WTYTIAAN Chapter 243

Chapter 243

“Ever since we entered this city, you’ve been unusually quiet.” Yan Yunqing casually pulled out a book that was frozen solid, attempting to open it, but couldn’t budge it. He put down the book and instead observed the entire bookshelf. “Your behavior doesn’t seem like that of an ordinarywánglíng or undead who is completely unfamiliar with this place.”

“At first, I thought you might have been a resident of Erantick City in your past life, someone who died in that final battle,” Yan Yunqing said. “But you’re acting far too calmly.”

Yan Yunqing glanced through the window at the tragic scene on the street. “A normal person would be somewhat affected by that scene, whether with shock, sadness, or anger. But you haven’t shown any of those emotions.”

“Why?”

Yan Yunqing’s red eyes, hidden under his messy hair, stared at Sean, those deep eyes seemingly containing a vortex that devoured souls, focusing on the area on Sean’s flat face where his eyes should be.

“I even wondered if my senses were failing me. After all, if you really were a resident of Erantick City who died in that battle, no matter how much time had passed, it’s impossible to revisit this and remain so indifferent.”

“But when I wanted to enter here, you clearly showed that you didn’t want me to come in. Were you once the master of this place?”

“However, that contradicts my previous deduction. But I know that there must be a secret here that you want to hide?”

Yan Yunqing took a moment to check the mission progress and found that the first task was completed, and the second task, exploring Sean’s past, had already reached forty percent.

He initially thought this mission would be difficult, but it seems quite simple, doesn’t it?

“Until I saw this.” Yan Yunqing took out a thin booklet hidden behind the bookshelf and tossed it on the table. It was a simple notebook made of a few sheets of parchment sewn together. It seemed that its owner was still looking at it before this disaster struck, so it wasn’t closed and avoided being frozen into a single mass.

Yan Yunqing lowered his head, looking at the patterns and words displayed on the open page of the parchment book. It was an alchemical array that was extremely unfamiliar to him, but the keywords of this array were recorded in an ancient language.

‘Energy Conversion’ ‘Time’ ‘Undead’

There was no need for much speculation. Everything outside was the best evidence. The effect of this array was obvious at a glance.

Yan Yunqing’s finger tapped on that notebook. Although he was unfamiliar with this alchemical array, he was very familiar with this writing style and handwriting.

Or rather, the former Demon King was very familiar with it.

“The necromancer, Kean.”

Yan Yunqing’s dark red eyes became silent. “This is one of Kean’s many notebooks.”

He turned to look at Sean. “But I’m very sure that you’re not Kean. Did you take the name Sean after Kean? How did you get this notebook?”

Yan Yunqing wanted to sigh.

After killing Kean, the task of destroying the notebooks and books left behind by Kean was given by the Demon King to several trusted subordinates, and Merlin was put in charge of this task.

Merlin had said that all the notebooks and books they could find had been destroyed, but one after another, notebooks related to Kean kept popping up, and the timeline was very disjointed.

In the incidents he knew so far, this notebook in front of him was probably the earliest in the timeline. The notebook in the hands of the alchemist who improved Kean’s talent-switching alchemy was in the middle of the timeline, and the blood pool in the small village near Castella City was the most recent in time.

There were traces of Kean everywhere.

Even a fool would know that something was wrong here.

As everyone knows, when you find one cockroach in your house, you already have thousands of cockroaches spread throughout all the dark corners.

Yan Yunqing naturally absolutely trusted Merlin. Given Merlin’s abilities, since he said that all the items related to Kean that could be found in those years had been destroyed, Yan Yunqing did not suspect that the destruction was not thorough enough.

He was now truly beginning to believe: Kean might have been resurrected through some means.

So the enemy who had been secretly observing him, the culprit behind all the events, the one who pulled him from Blue Star into this world, was also Kean?

Yan Yunqing thought about it and felt that it was unlikely.

