Chapter 134: Thoughts on Acting

Chapter 134: Thoughts on Acting

After watching Butler Walter leave the second floor, Klein entered the dining room while glancing around. He discovered that the male and female servants all seemed much more energetic than usual. Some even appeared faintly restless.

“As expected, the Staff of Life does affect humans as well. It just isn’t quite as exaggerated and remains within a relatively normal and acceptable range… Following that logic, the servants’ reproductive ability must have increased. The only issue is that they don’t have spouses, so there’s no way for it to show…

“Mm… Will Mr. Butler going home today result in another child nine or ten months later? His wife is close to forty. In this era, giving birth at that age is a little dangerous. Of course, as the other party in reproduction, the influence brought by the Staff of Life should spread over to her as well. There shouldn’t be a problem…

“Hiss. I wonder whether the potential effect will make conception easier. If, after Dwayne Dantès moved in, the birthrate on Böklund Street noticeably rises, then my reputation will be beyond saving…” Klein let his thoughts wander endlessly before finally summarizing two points inwardly:

“The Staff of Life” is indeed very sinister!

In the future, I’ll only bring it into the real world for limited periods each day and try not to affect the surrounding humans!

After breakfast, Klein brought his personal valet Enyuni to the first floor, preparing to go out for a walk.

At that moment, two second-class maids were cleaning the hall.

“Good morning, sir.” Seeing Dwayne Dantès approach, the two maids immediately stood up, moved aside, and greeted him.

Of course, if they had been in a more remote corner, they would have tried not to make any sound so as not to disturb their employer. This was something Butler Walter had taught them.

Klein nodded gently, gave a simple response, and slowly approached the front door.

Just then, the two maids suddenly saw a stalk of wheat sticking out from the top of Enyuni’s head. Its grains were plump and enticingly golden.

Before they could examine it carefully, the personal valet seemed to sense something abnormal. He raised his right hand and pulled the stalk of wheat off rather forcefully.

The two maids exchanged glances, both surprised and somewhat amused.

In their minds, Enyuni must have accidentally gotten a few wheat stalks stuck to him when he accompanied Mr. Dantès to Rose Song Manor. He had then brought them all the way back to 160 Böklund Street, where they had scattered into some hard-to-clean corner of his room—under the pillow, perhaps. Then, while sleeping last night, he had pushed away his pillow in a dream, rolling one stalk of wheat into his hair, and failed to notice it while washing up before breakfast.

The sequence was complicated and not particularly easy to achieve, but at least it was possible.

“It can’t be that Enyuni grew a stalk of wheat himself…” the two maids muttered, then returned to their work.

After leaving 160 Böklund Street, Klein and Enyuni walked one behind the other at a leisurely pace beneath the Intis sycamores whose leaves had already begun to yellow, breathing the comparatively refreshing autumn air.

Similar to him, some of the neighbors were also taking morning walks.

Of course, this had not been a custom of Backlund’s upper class. Last year, the smog had still been very serious and the air had been extremely harsh. No one had been willing to brave cold winds and dampness to waste time on the streets.

As neighbors, once they met, they naturally greeted one another. After they brushed past each other, a certain great lawyer happened to glance from the corner of his eye and saw Dwayne Dantès’s personal valet raise a hand to cover his mouth and nose, as though yawning.

When the mixed-blood young man lowered his right hand, the great lawyer suddenly noticed something different.

“His nose seems sharper…

“Haha. I must usually think about this sort of thing too much, to the point that I’m hallucinating…

“If only the bridge of my nose were a little higher…”

As the great lawyer thought this, he raised a hand and rubbed his nose. At the same time, he saw two stray dogs chasing each other ahead, attempting to reproduce right there in the street.

…

After finishing his walk, Klein returned to the third-floor sitting room and sent the Staff of Life above the gray fog.

“It really does have a certain effect. The core of digesting the Bizarro Sorcerer potion is actually creating shocking scenes to scare people and using strange methods to make people feel alarmed… That really does resemble being a ‘director,’ only a director of horror films…

“Mm. It doesn’t necessarily have to truly scare them… A peaceful daily life concealing one terrifying scene after another, while the humans around remain entirely unaware, only occasionally associating or thinking too deeply and becoming frightened by a possibility, to the point that they dare not turn off the lights and start having nightmares—that too is a kind of horror movie…” Klein examined his own condition and summarized the experiences of the past few months, finally condensing them into the key phrase “horror film director.”

Once he understood this, he gained many ideas on how to digest the potion quickly.

This required him not only to deal with enemies, but also to give those enemies the treatment of being the protagonist or important supporting character in a horror film!

