Ruger took another step, went to the adjacent room, and strode inside.
He raised his head and looked around the room, first making a circuit of the small space. It felt like a conversation separated by ages, and the image of that senior wizard grew a little fuller in his mind.
The stone houses in this city must have been made by that wizard. Judging from the way the rooms were divided, as well as the layout and allocation of each area, that wizard had likely been in something of a playful mood at the time. He must have known that the Demons living here had no need for such spaces. Those were human living habits—the partitioned little kitchen, for instance, even the counters for handling food, all shaped to ordinary human proportions. And before becoming a wizard, when he had been young, that lord had likely been a child of an ordinary family.
As he reshaped this mountain and his playful inclinations gradually rose, it had been an unconscious recollection of his childhood surroundings.
Ruger still remembered that when he had lived in Grotto City and the even more chaotic, darker Abyss Cavern District, many houses had looked like this. The house he had been given back then was already in a decent neighborhood of Starry City, yet his neighbors' homes had only been slightly larger than this one, with very similar layouts—like the family across the street who had exchanged food with him.
And there was the true center of this city: that bizarre castle belonging to the Succubus lord.
That senior wizard might have been an exceptionally focused person. Before becoming a wizard, he had never entered a noble's castle. After becoming one, he had lost interest in such things as well, devoting himself solely to exploring