Chapter 8: The Court of Curse

The pitch-black iron gate opened to both sides. In the middle of the silent courtyard stood an old tree with branches growing at an angle, its canopy overhead gloomily shading half of the courtyard on one side. The courtyard was kept very tidy, much more elegant than the yards of ordinary country folk. Beneath the residual snow, there were traces of garden plots covering a large area. Although it was now withered and desolate, it must have been a riot of flowers in the summer.

Luo Qi carefully examined everything in the courtyard. Du Zhengyi had already walked inside; his sense of purpose was stronger, even though his targets were all invisible to the naked eye. To an outsider, Du Zhengyi looked like he was inspecting something void, truly resembling a Ghost Catching Master.

In the half of the courtyard covered by the tree canopy stood a stone-carved lamp stand. Because it was brimming with an ancient air, it looked completely out of place with the layout of the farmhouse. A circle of waist-high stones surrounded the stone lamp stand. Luo Qi slowly stepped forward, walked close, and stared intently at those stones. Recalling the eerie story Guan Xinyue had told, his stomach churned a little.

After all, the residence of a strange old man, bordering a church to the west and a temple to the east, was in itself a bit hard to explain. There was also a large stone array in the courtyard that looked like it was for performing rituals; nine times out of ten, the resident here was a bit evil. Luo Qi pondered, searching for traces in his own half-understood knowledge base, and gloomily thought of the Black Mass in the Christian world. Could these stone arrays be where someone had prayed to the devil? Was it Guan Xinyue's Houye? Could he have performed a Black Mass after his daughter's death, beckoning the devil to descend and curse his own son-in-law to death? If human faith truly had power, this would explain the old man's mysterious behavior after getting drunk from another perspective.

He did not know if there was any logic to this explanation; perhaps God and the devil both existed and did not exist. Humans observed some abnormal behaviors and explained them in ways they could understand; this was relative truth.

He was pondering aimlessly when Du Zhengyi walked back to his side at some point and gave him a push.

"What?" he said defensively.

"You can space out at a time like this? There isn't even a shadow of a person here; even if your brain's synapses were more developed, no one here could interfere with you, right?" Du Zhengyi said, his tone a bit frustrated. "There is no one here! No energy! No traces of any Mage having existed! Your Luck must have decreased; hurry up and cast a big move to buff me. Otherwise, I can only tell you that there really is a ghost here."

"I am thinking about history and philosophy," Luo Qi said like an old man. He sensed that Du Zhengyi was a bit irritable, likely because the mission had gotten off to a bad start.

"Cut the crap. If you're stuffed from hot pot at lunch, just say so. I won't mock your brain for lacking weight just because all your blood has flowed to your stomach to digest."

"I've noticed you are particularly lacking in patience with me," Luo Qi pointed out to him patiently. "You are particularly disrespectful to me; this is not good. After all, the two of us still have to cooperate for a long time within the range of our sight."

"That's not the case," Du Zhengyi denied decisively, then continued, "I am equally disrespectful and impatient with everyone."

Luo Qi was blocked, looking at Du Zhengyi in surprise. "Are you a cat-man?"

Du Zhengyi narrowed his eyes at him. "If you want to insult me, can you use an allusion I can understand?"

Luo Qi glanced at him, his hands in his pockets, and his gaze turned back to the black stones scattered among the residual snow. They stood in the snow as if they were a group of ominous ring-tailed lemurs.

"Fine," seeing that Luo Qi was ignoring him, Du Zhengyi strategically conceded for the moment. "Then tell me about the history and philosophy you were thinking about. Does it have to do with these stones standing in such a strange posture?"

"You think these stones are strange too?" Luo Qi became interested; he had originally been a bit unconfident about his own suspicions.

Du Zhengyi nodded, seemingly wanting to say something, but stopped himself.

Luo Qi felt he had to share his knowledge with Du Zhengyi. No matter what the truth behind this matter was, the details here must be able to corroborate some of their ideas. He briefly told Du Zhengyi about human Christian faith and the Black Mass. He actually only had a half-understood grasp of human religious culture, but it was still more than what Du Zhengyi knew. He knew about "Curse"—a common phenomenon that ran through various human cultures, yet it was completely foreign to Mages. Whether it was a Black Mass, raising a Charm, or sticking pins in a doll, none of these existed in the culture of Mages. They were, to a certain extent, averse to imagination. After all, if you were particularly fond of horror fantasies, then in the ancient war years, you would have a huge handle and weakness; as long as you encountered a Mage skilled in Mind Control, you would truly be mentally tortured to death.

However, Luo Qi couldn't help but think that Mind Control itself was very similar to what humans called a Curse. Human culture had once been interfered with by Mages layer by layer, and even briefly controlled. Perhaps the original origin of things like Curses was hard to explain clearly.

During Luo Qi's narration, Du Zhengyi listened very carefully and did not mock his various bizarre speculations. As soon as Luo Qi started explaining, he entered the mode of a diligent and studious top student, and after listening, he keenly asked a question: "Is God the supreme deity of Christianity?"

Although Luo Qi hadn't expected him to ask, he immediately answered this simple question. "Of course."

"Is the devil the opposite of God?"

"Yes." Luo Qi became a bit more cautious.