According to what the Demon King had done in the past, the Demon King and Kean were mortal enemies. Kean couldn’t wish more for the Demon King to never return. How could he try everything to pull the Demon King back from another world?

What’s the point? So that the Demon King could come back to destroy his plans and even kill him again?

That would be too abstract. Yan Yunqing didn’t think Kean was that much of a masochist.

He put down the notebook in his hand, thinking: It seems that he would only be able to get an accurate answer to this question when he met Theodore.

Yan Yunqing looked at Sean again. “I guess you must have accidentally obtained this notebook and became curious about the alchemical array inside, so you started researching this notebook—this side is about the alchemical array, what about the other sides? Are they magic arrays? About what? Do you know that this is Kean’s notebook?”

Kean’s most powerful skills were his magic arrays, not alchemical arrays. After all, he was a legendary undead magician!

Sean took a deep look at Yan Yunqing. The thinking of this guy with unfathomable strength jumped so much that he couldn’t keep up. Yet one guess after another was thrown out, and even he was secretly shocked because every one of them was correct.

He pondered for a moment and finally admitted it under Yan Yunqing’s confident attitude, but he had to deny the young man’s guess first. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but only this side of this notebook is related to the undead. The other pages are just ordinary alchemical arrays. This is just a collection book I found from a traveling merchant.”

“Most of those alchemical arrays are useless, and some even have the circuits drawn wrong.” Sean floated over and touched the notebook. “Only this one alchemical array caught my attention.”

“However, at the beginning, the notebook only recorded the first keyword, which is ‘energy conversion’. The latter two were added by me after research.”

Yan Yunqing swept a glance over it and sure enough, he saw traces of two kinds of handwriting, but it wasn’t very obvious. Probably Sean had imitated the previous handwriting.

“I’m not a worshiper of that undead magician, nor did I imitate him to take this name for myself,” Sean said.

“Oh, that, I was indeed just assuming.” Yan Yunqing admitted that his reasoning also had mistakes. He pulled out a document from the desk drawer. Because of the special time stasis in this city, the documents from more than a thousand years ago were still as good as new, without the writing becoming blurred or simply turning into ‘brittle shards’.

After all, they had already been transformed into another kind of substance.

The heading of the document was written in Lanheng language: On the subsequent engineering of the magical ore collection near Erantick City…

This was a very formal report. It was clear at a glance that it was written by subordinates for their superiors, and the final signature was in ornate script, also in Lanheng language, meaning: Ron Sean Erantick.

This was a custom of the Ermann Continent.

It didn’t mean that this person’s surname was the same as the city’s name, but that this person was named Ron Sean, and the suffix Erantick represented his status.

——City Lord.

Only the lord of a city was qualified to use the name of the city as his surname and sign it on official documents.

Yan Yunqing affirmed, “So, you’re the city lord? The city lord of Erantick City?”

Sean sighed deeply, “Are you a little too clever?”

Yan Yunqing put away the document, his tone calm, “Thank you for the compliment, so can you tell me about the specific situation back then?”

Sean was silent for a while, then glanced at the tragic scene outside the window, his eyes complicated.

Yan Yunqing was staring at Sean at this moment. Because his attention was concentrated, he finally noticed the surging emotions buried beneath Sean’s flat face—but it was only for a moment, almost in the blink of an eye. Emotions such as anger, sadness, and regret all disappeared.

Sean became a wooden figure without any emotional expression again.

Yan Yunqing frowned and finally found something wrong. Even a person with good acting skills couldn’t possibly reveal and then completely restrain their emotions in an instant. There seemed to be a special presence on Sean’s body that… masked (?) all intense emotions for him.

…No, filtering them out might be more accurate.

That was why he hadn’t noticed Sean’s emotional fluctuations just now.

A sense of crisis arose in Yan Yunqing’s heart. He had a feeling that things were exceeding his expectations and were about to spiral out of control.

