"No. 17, stand guard outside. If anything happens, let me know a little later."
Tang put the Automaton Gnome's sole remaining head outside the door.
The latter had no idea how he was supposed to "stand" guard with nothing but a head.
Nor why he should report anything later.
He could only activate [Sentinel Mode] outside the door and enter a brief dormancy.
Having shut the door tightly, Tang fell into thought.
It was something he had been pondering ever since the day he first met Shalti-
What sort of person was the elf lady, really?
She seemed cold and distant, like a biting gust of winter wind.
But on closer examination, perhaps it was merely the heavy snow carried by that wind, covering a garden where spring flowers had once bloomed.
Unlike those truly proud and elegant elves, she, who had spent so long in solitude, was actually a girl who hid many emotions and simply did not know how to express them-a thousand-year-old maiden.
So, in a sense, the elf lady was full of contrasts. Perhaps it was precisely because her emotions were so turbulent yet confined within her heart that the frenzied magic surge had chosen her.
That made dispelling magic and suppressing wild surges a task with clues to follow.
Just as, in Tang's eyes, magic was something full of contrasts, much like her.
Magic was so abstruse and difficult to understand, like a rigid, eccentric scholar whom one struggled to approach.
Yet it was so endlessly changeable, as though it encompassed all the spirit and matter in the world.
It could create something from nothing, making a warm spark flicker into existence in one's hand.
It could transform what existed, turning that warm spark into a flowing spring.
It could bring transformation to stillness, allowing