Stibium Kingdom, City of Knowledge, Leipzig.
The Earthbound Spirit suddenly sat bolt upright in bed again.
The young man, who looked only twenty or thirty years old, looked around in panic.
It was deep into the night. Two rows of candles filled the room, their light passing through red paper shades and dyeing the entire room blood-red. An inescapable stench of blood hung in the air, and animal remains were arranged around the Ritual Array.
"...Is this... real?"
The Earthbound Spirit blurted out the doubt in his heart.
He seemed to have experienced something extremely terrifying in his hallucination just now.
He could no longer remember exactly what had happened—the details had rapidly faded from his mind after the dream ended. But that feeling of terror remained deeply engraved in his heart.
He seemed to have experienced this scene before. It was as if he had woken from a dream, only to fall into an even deeper one.
That shattered experience was like a broken mirror, or a shattered glass cup—some transparent and hard thing had pierced deep into his soul, making him feel intensely uncomfortable all over.
"Ah!"
The Earthbound Spirit had just begun supporting himself as he rose when he discovered that his left arm had suddenly gone numb.
There was clearly no wound, but a wave of excruciating pain surged from his left arm. He involuntarily let out a scream and fell straight back onto the bed.
"—What's wrong, Mr. Oliva?"
As cold sweat poured from him in his agony, a young woman's voice suddenly came from the doorway.
It belonged to Janet Platinumman, who had lived with him for some time while preparing for the Promotion Ritual.
But the Earthbound Spirit, whose real name was Oliva, only felt a chill run through him. The fear surging