"Isn't an object that even the supreme deity cannot finish off just another god? It is evident that Christianity originally had two supreme gods. Since God cannot protect believers from being harmed, and the devil can instead help believers curse the other party, wouldn't it be more cost-effective for a smart person to convert to the devil?" Du Zhengyi argued eloquently.

Luo Qi was stunned and instinctively said, "It's not like that. The devil is..." Luo Qi racked his brains, "The devil is not supreme; it is a fallen archangel who originally served God. I can't explain it clearly, but what you are talking about should be called the duality of Christianity or something like that."

Du Zhengyi interrupted him. "God can't even beat his own underling; it sounds like the goldfish I keep might one day turn around and finish me off. Would you finish me off, Luo Qi? Forget it, I'm not listening anymore, no need to explain. Humans are good at sophistry anyway; they must use a bunch of confusing words to cover up the fundamental paradoxes in their faith."

"Hey, why are you like this? You say you won't listen, so you won't? I want to continue," Luo Qi said with a sullen face.

"Shut up first," Du Zhengyi said unceremoniously. "Have you ever seen Calculating Rods?"

"Grass sticks that can be used for both going to the bathroom and arithmetic?"

"Those are human Calculating Rods. When we use some complex Magic, we often need to meticulously calculate some complex parameters, such as changes in light." Du Zhengyi sighed, walking among the stone pillars that varied slightly in height. "Seriously, are you really a Mage?"

Luo Qi didn't bother to answer. Du Zhengyi walked slowly to the center of the stone array, suddenly raised his head, lifted his arms, and swung them down abruptly as if he were a conductor of a symphony orchestra. His slender, tall figure and his psychopathic temperament did indeed make him look very much like a musician. But when a gale whistled into existence from above his head, when the trench coat on his body flew up in a cool and badass way, when the accumulated snow on the ground was swept up by the gale, and snowflakes danced around them, and the place where he stood was effectively the eye of this snowstorm, Luo Qi genuinely felt that Du Zhengyi was indeed very cool. Not only cool, but he had also interpreted the word "dashing" in the literal sense.

Luo Qi looked up at the flying snow, barely controlling his facial muscles to keep from laughing. But to be honest, controlling the weather was no small matter; even if they all claimed to be Mages, few people could do it. Du Zhengyi had suggested several times that he should use lightning to strike him dead; now he should seriously consider the true extent of Du Zhengyi's threat.

The gale blew the snow on the ground completely clean, revealing the ground paved with gravel. Dark red stones were mixed in with the gray gravel, converging on the ground into complex arcs, as if fresh blood had once overflowed here and eventually dried in the complex and precise small channels. Luo Qi stared at the ground in surprise, suddenly stepping back a few paces to a position where he could roughly see the full view of the ground. Sure enough, the red gravel embedded in the ground gathered around the stone pillars and lamp stand into one complex orbit after another. If it were paired with ancient inscriptions, he would have definitely seen this orbital map in some textbook. The facts slapped him in the face; this was not a human's Court of Curse, at best it could count as a Mage's laboratory.

Luo Qi slowly stepped on the blood-colored pattern, muttering with a sour face, "This is our facility, not a human's."

"Of course," Du Zhengyi replied, as if he had no time to mock him; he had been looking down at the dark red tracks under his feet. "But using Calculating Rods is very obscure knowledge. These stones contain some rare crystal components; only a Great Mage can master Magic that requires such large-scale Calculating Rods to assist in calculations. Therefore..."

Luo Qi shivered subconsciously.

Du Zhengyi turned his head to look at the old house not far away, the pitch-black windows silent in the north wind of the winter evening. "This must be the residence of a Great Mage."

"How is that possible?" Luo Qi exclaimed.

Du Zhengyi pondered and said, "He and Guan Xinyue's Nainai had no children; this also fits the situation where it is very difficult for Mages and humans to have children."

Luo Qi, however, could not accept this. "If that were the case, then the daughter he had with his ex-wife must also be a Mage, and his son-in-law was likely a Mage too. Three Mages died in this family? And it includes a Great Mage? Did the Supreme Committee not receive an Emergency Report? If they received a report, they wouldn't have sent students like us, right? In this situation, they should have directly sent a team of senior Execution Mages."

"Didn't you hear Guan Xinyue say that her relatives all died of natural causes? One died of illness, one died in a fire caused by a gas explosion, and one died of alcohol poisoning. If all three Mages died of natural causes, then there is nothing to investigate. Having said that, if these three victims were all Mages, don't you think that passage of Guan Xinyue's is very interesting? — Everyone who had no blood relationship with her suddenly disappeared, just like a draft in the summer. Perhaps to some extent, she had already sensed the unusual nature of these three people." Du Zhengyi pointed to the complex tracks on the ground; the degree of precision and complexity was something anyone would know could not be just a simple courtyard landscape.

Luo Qi, however, suddenly realized an important question. "Can you be sure that Guan Xinyue is a human?"

As soon as this thought crossed his mind, his heart panicked. If Guan Xinyue was not a human, then not only were they deceived, but the situation might have been exactly the opposite—Guan Xinyue and her father and grandmother were Mages, and the identities of the murderer and the victim had just been reversed.

"She is definitely a human," Du Zhengyi said firmly.

Luo Qi breathed a sigh of relief.

Du Zhengyi stood up. "Although I don't think there will be any discoveries in the house, let's go in and take a look."

Luo Qi hurriedly followed.