twist. The rain turned into frozen strings of symbols. Even the mud beneath his feet started breaking apart like a collapsing mosaic.
“And another thing—you were acting far too badly.”
Logaris looked at the world collapsing around him, his tone full of disdain. “I would never ramble this much. If the real me behaved like you, I would have killed myself out of shame a long time ago.”
He raised his right hand.
Within his palm, countless complex runes compressed and reorganized themselves at a frantic pace, until they finally condensed into a blade of light made entirely from pure streams of data.
Analytical spellwork pulsed across the blade in a way that made one’s scalp crawl.
“Ever since those memories started playing, I’ve been analyzing the underlying structure of this illusion.”
Logaris pushed up his glasses, and a cold glint flashed across the lenses.
“Sixty-three thousand four hundred and twenty-one nodes. Seven nested loops. This is your trump card? This is the so-called mental trial?”
“To be honest, it’s a little crude.”
Before the last word had even finished falling, the blade in Logaris’s hand slashed downward.
There was nothing flashy about it—just a pure, overwhelming crush of computational power.
RIIIP—!
The blade of light sliced through the Red-Eyed Duplicate’s defenses, and through the entire false memory-space along with them.
“Get out of my head.”
With Logaris’s icy verdict, a sharp crack like shattering glass exploded through the void.
Bang!
Darkness receded. The rotten wooden hut, the shrieking stormy night, that endlessly babbling monster—all of it turned into fragments of nothingness.
…
When his vision cleared again, Logaris found himself floating within a pure white void.
There was no up, down, left, or right here. Beneath him flowed a silver river of light like liquid mercury, slowly stretching toward infinity. Above him hung countless complex runic formulas, suspended in midair and carrying out their own calculations.
They were arranged like stars, forming the dome of this strange space.
And opposite him, the thing that had been impersonating his “true self” finally revealed its real form.
It was a woman in black robes.
She had no true physical body; instead, she existed in a half-transparent spirit-form, standing barefoot upon the void itself. Her gray hair spilled loosely over her shoulders like a waterfall, giving her an air of languid danger.
But the most striking thing about her was her eyes.
They were pitch-black, with no trace of white in them at all, like two miniature black holes devouring light. One glance was enough to make it feel as though one’s soul might be dragged inside.
Logaris narrowed his eyes.
He had seen this face before.
Back in the hall of the second trial, the giant thirty-meter statue had been carved in the likeness of this very woman.
“So it was you.”
Logaris let the light blade in his hand dissipate and rolled his stiff neck slightly. Not only did he show no sign of alarm in this unfamiliar place, he instead sized up the mysterious female spirit with open curiosity.
“Mad King Maxim’s hidden beauty?”
“Or rather…”
He pushed up his glasses, amusement tinting his voice. “The so-called ‘Mad King’ Maxim was actually a woman?”
“The so-called ‘Mad King’ Maxim…”
“That was you?”
The black-eyed woman said nothing, which was answer enough.
She floated there in silence, those pitch-black eyes fixed on Logaris as though she were reassessing the danger level of this intruder.
After a long while, a cold voice, devoid of emotional fluctuation yet filled with supreme authority, rang directly inside Logaris’s mind.
“Passed.”
“Logaris West, you are the most arrogant human I have ever seen.”
Maxim’s voice was ethereal and vast, echoing through the white expanse.
“Your talent is unmatched in all my life. Your logical reasoning surpasses by ten thousand times those fools who do nothing but clutch statues and pray, treating magic as though it were a gift of grace. You are the most perfect vessel, and the only one fit to bear truth.”
She paused, and within those black-hole eyes, a trace of something like regret flickered in the form of flowing data.
“What a pity.”
“It is a shame that you are too greedy. You desire the omniscience and omnipotence of divinity, yet cannot part with the crude amusements of humanity. You want to ascend while carrying that garbage called ‘emotion’ with you? That is nothing but tearing down your own walls.”
Logaris stood upon the mercury-like ground and leisurely brushed nonexistent dust from his sleeve.
“Finished?”
He pushed up his glasses, wearing that trademark false smile of his—the sort that could make even a bishop of the Holy Church want to punch him on sight.
“I happen to have one flaw: I can’t stand listening to old people preach. Whether they’re still alive, or have been dead for who knows how many years. As for whether I’m greedy…”
Logaris spread his hand, and a pale blue flame of magic flared to life in his palm.
“Adults never choose just one. I want all of it. Was such a simple truth really too much for that brain of yours, so full of ‘truth,’ to understand?”
Maxim fell silent.
She seemed to be reevaluating just how hopeless the man before her truly was.
A few seconds later, she raised her hand.
It was a pale, slender hand, yet it seemed to hold the authority of the entire world.
“If you insist on dancing in chains, then prove it to me.”
“Prove that your ‘humanity’ is not a burden, but a weapon.”
“If you win, everything here will be yours! My knowledge, my power, even this tower!”
“If you lose, your soul will be completely erased, and this body will become the vessel through which I return to the world.”
“Prove it to me, Logaris!”
Before the final word finished echoing, the entire white space erupted into motion. Countless strands of silver radiance appeared from thin air, rapidly weaving themselves into a massive three-dimensional net that completely sealed off the area around Logaris.
Ancient Forbidden Spell · Lock of the Firmament!