Ghost Maid

"This is... your house?" Zheng Yichen stared in astonishment at the little castle in the forest. Time had left plenty of marks on it, but... so the little girl beside him was a rich woman at heart?

"I used to live here. It should still be usable." Lolise glanced at the castle hidden among the trees and spoke after confirming there were no signs of anyone living there.

"How long has it been since you came back?"

"I forgot." Lolise opened the castle door. Zheng Yichen had expected clouds of dust, but none appeared. Inside, everything was unusually clean and tidy, as though someone cleaned it regularly.

Uh!? What are those!?

Two translucent figures rose out of the floor. Zheng Yichen, who had barely managed to squeeze himself into the castle, felt his mouth twitch. Didn't they look like ghosts?

The two translucent figures bowed slightly to Lolise, then faded away again.

"What were those?"

"Ghost Maids. You can sleep in the hall. There's no bedroom here that fits you."

"Uh." Fair enough. Zheng Yichen nodded. The hall was fine, at least better than sleeping outdoors. But that night, he couldn't sleep soundly. Every time he closed his eyes, he felt an inexplicable sense of being watched.

Whenever he opened his eyes, the feeling vanished at once. Zheng Yichen scratched his nose in irritation, looked around, then quietly opened the castle door and slipped outside.

He didn't notice a white shadow follow him out of the castle.

He hadn't felt much when he came here during the day. The atmosphere was merely a little eerie. But at night, the Illusion Demon Forest revealed its extraordinary nature.

The trees around him seemed to have become the kind from a terrifying fairy tale, each bearing a hideous face. Countless malicious gazes seemed to peer at him from every direction...

Crack!

Zheng Yichen snapped off a branch with one claw and narrowed his eyes at it. Its brown color had somehow turned black at night, and it gave off a faint, strange fluctuation.

He had thought the forest's power to cause hallucinations came from something like miasma. A tiny flame lit up on his claw and rapidly swelled to the size of a washbasin. Instead of throwing the fireball, he tossed it lightly into the air and caught it in one claw.

As he squeezed, he forced the washbasin-sized fireball down to the size of a basketball. Zheng Yichen had come up with this method when dealing with that mage.

The compressed fireball was more powerful, much like the boost from maximized spellcasting. Without this method, the earlier fireball was the limit of what he could manage. It wasn't that he couldn't make it bigger.

The problem was that he couldn't compress its power any further. Bigger magic wasn't necessarily better. Making it enormous was simple: just keep pouring magical power into the spell pattern. A spell cast that way would only be good for slaughtering the weak.

Was there any difference between being hit by a palm-sized wad of cotton and one the size of a car? Only the weight. Their ability to do damage was basically the same.

Without sufficient control over a spell, piling on more power would never produce a qualitative change. Losing control was the likeliest outcome. Maintaining a spell like that also consumed a great deal of magical power. As long as he held it without releasing it, he had to keep spending his own power to sustain it.

Even if the ongoing cost was small, it was still a cost.

By holding the spell directly in his claw, as he was doing now, Zheng Yichen could increase its power after casting it and avoid that ongoing drain.

He flexed his claw. He could squeeze it a little tighter, but that would take more strength. This was only a test; there was no need to go that far. He hurled the fireball at the tree whose branch he had just snapped off.

The compressed fireball burst the instant it struck the tree, engulfing it in flames. The smell of burning wood spread at once. Zheng Yichen caught one whiff and immediately backed away.

After just one breath, his surroundings seemed several degrees more terrifying. That smell definitely caused hallucinations! The flames on the tree did not last long, either. They soon vanished without a trace.

Aside from losing all its leaves and turning a little blacker, the tree was actually almost unharmed!

That's downright unnatural. Zheng Yichen ground the branch in his claw to powder. It had been about as hard as an ordinary branch, yet its resistance to magic was astonishing. As he lifted a foot to leave, he caught a flash of white from the corner of his eye. Looking closer, he saw it was the Ghost Maid from earlier that day.

She looked more solid at night. Though she was called a maid, Zheng Yichen thought her outfit was nowhere near appropriate... He would have to talk to Lolise about getting her a maid outfit sometime.

"Need something?" Zheng Yichen asked tentatively as she approached him.

"..." The Ghost Maid pointed at the tree, which was still giving off black smoke, then at Zheng Yichen, signaling him to get away from it quickly.

"Hm? Nothing seems to be happening." Zheng Yichen glanced at the tree. Apart from that first breath of smoke making his surroundings seem a little scarier, he hadn't felt any other effects. By now, he had grown used to the place.

He wasn't afraid, either. Before he met Lolise, he had once been trying to fly and accidentally glided too far, shooting straight off a high ledge. He had been scared to death, but after hitting the ground and finding it barely hurt, his fear of heights had plummeted...

A person standing on a platform half a meter high felt no pressure at all. They would run and jump without a second thought. But put them on a platform thirty meters high! Wasn't fear of heights just the knowledge that falling from up there could kill you? What if you knew falling from three hundred meters felt no different from falling off a little stool?

Would ordinary heights still frighten you?

That was how Zheng Yichen felt now. Before crossing over, someone pointing a gun at him would have made his legs go weak. His current body could shrug off ordinary gunfire, so he could remain perfectly unconcerned even with a gun pointed at him. It couldn't hurt him anyway!

The Ghost Maid shook her head and gestured with both hands. Zheng Yichen watched for a long while before he began to understand what she meant.

"Uh, you mean what I did affected... someone?"

Looking relieved that he had finally understood, the Ghost Maid nodded hurriedly and pointed in a direction, urging Zheng Yichen to go and look.

"...Who'd come to a place like this at night looking for trouble?"