Chapter 304
Chapter 304: A Succubus Really Is a Cut Above a Princess
Cocotte lay adrift within swirling white mist, seated atop the lightweight cloud that had just been yanked along with her, wandering aimlessly through this place in a daze.
The enormous full moon hung high in the night sky, yet the pitch-black starfield showed no sign of brightening because of it.
Pale white mist and pitch-black sky mingled at some indeterminate boundary, and faint blue Runes drifted and swayed all around.
The patterns continued to spiral even through the dense mist, as though dancing around Cocotte.
Taking in the scene before her, a faint unease rose in Cocotte's heart.
After all, this was her first time here—not feeling quite at home was perfectly natural.
Within the Deep Archive, hallucinations would wind themselves around those who lingered, driving those of weaker will into madness; some would even be seduced by the enchanting melody produced by the dense Magic Power, and remain here forever.
Being a 5th-Tier Mage, however, Cocotte would not be induced into hallucinations by this kind of drifting Magic Power.
Even so, she found herself more worried about Heni.
Everything inside the Deep Archive seemed random—like a labyrinth layered upon labyrinth.
Cocotte sat atop her cloud, drifting back and forth as she searched and searched, yet could not catch a glimpse of Heni anywhere.
Only the constantly shifting scenery around her, wrapped in that hazy mist, left her perpetually off-guard.
"Hmm? This is……"
Cocotte rubbed her eyes. The Archive before her seemed subtly different from a moment ago.
At some point, the black sky that had been blending with the white mist seemed to have developed a crack—and the hazy white mist beneath her feet had begun to slowly transform.
Whoosh—
The white mist gradually receded, as though it had sensed Cocotte's intention.
It parted to either side, carrying the fog with it, automatically clearing a path for Cocotte toward what lay ahead.
The clouds and mist drew back to the sides, leaving only a single road stretching into the distance.
Cocotte had no time to think further—even the cloud beneath her picked up speed.
She had no sense of how long she climbed, but it felt as though she had already crossed 3 mountain peaks.
At last, on an open plain, she spotted a familiar silhouette.
Heni appeared to be lying prostrate beneath the starry sky, the glittering stars seeming to drape a magnificent robe over her.
The shimmering Magic Power around her orbited her like stars.
A gentle breeze passed through, carrying the silver-white grass leaves around her as they drifted slowly by.
Everything was hazy and dreamlike.
Cocotte shook her head, trying to clear her mind a little.
Only then did she continue forward on her cloud, drawing closer to Heni.
The nearer she drew, the more clearly she could see.
At that moment, Heni was lying prostrate atop a massive book, a feather quill dancing swiftly in her hand.
"Heni……"
"Heni……" she had just started to call out, when she realized her throat seemed to be seized by some mysterious force.
She couldn't squeeze out a single word.
Desperate and speechless, all she could hear was an extraordinarily faint voice drifting from the far edge of the sky.
"Shh~"
Cocotte looked left and right, but the surrounding area was still utterly empty.
Perhaps the Archive feared she might disturb Heni, and had therefore silenced her voice.
She had no choice but to look forward once more.
Suddenly her eyes went wide.
At some point, an endless stream of obscure Runes had appeared around Heni—drifting across the mist-clouds, surrounding her and filling all the space around her.
With every stroke Heni wrote down in the book beneath her, a Rune would surface by her side.
Those Runes looked—looked extraordinarily familiar.
But when Cocotte tried to read through them, she found these Runes were clearly incoherent, and would be extremely difficult to combine into any recognizable Magic.
What on earth was Heni doing?
Cocotte quickly stifled her urge to speak and waited, her gaze fixed on Heni's focused face.
Before long, Heni appeared to have finished writing all the Runes.
She lifted her head and stretched out a long, contented stretch, and upon raising her eyes, happened to look straight at Cocotte.
"Senior Cocotte?"
Cocotte opened her mouth, and suddenly realized she was able to speak again.
So she hurriedly asked the question she had been holding this whole time:
"Heni, what are you doing?"
Heni patted the massive book and explained with excitement:
"As you can see."
"These are all the 4th-Tier Magic spells recorded in the Magic Archive. I've extracted as many Runes of similar properties as I could, and rearranged and recombined them."
Cocotte listened with a completely blank expression.
When these Runes were combined into their normal 4th-Tier Magic forms, she could make sense of them.
But once they were all separated and rearranged—
She was utterly lost.
No wonder—these Runes looked incredibly, even ninety percent familiar, yet she simply couldn't understand what Magic they were supposed to form.
So Cocotte asked:
"Can you actually make sense of these yourself?"
Heni shook her head.
"I can't—so I've been trying over and over again."
"Trying?"
Heni picked up the massive book and flipped it open.
From among the tens of thousands of Runes recorded within, she selected several dozen of the most obscure ones and touched them lightly with her fingertip.
Immediately, those several dozen Runes materialized from thin air, surrounding the book and circling around Heni.
The Magic patterns around her began to shift, and a Formation materialized without any warning.
Then the Runes began to crack—shattering apart like glass.
A surge of tremendous energy was released in an instant, a dazzling radiance sliced through the air, as though the sky had been torn apart by a deep ravine.
The powerful Magic Power expanded rapidly through the air and instantly detonated an astonishing surge of energy.
That force burst open like clusters of brilliant fireworks, breathtaking and magnificent.
Emerald light bloomed like flowing radiance in Cocotte's eyes, the intense brilliance nearly robbing her of her vision.
Even her heart felt stabbed by those brilliant beams of light.
This Magic appeared quite simple—one needed only to know the Runes in this book in advance.
But therein lay the difficulty.
