At dawn, after going through all the material the spies had gathered, Turan neatly put everything back and left the house. Closing the door without a sound, he took a long wooden case from his High-Capacity Pouch.

He had commissioned a few settlers to make it while he was busy with the reclamation project in the south: a case with separate compartments for storing different people's hair.

It already held hair from his two companions, a feather from Vije, and hair from Solif's father, Godis. The strands he had just acquired from the Zahar knight now joined the collection. If he ever needed to find the man again, these would let him do so easily.

After sleeping soundly at the inn until around noon to make up for his sleepless night, Turan enjoyed a delicious lunch and returned to the Karmine nobles' residential compound. Unlike his previous late-night visit, it was broad daylight, and everyone was bustling about.

'Let's see. If the knights' quarters are over there... do I need to go as far as the next junction?'

Putting together the basic knowledge Asiz had supplied and the Zahar spy's intelligence, Turan found that Karmine had no real factions to speak of. As with Ravista, its House Head was still young, only around a hundred and fifty, so succession was not an issue. If he had to divide them, there were the upper-tier nobles, including the House Head, and the young nobles expected to reach their level, followed by everyone in the upper-middle tier and below.

Naturally, a secret meeting of the house's senior members would be attended only by nobles in that first, dominant group. Turan's objective was to secretly replace one of the participants, and he had already chosen whom.

'Found you. Onil Karmine.'

The owner of the mansion he had reached, Onil, was the son of Jemel Karmine, the current House Head's younger brother and a top-ranking noble. Onil, too, was a young noble with considerable potential. Someone of his standing was highly likely to attend the secret meeting.

Turan circled the building and slipped through an open window. A sharp crash rang through the mansion as though welcoming him. It sounded like a drinking glass or something similar shattering.

"Get out, you bastards! You call this food...?"

"E-excuse us!"

"Mani, Mani? Wake up!"

"Shh. Carry him out carefully..."

Following the voices, he saw an unconscious servant bleeding from the forehead and two other servants carrying him out of the room. Behind them, a young noble sat fuming in an armchair. His mana was near the bottom of the upper tier. That had to be Onil, the mansion's owner and the Karmine noble Turan had chosen as his target.

'Threw a glass and split his head open, did he? His character's showing already.'

Whatever had enraged him, Onil stormed out of the dining room despite the lavish meal spread across the table. That left the Abacha-style feast of delicious seafood to the servants tasked with clearing it away.

Perhaps they were used to serving nobles. They ate the leftovers in silence and only began complaining once their master was too far away to hear.

"He's really gone too far lately. How many times a day does he do this?"

"Exactly. It tastes this good. What's his problem?"

"He's just throwing a fit because he can't control his temper... At least we get to eat something nice out of it."

The servant mumbled around a roasted shrimp the size of a forearm, probably a monster, which he had stuffed into his mouth in one go. The food certainly looked delicious, so Turan slipped a piece of grilled salmon into his own mouth without the servants noticing.

"Hey, don't eat it all. Leave some for Tonin and the ones who carried him out."

"At least he only broke a glass this time. Maybe it's because the old master scolded him for beating Mr. Boshu's family to death."

"Old master, my ass. He's just an older bastard who lets that little shit do whatever he wants."

"If only I'd been born a noble."

Perhaps they were growing heated, because the servants began denouncing Onil with abuse so scathing that, had any noble overheard, they could hardly have protested being hanged on the spot. His parents were all bastards for bringing a creature like him into the world and letting him run loose; they hoped he would go off on a pilgrimage somewhere and die horribly.

There were plenty of nobles who were unpopular with their retainers, but few were hated to this degree.

'Looks like I made the right choice.'

Wizards, as descendants of the gods, protected humans, and humans served wizards. That was the law of the human world. Raised on that teaching from childhood, nobles might regard commoners as insignificant, but they did not personally abuse and torment them. Such behavior was considered far too undignified for a noble.

Besides, knights and nobles tended to take less sadistic pleasure in abusing the weak than commoners did.

Every so often, however, someone like Onil was born who refused to be bound by those rules—the sort who personally tormented commoners to a degree that made other, sensible nobles frown.

That was another reason Turan had chosen Onil's identity for his disguise. Erasing the evidence of his infiltration would require eliminating the original, and killing a decent person would have left a bad taste in his mouth.

Leaving the servants' complaints behind, Turan followed Onil's presence outside the mansion. Onil wandered through the garden as though he wanted a stroll, then suddenly conjured a whip of ice and began slicing down all the ornamental trees nearby. A gardener trimming branches close by cried out in horror at the sight.

"Aagh!"

"I don't like their shape. Replant the whole lot!"

"Y-yes, Master..."

