Chapter 251: A Serious Heart and the Loss of My Love

Thump thump thump!

Liszt hurriedly left the cabin and rushed to the deck, kicking away two knights who were fighting each other, and charged straight toward the mast.

He believed what Curtis had said; after all, he held the soul-sunken wood in his hands and had the ability to dismantle the ship, so the other party wouldn't dare to play tricks.

The mast was tall, but for an elite earth knight, it was easy to climb.

The ram's head flag was at the top of the mast, fluttering without wind. The green flames were not burning the flag but the ram's head emblem. It was unclear what material it was made of, but the ram's head looked real, not just a painting.

"Pull down the ram's head flag and place it on the dragon's head at the ship's prow. This will open the gate to the real world." He reached out to pull the flag.

But suddenly, his heart tightened.

His long-held caution reminded him: "Why do I so easily trust Curtis? She is an evil sorceress who can use the souls of a ship's crew as spell components! Not a single word she says can be trusted!"

He glanced down.

He quickly suppressed his urgent desire, immersed his will into the gemstone space, and decided to first flip through the magic book titled "To His Highness Anut — Curtis Truth," hoping to find some answers from this testament.

Page one.

Two lines of green glowing serpentine script, written with an unknown pigment.

"My eternal love, Anut, is everything well?"

"Making this decision is only to meet you again in the Exile Land, perhaps for eternal damnation. Two sinful souls, countless lives' blood, how can such sins be borne?"

The words were somewhat mystical, tinged with a faint pretentiousness typical of female writers.

He didn't understand.

Page two.

It was a preface-like text.

"Upon hearing the news of Uncle Cohen's death, my heart turned to ashes, all because of the sinful thoughts of Anut and me, which led to the entire family's demise... Perhaps we should have calmly accepted our brief but beautiful love instead of longing for immortality and stealing the power of the Sapphire Dragon."

"The plan of the Dragon Domain Lord has failed, and Anut's soul has been exiled. Losing my love and then my family, this world has no meaning to me. Perhaps I should continue studying the notes of ancient mages and transform myself into a lich, a being that walks between life and death."

"If I can walk freely in the Exile Land, perhaps I can see Anut again, and then all this torment and pain will become meaningful!"

After finishing this page, the concept of a "lich" lingered in Liszt's mind.

There was no time to think more, and he flipped to the third page.

The third page was strange.

It featured a drawing of a triangle with an eye in the middle, the Eye of Truth, symbolizing a mage's understanding and exploration of the world.

At each corner of the triangle, there were additional terms.

At the top corner, it read "Matter," with annotations including "Alchemist," "Vampire," and "Necromancer"; at the left corner, it read "Magic," with annotations including "Mage" and "Druid"; at the right corner, it read "Spirit," with annotations including "Wizard," "Sorcerer," "Seer," "Succubus," and "Shaman."

Below the Eye of Truth pattern was another term—Knight.

A line of messy serpentine script followed: "Heretics, defiling magic like beasts, crudely cycling their martial qi, oppressing the survival space of mages! If the age of magic ever comes, burn all the knights and let mages rule the world, seeking truth!"

If this was Curtis's own writing, it indicated she was a fervent magic believer.

This bordered on religious fanaticism, which was not good.

Liszt instinctively disliked the term "heretic." His gaze lingered on the words "alchemist," "wizard," and "druid" for a few seconds before moving on, continuing to flip through the pages.

Starting from the fourth page, the content of the book became research notes, focusing on a single topic—the possibility of soul extraction and repeated experiments.

From Liszt's quick scan, it seemed that in ancient times, a wizard had developed the "Phylactery Technique." By entrusting their soul to a phylactery, they could become an undying lich, transcending life and death, reality and illusion, achieving an inconceivable state.

This record was hard to verify.

Curtis mainly focused on repeating this technique to verify the method of soul extraction.

Initially, she experimented on small animals, then gradually progressed to humans, and finally to fellow mages. On the sixteenth page, she completed her experiment, confirming that souls could be extracted and temporarily exist, but required a compatible vessel to anchor them.

Starting from the seventeenth page, she began her second research topic—the Phylactery Experiment and Construction.

For twenty-five pages, these were detailed experimental notes on this topic. Like a genius, Curtis succeeded in her phylactery experiment on the forty-second page, developing soul-sunken wood as a material for storing souls and the magic array for self-exile.

"Is this the thing I cut off and retrieved—the four walls? Using this magic array, can souls be extracted and exiled into the soul-sunken wood?"

Time did not wait, and he had no time to think. He quickly flipped through the pages, looking for information about the ghost ship.

After flipping through about thirty more pages and skimming over four smaller research topics related to lich phylacteries, he finally saw on the seventy-fourth page a detailed drawing of a ship—a three-masted square-rigged ship, with the ram's head flag on the mainmast clearly visible—this was the Goat, before it became a ghost ship.

The following twenty-six pages were all about the transformation of the Goat, or rather, the setting up of magic arrays.

Curtis expanded the phylactery technique to the entire ship, binding all the crew's souls to protect her own phylactery.

According to her final part of the testament, the ship would, with the continuous erosion of the magic arrays, gradually breach the boundary between reality and illusion, entering the Exile Land.

The Exile Land.

Mages believed that at the boundary where magic, matter, and spirit interconvert, there was a place where time and space were indescribable, where eternity and brevity coexist, and only souls could traverse it. This place was the Exile Land.

Those who committed heinous crimes were often exiled to the Exile Land by nobles.

In simple terms, it involved casting a spell to euthanize someone. Mages believed that the souls of those who died this way would enter the Exile Land.

Curtis's ultimate goal was to use the Goat to breach the boundary between the Exile Land and the real world, sending her soul into it.

Then she set out to seek her beloved Anut.

But what she hadn’t anticipated was that the Goat would turn into a ghost ship, wandering between the Exiled Lands and the real world, failing to deliver her soul to the Exiled Lands.

“Woman, truly mad, mad with love? One death isn’t enough, now she wants to kill countless others!” Liszt’s skin crawled, and he felt a chill of fear, “The goat’s head on the dragon’s prow—it wasn’t meant to sail away from the Exiled Lands, but to sail towards them. This woman is still trying to harm me!”

Fortunately, he had the presence of mind to open this magic book.

“So, to return to the real world, we must first destroy the goat’s head banner and the figurehead!”