My dear witch, please turn evil according to the script!

Chapter 377 Now I can't count anymore

Although Neve was willing to act as a guide, Roland did not immediately rush into the place that he thought the Demon King's Court would definitely guard closely.

as well as……

The fact that someone as important to the royal court as Neve suddenly disappeared after entering Enva is suspicious enough.

A short period of losing contact is fine, but if it lasts too long, it will definitely attract attention.

Roland didn't want to be targeted by a large army of demons.

"Nive, you should go back now, otherwise the demons will start looking for you."

"Hmm!" Neve nodded. "Then how can I contact you afterwards? And weren't we supposed to be stealing runestones? When does it start?"

Roland smiled and said, "No rush. Leave me your communication device first, and leave your communication frequency band. When you get back, you can ask for a new one. I will contact you at the appropriate time using the communication frequency band you left."

"As for your request, I will consider it carefully. Please wait patiently. I will contact you within two days."

Upon hearing this, Neve asked somewhat uneasily, "Are you really going to come find me?"

“Of course.” Roland nodded. “But it needs to be at the right time. I will decide the specific time myself.”

"What you need to do now is to act as if you've never seen us and live each day as usual."

"do you understand?"

Neve nodded, then looked at the Demon King with a complicated expression: "Your Majesty, if the demon race cannot place its hopes on the divine artifact, how will it deal with the imminent crisis?"

“I don’t object to my father’s plan to collect rune stones to control humanity… I only came back because I couldn’t stand seeing him actually planning to start a war and indiscriminately kill innocent people.”

"But he did it for the survival of the demon race... If they can't even rely on divine artifacts, how can the demon race survive?"

"If the problem of the mist cannot be solved, the war between the demons and humans will inevitably begin again sooner or later!"

Upon hearing this, the Demon King merely let out a soft chuckle from his gauntlet: "What, seeing me in this state, you think I can't solve the problem?"

"I am the Demon King, the king who united the previously scattered settlements and brought them together in the form of a royal court!"

"No matter what difficulties or crises we encounter, Wang should be the first to shoulder the responsibility!"

"The fact that the stabilizer I developed can still dispel these illusions today proves that I was on the right track! I just lacked some luck!"

"Besides...who says there's absolutely no way?"

"I was able to fight back against those things back then, and I can do it again now!"

Hearing these boastful and arrogant words, which were also trustworthy, Roland couldn't help but sigh.

He was, after all, a king who ruled over a race.

Compared to the Elf King Thran's calm and unassuming style, the Demon King is more like the type who charges ahead, leading by example with his courage and charisma, and guiding his people to fight together.

Even though the Demon King is now just a remnant soul, when she uttered those words, one couldn't help but believe that she truly could do it.

Whether it was Neve, or Roland as a listener, or Cellina.

After listening to the Demon King's sermon and encouragement such as "Young man, I have high hopes for you," Neve, somewhat bewildered by his words, obediently followed the Demon King's orders and returned to the royal court to await further instructions.

After Neve disappeared from sight, Roland asked the Demon King, "What you just said was true? Do you really have a way to completely resolve this fog?"

“Nev is right. As long as this fog that makes the demons feel threatened does not dissipate, the war between the demons and humans will begin sooner or later, and it will be a fierce war to the death, a brutal war for survival.”

"When the hero killed you, the morale of the royal army collapsed and they were routed. But even so, humanity was unable to fully recover the lost territory."

"It's not so much that the demons lost, but rather that they didn't want to fight anymore."

"Even though humans now possess more advanced magical technology, judging from the communication device left behind by Neve, the demons may not lack something similar."

"After all, they were able to create a giant war machine like the Demon King's Castle a thousand years ago. Even if there has been no progress in the past thousand years, no matter how much they have regressed, it is still not much better than the technology used by the Federation of Nations."

"We have many advanced technologies, but not all of them can be mass-produced, nor can every technology be perfectly replicated and applied."

"If possible, I'd like to hear your thoughts on these mysteries."

"Since you're here and you have a solution, let's see if you can resolve this."

After listening to Roland's rambling speech, the Demon King asked with some surprise, "You didn't believe my nonsense just now, did you?"

"If I could solve the problem completely, I wouldn't have invented something like the stabilizer, which only addresses the symptoms and not the root cause."

"Why not just address the root cause?"

Cellina was speechless.

She had initially been fired up by the Demon King's few words, but it turned out to be all just empty rhetoric.

Suddenly, the little respect she had for the Demon King diminished even further.

