As the incantation spilled out like popping beans, the patterns on the altar lit up. Starting beneath the beautiful female reporter, every pattern across the altar illuminated within seconds.
The mysterious designs gave off an invisible aura of terror, a classic tale of demonic destruction.
This supernatural phenomenon terrified the beautiful reporter on the altar even more. She seemed to see her own end.
Something even stranger happened next. The beautiful foreign reporter, only in her twenties, began aging at a speed visible to the naked eye.
Wrinkles appeared on her smooth skin, her shining blond hair gradually dulled, and her voice grew hoarse. Her sexy, vibrant young body aged at ten thousand times its normal speed, as though time had switched on a jet engine inside her.
"Her life is being absorbed."
Leo felt a chill of terror. Everyone already knew that those chosen to leave the cells met bad ends, but he had never expected an end like this.
To live out your entire life in just a few minutes-was there any crueler way to die?
The other woman floating beside Leo watched everything happening on the altar, her features twisted into a knot with fear. Beneath her feet came the drip, drip of liquid.
Leo did not mock her, because he knew his expression might not look much better. He had only avoided wetting himself because his bladder was empty.
Accompanying the beautiful reporter's agonized screams, a dark shadow slowly expanded behind her.
At the sight of the spreading shadow, the being Leo called a mage grew noticeably more excited, even his voice becoming more hurried.
But as the beautiful reporter's body hunched over and her blond hair turned a bleak white, her vitality was clearly exhausted. Like a candle guttering in the wind, she could die at any moment, yet the shadow showed no further change.
The mage grew anxious. With a twitch of his finger, the woman beside Leo, whose features were twisted into a knot, was hurled roughly onto the altar.
At that same moment, the beautiful reporter who had still been blond-haired and blue-eyed minutes earlier closed her eyes forever, her drained body withered and shrunken.
Dead.
As the second woman was thrown onto it, the shadow continued growing, reaching the size of an adult's fist.
But at that point, no matter how quickly the mage spoke that unknown language, the shadow did not grow another fraction.
The light from every pattern on the altar grew brighter, and the woman who had just been thrown onto it likewise aged at ten thousand times the normal speed.
Leo understood. They were sacrifices!
Sacrifices for the mage to communicate with an unknown being!
There were no surprises. When the second woman had been drained of life and was about to die, Leo was thrown onto the altar too.
Leo wanted to resist, but apart from his mouth, he could not move any part of his body.
If looks could kill, this mage would not have survived a minute. Unfortunately, looks could not kill.
Or rather, the hatred and dying resentment harbored by Leo and the Earthlings sacrificed before him meant less than a breath of air to this mage.
Leo now understood why those two beauties had suffered so much on the altar. It hurt too damn much!
The entire space was squeezing him. It reminded Leo of squeezing an orange dry for juice.
With one simple, forceful squeeze, all the juice inside an orange was instantly pressed out. He was now the orange inside that machine.
His strong muscles began to slacken, his agile mind grew sluggish, and his eyes, which could spot a mosquito ten meters away, began to blur.
He knew he was riding a rocket toward death, on a one-way journey with no return!
"I still haven't found you. I really can't accept that."
Leo did not experience any great surge of emotion. There was nothing he could change about an established fact. Powerless barking was merely a fig leaf for the powerless.
If only that kitchen knife had slit his throat a little sooner back on Earth, none of this would have happened.
But while Leo silently awaited death, he did not see the mage's burning eyes fixed intently on the space behind him.
The shadow, which had remained only fist-sized even after two women were sacrificed in succession, had now changed.
It had not grown larger, but it seemed to have caught the scent of something delicious and was approaching Leo on the altar.
Just as the draining of his vitality turned all of Leo's black hair white, the shadow silently pressed itself against his back. Like a black curtain, it instantly expanded and wrapped around him, swallowing him whole. From a distance, it looked like a scorched zongzi.
"Aah!"
Leo, who had not cried out even as his life was drained away, now resembled a three-scaled carp thrown into hot oil before it had quite died.
The instant the black curtain enveloped him, he sprang two meters into the air at an impossible angle, his entire skeleton convulsing so rapidly that even an epilepsy patient would have felt outdone.
Pain.
