Suddenly.
The dried corpse, which Reilo had sensed no life signs from, let out a hoarse, sonorous voice. It swayed as it stood up, then slowly turned its hideous face toward Reilo, its sunken eyes staring fixedly at him.
An ordinary person would probably have gone mad with fright at the sight.
"Corpse Puppet?"
Reilo was no longer the little scholar he had once been. Through his continual accumulation of knowledge, he had learned about many advanced topics in academic history.
Among them,
Corpse Puppet arts were a strange form of scholarship developed more than two thousand years ago by ancient scholars of a fallen kingdom called "Rossi," in the lands of the duchies.
Just as Practical Technology practitioners modified their bodies by installing energy crystals in their hearts as "igniters," learning Corpse Puppet arts required one to alter oneself as well: one had to turn oneself into a corpse and hide the secrets of the living soul in a receptacle called a "Life Box"!
From then on, a Corpse Puppet scholar became a monster caught between life and death.
But these arts were so bizarre and so contrary to the Holy See's scriptures that after the Black Death Great Warlock King fled and the Witchers fell into decline, the scholars who had developed this grotesque ancient art were wiped out along with their country by the Crusaders' Light Knight Order.
Throughout history, the destruction of the Practical Technology of Utolan and the Corpse Puppet arts of Rossi were far from isolated cases.
In the history of scholars' growth in the lands of the duchies, countless forms of scholarship had been erased by the Holy See's trials, vanishing into the river of history as forgotten forbidden arts.
The dried corpse looked at Reilo, a hint of evil in its voice.