Indeed, longing is the furthest distance from understanding... The majestic and powerful demon king in the original demon stories only exists in stories.

Or is it simply because I've become too familiar with this gauntlet sprite?
Roland punched the Demon King in annoyance. Boosted by the blessing, Roland had the advantage in toughness this time, successfully making the Demon King cry out in pain. "Ouch! Why does my soul feel pain when you hit me like that?! This doesn't make sense!"

"Whether it makes sense or not! I can't help it, you just said it as if it were the truth!" Roland retorted irritably, his anger burning even more intensely.

As for why it can cause effective damage...

Roland still had some guesses, after all, he had just fused with a divine fragment, and the system panel had already displayed a buff called "Divinity" with unknown effects.

"Let's go back first. I'll contact Neve once I can move around normally."

After fiddling with the communication device in his hand for a while, Roland used his knowledge of runes and magical technology to make some minor modifications to it.

For example, it prevents others from locating the "phone" by "making a phone call".

It was fortunate that he thought of this, because he only realized that it was theoretically possible to do so when he was making the changes.

At this moment, the Demon King asked, "By the way, Cellina said she showed you a stone engraving yesterday, found in the mysterious basement of their family library. Did you see anything about it?"

"No, I wasn't planning to let you see it after you recovered... Ah, you can't see it now, but it's not like there's no way to get around it."

Roland remembered a dream spell that had been gathering dust for a long time; he didn't seem to have used it in environments outside of dreams.

However, after mastering almost all runic magic, Roland's adaptability was greatly enhanced.

He looked at the Demon King: "Do you remember what happened in Isfar?"

“I have a way to create a temporary physical body for you, just like before. It will be so fragile that it will be rendered useless if it suffers any kind of damage, even if it is bitten by a mosquito. Even if your soul cannot enter this body, it can allow your soul to share the vision and five senses of this soul.”

The Demon King retorted, "What are you going to do? Let me into your dream? Don't be ridiculous."

After learning the significance of Roland's identity, she never considered it again.

To enter Roland's dream, one must make contact with Roland's soul.

Even the slightest contact was enough for Roland's soul strength to inflict irreparable damage on the Demon King, who was in a remnant soul state at the time.

Roland explained, "It's very simple. The essence of dream magic is projection."

"The projected entity does not necessarily need to actually exist."

"In Isfar, it was because of the special environment there that your impressions in the history recorded by the earth's ley lines resonated and became entangled with your soul, which formed the you in the dream."

"It's almost indistinguishable from a real physical body, but it's limited by the strength of my magic and the strength of your soul, so it can only have the strength of a normal human."

"But what I need to do now is simply to recreate the image of you in my mind, which is not difficult at all."

"This is just a 'shadow,' a fragile shadow, truly one that could shatter at the slightest touch."

"All I need to do is make your soul inside the gauntlet connect with this shadow, that's enough."

The Demon King was somewhat displeased after hearing this.

She actually thought she could get a physical body.

Looks like I'll have to go back and have a professional pilot assemble a new body for me.

Even if it only allows for shared vision and senses, it's still pretty good; it sounds almost the same as getting a prosthetic body.

It's simply a matter of one operating internally and the other operating externally.

Seeing that the Demon King agreed, Roland also said, "Then let's go back first. I need a quiet environment."

"Also, you seem quite interested in that stone slab. Do you know what it is? Or is it something you asked the Cangya family to keep safe?"

The Demon King sighed: "You guessed right, this is the thing I had the Cangya family keep back then."

"As for what this is... do you remember the poem I told you about? The poem about the primordial runes."

“That stone slab is where the original runestone, which was originally removed from the Golden Horn, was placed.”

There are nineteen squares in total.

"Nineteen?" Roland interrupted the Demon King. "Isn't it twenty-four squares?"

"?!" The Demon King paused for a moment, then quickly asked, "Are you sure it's twenty-four!? Not nineteen?!"

"Nonsense, do you think I can't count? Besides, Cellina counted along with everyone else, you can ask her if you don't believe me."

Roland pointed to Cellina, who had been counting with him at the time.

Although she didn't say anything at the time, she was just counting. Surely there can't be two different answers from two different people?
But after seeing Cellina's expression, Roland knew things were in trouble.

"But... but I only counted nineteen squares..." Cherlinina said somewhat awkwardly, as if she had done something wrong: "Could it be that I miscounted?"

"No!" the Demon King immediately retorted, "If nothing unexpected happens, it must be that kid Roland who's in trouble."

"Can you tell me the specific details of your meeting with the Elf King Thran?"

(End of this chapter)