After observing him carefully, Kroya concluded that the man bound in chains and forced into sleep was probably only in his late teens or around twenty.
Whip marks covered his body, but his face alone remained unblemished. He looked rather handsome, and with that head of blond hair, he could honestly win the favor of quite a few noblewomen.
"Well, it's a circus. Good looks don't count for much. You still get whipped."
Kroya shook his head and focused on the wound on the man's back, examining it with his mental power.
Although he had seen this before at the Mage Association, that had been quite some time ago. Besides, the original owner's magic and mental power back then were nothing compared to his now.
Perhaps his current magical perception and control would allow him to discover something.
Under the influence of the anti-magic iron, his power had weakened somewhat, but he could still easily penetrate the fissure in the man's back.
Liquid magic flowed inside. Judging by its quality, its fluctuations barely fell somewhere between those of first- and second-tier magic crystals.
The quantity, however, was staggering. A blue fissure roughly thirty centimeters long and five centimeters wide stretched across the man's whip-scarred back.
It was deep enough that he could faintly make out the white spine within, and the affected area clearly extended far beyond the visible fissure.
The magic inside even gave him the strange feeling of facing an abyss. There was clearly no shortage of it, yet it flowed extremely slowly, with scarcely any turbulent fluctuations.
"Hmm, this feels different from before."
He mused, "The magic inside was extremely turbulent back then. Why isn't there any turbulence now?
"And why is there so much magic? Where exactly is it coming from?
"Somewhere deeper?"
The gentle flow