Chapter 539，Par1: You Don’t Have to Do So! (1)
How well did two siblings who had grown up together know each other?
That wasn’t an easy question to answer, particularly in the case of Roel and Alicia. The Ascart House was quite different from a usual family, after all.
It was rare for nobles to leave their children alone no matter how busy they were. At the very least, the parents would entrust their children to a trusted elder in the family. Leaving two non-blood-related children of similar ages at home was practically a scandal in the making, especially as they progressed into adolescence.
Ironically, Carter would have welcomed such a scandal with open arms, but it was a pity that his son was far too strait-laced to allow such a thing to happen.
In any case, there was no question that the children of the Ascart House had grown up without the care and concern of their elders. This led to Roel and Alicia becoming closer than ever. Alicia did pull some strings along the way too, but those were mostly inconsequential since Roel quickly caught on to them.
Roel thought that he had already grasped all of Alicia’s little tricks and thought that he could handle whatever she threw his way, but his confidence backfired on him when she threw a curve ball instead. He was caught off guard, and that landed him in his current position.
Alicia had come so close to him that he could clearly smell her body fragrance. He knew that he should push her away, but he couldn’t do so at all. It was not just because he felt indebted to her due to her precious gift. More than that, he was stumped because he sensed her real feelings behind those seemingly joking words.
Although Carter was rarely home, he treated Alicia extremely well, playing a fatherly role in her formative years. He was both her first spellcasting teacher and her most reliable wingman in her pursuit of love. He even took a detour to the Ascarts’ manor this time around to give her a push. Despite Alicia’s independent personality, she had unknowingly come to rely on Carter a little.
She knew that it was unlikely for the two of them to meet within the next few years following this separation, so it was only normal for her to be in low spirits.
Roel’s heart ached a little thinking about it.
Truth be told, he felt melancholic about Carter’s departure too. The feeling had been minor when he waved him goodbye earlier, but it slowly intensified in the lonely silence of the night. Just like water slowly seeping through paper, yearning gradually permeated his being and taught him the bitterness of missing a loved one.
This was an inevitable ordeal of life.
Alicia would eventually have to come to terms with it by herself, but just for tonight, she should be allowed to throw a tantrum. A minor like her should at least be entitled to this much.
“…I understand, but you mustn’t mess around,” Roel eventually replied with a sigh.
“You should trust me, Lord Brother,” Alicia promised while nuzzling against Roel’s cheek.
Thus commenced their first time sharing a bed since returning to the Ascarts’ manor.
…
Practically everyone in the Ascarts’ manor knew that Roel had been suffering from insomnia in recent days.
A feeling of unease wouldn’t have been a big deal to ordinary humans and even most transcendents, but to Roel, who had been honing his sensitivity toward danger from a young age, it felt like the deafening chimes of a bell. The situation was only exacerbated after he heard Artasia’s warning.
This wasn’t good news at all. More often than not, it was the more well-rested party who had an advantage in battle. Maintaining a strung-up mind was only needlessly expending Roel’s energy, and it might hinder him from reacting quickly if anything really happened.
There was no way Roel, who had often been on the frontlines fighting against the evil cultists, wouldn’t have known about that. That was also one of the reasons he had accepted Alicia’s request tonight.
It was just that the actual situation was slightly different from what he had expected.
“…Alicia, do we really need to be in this position?”
“…”
In a moonlit room, Roel sat on a chair next to the window. In front of him, Alicia had stuck a knee in between his thighs, forming a cage that trapped him in the narrow space between her and the chair. Her calculated positioning amplified her presence while asserting her dominance against him at the same time.
This is the kind of thing I would expect from Nora, not the obedient Alicia! Roel roared in his mind while maintaining a composed appearance.
Meanwhile, Alicia blinked a couple of times while looking at him. She seemed to be deep in thought, but she wasn’t verbalizing anything at all.
Is she thinking of a treatment plan?
It was no easy task to put Roel to sleep. High transcendents like him were resistant to external spells, and that was further amplified by the protection of his ancient gods. For better or for worse, sleeping spells weren’t very effective on him.
