Lorne dragged his exhausted body back to 69 Rose Street.
"Meow~"
As soon as he returned, Lucky, who had been curled up asleep on the bed, sprang up with renewed energy. She hurried over to Lorne and rubbed her fluffy head against his trouser leg.
Lorne smiled, reached down to rub her head, and said softly, "I've managed to get your formula."
"Meow!"
Taking Lucky into his arms, Lorne looked again at the slip of paper bearing the formula.
[Sequence 7: Witch] [Main ingredients: all the blood of a Black Abyss Demon Fish, one Agate Peacock egg.] [Auxiliary materials: 80 milliliters of pure water, 5 drops of golden mandrake juice, three Shadow Lizard scales, 10 drops of narcissus juice.]
The formula looked fine, but... Witch...
To be honest, he had been puzzled from the moment he first saw the potion's name.
"Why... 'Witch,' rather than 'Warlock'?" Lorne couldn't help muttering.
Almost all the potion names he had seen so far had been names of various professions. This was his first time seeing one with such an explicit gender designation.
Was it because the person who sold me the formula was a woman that she called the potion "Witch"? If it had been a man instead, would it... become "Warlock"?
Lorne ventured a bold conjecture.
But that doesn't seem quite right, either. None of the other Beyonder pathways seem to have anything like this. Could the Assassin pathway itself involve some peculiar, incomprehensible phenomenon?
Wait, could it be... An extraordinarily startling, even horrifying thought suddenly surfaced in Lorne's mind.
Witch... woman...
This...
No, that can't be right! It's only a guess! Biologically speaking, that's simply impossible!
Lorne tried to use the scientific knowledge he had learned before transmigrating to forcibly deny this terrifying possibility steeped in mysticism. After all,