“HOW THE HELL DID THIS HAPPEN?”

Byron was furious.

“We don’t know, my lord, we are very sorry!”

Two guards were kneeling in fear in front of Byron.

“Useless fools!” he said, grabbing them by the throat and lifting them into the air.

“Please… my lord! It’s not… our fault!”

“Then. Whose. Fault. Is. It.” Byron asked slowly, emphasising each word.

“We… don’t… know…”

“THEN FIND OUT!” he yelled, throwing them across the room as if they were garbage.

Someone had snuck into the mansion, killed the two soldiers guarding Sam’s prison, used their keys to release him, and helped him escape the mansion, all under their noses!

What the hell was the point of these useless buffoons!

Standing behind Byron, to his right was the headmistress trying to calm him down, while to the left was Henry, behind whom was Astoria. She stood there calmly as always while enjoying the chaos.

Sam had been surprised to see her, but she didn’t have time to answer any questions. She released him and brought him out of his cell. She gave him a healing pill she brought from her own village and gave it to Sam to help him recover from his wounds.

Once he was healed, the two escaped through a route that Astoria had already planned and managed to leave before anyone found out.

They both ran far away to the edge of the city, where Astoria gave Sam some money to stay in a nearby inn and told him to wait until she contacted him. Then, changing her clothes, she returned to the mansion and snuck back into her room as if nothing happened.

“This is UNBELIEVABLE!”

“Please, calm down Lord Byron,” the headmistress consoled.

“Don’t tell me to calm down! How can you calm down when you’re surrounded by a bunch of idiots!?” he yelled as he punched a wall, leaving a huge crack.

“If I find out who did this, I swear I will rip them apart!” Byron stormed off and the headmistress was about to follow but was stopped by Henry.

“Leave father to me, I’ll take care of him,” he said before running after him.

Astoria tried to quickly follow him too but was pulled back by the headmistress.

“You, wait!”

“Yes, headmistress?” Astoria asked innocently.

“Where were you last night?”

“I was just in my room.”

“Really? Why did I see you enter the mansion from outside late at night then?”

“Oh, I was struggling to fall asleep, so I just went out for a breath of fresh air.”

The headmistress was silent.

“A few days ago, on the day when the intruder arrived, you changed the food for Master and Miss Langston guarding the gates, didn’t you?”

“Huh? What are you talking about headmistress?” Astoria asked puzzled.

“Don’t lie to me, you bitch!” the headmistress yelled, slapping her across the face.

“Ah, headmistress! Please I’m innocent, I didn’t do anything!” she started crying, looking at the headmistress with fear.

The headmistress was puzzled.

She knew how strong martial artists were, so she didn’t understand how a tempered body martial artist could get past two steel body martial artists, even with the element of surprise. So, she interrogated the twin blades separately.

They finally confessed to the headmistress that they had fallen asleep and begged her not to tell Byron for fear of what he would do to them for being complacent.

The headmistress agreed but she was even more confused.

It was not normal for steel body martial artists to randomly fall asleep out of tiredness like that. Or at least, that’s what she thought. But everyone was working hard to defend the village in recent times and being as strong as they are, they were often sent on dangerous hunting trips. Hence, it did seem reasonable for them to become very tired occasionally.

Still, something didn’t feel right for her.

As she was pondering this, she saw the slave servant of the twin blades tending to some injuries. She questioned him on how he got hurt when he revealed to her everything about what happened with Astoria. She immediately became very suspicious of Astoria and was watching her carefully.

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But to her surprise, Astoria visited the interrogation of the intruder every day. Not only did she visit the interrogation, but she also watched as he was brutally tortured, and was even friendly with the guards who were torturing him! If she really had a relationship with the intruder, there was no way she would be able to do that.

Hence, she convinced herself that she was just overthinking things and left the issue.

But then this happened.

It was impossible for an outsider to infiltrate and save the prisoner so smoothly. It had to be someone who knew the workings of the mansion inside out.

Even if by luck someone entered unnoticed, their fight with the guards should have alerted the other guards in the prison. The only way a fight wouldn’t alert any guards was if it ended instantly, that is to say, the guards were killed instantly.

But seeing the remains of the battle, the guards were wounded multiple times, so that clearly wasn’t the case. So why did they not raise the alarm when fighting?

There was only one other possibility she could think of - there must have been no fight at all!

The guards must have not felt the need to fight whoever had attacked them. Then, once they were close, they quickly backstabbed and killed both of them before they could do anything.

And who was the most suspicious person that the guards trusted, that could trick and betray them like that?

Astoria.

No one fit all the criteria as much as she did.

