The Villainess Is My Cute Daughter

’Well. Since my hands are tied right now, and since Maximilian desperately wants you to lose your troops and weaken your power to please his bitch of a wife, I guess I’ll have to make my move for the benefit of this Empire.’

He watched the blood seep into the grooves on the stone.

’And since I don’t really know the true extent of your power, let’s start from there.’

And then, as he decided on this, he looked at his expensive spatial storage ring that was on his finger, and he brought out a rabbit.

It looked completely dead, but as Roderick put his bare hand on its body, he could clearly feel the warmth. The heart wasn’t beating anymore, but he knew that he had put it into his spatial ring the exact moment he killed it in the forest, which basically meant that he could still consider it a fresh corpse since his spatialring stopped time for everything that was inside.

He grabbed it by the head before he just tossed it slightly into the air and immediately grabbed it by the hind legs instead.

And without any hesitation, he took the exact same bloody knife and cleanly cut it across its throat.

The hot blood freely flowed downwards and splashed onto the array, slowly filling up the deep, carved grooves while mixing with his own blood.

He watched as the blood completely drained from the small corpse before he casually tossed the rabbit body to the side of the cave.

And then, once this first sacrifice was done, he quickly glanced at the massive array.

The deep grooves were barely filled. Since they were carved incredibly deep into the stone, it would take a lot more liquid. And he was already used to this specific volume since he had secretly done it multiple times over the decades.

Roderick then started to walk out of the dark cave and put his hood back on.

He muttered to himself as he walked up the tunnel.

"Ritualistic magic.... I have exactly twelve hours from the very first drop of blood. I have twelve hours to collect the rest of the fresh corpses. One big animal, one medium-sized, and ten small ones. All alive before the cut."

It wasn’t too hard. He had done it multiple times after all, and he had efficiently streamlined the whole process over the years.

There were a few commoner villages nearby, very close to the cave entrance. Just a few kilometers around in the woods, the nearest one being only two kilometers away.

Luckily, he had previously managed to legally place restrictions on this specific territory and this small forest that he had artificially grown to make sure that the cave could be slightly hidden from wandering hunters.

This specific cave site was something he had accidentally found when he was just a child, around eight years old. Back when his exiled mother was, in fact, secretly living in the exact same village that he planned to go to right now.

And back then, this whole place was nothing but a bare, barren land. The cave back then had a sort of terrifying curse attached to it, or at least that is exactly what the superstitious villagers had always told each other.

The only real issue was that no one in the village really knew about the actual magical array hidden deep in the cave. It had incredibly specific rules that one had to strictly adhere to. If not, a horrifying curse would actually befall them.

Luckily, Roderick was someone who innately knew how to read the texts written on the murals in the cave . And even though he was completely caught by surprise on the very first time he entered the cave and read the glowing murals, it was extremely hard, but it wasn’t impossible for an ambitious kid to fulfill most of the basic conditions.

And he had done just enough back then to save himself from being cursed, but obviously not enough for him to get anything substantial in return at the age of eight.

But it allowed him to learn about the hidden cave and the lost art of ritualistic magic. Which ended up helping him a lot over the years to bring him to his current state of political power and also his immense personal magical power.

And once he got enough money, and once he had enough influence in the Empire, he just spent some of the empire’s resources into building a thick forest around it to hide his secret.

He walked smoothly through the gaps between the tall trees, which was a pretty moderate density. It wasn’t too dense with underbrush, and it also wasn’t too spacious.

He walked and walked until he finally reached the edge of the village.

The village that was pretty poor and was barely surviving when he used to live here decades ago, was now a village that could legitimately be considered as extremely prosperous for commoners. Which was mostly thanks to Roderick himself.

He had been sending a lot of resources to these people in disguise. And his only reasoning was that he was just using his own personal funds and his personal property, and that no one in the Royal Court had to really interfere with his charity.

And he was largely doing it out of a sense of gratitude for this specific village for letting him stay there when he was a bastard, and for letting him grow up in a relatively nice atmosphere. The people here, after all, based on what he had experienced, were genuinely good people, even though they were dirt poor.

But right now? They were nothing more than convenient, oblivious workers for him who essentially took care of his future sacrifices.

The only twisted thing was that they didn’t even know they were actively raising livestock for a ritual.

Roderick silently walked into the dirt roads of the village, and just exactly like he had expected, there weren’t any people out there.

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