Chapter 181: Chapter 181 Emotional Scam_1
When Aiden read the first line, he was quite pleased; it was indeed the familiar script he knew. This firmly confirmed that the unnamed witch from two hundred years ago was indeed his time-traveling predecessor.
Although he did not meet the time traveler in person, merely looking at the square characters written by someone else evoked a sense of nostalgia in Aiden.
He continued reading:
"I was deceived.
I finally found Melindale’s remains, and within her bones was a message left by the Reaper.
A wisp of a soul left by the Reaper mocked me mercilessly, telling me the truth.
In that instant, I suddenly became aware.
My love for Melindale, my admiration for her, it was all fake, crafted by her own powers...
It was she who seduced me to betray the Reaper, and I truly hadn’t expected her to be the master of ’desire’.
Both grievously wounded, the Reaper killed her, but was himself badly hurt...
The Reaper brought me to this world; he would never forgive my betrayal.
The God of Love or the Reaper, each was just using me.
In the end, I was but a pawn to be played by the masters, applauded as they pleased.
But I really don’t understand.
I could still grasp the Reaper wanting to use me to obtain the authority of ’procreation’, but why would Melindale do this?
If Melindale too sought authority, what need did she have to preserve me and suffer grievous wounds in a fight with the Reaper?
"
This was the content on the first page.
After finishing reading, Aiden began to distill information. This was a diary, and the diary’s owner was the unnamed witch, who served as his predecessor time traveler.
From the content of the diary, it seemed like this predecessor had experienced a... romantic deception?
Firstly, the entity that summoned this predecessor to this world was the "Reaper."
From this title, it seemed to refer to the master of the ’death’ dominion under the Throne of Life.
Aiden had long suspected whether, apart from Melifilia, the master of the ’wisdom’ dominion, there were other masters capable of summoning time travelers from other worlds.
Now it appeared there were indeed others, and these masters... seemed quite fond of snatching time travelers to this world to serve as their pawns.
From the description in the diary, it seemed the Reaper had indeed wanted to use the summoned time traveler to obtain the exclusive authority of ’procreation.’ If divine words and authority from adjacent domains were gathered in a single individual, their power would substantially increase, and ’procreation’ was the authority adjacent to the Reaper under the Throne of Life. Therefore, it was understandable that the Reaper would desire the authority of ’procreation.’
And according to Abigail, the hatching egg should have been in the hands of the Old Lese Kingdom royals at that time...
Although it was unclear why the Reaper did not seize it directly from the mortals, the content of the diary suggested that everything from the uprising of the Flying Spaghetti Cult to the assassination of the Old Lese Kingdom queen was orchestrated by the Reaper himself.
Realizing this, Aiden suddenly came to an awareness.
Could it be... that the Old Lese Kingdom’s sudden encounter with the plague and famine was also the Reaper’s doing?
Although he was still not very familiar with the specifics of Death’s dominion, even a slight consideration of its nature suggested it was far more than just the simple act of killing.
Major disasters capable of claiming the lives of tens of thousands, plagues, and famines... perhaps these too were within the purview of the Grim Reaper.
The Grim Reaper had driven the fall of the Old Lese Kingdom, and the unnamed witch had been used by Death to seize the sole dominion of "Fertility" as a pawn.
In the end, the unnamed witch successfully completed her task, but ultimately chose to betray Death due to the deceit of another sovereign.
The wielder of "Desire," Melindale, played the role of a deceiver in these brief diary entries, using her dominion’s power to make the unnamed witch fall in love with her, even to the point of worship—"Desire" being a mid-ranked power of the Throne of Spirit, sandwiched between "Wisdom" and "Hatred," it was not surprising that she could do this.
However, after deceiving the unnamed witch into betraying Death, this so-called "goddess of love" did not directly steal the incubating egg from the witch, but instead, both she and Death who had sought her out were grievously injured in confrontation.
It appeared that the experiences of this predecessor who had traveled between worlds were indeed quite rich, having become entangled with two sovereigns in one go.
He subconsciously reached out to flip the diary, only to find his fingers passing through the notebook.
Only then did Aiden realize, with a start, that both the diary and all the scenes before him were but illusions cast by a magical artifact crafted by Abigail, devoid of any physical form.
When he looked up, he saw Abigail observing him intently, her eyes, surrounded by thin mists, eerily luminous, as if intending to pierce straight to the depths of his heart.
"It’s clear, you do recognize this script," Abigail said slowly, "Could you translate it for me?"
It seemed he would not be able to see what followed unless he helped Abigail translate the content of the first page.
"Allow me to ask, where have the previous pages of the diary gone?" Aiden asked, pointing at the notebook.
"When I received this notebook from my mother, it had already lost some pages," Abigail replied, "It seems it was the same when she acquired it. Is there a problem?"
"No..." Aiden thought for a moment; it seemed likely that the diary’s author herself had torn out the earlier parts.
Did the beginning of the diary contain any information that shouldn’t be known? The likelihood of that seemed slim; after all, hardly anyone in this world could recognize the script, and the encryption was pretty reliable.
Or perhaps the diary’s author had refuted the content at the beginning, much like one might delete old online diary entries that now caused embarrassment... This was a possibility. Discovering that her emotions had been manipulated, if the earlier parts of the diary included content related to her feelings, she might have decided to dispose of them.
After conducting an analysis in his mind, Aiden began to translate the contents of the diary to Abigail truthfully. There was nothing particularly self-serving in the diary entries, and there was no immediate need to lie.
Still, he deliberately omitted certain details related to the world traveler, such as the fact that the unnamed witch had actually been summoned from another world by Death.
After listening, Abigail was silent for a while, seemingly digesting the information.
Then, without a word, she raised her hand and tapped twice on the table with her fingers.
The notebook in front of Aiden suddenly turned to the next page on its own.
Aiden continued reading. The subsequent diary entries mostly detailed mundane matters—deciding to hide away to avoid being tracked by Death in the future, the diary’s author chose the place now known as Banquet Forest, the Misty Forest, as her refuge.
There she summoned animals to scout pathways in and out of the forest, hiding there to study the divine language.
Aiden kept selectively translating the notebook’s contents for Abigail, who controlled the notebook’s pages, flipping through them. The intermittent diary entries that followed recorded the author’s life and research during her seclusion in phases.
But the further he read, the more Aiden noticed the diary entries seemed to grow sloppier, and there were more corrections.
Then he came upon an entry for a certain day:
"Recently, I’ve found myself forgetting things more and more frequently, and I’m starting to fear that there might be something wrong with my body. There’s no reason for it... With the power of ’Life’ within me, I shouldn’t fall ill."
