When Turan first ventured into the world, he met a monster hunter named Midan in a small city. The superstition that ordinary people could become wizards by hunting monsters was common enough everywhere, but what had left an impression on him was the peculiar look in the man's eyes. They were fixed on a single, unwavering goal, as if declaring everything else worthless.

Although his association with those hunters ended in a rather absurd fashion, it was not long before Turan met a second person with a similar look in his eyes: Orville the Burner, who believed that, through wisdom granted by the gods, he could awaken a new bloodline by burning people and covering himself in their ashes.

And now Bisen, the noble of House Karmine whom he had not seen in so long, wore the very same look. Her eyes certainly had not been like that when they first met.

But this was hardly the time to ask her about it. Right beside them, people were screaming as they burned. Turan immediately began using telekinesis to free the bound villagers.

"Wait!"

Startled, Bisen instantly gathered moisture into a bow and arrow of ice, apparently intending to stop him. But when she fired at Turan, Solif conjured a hammer of light beside him and intercepted it.

"Not a chance!"

Her mana had grown considerably since their last meeting, but she still ranked somewhere between the middle and upper-middle tiers. Naturally, the hammer of a top-ranking noble like Solif easily shattered her ice arrow and continued on to slam into her abdomen.

"Gah..."

Bisen crumpled, threw up everything in her stomach, and passed out facedown in her own vomit. Even that had been a restrained blow. Had Solif struck in earnest, it would have torn her belly open and killed her outright.

By then, Turan had freed every villager. He promptly handed Solif the chain magic tool.

"Restrain her and keep watch. Stay alert—she might have some strange trick up her sleeve."

"Don't worry."

Leaving the confident Solif behind, Turan went straight to the people who had been burning. Maysa had extinguished the flames by creating a vacuum around their bodies, but severe burns and suffocation had already brought them to the brink of death.

"This is..."

As Maysa turned to him helplessly, Turan immediately took out the healing-potion magic tool and held it out.

"Make the potion. I'll give it to them."

"Can we save them?"

"Easily."

The healing-potion magic tool was considered somewhat underwhelming, but only because its healing became less effective the more powerful the Magic Creature receiving it. A potion that could affect even their bodies as top-ranking nobles was nothing short of an elixir of life for ordinary people.

Turan immediately began sorting the burn victims according to the brightness of the flames of mana he could sense within them through the Holy Relic.

He laid the few who had already died a short distance away and arranged the others in order of severity. Then Maysa held out a bottle of sloshing liquid.

"It's ready!"

"Give it here. We'll probably need more."

Supporting the neck of the person in the worst condition, Turan drew his dagger and cut open the mouth that burns had fused shut. He then took out the metal tube he normally used to feed Maysa, pushed it into the opening, and poured in the healing potion.

Moments later, the onlookers cried out in astonishment.

"Oh...!"

"A-alive! A dead person is coming back to life!"

The skin split all over the body of the person who had seemed on the verge of death, and fresh, pale skin grew beneath it. From fingers fused together to lungs seared by smoke and eyes damaged by heat, everything healed in a process that looked more like resurrection.

Pulling the tube from the patient's throat, Turan tossed the empty bottle to Maysa and called, "Next!"

After administering the potion to several more patients, Turan noticed that Maysa's mana had dwindled markedly. They switched roles: he replenished the potion while she administered it. Three people, then five, then ten, then twenty.

Sadly, a few died before their turn came, but most of those in critical condition survived.

"Whew..."

With a sigh of relief, Turan patted Maysa on the shoulder. Standing beside him, she looked somewhat dazed, as though she had yet to grasp that the crisis that had begun so abruptly was over.

"Good work, Maysa. I don't think anyone's in immediate danger now."

"Oh, right... We saved them. We did."

Maysa looked down at her hands in disbelief. She must have experienced rescuing people from danger during the Dark Elf campaign, but treating the gravely injured seemed unfamiliar to her.

"Yes, we saved them. I'll take care of things here, so go get changed first."

Having had to handle the burn victims directly to insert the tube and administer the potion, both of them had clothes filthy with weeping fluids and soot. After sending Maysa off, Turan gave instructions to the uninjured villagers.

"Their injuries have healed, but it will take them some time to wake up. Arrange for them to rest in their homes. And keep away from this area for now."