Because this Magic had been generated by selecting several dozen Runes from among tens of thousands of different ones, and rearranging them into a new configuration.
And to use this Magic, one would have to understand all tens of thousands of those Runes completely.
Heni began to explain:
"This portion of the Magic has no real power, because I only extracted the 'luminous' aspect of them."
"But if it were like this—"
She waved her hand, and the Runes surrounding the Formation shifted once more.
And this time, the Runes began to take shape.
A mass of brilliant Magic Power began to rapidly converge, compress, distort, and tremble.
BOOM—!
A violent explosion suddenly erupted. Terrifying Magic Power, shockwave and all, surged up into the pitch-black sky.
The enormous blast warped the space, like countless flower petals being forcibly spliced into the fabric of space.
Transparent petal-shaped patterns fully revealed themselves, folding everything together.
The terrifying force sent Cocotte reeling with shock.
Her very bones seemed to tremble, the violent sound of the explosion hammering against her eardrums over and over.
"Through this method, I can discard the non-functional components of many Magics, and deploy them far more rapidly."
"This inspiration came to me from Professor Viktor's chant-free Magic."
Cocotte had difficulty hearing clearly—the ringing in her ears kept her mind from settling.
After a short while, she finally made out what Heni had actually said.
Wait—Viktor gave you inspiration like this?
Viktor's Magic at least follows traceable logic—but what about you?
You've gone straight to disassembling Magic and reconstructing it from scratch?
This difficulty, while not quite on the level of creating original Magic, was still thoroughly outrageous.
Cocotte felt her head spinning a little, and her chest oddly tight.
For the first time, she understood what it felt like when a true genius appeared right beside you.
But the most shocking part was still to come.
Heni's voice rang out:
"But, if I could make use of all these tens of thousands of Runes……"
Heni calmly and steadily raised the enormous book in her hands—the one that had accumulated countless layers of knowledge.
Under her control, the pages turned in a rhythmic cadence, and tens of thousands of Runes that she had recorded with meticulous brushstrokes leapt vividly off the pages of her notebook.
This book contained nearly all the 4th-Tier Runes from the Magic Archive.
Heni's eyes were bright and blazing as she stared at the massive book in her hands, her expression radiant.
The Runes seemed to take on a life of their own and began to surge of their own accord.
Under Cocotte's stunned gaze, they peeled away from Heni's pages and took form, rising gradually into the sky—like a scatter of stars dispersing into the heavens.
The Runes began automatically converging in the air, and the marks containing tremendous Magic Power lifted a dazzling brilliance.
"【Blazing Radiance】."
Part of the Runes began to combine. Radiance started surging, growing brighter and brighter.
"【Nebula】"
"【Pale Dawn】"
"【Deep Darkness】"
"【Defiance】"
"【Love Unchained】"
"【Rhinoceros Beetle's Oath】"
"【Destiny's Thread】"
"【Moonlit Dew】"
"【Eight Thousand Phantom Lives】"
With each word that fell from Heni's lips—
The tens of thousands of Runes began to converge at a frantic pace. The pitch-black sky had vanished entirely, replaced by the chaotic Runes as they fully merged together. 10 Formation patterns cycled in continuous rotation.
The obscure Runes now seemed like seeds from which all things grow.
Like spring returning to the land, they brimmed with surging vitality, fully reawakened.
What was reflected in both Cocotte's and Heni's eyes at this moment was the enormous shape of that Magic.
As though swaying and shimmering beneath the brilliant moon.
How on earth had Heni managed to do this?
And at that moment, Heni seemed to whisper beside her ear:
"When I first came in, there was a voice—telling me over and over."
"Only when I discover the secrets of these Magics, only when I uncover the Magic hidden within this layer of space—"
"Would it let me leave."
The flow of time within the Deep Archive differed from the outside world—Cocotte had once heard Heim Horn mention this.
For Heni to have entered the Deep Archive, perhaps only 10 or so minutes had passed in the outside world.
In here, she may have already been here for 10 or more days.
"Before you found me, I had already repeated this process more times than I could count."
Splitting apart again and again, recombining again and again, in pursuit of the most perfect configuration.
Until, finally—that one successful attempt.
Cocotte dared not imagine what this volume of work would mean for any ordinary 3rd-Tier Mage—it would absolutely be enough to drive a person out of their mind.
But Heni had not broken.
Maintaining this fascination with order and pattern, Heni had persisted in subjecting every 4th-Tier Magic in the Archive to renewed chaos and recombination.
Pursuing the sequence and world that belonged to her alone.
Unlike War Magic, which requires stacking different Formations of varying kinds and releasing staggering compounded power when their frequencies align in resonance—
The Magic Heni used was a complete dismantling of countless Formations—extracting Runes of identical elements from within them all.
And ultimately recombining them into entirely new Magic.
The shimmering, glowing world seemed to be draped beneath a veil of gossamer gauze.
10 Rune Formation patterns—like phoenixes reborn from ash—merged completely into one.
Tens of thousands of Runes soared and cascaded together, transforming into a great celestial scroll that unfurled in the air above, rolling and sinking through the void.
【5th-Tier Magic: A Cosmic Canvas Submerged in Chaos】
Yet beneath the sky filled with brilliance and starlight, only Heni and Cocotte remained in the world—both seemingly captivated by that wondrous luminescence.
But beneath the dazzling starlight that spread across the heavens, neither Heni nor Cocotte noticed.
The sky opened its eyelids once more. The moon shifted ever so slightly, as though it were lowering its gaze to look down at Heni.
"For a 3rd-Tier Mage to reach this level—no wonder the Archive was drawn to her……"
"Aubrey, it seems like that Eternal Furnace of your family is on the verge of losing its advantage."