The Foreigner on the Periphery

Though only the foundation remained today, a massive ruin had originally surrounded the estate. No Stanian knew exactly when that historic site had first appeared.

The Frying Pan explained, casually sifting through Gulesh's memories.

=The interesting part is that historical testimonies contradict each other. Roughly a thousand years ago, the Stanians living in this area claimed these ruins had been here since their grandfather's grandfather's time—a fixture since the distant ancient era.=

But not everyone agreed.

=On the other hand, outsiders who visited the region left terrified accounts. They claimed the ruins hadn't been here before and had suddenly appeared overnight. With such conflicting claims, the two sides couldn't understand each other at all. Each was convinced the other had been bewitched by ghosts.=

Though opinions on its origin and history were divided, everyone agreed on one thing.

Those ruins were a haunted place that no one should ever approach carelessly.

=Word has it that anyone who took so much as a single brick from the intact ruins met a bad end. A deadly mold would rot their skin and make their scales fall out, fine glass shards would mix into their urine, or an unexplainable urge would drive them to chew off their own tails... Huh? Oddly enough, I feel like I've seen these curses before. This feels like the handiwork of someone I know very well. I suppose your tastes were similar back then?=

Minjun glared at it, a silent warning to stop talking nonsense. The Frying Pan didn't flinch in the slightest and cheerfully continued.

That was how things stood roughly a thousand years ago.

=But around eight hundred years ago, when this world's race war ended, the situation changed. From that point on, no one suffered any misfortune no matter what they did here. The curse had vanished.=

Eight hundred years ago was right around the time Minjun woke up as a prisoner and received the designation 'Asif-666'.

=As you know, the war ended in the Stanians' defeat. The other seven races joined forces to beat them down. Ever since, the Shutan Royal Family's assets have been under the strict surveillance of the United Kingdom. They still are today.=

As a result, the royal family desperately needed a secret slush fund. The curse-free ruins looked like a perfect target.

=The royal family used proxies to buy up the surrounding land. Then, little by little, they dismantled the ruins and sold them off... supposedly?=

The Frying Pan finally showed its first sign of shrinking back all day.

It had seen Minjun's eyes burning with fury the moment the words "sold them off" were spoken.

Careful not to provoke its creator's temper any further, Asif-1 explained.

=However, stripping away bricks, pillars, and ornaments didn't amount to much money. It seems there was nothing that could truly be called treasure. That's why the United Kingdom's surveillance was relatively loose...=

"No, that's a lie."

=?!=

Minjun wasn't doubting the Frying Pan's abilities. It hadn't misread Gulesh's memories.

Gulesh simply believed the false information the royal family had intentionally leaked to the public.

"They tore the place apart; there's no way they didn't find any 'treasure'. They likely sold the cheap scraps on the open market through proxies while the royal family secretly hoarded the truly valuable items."

=Ah, I suppose that makes sense.=

"So they dismantled and sold off everything else, but couldn't touch what was hidden beneath this estate?"

=Gulesh doesn't know. He only thinks the estate was built over it for some specific reason. But that reason has faded over time, and now it's just being used as a safe house for a secret society supporting the royal family.=

After the explanation, Minjun made a swift decision.

The hesitation he'd felt in front of the barrier on the third basement floor was now meaningless. Especially since Solada was already comatose from the drugs.

'Still, just in case.'

Minjun issued a dry command.

"Sword."

The Frying Pan shifted its upper handle into a Dagger. Minjun pulled it out of Gulesh's mouth and unhesitatingly slashed the back of his own hand.

Slash!

The fresh blood scattered in the air instantly vaporized into a crimson mist. It slowly drifted out of the room, moving through the estate as if guided by its own sentience.

The blood mixed into the air would seep through the cracks under the doors and intoxicate everyone in the estate. It would plunge them into a sleep so deep that they wouldn't wake even if the sky fell and the earth shattered.

After confirming the curse had fully taken hold, Minjun spoke.

"The house is going to shake a bit in a moment. Don't panic, and stay right here."

And to Ha Eun-seong:

"From this moment on, absolutely no astral projection until I give the word."

"...?!"

Ha Eun-seong had no idea what his intention was, but he could only obediently agree.

Leaving them in the room, Minjun headed straight back down to the basement, to the exact spot where he had stopped right before breaking the barrier.

There, a lock crafted by someone other than Minjun still firmly guarded the entrance.

'But the barrier I created is gone.'

When the surrounding curses and barriers had vanished, a passage must have opened up. But someone had sealed that doorway again, building a new wall to ensure no one could reach what lay below.

Structurally, it was an incredibly crude blockade made of countless overlapping magical layers. But sometimes, such brute-force methods were the hardest to deal with, because they couldn't be cleverly dismantled—they had to be physically smashed to pieces.

The process was going to be quite noisy.

Already prepared for that, Minjun shifted Asif-1 to his left hand without hesitation. His empty right hand grasped the air. Then, a Magic Tool gleaming with brilliant silver light appeared in his grip.