Ten times worse than having his vitality drained, as though countless tiny lives were crowding together and forcing their way into his body, not caring whether Leo could bear it. They would get inside first and worry about the rest later.
From the mage's perspective, Leo's eyes had long since rolled back as he performed all manner of inhuman movements on the altar. Leo was no longer controlling his body. Perhaps it was his body's instinctive response to extreme pain, or perhaps something else was controlling it.
His shriveled muscles rapidly filled out as though pumped full of water, and his gray-white hair turned black as though undergoing a transformation. His once-dim vitality seemed to have had a bucket of gasoline poured over it, erupting with a boom into power a hundred times greater than before.
Deeply unconscious, Leo had no idea that he had returned to his original appearance in the blink of an eye, or even surpassed his former state.
"Hahahahaha! It worked! It worked! I finally did it!"
Leo knew nothing of his own transformation, much less the mage's frenzied behavior below the altar, which was practically a match for his own convulsions upon it.
But before either of them stopped their frenzy, several figures suddenly appeared above the altar. All wore robes and held various staffs, staring coldly down at the altar.
Only upon seeing those figures did the frenzied mage below the altar calm down slightly, though he still could not conceal the fervor in his eyes.
Pointing at Leo on the altar, he laughed while tears and snot streamed down his face. "Hahaha! I did it! I did it!"
The figures silently watched Leo, whose aura was still climbing on the altar. Every one of their previously indifferent gazes now revealed shock.
One figure rattled off an incantation like popping beans. As their staff waved, chains appeared out of thin air, slipped into Leo's body like nimble snakes, and vanished beneath his skin.
"Energy Sealing Technique."
Leo's steadily rising energy fluctuations stopped, and so did his convulsions. He fell rigidly onto the altar, only the occasional twitch of his limbs still telling of the intense exertion his body had just undergone.
When Leo opened his eyes again, he was free to move. Even more surprising were the changes in his body. Before he lost consciousness, he had clearly been drained to the point where one kick of his legs would send him off to report to the underworld. Now, not only had he recovered to his strongest state, but he was also brimming with strength, as though every cell had been packed with TNT and could unleash explosive power at any moment.
Leo reckoned that, while he would not dare claim he could tear a tank apart with his bare hands, tearing apart a truck would definitely be no problem.
* A blessing in disguise?*
Am I the chosen one?
Am I the protagonist of this book?
But before Leo could get over the changes in his body, a tingling sensation suddenly spread through him. His hairs stood on end, his muscles tightened, and a sense of danger hit him head-on, sending a chill from the soles of his feet straight to the crown of his head.
He had never experienced this sense of danger before. It seemed his senses had been enhanced along with his body, allowing him to notice something was wrong immediately.
This sense of danger came from several gazes. Merely being watched gave Leo the illusion that his throat was being gripped and he could die at any moment.
They came from two people dressed just like the earlier mage: voluminous gray robes, oddly shaped staffs, and faces Leo could not make out no matter how he looked. Simply sitting there and watching him made Leo sweat profusely.
These two mages were far more powerful than the mage who had thrown Leo onto the altar!
I can't beat them.
Definitely can't beat them.
Leo kept his body taut, not knowing what he would face. Still, not having his vitality drained until he died like the people before him was already pretty good.
"Name?"
"???"
Leo froze for a moment, because this mage was actually speaking Chinese, not that language he could not understand.
"Name?"
The questioning mage's tone did not change. Seeing Leo staring blankly, he asked again just as evenly.
"Leo."
Delight appeared on Leo's face. Being able to communicate meant he had a chance of surviving, so he hurried to answer.
"Age?"
"Twenty-three."
"Registered home address?"
"Number Five, Group Three, Ginkgo Village, Peace Town, Black City."
"What do you do for work?"
"Real estate sales. I sell houses."
"What kind of houses?"
"Both commercial housing and villas."
"How much do you make on one house?"
"The commission isn't fixed. It depends on how much we add to the price for the customer. Usually between ten and twenty thousand per property. If we meet someone who doesn't know housing prices, we can make over fifty thousand."
Leo did not dare conceal anything at all, answering whatever he was asked. He could clearly see that the mage who was not asking questions stared intently at him as he answered, those eyes seeming to pierce straight through his flesh and into his soul.