He moved toward the man bound against the wall at a steady pace — neither slow nor fast.
For a single fleeting instant, the faintest flicker of hesitation crossed him.
Killing a person was nothing, and the bound man had almost certainly come drifting into this place the same way Terren had — and simply failed to satisfy his lord.
But…
“Killing is the most hideous act this creature called a human can commit. One who harms the life of a fellow being deserves not just to be denied the right to live — they don’t even deserve the right to die.”
Damn it. The curse came out on its own. What a wretched sight — some piece of nonsense grinding itself around in his head on repeat.
Who does Leopold Delua think he is? In the end, he couldn’t even defeat a single dark sorcerer before dying.
Terren seized the man by the hair. The man was twisting his entire body and making terrible sounds.
Tears were streaming from the man’s eyes. The iron chains binding him rang out in harsh, clanging bursts against his frenzied struggling.
One look and it was obvious — some two-bit criminal who’d picked up a smattering of magic in some back alley and stumbled in here. This place was absolutely impossible to enter unless you were a criminal to begin with. And Leopold despises criminals. Holding that fact as a kind of consolation, Terren drove the dagger into the man’s artery.
Fwush. Blood spurted up like a fountain.
The sensation of the blade sinking into flesh was vivid. Terren watched carefully as the man’s pulse grew slower and slower, until it stopped.
A life that had been pulsing with vitality was reduced, in a single instant, to nothing more than a lump of meat.
Feeling that electrifying sensation spreading from his fingertips, Terren turned his head and looked at his lord — the master of the Precipice.
“It is done.”
“…….”
His lord, who had been visibly dismissive of Terren until moments ago, seemed to be properly registering him for the first time. He was silent for a moment, then smiled.
Gone was the gaze that had looked at Terren as though observing a small bug that had crawled into the wrong place. For the first time, he was beginning to recognize Terren Meyer as a person.
Yuhan had been standing silently in the corner the whole time.
His lord looked at Yuhan with careful attention. He had been deliberating over whether to expel him from the room — and had apparently decided, in the end, not to.
Terren Meyer, who had spent ten years glued to his lord’s right side and had done everything to cater to his every whim, read that transparent inner workings of his mind and let out a quiet, cynical laugh.
There could only be one reason his lord was not dismissing Yuhan. Because he thought it would allow him to make Terren — this newcomer who had arrived today — feel even more wretched.
This was the next step of the assessment.
“Kneel.”
Those who could enter this place were the ones with souls so rotten they could not be contained.
Those who met that condition were, for the most part, hardened criminals.
Violent criminals tended to have filthy dispositions and absolutely refused to submit to anyone.
His lord liked criminals — but despised the nature that came with them.
The result of that was this.
One had to be capable of killing a person without mercy on a single command — but at the same time, had to possess a submissive quality: kneel when told to kneel, and lick boots when told to lick boots.
Terren knelt and bowed his head. A deep silence fell again. He heard his lord make a satisfied sound through his nose.
“Well done. Now crawl to me.”
When Terren obeyed in silence, his lord seemed genuinely surprised. He bent forward from atop the rock himself and seized Terren’s jaw, forcing his face upward. The darkness that lay over his face — pale to the point of white — was exactly the kind a dark sorcerer would know how to read.
“I like you.”
Yuhan stared at them with wide, startled eyes.
His lord whispered quietly.
“Show me your body. Any part will do.”
Yuhan brought his hand unconsciously to the area near his heart. Across his chest, the marks left by dark magic and the scars from blade wounds were still tangled together in a mess, carved permanently into his skin.
Even I — his most favored — had my chest slashed open along with my clothes at our first meeting, bleeding freely as I nearly died. And yet this person right now…
Ordering someone to expose a part of their body meant: choose for yourself where you’ll be cut. Was this a situation that made any sense?
Terren pushed his sleeve aside and extended the other forearm — the one without the wound.
His lord raised a single finger, and the pitch-black, viscous force that had been coiling around it swelled in an instant and broke free into the air.
Dark magic. Terren bit down on his tongue hard enough to draw blood.
“Ngh—”
From somewhere near his shoulder down past his elbow, a burning agony pulled an involuntary groan from him whether he wanted it or not. The arm that dark magic had grazed turned a dull, dim color, as though rotting from within. Blood from his bitten tongue spilled from his mouth, but he clenched his teeth harder.
He had to endure it. If he fainted from pain this insignificant, how would he survive everything that lay ahead?
His vision went yellow, his sight blurred, and tears streamed down against his will. Receiving dark magic again after so long was a strangely moving experience.
Getting cut by Lloyd’s sword would have been preferable to this…
Cursing his own pathetic body for threatening to vomit on top of everything, he stayed on his knees and held himself still. Some time passed — and just as the pain gradually ebbed and his blurring vision began to sharpen again, another sharp pain stabbed into his arm.
Beside where the dark magic had struck, a long wound had been cut open with a blade.
Why in this order.
Normally, one had to endure the pain of being cut by the blade first — only then would the gift of dark magic be bestowed.
Whatever the case, there was no question his lord had taken a high view of Terren’s potential and was playing with him because of it. With relief that the unbearable pain was over, he did his best to console himself.
His lord was smiling openly. It was a rare smile that only appeared when he was genuinely pleased.
“What is your name?”
“Terren… Meyer.”
His lord took hold of Terren’s arm, observed the wound for a moment, then released it.
“Congratulations. From this day forward, you are a member of the Precipice. Follow Yuhan and learn dark magic. Through that, you will come to know what it is you are meant to do.”
His head bowed on its own. Both arms were in agony and completely useless — and yet, having resolved a great task, there was a strange sense of relief somewhere in his chest.
Seeing me like this, maybe the students will lay off for a while.
If I lose any more blood here, I might actually die.
Terren followed Yuhan and learned dark magic until dawn broke.
The wound his lord had made was the wound of distinction — the one that actually made it possible to learn dark magic. It was only by feeling that force with all five senses that one could at last begin to transform pure white mana into something dark and viscous.
Terren Meyer, whose speed of absorption was so startling that it stunned Yuhan once again, manipulated the black force blooming from his fingertips in every direction as he made his way back out of the Precipice.
He had only killed one person so far, which meant that force was weak and thin. There was only one way to become a powerful dark sorcerer, and that was killing. The more you killed, the stronger you became. Having committed to relearning dark magic in this life, serial killing was now inevitable.
His first thought had been to find a way to get to a battlefield. But this was an era of great peace. Fifty years ago, the previous king had concluded peace treaties with the surrounding nations, and pointless power struggles had ceased to exist.
On top of that, Terren was not a strong enough knight to reliably keep himself alive on a battlefield. And using dark magic openly in public would certainly get his head severed by his lord without delay.
Damn it all…
His head, heavy as lead from a sleepless night, could no longer function properly. His entire body felt like it was burning, and Terren Meyer was in the process of skipping his classes. With so many unauthorized absences ahead of him, if this was already how things looked, he might be expelled before he ever graduated.
But he had no strength left to get up. Terren lay there under the full force of the pouring sunlight and slowly drifted off to sleep.
And a few hours later, he was jolted awake by someone’s foot kicking him.
