Yet the expected explosion never came. When Ximo opened her eyes again, the intruder’s brilliant spell had vanished. Aside from the intense light and powerful mana reaction, it had caused no damage whatsoever.
She had been tricked—Ximo realized it immediately. In such a confined space, unleashing magic of that intensity would bury them both. Clearly, the mysterious man had no intention of doing so.
Once the spell’s glare no longer obstructed her view, Ximo spotted him… on the skylight?
Shasta’s basement was like a sealed cage on all sides. Aside from the main door, there was only a small skylight high up—after all, the Blood Clan naturally disliked sunlight.
The square skylight was tiny, far too small for anyone to pass through—or so one would think. Yet the mysterious man managed it.
Ximo watched his blurry form contort and fold at impossible angles for a normal human, squeezing out through the skylight. He showed no desire to fight, merely glancing at the crystal ball floating before Ximo before leaving.
Though she couldn’t make out his features, Ximo felt the weight of his gaze.
“Hmm, interesting.”
With that ambiguous remark, the mysterious man’s figure flickered and vanished from the skylight. Ximo didn’t hesitate and shoved the door open to give chase.
“Ximo? Why are you out?”
Xiliya jumped at the sight of Ximo nearly bursting through the door with a racket, but the maid’s serious expression immediately told her something was wrong.
“What happened, Ximo?”
Seeing Xiliya’s puzzled look, Ximo froze for a moment, suddenly sensing something off.
The fight with the mysterious man had made quite a bit of noise. Ignoring the patrolling guards—hadn’t Xiliya, right at the door, heard anything?
And now, the night outside the basement was eerily quiet. The mysterious man had escaped from such an obvious spot as the skylight to the ground level, yet neither Xiliya nor the distant patrols had spotted him?
“Someone just escaped from the basement’s skylight. Didn’t you see, Miss?”
“From the skylight?” Xiliya frowned. “But I’ve been on alert the whole time and didn’t see anyone come out.”
Ximo trusted Xiliya’s abilities. If she said she saw nothing… that meant the man had vanished after escaping the skylight. How had he done it?
“Never mind. If he got away, there’s nothing we can do. I’ll go back in and grab the stuff first.”
Ximo shelved the pursuit. She didn’t even know how he’d disappeared—priority one was checking if the mysterious man had taken the items Instructor Shasta wanted.
Following Shasta’s instructions, Ximo opened the cabinet’s hidden compartment. Inside the pop-out drawer sat two test tubes filled with a deep green liquid—the alchemy potions, no doubt.
“Phew…”
Ximo breathed a sigh of relief. Good, the items hadn’t been taken. She’d arrived just in time.
Pocketing the alchemy potions, Ximo glanced at the bookshelf area. Shasta had said her research notes on the crystal ball’s runes were recorded there too. Ximo wanted to take them along this time.
Shasta was right that she probably couldn’t understand them… but that didn’t mean Xiliya couldn’t! She could ask Xiliya to take a look. That way, she wouldn’t be helpless while Shasta was locked up.
Ximo eyed the puncture wound on her fingertip—a new discovery. She was certain the mysterious man hadn’t injured her, but after touching the crystal ball, she’d felt the sting, as if it had pricked her finger somehow.
Combined with the automatic barrier magic… Ximo was increasingly convinced this saint-level magigear from the auction was no ordinary item.
But as Ximo prepared to search for the research notes per Shasta’s guidance, she realized… she had no idea where to start.
Thanks to the daytime incident, half the books in Shasta’s basement were now blasted to the floor, piled in chaotic heaps that left barely any room to step—let alone sift through for experiment data!
How many books were in Shasta’s basement, anyway? Ximo stared at the jumbled mess of tomes, flipping through two at random without hope—they were all obscure magic texts she couldn’t comprehend.
Ximo felt like giving up. Digging through this garbage-heap of a pile for what she needed would take ages. A quick skim would have to do.
She groped toward the spot Shasta had indicated and grabbed a few books at random.
Introduction to Magitool Engineering, Advanced Alchemy Theory, Skin Sunscreen Care and Daily Maintenance… How did something as weird as that sneak into this stack of technical textbooks?
Ximo was about ready to call it quits when her peripheral vision caught an old, plain little notebook that looked like a handwritten copy… Maybe Shasta had jotted her experiment data in something like this?
Ximo snatched the yellowed copybook and flipped through a few pages. Regrettably, no—this seemed to be someone’s diary, utterly unrelated to experiment data.
But as Ximo went to toss the yellowed notebook back, her brain suddenly processed what she’d just seen. Her eyes widened in an instant, and she yanked it close again, spotting a line:
“After struggling in the human Empire for so many years, I finally have a chance to meet those legendary mysterious families. It’s not easy…”
It was clearly just some casual notes jotted down by someone, like the contents of an ordinary diary, yet it shocked Ximo so much that she nearly dropped the copy in her hand—she didn’t even react at first to the fact that what she had just seen was in Hanzi!
Hanzi, the characters she had known how to read, recognize, and write before transmigrating to this world!
After arriving in this world, its language and script had seamlessly integrated into Ximo’s cognition like an instinct. Apart from the amnesia she seemed to have suffered due to System’s botched transmigration as a person-machine system, Ximo hadn’t felt any discomfort living in this world.
This was why, in that instant when she spotted the Hanzi, she hadn’t even realized that this otherworld actually featured text she already knew!
Ximo suddenly thought of something and quickly closed the copy to check—sure enough, the title page was labeled in this world’s script with the words “Great Sage Gandalf’s Diary Copy.”
It really was… The information about the Great Sage Gandalf from her Empire history classes flooded back into her mind, and Ximo was certain: this Great Sage Gandalf was definitely a transmigrator too!