So, she confronted her.

However, looking at Astoria now, crying like she had been wronged, the headmistress wanted to believe her. She wanted to believe Astoria was innocent.

She didn’t like her at first, but she had seen her work very hard to serve Henry and he was much better once she came into the picture. Astoria was a very hardworking and exceptional maid servant who always did as she was told.

Hence, she wanted to believe that she was innocent.

However, the headmistress was old. She had seen so many fights and betrayals in her life to spot a poisonous snake when she saw one.

And all her instincts were telling her that this young girl in front of her was no pure, innocent angel. Those eyes were crying tears of deception.

She was sure of it. But she had no proof. No proof at all.

Ignoring her crying, the headmistress approached Astoria coldly.

“You listen to me very carefully young lady. If I find out that you had anything, ANYTHING, to do with this, I promise you, I will make you regret ever being born.”

Astoria listened and every word she said made her more terrified. Once the headmistress finished, she just started crying more loudly.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I didn’t do anything I swear, please don’t hurt me, I’m scared!” she begged.

The headmistress was at a loss. If she wasn’t always suspicious of her, seeing her performance now, she would be convinced that Astoria was innocent.

But nothing could convince her now. Not unless they found the actual culprit.

The headmistress scoffed and walked away, leaving Astoria crying on the floor.

Once the headmistress left, the crying stopped. The tears on her face were replaced with an eerie smile.

“Let’s see what you can do to me, you old hag!”

…

Summoning spirits was much more difficult than summoning artifacts. Drake had no prior knowledge or understanding of spirits at all. So, he was reading the spell scroll in his hand intently.

It was a spell to summon a light spirit. Over the past few days, he had tried dozens of times to summon one and failed repeatedly.

Ray saw this and breathed a sigh of relief. If he could summon numerous spirits too on his first try, the same way he could with artifacts, Drake would really be a monster.

Drake closed his eyes and felt the mana spring in his inner realm. He focused on the mana and willed them to activate the spell.

Cough! Cough!

He failed again.

From his understanding, there were two main stages to summoning a spirit - forming the body and carving the rune.

The body of the spirit could be anything, humanoid, animalistic, or something else. The rune is what gave the spirit the ability to manipulate the elements.

Spirits did not have a physical body and relied on mana to survive. But the mana supplied by the mage had to be able to flow through the body of the spirit properly for it to exist. So, to create a stable spirit body, one needed to create pathways for mana to flow through the body of the spirit in question, kind of like how blood flowed through the human body.

This was the first hurdle. Depending on what form the body had, the exact nature and distribution of the mana pathways had to be different, meaning there were essentially endless different variations of spirit bodies and mana pathways possible.

The second hurdle was the rune. Runes were complex symbols which essentially encoded a bunch of information. When mana passed through a rune, it would produce a specific effect. For example, passing mana through a fireball rune would convert the mana to fire, make the shape into a ball of a certain size, and make it fly in a particular direction at a given speed.

The information on how to do this was all encoded within the rune. So, changing the rune slightly might cause a completely different kind of effect to occur.

For example, if the section of the rune corresponding to the size of the ball was altered it may produce a very huge fireball. However, producing fireballs of that size would consume a huge amount of mana which a simple rune won’t be able to contain, so such a rune would just not work.

If a rune corresponded to an unfeasible spell, it would become unstable and cause the entire spirit to collapse.

Sometimes, even if it was stable, the spell the rune produced might be ineffective in battle.

For example, if the rune was altered to produce a really small fireball that moved very slowly, you could summon a simple spirit that would be able to create those fireballs, but that would be useless.

In this way, only a certain combination of factors was feasible and possible to be encoded into a rune. Given all the different factors and information encoded in the rune, and how they all had to be in specific combinations, the number of variations that each rune could have was huge.

Finally, when carving the rune onto the body of the spirit, the mana pathways in the spirit's body had to accommodate the rune. The pathways had to be denser where they were closer to the rune, so the spirit could provide the rune with sufficient mana to activate it. If any part of the rune was altered, the mana pathways close to the rune also needed to be changed accordingly for everything to work.

So, all of these had to be executed with absolute perfection to summon a spirit. The exact nature of the rune, the spirit body, the position of the rune in the spirit body, and the necessary mana pathways to power the rune and the spirit body, all had to be created without even the slightest error.

Ordinarily, people would just learn the perfect combination through trial and error. However, Drake did not like this method. He took the time to analyse why he failed every time he did and learnt from the process.

Hence, he spent a long time experimenting by changing different components of the rune to understand how it all worked.

I won’t give up, Drake thought, as he continued cultivating to recover from the backlash.