What’s going on…?

“You’re right, I am Ron Sean, the last city lord of Erantick City.” Sean’s voice was calm and without any fluctuations. “I was born into a large family. My grandfather and father were the third and second-to-last city lords respectively.”

[Sean’s family had been entrenched in Erantick City for many years and was one of the great families of Erantick City. After Sean’s grandfather became the city lord, their family became even more prosperous and gradually became the top family.

Because Erantick City had special magical ore resources, the families entrenched here were also a bit stronger than the families in other cities. Sean’s family could be considered one of the top families in the entire Eternal Empire, once having the qualifications to be on par with the Demon King’sjuànshǔ or Retinue.

That was no simple feat because the Demon King mainly used several different races when he went to war. Therefore, after establishing the Eternal Empire, the status of the different races far exceeded that of the human race.

Especially—after the Demon King disappeared, it was also a different race—the Archangel Theodore—who fulfilled the role of supervisor for the Demon King.

Under this kind of background, the fact that the Sean family could be on par with the different races shows how large a wealth the magical ore that Erantick City possessed was. This was also why Romunike and Bato Vita repeatedly attacked Erantick City.

After Sean’s grandfather stepped down, his father took over the position of city lord of Erantick City and continued the family’s glory.

Sean was born when the family was at its most prosperous. Almost from the moment he was born, he had already been designated as the next city lord. It could be said that he was a textbook example of being born in Rome.

However, Sean was not interested in power from a young age. Instead, he developed a great interest in alchemy.

As the heir of a large family, giving up the family to become an alchemist was destined to be a pipe dream. Alchemy could only become his pastime.

The notebook that hid Kean’s notes was found by Sean from a traveling merchant. As a hobby, he accidentally discovered the uniqueness of one of the alchemical arrays. Although it was related to energy conversion, with Sean’s outstanding alchemical talent, he keenly realized that this array might have some connection with the necromantic magic arrays that had been lost for a long time.

So Sean secretly began to study this alchemical array at home. The wealthy family provided him with readily available materials. Experimenting with a small alchemical array was naturally not a problem.]

Sean motioned for Yan Yunqing to follow. He led Yan Yunqing out of the study and walked into a room after many turns. He casually tapped on the wall a few times with an odd rhythm, and a staircase leading to the next level appeared in front of him.

“Let’s go, I’ll take you to see my secret base,” Sean said.

They went down all the way, and the line of sight gradually became dim. Yan Yunqing took out a fist-sized night-luminescent pearl from his backpack, and suddenly the surroundings became bright.

The space hidden here wasn’t like a mysterious secret room in a film, where runes and spells were carved everywhere, full of dangers, and you would die at any moment. Instead, it was a larger study.

There were more books stored here than above. The walls were densely packed with all kinds of books. Yan Yunqing casually glanced at them, and as Sean had said, most of them were related to alchemy.

“This is my secret base, and also where I experimented with various alchemical arrays.” Sean looked reminiscent. “It was also here that I discovered the problem with that array.”

[At that time, Sean was still a fearless noble young master. With his grandfather and father backing him up, even if he learned a little necromantic magic, there wouldn’t be much of a problem.

Although the Eternal Empire explicitly prohibited the circulation of necromantic magic, it was only aimed at lunatics like Kean who frantically created undead armies from living people. They were not welcoming to proper necromancers who contracted with undead, but they didn’t shout and kill them and insist on their extermination.

So Sean delved deeper into the research. He thought that his life would be so ordinary:

When he was young, he would devote himself to research for his hobby. When the time came, he would listen to his grandfather and father and get married to a suitable noble lady, leaving a successor. Then, in middle age, he would inherit the position of city lord, and cultivate his successor in the same way as his grandfather and father had cultivated him. When the time came, he would hand over the family and the position of city lord to the successor…

However, everything changed drastically after Romunike and Bato Vita’s armies set their sights on Erantick City.

