Supreme Magus novel Chapter 1368

Chapter 1368 - Travelling Tavern (Part 4)

"I had prepared a long speech to explain the situation to you, but since there’s no trust between us, I’ll try to keep it short." Haug said with a sigh. "Do you see Tartania there, at table three?"

He pointed at a young woman with red hair streaked blue all over that dined alone at a table for four. She only drank water, and there were more glasses in front of each one of the three other chairs.

Tartania seemed to be saving them for her friends who had left each a piece of clothing on the chairs.

"She was the first of her group to Awaken. They were just a bunch of kids with no mentor who had stumbled upon our secret on their own. They threw a party here, getting so drunk that those morons decided to follow her lead immediately.

"Awakening while in a drunken stupor is already a dangerous business, but doing it while your body isn’t strong enough is just suicide. After that, I had to enchant the ceiling with a self-cleaning spell like the rest of the restaurant.

"Tartania, instead, took a vow to never drink again and after decades she’s still upholding it." Haug said.

"So what?" Lith asked.

"So, we Awakened are a society that doesn’t give a f.u.c.k for their youths and only cares about their precious legacies. Those kids were good people and yet died on their first bender only because they had no one caring for them." Haug snarled.

"Heck, even I am not blameless. If only I kept an eye on their ever-growing tab, I might have saved them. Yet I failed them, just like I failed my own apprentice. He died fighting a losing battle because he was too afraid to ask for my help.

"Because even though I loved him like a son, I never treated him as such. Patting his back was the greatest praise I ever gave him because men don’t hug nor cry. We barely nod in approval." The plate he was cleaning shattered under his grip, and then the pieces reassembled themselves like nothing had happened.

"Not to be ins.e.n.s.i.t.i.v.e, but even I am completely missing your point." Kamila said.

"My point is that the children are our future and that the Council is just a bunch of old greedy bastards. They are ignoring the problem under the pretense that we are at war against the Undead Courts, but the victims don’t belong to any of them.

"They are free people who only want to live in peace." Haug said. "Let me sweeten the pot by talking about your pay. If you accept my request, I’ll share with you the secret of my violet core and I’ll tell you the identity of the person who murdered Count Lark."

"What?" At those words, all the pain and grief that Lith believed to have overcome during the last few months squeezes his heart like a vise. Yet instead of tears, they triggered an unbridled rage.

"Tell me who killed my friend now, or I’ll raze this place to the ground. Even if it costs me pledging my alliance to my Grand- I mean Salaark!" Every time that Lith thought about the Count, the images of his corpse displayed like a scarecrow overlapped with his smiling face or with his monocle jumping around.

By messing with Lark’s body, the culprit had done more than just kill him, they had poisoned all the good memories that Lith had about him. Only by avenging the Count might Lith hope to rid his mind of those images and remember Lark for how he lived instead of for how he died.

"So what you’re actually saying is that if I accept your terms and if I succeed, then someone might tell me the truth about what happened to Lark?" The revelation didn’t ease Lith’s anger, it only fueled it further, making three more of his eyes open.