“Nothing wrong on your side, right?”

“I just stepped in and saved a few ordinary people.”

King Yintuo flicked his hand casually. Ebul and the others—who had been badly injured inside that tent—floated over as light as drifting smoke.

It even included Gree, who’d gone to act as bait.

“Fair.” Muen nodded, also feeling like he’d asked a stupid question. He walked over to them.

“Hm?”

Muen suddenly felt puzzled.

Because he realized that the injuries on these people hadn’t recovered at all. Blood had soaked their clothes. They looked miserable, and you could even see those horrifying open wounds.

It was just that a powerful battle aura was forcing their life to hold on, keeping them from being in immediate danger.

“Why didn’t you heal them?” Muen looked at him oddly, thinking to himself since when was King Yintuo this stingy.

“Because I can’t use magic.”

“?”

“I walk the ascetic path. I’ve tempered my body since I was young. I’m the purest kind of martial artist, so of course I don’t use magic. And not just magic— I don’t have even the slightest talent for controlling magical power.” King Yintuo pressed his palms together and said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“...That avatar earlier?”

“Just borrowing an Inner Council artifact.”

“...”

“...”

Muen—whose talent for magic was also a tiny bit not great—and King Yintuo—whose talent for magic was completely nonexistent—stared at each other, wide-eyed, and both fell silent.

“Fine. That one’s on me.”

Muen’s cheek twitched.

He’d been thinking that King Yintuo—famous across the whole continent, the one who’d brutally hammered three opponents at once back in Belrand—would at least ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) know a bit of trivial magic...

He hadn’t expected him to be pure in a way that was even more thorough than Muen.

At least Muen could still cast a light spell. If you looked at King Yintuo...

He probably really was worse than Professor Prang’s cat.

“I should’ve brought one or two escorts who are good at magic.”

Muen sighed, took out healing magic scrolls, and covered the few of them with them.

Normally, healing scrolls weren’t anything precious to Muen. He could toss them around without much regret.

But after coming into the Abyss, from what he’d seen along the way, even ordinary healing scrolls would become extremely precious items.

“If you brought other people, you wouldn’t have made it here this fast,” King Yintuo said.

“That’s true.”

To reach the Abyss as quickly as possible, Muen had even vetoed the idea of stopping by Campbell territory to check on Mother.

Later, even the dragonblood horse had collapsed from exhaustion. If King Yintuo hadn’t simply carried him and flown over, there was no way he could’ve crossed more than half the Empire and arrived at the Abyss in such a short time.

Bringing extra people just for a bit of healing magic would’ve been putting the cart before the horse.

And on the current Abyss battlefield, one or two mages who knew healing magic wouldn’t change anything anyway. Even the various magic scrolls Muen had stored up would probably still be a drop in the bucket.

So he could only save whoever he could save right now.

“What about the stuff inside the tent?”

“Confirmed. It’s arcane-conducting materials. Out of over a hundred wagons, half of them hid this kind of material. There’s a lot, and the quality isn’t low.”

King Yintuo spoke.

Even if he couldn’t use magic, his perspective as a Crowned One was still there. He could distinguish the details far more clearly than Ebul could.

“So it really is...”

Muen’s expression grew heavy.

“Something the Kingdom smuggled over?”

“...”

King Yintuo went silent. He pondered for a moment, then looked straight into Muen’s eyes.

“I think you’d better go see it with your own eyes.”

...

...

“Animals!”

Inside the tent that had already been torn to shreds by the earlier explosion, Muen suddenly smashed a fist into the wagon wall.

At this moment, the arcane-conducting materials hidden in the wagons had already been removed by King Yintuo and gathered together, piled into a small mountain of shining brilliance—visually shocking.

But compared to the fact that so many arcane-conducting materials had been secretly shipped to the demonfolk, what made Muen angrier was...

“This is actually the Empire’s stuff?”

Muen’s palm brushed over those metal-cold arcane-conducting materials.

He didn’t have deep understanding of magic materials. He still hadn’t given up on studying magic knowledge, but arcane smelting required massive accumulation of hands-on experience. Even with the Black Book space, he still didn’t have the spare room to learn that right now.

But as the son of Duke Campbell—the Empire’s military-industrial giant—he could tell at a glance from these materials’ specs and serial markings that they truly were...

From the Empire.

Not from the Kingdom, like Muen had assumed.

After all, he’d secretly snuck so many arcane cannons out of his own house. He could tell this much.

And precisely because he could tell, it made him furious.

“In your opinion, what are the odds these were purely intercepted by the demonfolk?” When anger reached a certain point, Muen instead became calm, and asked.

“Not high,” King Yintuo said.

“Because no one transports arcane-conducting materials that haven’t been fully processed to the battlefield. Soldiers can’t kill enemies with this kind of thing.”

“...Yeah. Our soldiers can’t use this to kill enemies, but if this gets transported to the demonfolk rear, it becomes a weapon that kills our soldiers.” Muen turned his head, frowning in confusion. “By the way, do the demonfolk have methods to process arcane tools?”

“They should,” King Yintuo said, glancing at Sorin, who had been cut into pieces.

“The demonfolk are a very strange race. Among them, demons are very clearly divided into low-ranking demonfolk and high-ranking demonfolk. Most low-ranking demonfolk have obvious mutant traits—the most common are fangs, claws, green or red skin. The more severe the mutation, the lower the intelligence, and the more vicious and brutal they are.”

“And high-ranking demonfolk... are the complete opposite. The higher they are, the more they resemble humans. Even demon royalty—aside from the blood-red pupils every demonfolk has, and the horns on their heads—aren’t much different from ordinary humans in appearance.”

King Yintuo paused, then continued. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

“But what’s baffling is that once those high-ranking demonfolk break through into the realm of a Crowned One, they become extremely deformed again—often even more deformed than low-ranking demonfolk. They can’t even maintain a basic human shape, completely turning into a monstrous form. It’s as if... they aren’t acknowledged by this world.”

“I know all that, but what does it have to do with whether the demonfolk can manufacture arcane tools?”

Muen thought it over, matching King Yintuo’s words one by one with the intel Pink Bear had given.

Pink Bear’s intel was detailed, but it hadn’t mentioned the demonfolk’s arcane-smelting craft.

Because in previous wars, the demonfolk basically hadn’t used arcane tools at all.

“The connection is in that so-called ‘royalty.’”

As he said that, King Yintuo’s expression also grew heavy.

“Even though the demonfolk are trapped in the Abyss, it’s said that because of that, they happened to avoid the disaster of the great chaos a thousand years ago. So there’s a rumor—”

“The demonfolk ‘royalty’ may still have preserved the inheritance of ancient magic, and... the methods to manufacture ancient relics.”