“That’s troublesome. Against demigod-level targets, I definitely have to go all out. How would I have the spare energy to make things so fancy… Mm. There’s no need to specifically choose demigod targets. Acting has no such restriction. I can absolutely teleport to the sea, find a few lucky pirates to ‘perform,’ and create some horror stories…

“Right. Since I’m a director, I must let my ‘works’ spread! It seems that each time, I still need to let some ‘actors’ successfully escape, so they can spread the nightmares they experienced and create corresponding sea legends. I can’t feed them all to Creeping Hunger…” While drawing up a plan, Klein suddenly thought of a question:

Among the horror legends with a certain mass foundation across the Northern Continent and the seas, how many were deliberately created by Bizarro Sorcerers?

“There must be some… Sigh. If Amon acted as a Bizarro Sorcerer, He would probably digest the potion in less than a month. His talent in this regard is simply astonishing, and He doesn’t especially consider consequences… Actually, while finding pirates to ‘shoot horror films,’ I can also look for opportunities to scare other demigods. There’s no need to fight them to the death every time. Once the goal is achieved, I can just leave…” As Klein’s thoughts turned, he came up with an auxiliary acting plan.

Thus, he seriously began considering targets.

“Angels and above are absolutely out. Those I’m unfamiliar with would instantly turn me into the protagonist of a horror film—the kind who dies. Those I’m familiar with already know I’m a Bizarro Sorcerer, so I can’t scare them…

“Among saints, I don’t know the whereabouts of many of them. Scaring archbishops would also easily trigger unnecessary chain reactions, making the global situation even more tense and causing the war to erupt ahead of schedule…

“Uh. After excluding all that, the most suitable targets are actually the fanatic demigod Patrick Bryan of the Artificial Death faction of the Numinous Episcopate, members of Will Auceptin’s Council of Fate, and…”

After drawing up the list, Klein decided to find some time in the next two days to visit Dr. Aaron Ceres, bring a certain baby some ice cream, and ask where those “council members” had been recently.

If he wanted to scare someone’s subordinates, he had to obtain the chairman’s permission!

Having organized his thoughts, Klein’s mood improved. He went out again, prayed and donated at Saint Samuel Cathedral, then stayed at the Loen Charity Bursary Foundation until noon.

In the afternoon, he met several merchants seeking investment, as well as professional lawyers and accountants, behaving exactly like a normal wealthy gentleman.

After dinner, he returned to the semi-open room with the large balcony. He was considering whether he should visit Dr. Aaron Ceres’s home directly tomorrow, or invite the entire family to share dinner at the Serenzo Restaurant, whose ice cream was very good, when his spiritual intuition was touched.

He turned his head and, unsurprised, saw Miss Messenger walk out from the void holding four blond-haired, red-eyed heads.

One of the heads was biting a letter.

“Who sent it?” Klein asked, already somewhat used to and expectant of the answer.

Because he had not yet taken the letter, Reinette Tinekerr could only use three heads to answer.

“King…” “of…” “Fools…”

Patrick Bryan? This nickname actually evolved too? Klein reached out, took the letter, and opened it. As expected, it was from the fanatic demigod of the Artificial Death faction of the Numinous Episcopate.

In the letter, he wrote:

“…I have already prepared the special ritual that will help my teacher, Haiter, recover further. Honored Blessed, if I can obtain your permission, I will hold it at dawn tomorrow…”

A ritual pointing toward that angel, Haiter? The probing from the Artificial Death faction toward Patrick can no longer be avoided… This can be interfered with using a Paper Angel… Perfect timing… With a flick of his wrist, Klein burned the letter.

Then he pulled out a sheet of paper and wrote his reply:

“You may proceed. Be sure to exercise caution.”

…

In the still of the night, close to dawn, inside an empty workshop of a ready-made clothing factory in Saint George Borough.

A clearing had been made there. Nearly ten mysterious figures stood within it, all dressed in black robes and hooded cloaks.

At their center was a deep-black coffin that looked extremely heavy. Around the coffin lay many gold ornaments still stained with earth, numerous candles swaying with pale flames, and skull after skull.

Some of these hideous white skulls came from humans, some belonged to animals, and some were extremely strange, deformed in a way that made it impossible to imagine what they had originally looked like.

The skulls were piled highest directly in front, and Patrick Bryan stood there.

He too had changed into a black robe, but he had not pulled up his hood, revealing a rather long and thin face with deep-set features, black hair, and brown eyes.

This demigod had yet to do anything, but the surroundings had already become extremely cold, as though countless invisible creatures were reveling there.

As Patrick Bryan raised his right hand, those hooded believers began dancing a somewhat twitching, rather frenzied, and highly rhythmic dance.

This was a “spirit dance,” a ritual method beloved by Death. The stronger the dancer’s spirituality, the better the effect.

When the dance grew intense and a cold, invisible wind blew out from the coffin, Patrick Bryan lowered his head and chanted in a language that seemed to come from the Netherworld:

“King in the depths of Hell;

“Angel who plays the movement of death;

“Sovereign above the River Styx.”