Holding the Orichalcum Frying Pan for the first time in a while, Minjun fixed a resolute gaze on the barrier before him.

   *

Meanwhile, back in the room Minjun had just left.

"By the way,"

Ha Eun-seong asked Yumtus. They had remained in the room as instructed, keeping an eye on Del and Gulesh.

"Do you know why we came here? To this house, I mean. I get the feeling we aren't just here to nurse the princess back to health."

Though waking up to a midnight assassination attempt had been a shock, Minjun clearly hadn't anticipated it either, meaning it wasn't the reason they had come here.

He vividly remembered the look on Minjun's face earlier today at the ruins. It had been completely rigid.

The ghost reflected further back into the past.

Even when he found out Eun-seong had accidentally squandered some Talent, the agent had gotten angry, but he hadn't frozen up. Whether he was picking fights with aliens like Yumtus in Germany, watching those same bloodthirsty aliens suddenly throw themselves at his feet in reverence, or seeing his presumed ex-girlfriend—the princess of a tentacle kingdom—collapse unconscious, he never lost his cool. Ye Minjun was the very symbol of an unshakable mind, a man of steel unfazed by any crisis.

So why had he looked so shocked coming here?

"Who can say?"

Yumtus fell deep in thought for a moment before continuing.

"I do not know his true purpose for coming here, but I believe I know why he brought 'that' with him just now."

"Huh?"

"Did he not mention the house would shake a bit? Brace yourself."

Just as Ha Eun-seong tilted his head in confusion—

BOOM—!

A deafening roar, like the universe itself exploding, echoed up from the basement.

   *

Without warning, the floor began to violently buck and sway.

An earthquake mercilessly rocked the estate. Yumtus, having prepared himself, firmly held down Del so she wouldn't roll out of bed. Gulesh, still gagged and bound to his chair, tipped over onto the floor with a muffled grunt. Ha Eun-seong lost his balance on the violently convulsing floor and fell flat on his rear, barely managing to swallow his scream.

'What the hell is going on?!'

The upheaval was as brief as it was violent. Though it lasted only a few seconds, it felt agonizingly longer before the tremors finally subsided.

The aftermath was a disaster. Ha Eun-seong stared at the floor, which was now littered with shattered ornaments. Stone dust and dirt spewed from the cracks and lay thick on every surface. Coughing, he brushed the debris from his clothes and hair.

A sudden worry struck him.

'Are they really not going to wake up from that?'

Since there were no other houses nearby, he didn't expect any Stanians to come running right away, but he was worried about Solada and the other Stanians living in the estate.

Surely this would have woken them up, right?

But since Minjun had strictly forbidden him from leaving his physical vessel, he didn't dare disobey the order to go check.

'Regardless.'

Ha Eun-seong blinked his eyes, his face pale, and croaked out a question.

"What exactly did the agent just do?"

Yumtus only smiled faintly in response.

At that exact moment, the only person who could accurately answer Ha Eun-seong's question—

"..."

—was staring straight ahead with his usual calm gaze.

Before Minjun lay a gaping hole where the very fabric of space had twisted and torn apart.

He had just forcefully obliterated the barrier with a single swing of the Orichalcum Frying Pan.

=That silver pan really is omnipotent. For some reason, I'm feeling a bit competitive?=

Ignoring its nonsense, Minjun waved away the thick cloud of dust to survey his surroundings. The earthquake—a mere byproduct of his full swing with the Frying Pan—had turned the basement behind him into a disaster area. Although it had originally been built as camouflage, the current occupants had genuinely been using it as a storage room. Every shelf had toppled over, sending shattered seasonal tools and dry provisions rolling across the floor.

Stowing the Orichalcum Pan away, he stepped through the opening without hesitation. A long, stone passageway unfolded before his eyes. The black pan, currently in the shape of a Sword, hummed in admiration.

=Oho? It goes down quite deep.=

From here on, he could navigate with his eyes closed.

Minjun had deliberately kept from ordering Ha Eun-seong to scout ahead. He knew this path better than anyone, but more importantly, he wasn't sure how Eun-seong's spiritual body might interact with what lay below. Until he fully unraveled the secrets hidden within Eun-seong's soul, he needed to be careful.

The incident where 180,000 Talent had instantly evaporated still lingered in his mind as a mild trauma.

=Wait... What? I'm getting a strange feeling.=

The maze extending beneath the estate's lowest floor was incredibly complex. Paths crisscrossed like a spider web, splintering off randomly and merging again in bizarre structural patterns. The intersections didn't always present straightforward horizontal choices, either. Periodically, large cylindrical rooms resembling the bottoms of deep wells would appear, their walls completely riddled with holes serving as tunnel entrances, layered from top to bottom. The stairways leading to these tunnels moved of their own accord, broke off mid-air, or looped right back to their starting points like a nonsensical illusion.

