After shoving the task of guarding their luggage and the beaten-up carriage—recently reassembled via alchemy—onto Silvan, who remained in the forest, Chris and Lune headed to a nearby town in search of horses or donkeys for transport.

  "Tch! Who does she think she's brushing off with this measly pocket change? That damn old hag. With a budget like this, we might as well just buy a donkey and call it a day!"

  Ignoring Chris's nonstop grumbling, Lune looked left and right as they navigated the bustling morning market. Kiehulan's morning market was full of life. The stalls were piled high with brightly colored fruits and vegetables, dripping roasted meats, and freshly baked bread. The mouth-watering aromas made Lune swallow hard.

  "Uncle Chris—! I want to eat that!"

  Lune reached out his cute, tiny hand, desperately tugging at Chris's baggy trousers. Looking up, he unleashed his ultimate finishing move: the Puppy Dog Eyes.

  "Eat what, exactly?" Chris glared at the brat by his feet, grinding his teeth. With zero hesitation, he slapped the tiny hand away with a sharp smack. "Are you pretending your IQ has regressed to that of a five-year-old? Save it, that trick doesn't work on me at all!"

  Chris shook the coin pouch in his hand as a demonstration. The pitifully few gold coins inside let out a crisp jingle.

  "Listen closely. Shumanton didn't need to eat at all while he was sleeping. Now look what happened! We have an extra mouth to feed for absolutely no reason! If you're going to be useless, then get lost! Weren't you looking for your dad? Hmm? Where exactly is your daddy, little Lune?"

  Seeing his acting tactics end in complete failure, Lune instantly dropped the pitiful expression and gave a heavy Hmph!

  "Uncle Chris, you're a giant idiot! I'm just hungry! Those dry breads taste awful, and Shumanton said he didn't want to eat them either!"

  "Oh, damn it, what kind of act is this? Dragging out that old monster Shumanton as a meat shield? I'd bet my life he never needed to eat before! He was asleep the whole time, after all. Sigh, I really miss those days. Things were so much easier back then!"

  "Uncle Chris, how could you be so mean! Hmph, no wonder you can't get a girlfriend!"

  "Hah! I don't need one of those anyway!"

  After asking around, Chris finally ran into a farmer who claimed his family ran a stable. The two followed the farmer out of the noisy market and headed toward the deeper outskirts of Kiehulan.

  The scenery of Kiehulan was like a painting. Clear streams flowed through the tree-lined villages, sometimes gathering into ponds, sometimes turning into miniature waterfalls between the rocks. Even more common were the pristine drainage ditches running around the houses. It was late autumn, and the field views were even more enchanting. Tall cornstalks stood like sentinels on both sides of the country paths, while sunflowers and beetroots awaited the harvest season.

  Crossing the fields, they arrived at the farmer's stable. It housed dozens of dark-colored horses, mostly various shades of brown. Like an officer inspecting new recruits, Chris swept his sharp gaze over the lot before finally stopping in front of a black horse.

  The black horse wasn't particularly muscular; its only real merit was probably its youth. Its coat was a mess, but there was an untamed, wild gleam in its eyes.

  "Boss, I'll take this one. A horse with a temper like this is definitely a pain to take care of, but that usually means it's got a tough core. It just lacks discipline!"

  "Oh my! It seems you truly have an eye for talent, Mr. Chris. It's wonderful to meet someone who knows their stuff."

  Under Lune's skeptical gaze, Chris readily finalized the transaction and led his newly acquired prize back onto the road.

  "See that? My eye for quality is downright vicious! At a rock-bottom price like this, you can usually only afford a stupid donkey!" Chris laughed triumphantly from the horse's saddle.

  Leading the horse from the front, Lune had a look of utter disgust on his face. "It looks completely frail, okay? Silvan is definitely going to think it's useless. Besides, doesn't training cost money? What if it accidentally gets killed by Verbonia Empire scouts on the road before it's even fully trained? Wouldn't that be a huge loss?"

  "What nonsense are you spouting? You adorable little idiot! Careful, or this horse is going to hate you!"

  Meanwhile, at the edge of the forest.

  Silvan was guarding the carriage out of sheer boredom, his gaze sweeping over the precise alchemical instruments inside, including a clock.

  (Are they seriously not back yet? This is taking way too long...)

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

  A sudden, deafening roar tore through the sky.

  An imperial fighter jet tore through the clouds like a meteor, diving straight toward them! Chris instinctively gripped the reins tight and looked up, only to see the jet's wings completely engulfed in raging flames. Trailing thick black smoke, it plummeted in an out-of-control spiral.

  In that split second, before Chris's brain could even process the situation, a sudden anomaly occurred—the newly bought black horse seemingly went mad, sprinting wildly, completely out of control, straight toward the exact spot the fighter jet was about to crash!

  "Hey! Oh my god! Little black horse, what are you doing?! Are you rushing to your death?!" Lune screamed in terror from the horse's back.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  "Lune! Damn it—!" Chris desperately sprinted after them.

  However, the fighter jet was falling much faster.

  KABOOM—!!

  The jet slammed brutally into the ground less than five hundred meters away in a field of sunflowers, triggering an earth-shattering explosion. The Solar-ore loaded in the cabin shattered from the extreme heat, morphing into a massive, visible shockwave that rapidly expanded outward in a ring of pure destruction!

  In this life-or-death moment, the black horse reared up on its hind legs, letting out a piercing neigh.

  The tangerine sunset flickered with blinding golden rays amidst the explosive fire clouds. Chris thought he was a goner, but to his utter shock, he found himself completely unharmed. He sharply looked up at the horse's back—

  He saw Lune's short blond hair erupting in a divine brilliance. The boy's delicate, childish hands had somehow tightly grasped that abyssal black greatsword, pointing it directly at the core of the explosion.