"Yes, sir!"

"Thank you! Thank you so much!"

Naturally, they worshipped Turan like a god for appearing out of nowhere, subduing the devil, and saving their families and friends—just as the citizens of Kalamap once had. Turan found that gratifying.

* * *

"No trouble, I take it?"

"None at all."

While Turan and Maysa were saving lives, Solif had been watching the chained Bisen. He nudged the still-unconscious woman with his toe and spoke.

"So how do you know this woman? She looks like a Karmine noble. If you're seeing her, I'd suggest breaking it off. She has a truly awful hobby."

"Remember the noble I told you about who was burning people to death around here? She helped me hunt him down."

Turan had briefly explained the incident before, so Solif understood at once.

"And now she was here doing the exact same thing? Why?"

"That's what we're about to find out."

As they spoke, Bisen happened to regain consciousness. Looking back and forth between Turan and the chains binding her, she asked quietly,

"Why on earth are you interfering with my work?"

"I'd like to ask whether you really need to ask that... but I'll start with a question of my own. Why are you going around doing this?"

There was no need to puzzle over the circumstances. Bisen must have been attempting the ritual for obtaining the Pyromaniac bloodline described in Orville's notebook. She had copied its contents at the time, so it was hardly surprising that she knew the method.

But back then, she had not only distrusted the method itself, but also expressed profound disgust at burning ordinary people alive. People's minds changed with time and circumstance, of course, but surely a little over half a year was too short for so drastic a transformation.

Bisen's eyebrows twitched briefly at his question before she answered calmly.

"Because... I need to obtain a third bloodline. Haven't you already tried it yourself, Master Turan?"

"Of course not."

Bisen grinned at his answer as if telling him not to lie. She was utterly unlike the resolute warrior he remembered. Something had clearly changed her profoundly while they were apart. It probably had something to do with that altered look in her eyes.

"What happened after we parted? Where are your companions?"

"Back then... Oh, you mean Kebek, Asha, and Gil? All three are dead. Unfortunately, we had a difference of opinion."

Not a trace of guilt showed on her face even as she spoke of killing her companions. Turan called to Solif, who was watching beside him.

"Solif."

"Yes?"

"What do you think of the look in her eyes?"

"Her eyes? Well, they're just... I don't know. Maybe she looks too calm for the situation?"

Unlike Turan, Solif seemed to find nothing unusual in Bisen's eyes. Maysa returned just then after changing, and he asked her too, but received much the same answer. Finally, he summoned the librarian and asked him. When he too answered in the negative, Turan clicked his tongue softly.

'Is this another thing only I can sense?'

"You can't simply have decided you wanted a new bloodline out of nowhere. Why did you suddenly start believing in this method? Did a god guarantee it would work, as with Orville?"

"A god? Yes, it must have been a god. That voice. It kept telling me to become something greater, asking why I was giving up the right I'd been granted..."

Turan frowned at the rambling, so like Orville's when they had captured and interrogated him. Aside from his kindheartedness, Midan had seemed no different from an ordinary person. Orville and Bisen, on the other hand, both seemed half out of their minds, and both had inflicted enormous harm on others.

What distinguished the two cases? The presence or absence of mana? Or the fact that the former had targeted monsters rather than humans?

Turan continued questioning Bisen until he had a rough picture of what had happened to her.

For several weeks after parting with him, the group had roamed Karmine's western borderlands hunting monsters. Then a voice had suddenly begun speaking within Bisen. Strongly tempted, she suggested trying the burning ritual to her companions, only to pass it off as a joke when they reacted in horror.

By then, however, Bisen had already been half mad. In the end, she killed her obstructive companions one by one in their sleep and buried them. Since then, she had been imitating Orville the Burner and carrying out the ritual, right up until now.

"So you haven't returned to your house?"

"No. I'll go back once I have my third bloodline... Then my parents and everyone else will be proud of me. So please, help me. You want a second bloodline too, don't you? And so do you two over there."

Ignoring her absurd attempt to persuade him, Turan laid out what he knew for his companions and asked their advice. Maysa, who had been stroking her lips thoughtfully, was the first to offer an opinion.

"Well, given that the Spirit of Fire worked, I don't think the methods are entirely nonsense."