Yet the labyrinth couldn't slow Minjun down in the slightest.

With every step he took, his expression darkened further, while his creation seemingly sensed something ahead.

=This is strange. Have I been here before? No, that doesn't seem to be it...=

Minjun shook his head.

=My first time? I suppose so. But it feels familiar. Something down there is...=

"Does it feel like something is calling out to you?"

Asif-1 sent a mental wave of affirmation.

And when they finally reached the bottom—

=...!=

Uncharacteristically, Asif-1 was at a complete loss for words.

Minjun's destination lay at the very end of the maze: a massive structure resembling an altar. Blue light undulated across its surface in a continuous flow, and right in the center, where the pulsating waves converged, sat a translucent Crystal Ball.

Feeling an overwhelming urge pulling it toward the center, Asif-1 spoke.

=Did you build this yourself too?=

Minjun answered.

"I did."

He traced back through his memories.

Back to the days when he still possessed his freedom.

Yet this timeline was slightly closer to the present than the distant past he had been dreaming about lately.

"It happened when you were captured by the Committee and slapped with the designation of the most atrocious sinner, 'Asif'. You were the very first prisoner, and those bastards tried to use you as a convenient tool."

Asif-1 knew that Minjun wasn't just referring to the fragment residing inside the Frying Pan.

He was talking about the original creation—what it had been before its soul was ripped to pieces.

"But the moment they realized they couldn't perfectly control you, they tried to erase your soul entirely."

However, that attempt ended in failure.

Instead of being extinguished, Asif-1's soul had shattered into countless pieces and scattered to the furthest frontiers of the dimensions.

"It was only a matter of time before they figured out that I was your creator. I had to make preparations before that happened. I can say it now, but you were a masterpiece forged at the cost of tremendous sacrifice. You were special, even among my creations. You might take your existence for granted, but being able to manipulate the free will of a sentient entity is a far more difficult feat than anyone could imagine."

Minjun tightly gripped the hilt of the Dagger holding Asif-1 and whispered.

"That's why I tried to get you back."

Desperate to escape, the soul fragments of Asif-1 had fled to the most obscure, distant dimensional frontiers before disappearing entirely.

To counter that, the Minjun of the past had left an arrangement in place to gather and reunite them.

"The ruins that used to surround this place—those old buildings that are now gone—served as camouflage to hide the vault, but they were actually part of a larger mechanism. They were the engine designed to power that altar over there."

Asif-1 finally understood the true purpose of the altar buried beneath the center of the ruins.

Even at this very moment, it was calling out to him.

If the fragment hadn't been anchored inside this 'tool', it might have been bewitched into approaching the altar.

=That altar is still barely operating even with all the surrounding components gone.=

"But it's effectively lost its true function. You can barely feel its pull even from this close, right? Originally, it was meant to cast its influence across vast distances."

Minjun spoke, lost in his memories.

"That altar is a kind of lighthouse. It was designed to lure your soul fragments closer once they spotted it from afar. At the same time, it acts as a net—a trap designed to continuously hold any fragment that draws near so it can never drift away again."

Asif-1 understood perfectly.

The altar was one of the devices his creator had planted throughout the dimensions to gather his scattered soul fragments.

"However."

Minjun's gaze turned fierce.

"There are traces left behind. This altar was functioning perfectly until the ruins above were dismantled. And it looks like it managed to 'catch' one."

=What? You mean...=

"Yeah. A long time ago, one of the fragments was lured here and captured."

It was another fragment entirely—different from the one residing in the Frying Pan or the Sword.

It had been lured here and trapped within the altar.

=I don't see anything.=

"Because it isn't there anymore."

Minjun ground his teeth.

"Someone took it."

=Could it be the Committee?!=

"If it were, they wouldn't be sitting this quietly right now."

Nor had he heard any rumors of someone turning it in to the Committee for a bounty.

In this situation, there was only one logical conclusion.

"Someone retrieved the fragment caught here, but rather than handing it over to the Committee, they hid it away."

Needless to say, the most likely culprit was the Shutan Royal Family.

Minjun solidified his resolve. He was going to shake them down.

While its creator was lost in thought, the Frying Pan—which normally never filtered its words—kept a singular burning question to itself, not daring to speak it aloud.

The thought went something like this:

'For someone with the power to plan so far ahead... just how the hell did you ever get caught?'

Just then.

=Oh, avatar!=

An urgent telepathic wave beamed down from the estate above.

It was Yumtus.

'What is it?'

The priest answered quickly.

=The Princess of Endelion is showing signs of regaining consciousness!=

   *

At that exact moment.

Del managed to cling to her fading consciousness and observe her surroundings. Her senses were a jumbled mess, and barely an ounce of strength remained in her body. Even so, she could feel one undeniable fact: her soul was still firmly anchored to her physical vessel.

Thank goodness. I'm alive. I didn't die.

Under the stare of the two figures in the room, she barely managed to mutter.

"...Gods, I really thought I was going to die."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!