Sean’s father, the city lord of Erantick City at the time, an archmage at level eighty-seven, died in a defense battle.

Then, his grandfather also died in another defense battle.

The still young Sean was forced to take the position and became the new city lord, and also the last city lord.

Although the family’s education had always regarded Erantick City as the family’s possession, Sean was one of the nonconformists. He was born when the family was at its most prosperous, and everything around him was flowers and applause. This formed a sharp contrast with the various battles and hellish situations he experienced after becoming the city lord.

If everything had gone according to plan and he had taken over everything at the most suitable age, Sean might have become an experienced politician, calmly judging the family’s gains and losses and making the best solution.

However, he was still young now. Young people didn’t have much experience but were more easily touched.

No matter what his grandfather and father’s original intentions were, they did set an example for Sean: to defend Erantick City to the death.

The tug-of-war lasting three years began.]

“Erantick City almost collapsed several times.” Sean sighed. “It barely managed to survive with the help of several families who used to be on good terms with my family, but unfortunately…”

No country could withstand continuous wars, let alone just a small city.

“Several of the major families in the city have moved away from Erantick City.” Sean said with some loss when he spoke of this. “In fact, some people have advised me to simply surrender and hand over this city to them. My family can still become a major family entrenched here, only losing the position of city lord.”

“From your family’s interests, this is indeed the best choice.” Yan Yunqing didn’t make emotional comments because this used to be the Demon King’s empire. Instead, he was very calm. “But you didn’t choose to do this.”

Because Yan Yunqing already knew the result, Sean didn’t choose this ‘happy ending’ answer.

Sean chose to defend this land, this city, to the death, even though he wasn’t interested in power at first and only wanted to become an alchemist.

Fate often forces people to make decisions that are completely opposite to their original selves.

Sean laughed, “Actually, I almost really did that, but…”

“Just before I made the decision, a city similar to Erantick City made the same choice, surrendering, welcoming in the rebel army. The surrendered city lord did save his life, and even the family didn’t suffer any losses, but eighty percent of the people in that city… died at the hands of the rebel army that rushed into the city and wreaked havoc.”

“…” Yan Yunqing lowered his eyes. He wasn’t surprised by this result.

He had already read about the rise and history of the two great empires in the library of Sigrid Academy. There weren’t many historical records of that time, and they must have been destroyed by the later victors, leaving only more beautified versions of ‘history’.

However, he had people who had truly experienced that era by his side… Dragons.

When Divick discovered that he was interested in the past during that period, he basically told him everything. Because the Dragon Clan returned to Dragon Valley relatively early, Divick didn’t know about the subsequent events, and Boros told him everything.

Compared to otheryìzú or races, Boros was the one who truly experienced these more than a thousand years of changes from the perspective of ordinary people. Even Merlin couldn’t compare to him because Merlin had been asleep for a long time.

He had known very early on that the establishment of the two great empires was built on countless bones.

“I see, you chose to fight to the last moment.” Yan Yunqing nodded. “Then what happened to the outside? That alchemical array?”

Now that he had said this, Sean naturally didn’t mind telling everything. He touched the notebook. “At that time, Erantick City was almost exhausted. Almost all of the young and middle-aged men in the city had died in battle, and fourteen and fifteen-year-old children had to take up weapons and fight the rebel army.”

He cursed, “I really don’t know where those rebel armies came from with so many people. They were endless and couldn’t be killed.”

Yan Yunqing shook his head. It stands to reason that, given the size of the Eternal Empire at that time and Theodore’s strict implementation of his policies, there shouldn’t have been so many people following Romunike and Bato Vita to overthrow the Eternal Empire.

Even if the Demon King was missing, the Eternal Empire was still a country that was actively developing and had nothing to do with the chaotic world.

The banners raised by Romunike and Bato Vita were only to overthrow the rule of theyìzú or race.