"You mean this fire bullshit really can give someone the Pyromaniac bloodline?"

Maysa shook her head at Solif's incredulous question.

"I'm only talking about possibilities. What I don't understand is that if bloodlines could be acquired this way, the method should have spread everywhere long ago. We stopped her this time, but it's hardly difficult to do, is it?"

"Likewise, I've never seen anyone actually become a wizard by hunting monsters."

Turan added the remark almost in passing. If such methods really were useful, they would long since have spread far and wide. Every noble under the sun would be sporting four bloodlines, with a host of commoner-born knights serving beneath them.

From this, they formulated two hypotheses. First, the knowledge held by those with that mysterious look in their eyes was partly correct and partly false. Second, the knowledge itself was correct, but putting it into practice required some additional aptitude.

They also concluded that this knowledge corrupted the minds of those people whose peculiar eyes only Turan could see.

"The source of the corruption is probably a god's soul or something similar, right?"

"It must be. Where else could this knowledge have suddenly come from?"

"Perhaps it's only a fragment, not an entire soul. It might simply be projecting some of the information it had in life."

"Oh..."

Their admiration for the fairly convincing hypothesis was brief. Looking at Bisen, Solif raised the question they had been putting off.

"So, what do we do with her?"

"Kill her."

"Won't that soul attach itself to one of us, then?"

"We can't let her go, either. I'll execute her, so keep your distance. I've seen Ymir's soul before, so I'll know if it tries to enter me."

"But even if you can see it, we have no way to deal with it."

"I'll try the jewelry box first. Even if something goes wrong, we should have a few months to find a solution."

In the worst case, they could negotiate with the god in Karmine to borrow the power of a Living Spirit Sorcerer. If he kept changing bodies, that meant he too must have one in his service.

Once their discussion ended with the decision to execute her, Turan sent the other two away and approached the chained Bisen.

He felt sorry for her as he looked at her slumped helplessly on the ground. She had burned hundreds of ordinary people to death, but the circumstances strongly suggested she had not acted entirely of her own free will. If a god possessed Maysa or Solif and went on a killing spree, surely that would not be their fault.

But if he released her, she would very likely attempt the same thing again, and he could not allow that knowledge to spread. Rendered no different from an ordinary person by the chains, Bisen died instantly and painlessly when Turan broke her neck.

A moment later, a tiny mass of mana seeped out of her body, just as it had with Ymir. He had expected it to be drawn into someone nearby, but instead it rose toward the sky, intent on heading somewhere.

'Will it work this time...?'

As before, Turan took out the jewelry box that had held the librarian and poured mana into it. The rising soul flowed into the box as though being sucked inside.

* * *

"A very small soul fragment."

Those were the librarian's first words after entering the jewelry box that now held Bisen's soul and coming back out.

"A soul fragment?"

"Yes. You might call it a shard with only two things left: the information you mentioned, and the yearning to achieve it. Its memories of life and everything else are gone."

The librarian knew little about souls in detail, but as a spirit—a kind of spiritual entity himself—he seemed to sense certain things instinctively.

"Could it cause trouble for you, sir?"

"It hasn't the power for that, so don't worry. Though I do suspect that if you gathered too many of these fragments, it might actually recover its sense of self."

"Fragments..."

"On the other hand, if you gather a few more, I think I could read the information inside them for you."

The knowledge contained in those soul fragments would certainly be useful. The Spirit of Fire alone could more than double Turan's firepower, so long as he did not need to conceal his identity.

And if they could discover and carry out a gentler way to acquire bloodline abilities, rather than the Burner's extreme methods, its usefulness would go without saying. Of course, whether Turan could gain any more power when he already had four bloodline abilities remained unknown.

When Turan relayed the librarian's words exactly, Solif asked with evident curiosity,

"Could you perhaps tell which god the soul belongs to?"

"How would I know? I'm not even certain it truly is a god's soul."

The librarian snorted as he answered, then suddenly looked hesitant.

"Hmm. I'm not sure I should say this. A mistaken impression of mine might lead you to the wrong conclusion..."

"That's all right."

With an uncharacteristically uncertain expression, the librarian looked at the jewelry box and said, "Only faintly, but I felt a sense of longing. I have no homeland, yet I imagine this might be what it feels like to remember one."