Even with Alicia’s expertise in sleeping spells and his intentionally lowering his guard, it would take her a great deal of effort to work things out. Naturally, she would have to carefully plan how she wanted to go about it.
Roel was impressed by how stringently Alicia was regarding this matter. He thought about the spell resistance theories he had learned from Saint Freya Academy, and he wondered how she would approach this matter.
Little did he know that Alicia had something completely different in mind.
Yes, Alicia was deep in thought, but what was in her mind wasn’t how she could go about hypnotizing him, but whether she should make a move tonight.
Laymen thought that hypnosis was nothing more than a cheap trick involving subliminal messaging—they couldn’t be more wrong. Hypnosis was one of the scariest classes of spells upon reaching the higher levels. In particular, ‘Forced Commandment’ and ‘Mutual Infatuation’ had been classified as forbidden spells.
Forced Commandment turned the target into the hypnotist’s puppet, forcing the target to unconditionally carry out the hypnotist’s command, even if it was a command to end their life.
In exchange for its overpowered effects, Forced Commandment had an extremely convoluted invocation requirement, and it had a frighteningly low success rate too. Against individuals with high spell resistance, there was even a chance that the target would self-dispel it. It wasn’t often used by hypnotists due to these reasons.
Mutual Infatuation, on the other hand, was much more useful. There was even a famous story about it. It detailed a young lady falling in love with a dashing king but being unable to win his heart, so after much internal conflict, she decided to hypnotize the king to make him fall in love with her.
She succeeded.
Under her hypnotism, the king fell in love with her and took her as his queen consort. Their love continued to deepen after their marriage, and their relationship was even lauded as a role model for other nobles.
But power always came at a price on the Sia Continent.
The young lady had to pay a price for maintaining the effects of Mutual Infatuation over a long period of time. One of the conditions she had to fulfill was for the two of them to drink from a particular palace well every day. Such a task wouldn’t have posed a problem to the young lady and the king, who were deeply in love with each other, but fate liked to play pranks at times.
One day, an earthquake caused the water in that particular palace well to turn turbid. Out of concern for his queen consort’s health, the king secretly ordered the servants to serve water from another well instead. This resulted in the young lady’s failure to fulfill her spell’s condition.
The backlash came with a vengeance. The young lady fell bedridden the following day and departed from the world not long later.
The king was finally freed from his hypnotism, but he was hardly happy about the situation at all. He realized that he had fallen in love with his queen consort over their years of companionship. He eventually succumbed to his mental anguish and ended his own life.
This story taught the people of the Sia Continent that there was no place for lies and deception between lovers. A relationship built on falsehood would only hurt oneself and the person one loved. It was also for this reason that Mutual Infatuation was classified as a forbidden spell.
But Alicia wasn’t deterred by the story’s warning; if anything, it encouraged her. Thanks to her bloodline, she was the only transcendent in the world who was unaffected by the side effects of spells. Problems like dropping dead from failing to take a sip of water from a particular well weren’t concerns to her.
She could easily hypnotize Roel until the end of their time, constructing a lie that would never be exposed.
It was a seductive notion to her. She was confident she could pull off the hypnotism, especially with how unguarded Roel was. Yet, as she looked at him, she couldn’t bring herself to follow through with it. The reason behind her dilemma lay in the very same story.
At the end of the story, the king, who had fallen in love with his queen consort, chose to end his own life. If the young lady’s outcome served as a warning to normal transcendents, the king’s outcome was a warning to people like Alicia, who weren’t concerned about the backlash of the spell.
Even the possibility of harm befalling her loved one was unacceptable to Alicia, not to mention that she didn’t think that the gains were worth the risks.
In the story, the young lady had no choice but to take a gamble because she wasn’t even in a position to approach the king and cultivate his feelings for her. Such wasn’t the case for Alicia and Roel. If anything, the two of them had grown up together and knew each other inside and out. Their feelings for each other had also long since transcended those of ordinary lovers.
With how inseparable the two of them were, there was no need for Alicia to go so far as to hypnotize Roel.
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