This wasn’t very beneficial to the bottom-level civilians. It stands to reason that they shouldn’t have gathered so many people.

This was also the point that Yan Yunqing had always been puzzled about. To say that the prophecy had an effect wasn’t right either, because the prophecy appeared when the two teams of Romunike and Bato Vita had become somewhat established. Therefore, the prophecy wasn’t a factor in their gathering of a large team.

So where did they get their people from?

They could even kill Sean’s father and grandfather, who were archmages of level eighty or higher. The teams of Romunike and Bato Vita could even kill mages of this level. Why could Sean defend Erantick City for three years?

These views were obviously contradictory again.

But…

Yan Yunqing’s eyes fell on the notebook that recorded the alchemical array. The handwriting belonging to Kean was so glaring, and Yan Yunqing felt a bit of a headache.

He had probably guessed it.

The two teams of Romunike and Bato Vita were likely to have been aided by Kean at the beginning of their establishment.

Even if it wasn’t Kean himself, it was someone related to Kean, so these two teams could develop at an extremely fast speed, even reaching the point where they could overthrow the rule of the Eternal Empire.

So Kean had been resurrected that early?

But why did he painstakingly support the establishment of the two great empires? What exactly did he want to do?

…Become a god?

No way?

Yan Yunqing was startled by his guess, but after thinking about it carefully, it didn’t seem to have any problems.

The Light Church had already extracted enough ‘talent’ through these arrays and created a new god, the ‘Goddess of Light’.

With such a successful case in front of him, Kean, who had been personally killed by the Demon King, resurrected through some means, discovered that the Demon King was missing, but there were still many of the Demon King’s retainers who could threaten him. What would he want to do?

Become stronger.

Become strong enough that even if the Demon King returned, he would not be able to kill him.

Be able to fight the Demon King and even threaten the existence of the Demon King several times…

The original God of Light.

Kean wanted to make himself a new god, even a god more powerful than the former God of Light?

So——

Yan Yunqing only felt that his thoughts were clear, and only felt a flash of inspiration. His thoughts captured a moment of inspiration.

If it was put in a tabletop role-playing game, it could probably be called a great success in inspiration.

The Eternal Divine Church—the person who established it behind the scenes was Kean, or someone related to Kean.

And what the Eternal Divine Church wanted to resurrect was not the Eternal Lord, but Kean, who was using the name of the Eternal Lord to collect ‘talent’ and preparing to become a god himself.

Yan Yunqing only felt that the fog in front of him had cleared a lot, but the fog that followed covered his sight again.

Even if he figured out the problem with the Eternal Divine Church, he still couldn’t find the reason for the appearance of the game system, and the reason why he would be pulled into this world.

Yan Yunqing could only be sure that his coming back was definitely not what Kean wanted to see.

Then his return, and even the game system, according to the prophecy, should have been made by the forces standing opposite Kean, and the actions taken to compete with Kean.

Then… could it be you? Theodore?

Theodore, who questioned Sylvia in the memory dream about releasing rumors, why did he let the prophecy spread, and finally even chose to surrender and give up the Eternal Empire.

Yan Yunqing previously thought that Theodore was related to the Eternal Divine Church because the secret of the Eternal Divine Church was ‘collecting talent to resurrect the Eternal Lord’, which was something Theodore might do.

But now that he had figured out that the significance of the existence of the Eternal Divine Church might be that Kean had created it for himself to become a god, then Theodore was definitely not the existence behind the Eternal Divine Church.

Just like Kean would only become the Demon King’s mortal enemy, Theodore, as the former Demon King’sjuànshǔ or retainer, the Demon King’s number one general, and also one of those who ultimately killed Kean, Kean could not possibly become a partner with Theodore.

In this way, Theodore conformed to Yan Yunqing’s guess about the one who pulled him back into this world.

Whether it was true or not, he could only know when he truly stood in front of Theodore.

Otherwise, all guesses could only be empty talk.