Hermit Wizard Chapter 56

The Soul Flows High (1)

“I’m ready.”

In the studio on the lower floor without a window, the reverberation of my voice returned coldly. In front, there were twenty-nine bodies lying side by side. So of the corpses collected from the beach in Yeong-jong Island so ti ago had been burned, and that was what was left. In the anti, the preservation magic was placed on them, so no further corrosion or damage occurred.

I glanced at Parvache.

“Let’s start.”

The robot nodded, and I closed my eyes. Enormous Mana was concentrated in my chest, and it extended through the junction of the Dinsion connected across the Channel. The density of Mana was entirely different from when I opened a Channel to a random dinsion.

Just before the Seed Channel was fully opened, an unfinished crack that could lead to any dinsion absorbed the Mana. At the sa ti, the dinsional map stored in the unconscious was awakening. Compressed information shot like an arrow from the deepest sections of my mind to control Mana’s flow. Power began to pave the way.

In the chaos, where countless dinsions overlapped, the Channel moved to find the exact destination. As such, the spearhead of power, which found the Dinsion, sensed my contractor and opened the door in front of it.

“…!”

I recited the spell. Through my soul and beyond the Channel, the promised language floated and conveyed the will to the other’s consciousness. Finally, I felt the other party in the contract agree to my call and step into the Channel which was opened before it.

-Ghooooooong!

As the contractor entered the door across the world, a long forefoot covered with black hair popped out from the Channel of my chest. It was a little longer than my waist height. It checked the floor several tis with thin legs about as thick as bamboo, and its head was out of the Channel. Then it slowly took the rest of the feet and crossed over entirely.

Before long, the atypical animal pulled its entire body out of the Channel. It looked at as I deactivated the Channel after the summoning.

=…Ah, already?=

I nodded my head. At first glance, the summoned creature looked like a wolf with a very long snout. However, where the upper and lower lips should be, a sharp beak grew, and its two ears were like palm tree leaves. They appeared to be of the sa material used by insects to make cocoons. Compared to the size of the body, the legs were long and slender. Standing on the ground with all four legs, its height reached up to my eyes.

The na of this species was Yodmo, the latest successful summoning I signed.

“Then, according to the contract…”

I pointed to the body lying neatly on the floor.

“Eat their mories. All you have to do is give the mory of the group they belonged to just before they died.”

Yodmo’s eyes were looking at …unenthusiastically. I tried not to show confusion on my face and pondered the reasons for such a reaction.

Why? According to the knowledge I gained from Parvache, the race called Yodmo always suffered from hunger. Even when I first called it out to sign a contract and had a conversation through its soul, I could feel the urge of terrible gluttony that was deeply seated in its mind. However, the atmosphere I felt today was totally different. A bit of annoyance now stood in Yodmo’s eyes. What was the reason?

Despite its mood, Yodmo accepted my request according to the contract.

=…Good.=

It walked with its long, slender legs, making a slow, grunting noise, and stood in front of the nearest body. Its legs bent slightly, and its neck stretched, bringing its long snout in front of the corpse to sniff it.

“Will it be okay? I’ve preserved the body, but they were already dead for quite so ti…”

=Let’s give it a try.=

Yodmo opened the tip of its snout slightly and stuck out its elongated, pale pink tongue like a snake. It moved its tongue by drawing a vertical line against the body’s philtrum with the tip of its slender tongue. The line was drawn by the tongue, which started in the middle of the body, passed through the nose, brow, and forehead, then turned around the body’s scalp and continued to the upper part of the head that touched the floor.

Yodmo left a fine line on the body’s head with the fluid collected at the tip of its tongue, then put its tongue back in its mouth and waited for a few seconds. And…

Geeck!

The head of the body, which had been left still on the floor, split from side to side with an intense sound. The cross-section of the broken skull was smooth as if cut masterfully with a knife. The place where Yodmo’s tongue passed created this elaborate crack. The brain was revealed through the open skull. At first glance, it was in poor condition. However, Yodmo didn’t mind and stuck its beak through the crack.

-Slurp slurp, slurp.

When I heard the creature suck the brain up, my expression distorted with unease. Yodmo moved slowly, never in a hurry. It opened all twenty-nine heads and ate all the brains present inside them. After the large al, Yodmo approached .