Having crushed the gardener's spirits, Onil continued roaming the mansion and committing every sort of outrage. He knocked down a stable wall because it smelled, then crushed the bones in a knight's foot under his heel for merely glancing at him in passing. Watching from behind under stealth, Turan let out a disbelieving laugh.

'I'd heard the stories, but... he really is a fucking brat.'

Considering that Onil was already over sixty, there was no way to describe these tantrums except as shamefully childish. Astonishingly, though, even this was him exercising a measure of restraint.

'Didn't they say his father recently scolded him for beating his concubine and her family to death?'

Onil had three concubines rather than a spouse. Rumor had it that, after one died from his excesses, he killed her father and older brother when they came to protest. However inferior a concubine's standing might be to a spouse's, that was so outrageous that his father had severely reprimanded him and ordered him confined.

Apparently, he had also killed more than a few servants in his younger years, whether deliberately or by accident. It was no wonder everyone feared him and he had been unable to find even a spouse.

Turan continued following Onil, scrutinizing and analyzing every detail of his speech, gestures, and expressions.

'I was too rushed when I impersonated Kadram last time. Someone close to him nearly caught me... I need to be more thorough this time.'

* * *

Three days passed after Turan infiltrated Onil's mansion. He devoted every waking moment to observing and imitating everything about Onil. Just as the actors he had once watched brought historical figures to life, he meant to reproduce every aspect of Onil's behavior.

He even watched when Onil invited friends over to gamble out of boredom or took a woman to bed, uncovering every little habit.

Then, in the midst of this, Onil's father, Jemel Karmine, unexpectedly visited the mansion.

"I keep hearing that you're still behaving like a lout."

"Father."

"You know there's an important family meeting in four days?"

"Yes."

"I'd rather tell you to forget it, but none of my other children measures up to you, so I'll let you have a seat. You are not to cause any trouble there."

"Yes..."

Onil, a virtual tyrant within his mansion, could not even meet his father's eyes. His reply came in a timid voice.

In any case, confirmation that Onil would attend the meeting was welcome news. The man had proved so much more of a monster than Turan had expected that he had wondered whether Onil might be excluded from such an important gathering.

'Then again, even a great house doesn't have many nobles of his caliber.'

Onil's personality was the problem, but his upper-tier mana had yet to reach its limit. He still had room to grow. With fewer than twenty or so individuals of that caliber even in a great house, it would be a waste to discard him over his temperament.

Jemel clicked his tongue at his son's utterly spineless display and left the mansion.

"Damn it, damn it, damn it!"

Predictably, once he was gone, Onil flew into a rage and smashed up the entire reception room, seriously injuring a servant by breaking his arm in the process. The day after receiving that confirmation, Turan began a simple experiment.

"You there."

"Yes, Master!"

"Bring me a cup of tea. Any kind will do."

"At once!"

Taking advantage of Onil's absence from the mansion, Turan assumed his appearance, dressed in matching clothes, and summoned a servant to order tea. Whether his practice had paid off or the servant lacked the closeness to notice anything odd, the tea arrived without the slightest suspicion.

After secretly approaching the servants a few more times elsewhere, Turan felt confident that his performance was sufficiently polished.

At dawn on the sixth day, Turan stood beside Onil's bed and looked down at him. As usual, Onil had practically raped one of his pretty concubines before falling asleep alone. Turan gazed briefly at the face illuminated by moonlight, then drew Haram's dagger and struck down at his neck. Blood sprayed everywhere.

Like the Arabion knights who had once faced Zahar, the deeply sleeping Onil died in a single blow, never knowing death had come. It was a pitifully abrupt end for a high-ranking noble with upper-tier power. Anyone witnessing it would have understood why Arabion's nobles were so obsessive about their defenses.

'He got off lightly, considering everything he's done.'

His behavior had already led Turan to think otherwise, and, as expected, no god's soul suddenly emerged from within him. That was fortunate. If one had, Turan would have had to abandon the entire plan and flee at once.

Turan absorbed the dead Onil's mana, then extracted every drop of blood that had flowed from his severed neck and soaked into the bed and blankets, gathering it in a container he had prepared. He put the container and corpse into his High-Capacity Pouch and assumed Onil's appearance. The substitution was complete, without a trace.

From this moment on, he was Onil Karmine.

* * *

"This is far too cold!"

On the day of the meeting, Turan ate breakfast with perfect assurance, tormenting the servants by throwing his stew on the floor as Onil had done. Even that was merciful compared with the original, of course, and the servants cleared away the dishes without so much as a look of distress.

After breakfast, he followed Onil's usual routine by inviting a few friends—or, more accurately, underlings—over for a simple card game, verifying once again that his disguise was flawless.

