New Grudges and Old Scores

Of course Aish remembered that name.

Memory, for a being who had lived more than five thousand years, ought to have been a burden.

Too many faces, too many events, too many tangled debts and grudges... They piled up layer after layer like tree rings, until in the end they compressed the core "self" into an extremely narrow space.

Most Archwizards who had lived over a thousand years would selectively "prune" their own memories.

They kept the necessary knowledge and experience, and cut away useless emotions and details.

It was a survival strategy, and also a form of self-protection.

Aish's method of pruning was especially thorough.

She kept only two kinds of memories: those related to research, and those that made her "uncomfortable."

The former was the foundation she relied on to survive. The latter was her way of staying alert.

And the name Ron Ralph happened to belong to the latter category.

To be precise, it belonged to the "extremely uncomfortable" tier.

Looking back now, the cause of that conflict sixty years ago was absurd enough to seem like a shoddy stage play.

As for the Elemental Carnival affair, Aish herself had not actually taken part in the on-site decision-making.

She had been sleeping in the Azure Garden, half-fused into the petals just as she was now, too lazy to concern herself with outside affairs.

It was Seraphina and Darius who had acted on their own, attempting to use the foreign trial-takers who entered the elemental convergence point as "local materials," turning them into sacrifices for a large-scale live sacrificial ritual.

Among those trial-takers had been a certain young wizard who, at the time, was still only Monday-Level.

And that young wizard's situation had been sent to Cassandra by that fellow Salamander.

What happened afterward was like knocking over