Under the combined effect of the Curse and the Mental Shock, his central nervous system would suffer devastating damage, his whole body would be paralyzed, he would lose all ability to move; even blinking once would become a luxury beyond reach. His consciousness might remain clear, yet it would be forever trapped in a shell that could not move.
Feeling nothing but endless darkness and despair.
This would be a punishment far more cruel than Death. For such scheming, incorrigible types, Ian had never been stingy about giving them the "payback" they deserved.
There had originally been a few guests chatting idly or admiring flowers in the corridor and the backyard; they were startled by this sudden commotion and all turned their eyes toward it. But when they saw the Dark Wizard collapsed on the ground, and then saw Ian—whose footsteps had not even paused—walking straight toward his own room, most of them showed expressions of understanding or indifference.
On this vast and chaotic land of Africa, conflicts and intrigues between Wizards play out every single day. Power is the unspoken Law here. No one is going to meddle and ask what happened, and even less will anyone sympathize with a Dark Wizard who had clearly failed in a sneak attack and was now reaping what he had sown.
A few passing Witches merely glanced over.
Then, with practiced ease, they began contacting the specialists responsible for handling this kind of "emergency," their faces showing no surprise at all, as if this were nothing more than a trivial little interlude in daily life.
Ian returned to his room and shut the door behind him, completely cutting off the noise outside and the minor incident that had just occurred. The room was simple and tidy, with a strong local flavor; bright woven tapestries hung on the rough earthen walls, and the air was filled with the smell of dry soil and some sort of insect-repelling herb.
He walked over to the wooden table by the window and sat down, then took from his Magic Backpack the thick stack of notes Musa had given him. These notebooks were heavy in his hands.
Not only because of their number and the weight of the paper, but also because of the knowledge and emotion they carried. Ian did not immediately dive into the core sections on Time Magic; instead, with the intention of gaining a rough overview, he casually picked up the topmost notebook—which looked the oldest and had a dark-brown hard cover—and began to flip through it.
The earlier sections.
Were mostly derivations of basic Alchemy principles, and ideas on how to apply Alchemy Array Maps to cookware and stoves, in order to achieve more precise control of heat and better fusion of flavors.
The handwriting was a little immature, but the logic was clear and filled with whimsical ideas. One could easily imagine how passionately the young Musa had thrown himself into exploring the path that fused cuisine with Alchemy.
As he turned the pages, the content gradually shifted toward more abstruse fields. Discussions began to appear on "time" as a perceptible, guidable "flow of energy," with all kinds of complex geometric diagrams alongside them that attempted to depict changes in the temporal dimension.
Ian saw some experimental records on accelerating local temporal flow to rapidly ferment dough or ripen fruit. Some had succeeded, but more had failed—yet beside every failure there were detailed reflections and new hypotheses.
The further he read, the more profound the notes became, and the more they…strayed from the original culinary theme. It was obvious that by this period, the old man's wife and child must have already vanished completely.
Every line was suffused with a sense of anxiety, despair, and a reckless madness.
The theoretical constructions on time reversal grew ever bolder, the formulas for stabilizing a Time Passage ever more complex, and there even appeared many dangerous conjectures involving higher-dimensional space and the laws of causality.
"Tch! He really is a genius!"
Only now did Ian truly realize this.