“Will it take so ti to sort them?”

=It’s already done.=

Yodmo chewed and spat out an opaque bead. It didn’t fall to the floor but floated in the air, hovering around its mouth.

=Out of 29 mories, only information on the group that they belonged to until the ti of their death was sorted and put together. Most of them belonged to several duplication groups, but the places where they truly felt a belonging were all the sa. But the problem…=

Yodmo continued speaking, striking the bead with the tip of its nose.

=There are mories damaged over ti after death, but it looks like sothing was caught in magic. Due to its influence, so parts were volatilized at the ti of death. The remaining mories are not complete.=

“I guessed that already.”

That’s why we had to destroy the spells while they were alive. It was best to destroy the spells before they died, then press the Fake God to make them confess with his power. If the Fake God didn’t obey my threats, then I could have signed a contract with Yodmo and pulled out all of its mories alive.

Unlike the Fake God, Yodmo could extract mories from dead creatures. However, the power seed to be less effective than when targeting living and thinking creatures. Still, using this bead would reveal more information than the Fake God found. Yodmos were real specialists when it ca to retrieving mories.

“Then…the first request ends here. Return to your original Dinsion…”

=Wait a minute.=

“Well?”

Was there anything else? The Yodmo looked at for a mont with its unmotivated eyes, then teased his mouth and again spat out another opaque bead. This ti, the size was much larger.

=All mories except for the mories that were classified earlier. It contains both superficial and unconscious mories. This is from the 29, too.=

“What, you don’t need it?”

Yodmo quietly nodded its head.

“…I don’t mind it, but originally, the terms of the contract were that I would take the mories that I wanted, and you eat the rest for each call, right?”

=It was.=

Yodmo responded drowsily. This was a little strange, no matter how much I looked at it. A race called Yodmo was the superior entity that crystallized and consud mory. For them to be satisfied, they must eat the enormous mories of beings that had lived for a very long ti, and this race didn’t have the power to deal with such a long-lived species.

Therefore, they mainly hunt for lower-level beings who were weaker than themselves and ate away their mories. Even if they eat the mories for such a short ti, it is said that they didn’t always grow full. That was why most Yodmos were always starving and suffered from hunger that was close to madness. This Yodmo contracted with was no different. Until the mont when the first contract was signed.

=…In fact, even though you didn’t ask for a few days, I was trying to get the first request on the very day of the contract.=

Yes, it was a few days ago that I signed the contract with this Yodmo. After signing the contract, I asked for a few days before making the first request. This was because it took ti to restore the deviated corpses to their normal state by applying the preservation magic.

=Usually, it doesn’t feel like I eat anything even though I ate the mories of a human-like you for several years.

“…”

On the day I first called it, Yodmo demanded two kinds of prices from . One was the price for the act of signing a contract with itself, the superior being. The other was the price that I had to pay every ti I called out and requested. What Yodmo, who first appeared in the world, requested as a price for a contract…was my mory as the summoner, as Parvache expected. This was like a kind of ritual procedure.

And the discussion about what mories to pay in return had already been done with Parvache. I didn’t want to categorize the mories to hand over. For example, if I say take only useless mories, the standard was unclear. If Yodmo randomly classified and passed the mories that shouldn’t be lost, there was a risk of affecting the magic.

So, we decided to set the period in which the mory was accumulated and agreed to cut it. Losing mory after eting Parvache was dangerous. It went without saying any more about the mories of learning magic. So, I decided to give Yodmo all the mories from birth to the year I t Parvache, the year I was seven, in return. This mory’s scope included mories that I could consciously access and those that had sunk in the deep swamp of oblivion in the subconscious.

That mory was too short, so Yodmo looked unpleasant (at first, he asked for more than 20 years of mory!) Still, I convinced it that it was a third of my life so far, and it barely signed the contract. As a result, I now had no mories of until the age of 7 in my mind. Before summoning the Yodmo, I made a record in advance. Of all the mories until the age of seven, everything that could have been rembered was docunted before summoning the Yodmo. Maybe later, sothing difficult might arise because of the mory loss.