Around sunset, at the appointed hour, a carriage stopped outside Onil's mansion.

"It is time to attend the meeting, Master."

"I know."

Onil's butler escorted him with a bearing as stiff as marble, but Turan's keen sense of smell told him that the man despised Onil utterly.

Once Turan boarded, the carriage headed straight for the House Head's residence at the center of the Karmine compound.

'So far, so good...'

In his experience, several kinds of magic tools could see through even Zahar's stealth, but nothing could detect this Mimic mask. Nor, as a rule, did tools that detected other magic tools exist.

As expected, the unidentified barrier around the House Head's residence sounded no alarm when Turan passed through. When the carriage stopped in front of the residence, he opened the door and stepped out.

"Onil? Fancy seeing you here. I didn't think your father would invite you."

Several Karmine nobles were already standing outside the mansion. One middle-aged man addressed Turan with a sardonic look. According to the information he had gathered, this was Onil's maternal uncle.

"Yes, Uncle... Father was kind enough to let me come."

"Hmm? Why are you calling me Uncle all of a sudden? You've always called me mister."

It had been difficult to catch every little detail like that. Turan put on a sheepish expression, offered a vague excuse, and hurried away. Fortunately, no one found it suspicious, perhaps because it resembled Onil's usual habit of cowering before the strong.

A short while later, Turan entered a conference room deep within the House Head's residence alongside the other Karmine nobles. There were sixteen attendees in all—the most powerful members among Karmine's more than a hundred nobles.

At the head of the table, Rodor Karmine, the House Head, surveyed them with sharp eyes. He had an intelligent face and a long beard, perhaps the reason he seemed quite imposing despite his youth.

'So that's Karmine's House Head...'

Presumably, the Freyan god nicknamed the Lawyer resided within him. After all, entrusting a host of that caliber to a subordinate would be unsettling.

There was also a very high probability that another god's vessel was among the attendees. Looking around now, though, Turan could not even begin to guess who it might be.

Shortly afterward, the meeting began, and, just as Turan had expected, the subject of Arabion came up immediately.

"How are the war preparations coming along?"

"Things aren't going very well. Our sea routes have been completely cut off for some time now..."

"On top of that, the winds in the North Sea have recently died down, making conditions similar to the South Sea. That has slowed the ships as well."

Fortunately, Onil was young enough that Turan, in his guise, did not need to offer opinions or answer questions. After the discussion had gone on for some time, the subject he wanted finally arose.

"Ranusa, have we still had no contact with the merfolk?"

"No. Starting with the whale, every merfolk kingdom is now refusing communication. They no longer heed the Blue Coral Crown's commands, either."

The Blue Coral Crown. That seemed to be the secret behind Karmine's domination of the merfolk. Judging by the name, was it some sort of Holy Relic?

"Tsk. Should we have subdued that great sea serpent's wraith as soon as it appeared?"

"We had little choice, did we? We were dealing with an important matter at the time. By the time it was settled, the merfolk had already caused trouble."

Turan had wondered why the Karmine nobles had not intervened while the great sea serpent's wraith was running rampant. Apparently, something had happened on their end at the time as well. What could it have been?

He was curious, but he could not ask anyone here. If it was something Onil should already know, that alone would arouse suspicion.

"In any event, if the Blue Coral Crown no longer works, the merfolk have very likely regained the great sea serpents' ancient blessing. That would explain the recent monster rampages as well. Once the war is over, I'll settle matters with them myself. Losing control of the merfolk would be troublesome."

"That is reassuring, House Head."

Unlike Arabion's House Head, Karmine's actively involved himself in the house's affairs. Judging by how naturally the others took it, this appeared to be his usual approach.

As Turan sat quietly filling a seat and gleaning information, the House Head suddenly clapped his hands to draw everyone's attention.

"Now that we've largely finished our internal discussions, I will invite in an important guest."

"Ah, the one you mentioned before...?"

"Yes. Come in!"

At the House Head's words, a firmly closed door at one side of the conference room opened, and a man entered. He was an unidentified top-ranking noble who had stood outside throughout the meeting. Turan had assumed he was guarding the room. The middle-aged man had slicked-back black hair, gray eyes, and rather lean, sharp features.

'Was there a Karmine noble who looked like that?'

The Zahar spy's materials had included crude portraits of the Karmine nobles, but none had looked like him. Was he some secret weapon Karmine had kept hidden?

Yet, for some reason, that face did not feel entirely unfamiliar. Turan could not have said precisely who he was, but he felt as though he had seen him quite often...

While Turan puzzled over that strange sense of familiarity, the House Head introduced the man to the others.

"I believe none of you has met him before. This is Talis Zahar, who has come all the way from the distant desert to mediate this war. Please welcome him."