Chapter 63 - 62: The Devil’s Conjecture

Chapter 63: Chapter 62: The Devil’s Conjecture

Veera didn’t dare stay in the lobby for another second. Keeping his head lowered to hide his contorted, livid face, he turned around and stumbled blindly out through the heavy bronze doors of the Arcane Training Tower.

?He didn’t stop until he had ducked into a deserted, shadowy alleyway between two storage warehouses behind the tower.

?BANG!

?Veera slammed his fist viciously into the cold stone wall, splitting the skin over his knuckles until blood trickled down the bricks.

?"Aegon Noiré! I’ll kill him! I swear I will tear him to pieces!" Veera roared in a low, hoarse voice, his chest heaving like a bellows as murderous black-and-red mana leaked erratically from his pores.

"Master, why didn’t you stop him?! That was the Dimensional Sage’s God’s Ring! With that personal pocket dimension, I could have trained at triple speed under fifty times gravity! Why did a lunatic like him have to destroy it?!"

?Veera waited for the ancient devil inside his Grimoire to curse Aegon alongside him.

?However, for several long seconds, his mind remained completely silent.

?When the raspy voice of the ancient spirit finally echoed inside Veera’s skull again, all of its earlier arrogance and greed had vanished. In its place was a bone-chilling, unnatural solemnity.

?Shut your mouth and calm down, kid. Something is very wrong with that boy.

?Veera froze.

"Wrong? What do you mean, Master? He’s just an arrogant noble brat who wanted to humiliate me because he had extra credits!"

?"Humiliate you?" the devil sneered coldly. "Use your brain, Veera! Think carefully about what that brat said right before he crushed the gem. He looked straight into your eyes and said, ’Now nobody can fix it.’"

?A cold shiver suddenly ran down Veera’s spine, extinguishing half of his frantic rage.

?"Do you understand what those five words mean? For the past five hundred years, not a single Runic Grandmaster on this continent has been able to mend that spatial fracture. To every living soul in this Academy, including the Supreme Dean, that ring was already completely unfixable! If Aegon Noiré thought the ring was just a dead piece of scrap metal, why would he be afraid of you taking it from him at the end of the month? And why would he specifically crush the spatial core so that ’nobody can fix it’?!"

?Veera’s breathing stopped completely. His pupils shrank as the terrifying logic behind his master’s words hit him like a bucket of ice water.

?"Wait... You’re right. Nobody in this world knows that my Abyssal Grimoire has the Blood-Weaving technique to stitch broken spatial nodes together. You only told me about it in my head two minutes ago! How could Aegon Noiré possibly know that I had a way to repair the God’s Ring?!"

?<Not just the God’s Ring, Look back at everything he has done today. At noon, he earned fifty Academic Credits. Instead of buying healing potions, he walked straight to the bottom shelf of the Treasure Pavilion and bought a 300 year-old petrified Dragon-Marrow Pill that the Alchemy Department had thrown into the bargain bin as dead gravel. An hour later, his physical strength skyrocketed by a whole tier.>

?Inside Veera’s chest, the black-and-red pages of the Abyssal Grimoire trembled slightly.

?<One coincidence is luck. Two coincidences is cunning. But walking into the Treasure Pavilion to pick out the only hidden treasure in the trash bin, and then walking into the Training Tower five minutes before you to destroy the exact Mythic artifact that only my Abyssal magic could repair? That is not luck, Veera.>

?"Then... what is he? Could he be an old monster who possessed a child’s body?"

?<No. I inspected his soul aura at the Pillars of Solomon yesterday. His soul is genuinely ten years old, without a single trace of possession.

There is only one possibility left in the laws of the cosmos. Aegon Noiré is a Regressor. Someone who has already lived through the future once, and used a forbidden time artifact to return to his ten-year-old body.">

?"From the future?!" Veera gasped, his mind fucked at the revelation.

?<Think about it!> the devil snarled. <You are the awakener of my Supreme Abyssal Grimoire! In the original flow of fate, you were supposed to take first place in the entrance exam, claim the 50 High-Grade Mana Crystals, move into the Prime Villa, and win the heart of the Everlight girl. Then, you would have discovered the petrified Dragon-Marrow Pill and repaired the God’s Ring, rising to become the undisputed ruler of this era!>

?The spirit’s voice grew sharper and more urgent.

?<In that previous timeline, Aegon Noiré must have been nothing more than a stepping stone who died under your feet, or an enemy you crushed on your path to supremacy! That is why, the moment he returned to the past, he has been following your footsteps like a phantom. He is using his memories of the future to snatch away every single treasure that belonged to you, and anything he cannot use himself, like the God’s Ring, he destroys on the spot just to stop you from growing stronger!>

?Listening to his master’s explanation, Veera felt as if a bolt of lightning had split open the dark clouds in his mind.

?All the suffocating confusion and self-doubt that had tortured him for the past two days vanished in an instant, replaced by a volcanic eruption of hatred.

?"So that’s it!" Veera clenched his bleeding fists, his eyes burning with a fanatical, murderous crimson light.

"I knew it! I am the chosen ruler of the Supreme Grimoire! The Triple Crown, the Prime Villa, Aria Everlight, the Dragon-Marrow Pill, and the God’s Ring... every single thing Aegon Noiré has right now was stolen from my future!"

?Without realizing it, the ancient devil had come up with the most logical deduction possible, yet he had still underestimated the truth by a mile. Aegon wasn’t a defeated rival who had turned back time, nor had he destroyed the God’s Ring because he couldn’t use it.

?"Master, since he knows all of my future opportunities inside the Academy, how do I stop him from cutting off my path?!" Veera asked urgently.

?<Simple. He only knows the treasures you found inside the Academy during the normal school schedule. Tonight, after curfew, we won’t waste time in the public training rooms. I will guide you into the sealed catacombs beneath the capital’s old graveyard to absorb abyssal death-marrow directly. No matter how much of the future he remembers, he cannot stop you from growing if we abandon the original timeline completely. By the time the Monthly Battles arrives in thirty days, we will drag that thief off his stolen throne and take back everything he owes you!>

?"Good!" Veera wiped the dried blood from his lips, a cruel, twisted grin forming in the dark alley.

"Wait for me in the Prime Villa, Aegon Noiré. Enjoy my life while you still can."