After signing the contract and losing my mory, I first opened my laptop and checked the files. And I encountered an unfamiliar childhood record. It must have been a docunt I wrote, but I couldn’t believe what I thought about writing this docunt. All of the past events described in this docunt felt like soone else’s life. Yodmo’s power was so sophisticated that I still had mories of writing this file. Still, no mories of the mories I would have had in my head as I typed the docunt. Not only the mories accumulated until the age of 7 were deleted, but all the mories that had co to mind after the age of 7 were deleted.

Yodmo spoke, looking at with obsidian-like eyes.

=If I look at the object, I can see how much mory it is. At first glance, you had about 20 years of mory. Combining the conscious mory and the unconscious mory.=

It was saying sothing similar to what the Fake God told .

=What I ate out of your mories…it was definitely only about six years. So, I waited for the first request. Expecting how many humans would have been prepared. Since you signed a contract with , I hoped you would prepare for two or three hundred if you had common sense.=

“…”

=But…things gradually changed over ti.=

“What does that an?”

Yodmo said, pushing the crystal with its nose.

=Anyway, I’ll give you all the mories of 29 humans. I will not eat this.=

“Yodmo refuses to eat?”

=Yes. I didn’t know I was going to say this. It’s my first ti feeling it since I was born, but…=

Yodmo looked at .

=I’m so full right now.=

* * *

Yodmo was…full?

Parvache and I were staring at it, dumbfounded. Looking at us, Yodmo continued.

=I obviously cut your mories up to 7 years old, crystallized them, and swallowed them. It usually takes a few minutes to digest. I checked the size with my own eyes.=

Tapping the bead of mory the size of my fist floating around its mouth, it added.

=The size that crystallized your mory is far less than this bead. It was tiny and insignificant.=

It made a groaning sound, expressing subtle feelings that seed to be half mixed with satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

=But while the crystal was being digested in my stomach, sothing strange happened. Even now, the phenonon of The Vial of Adelegos is occurring.=

Yodmo cited the divine relic, which collected and stored sounds of all dinsions. The vial was said to have created rivers and streams where sound flows in A-Verdag because the bottle’s size didn’t et God’s greed.

=In the process of digesting the tiny crystal, mories of unknown identity are continually being released and filling my stomach. Your childhood mories are already digested and over. This is a mory like a black fog that I cannot interpret. It looks like it was compressed and embedded in a size smaller than dust in the deep bottom of your mories before the age of 7 years. It seems like it’s recovering the original size while I digest it. However, even if I digest this, there is no end.=

Then Yodmo said, pointing at .

=I knew you were a unique human. Opening doors to multiple dinsions, bringing in an entity like , and signing a contract, it seems that there was a side effect, right? This enormous amount of inexplicable mory is probably not yours. The fact that mories that are not yours are piled up at the bottom of your mind is a phenonon that I saw only in high-level wizards a long ti ago…anyway, I am very full, thanks to that.=

I couldn’t understand Yodmo’s words well. Since it said it was so large, I thought that the dinsional map under the unconsciousness was judged as mory, and so of it was taken, but it seems that wasn’t the case. I checked the map when I summoned it a while ago, but there were no signs of damage. Most of all, the map was implanted into after I t Parvache. There was no reason to have dinsional maps mixed with mories before the age of seven.

Yodmo looked at before continuing.

=Since you often sign contracts of souls with superior beings, their compressed mories have likely flowed into your subconscious. It can’t be your real mory, can it?=

Hmm? That was also a bit strange. I started the summoning after eting Parvache. How did the mories of the superiors’ blend into my mories before the age of 7? Yodmo signaled to reopen the Channel without worrying about my upset expression.

There were many more questions I would have liked to ask, but Yodmo had done all of his work, so I had to follow the other person’s intentions according to the contract. And the Yodmo was hoping to go back right away. I opened the Channel on my chest, and Yodmo looked back at as if it had sothing on its mind while trying to get into it.

=Thanks to that, I learned the feeling of being full. Even if it were a mory shared by a superior person, it would be over if I digested it for a few more days, but it would be better to give compensation.=

Perhaps because it was reluctant to be penalized because the contract was interpreted as unfair, Yodmo stopped its steps going back. Then it cuts off part of its ear without touching it. In the inner wing-like ear of an insect, one of the nurous branches was cut off and slowly flew to . I held it in my hand.

=Ask the spirit who advises you what it is for.=

With those words left behind, Yodmo returned to its original Dinsion.