  A resplendent golden barrier shot up from the earth, completely isolating them from the explosion's destructive force.

  Then, Lune's radiant blond hair began to fade, slowly tainted by a hue as pitch-black as the night sky. Accompanied by the rapid, crackling sound of his bones lengthening and growing, the innocent boy vanished.

  —The legendary existence, Shumanton, had awakened once more upon the back of the screaming black horse amidst the raging flames.

  Shumanton roughly grabbed the black horse by the cheekbone with one hand, instantly pouring a massive surge of magic into the beast's body. The horse's previously messy coat turned sleek and pitch-black in an instant, but the whites of its eyes lost all signs of life, looking exactly like an empty, soulless puppet.

  Forced into submission by Shumanton's tyrannical control, this puppet sprinted toward the blazing wreckage at a speed defying all logic.

  "Halt." Shumanton gave a hard yank, and under his monstrous strength, the black horse skidded to a brutal stop, plowing two deep trenches into the earth.

  He hopped lightly off the horse and stepped alone into the barrier, now thick with intense heat and smoke.

  Rustle—

  Jet-black thorns burst from the soil at his feet like living vipers, rapidly climbing up the mangled fuselage. Through the touch of the thorns, the structure of the frame, the engine layout, and even the material of the wings were instantly mapped out into a complete blueprint within Shumanton's mind.

  "Oh? This is an early model of the Empire's fighter jets." A playful, cold smirk tugged at the corner of Shumanton's mouth. "Who exactly was flying this antique? And what shady mission were they on? Color me curious."

  The black thorns acted like nimble tentacles, scooping up the scattered shards of golden ore and reverently placing them into Shumanton's palm.

  "Solar-ore. It seems that whenever the energy emitted by this stuff reaches a certain threshold, it forcibly breaks my dormant state. I believe that's exactly what happened last time, too."

  Shumanton let out a light chuckle, then his gaze suddenly sharpened, locking onto a pile of ruins still engulfed in flames.

  "Also... heh, talk about lucky!"

  The black thorns swiftly pulled a prisoner of war from the wreckage. In the twilight rays piercing through the smoke, it turned out to be a young girl, covered in blood and in a deep coma. Her wavy brown hair was coated in ash, yet even unconscious, her hands were crossed tightly over her chest, as if guarding something more precious than her own life.

  "What a stubborn lady. Let's see just what it is you're protecting."

  Shumanton casually drove his black sword into the scorched earth with a clack, showing absolutely no chivalry as he forcefully pried the girl's fingers apart. A crystal ball glowing with an aquatic blue light rolled into his palm.

  Crack—!

  The moment it made contact, the crystal ball shattered without warning. Shumanton raised an eyebrow, watching helplessly as the sphere split in two. Its beautiful aquatic blue glow instantly died, turning into lifeless gray dust.

  "L-Lord Shumanton!" Chris, heavily panting, finally arrived at the scene, leaning against the plane wreckage to catch his breath. "What is that in your hand? Oh, good heavens, is that person even alive?"

  "Ah, Chris, impeccable timing. By the way, your eye for picking horses is barely passing."

  With a wave of Shumanton's hand, the black thorns withdrew from the girl with a swish. Losing her support, the girl was about to collapse face-first onto the ground, but Chris rushed forward and caught her steadily.

  "Lord Shumanton, aren't you being a bit too rough?! This is a girl, for crying out loud!"

  "Legend has it that there was a rare race highly proficient in the 'Healing Arts.' They typically served as intelligence officers in the military, always holding a crystal ball capable of bewitching people's minds," Shumanton said, staring at the ashes on the ground, his tone as flat as still water. "However, logically speaking, this race should be entirely extinct. After all, during the Verbonia Empire's territorial expansion, they were deemed a primary threat and ordered to be completely annihilated."

  "Haha, Lord Shumanton, how can you be so sure they were wiped out to the last person? Besides, it's hard to guarantee something like the inheritance of a bloodline, right? Maybe someone was out of town and got lucky."

  "No, Chris. Your brain is still as hopelessly naive as ever." Shumanton looked back, a chilling glint flashing through his deep black eyes. "Because every last one of the surviving clansmen... died by my blade. You should know very well that as long as I served the Empire, I absolutely never disobeyed military orders."

  Having said that, Shumanton walked over to the black horse and crouched down. In stark contrast to his rough magical coercion from earlier, he reached out and stroked the horse's mane with utmost gentleness, as if comforting a wounded comrade who had braved life and death.

  "Since she is an Imperial prisoner of war, perhaps we can pry some useful intelligence out of her. She might just know if 'those four bombs' I personally sealed back then... are still safe and sound."

  Chris looked at Shumanton's back and sighed in resignation, tossing the unconscious girl over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

  "Got it, I'll figure out a way to get her talking. Though, I have a feeling things aren't going to be that simple! I mean, you went into a deep slumber specifically to maintain the seal on those four bombs, right? Waking up early like this, the sealing barrier has probably already started to weaken."

  Shumanton didn't reply; he merely pulled the black horse up. He opened his hand, and the scattered metallic wreckage of the plane instantly converged. Amidst the blinding light of an Alchemy Circle, it transformed into an incredibly durable steel cable, anchoring securely onto the black horse.

  Seeing this, Chris instantly broke out in a cold sweat. "Wait... Lord Shumanton, was that an Alchemy Circle or a Barrier Spell you just cast? If you used a Barrier Spell, the Imperial Army will lock onto our coordinates in less than a second!"

  "Does it even make a difference at this point? I already cast a barrier to block the explosion earlier anyway, didn't I?" Shumanton stated matter-of-factly.

  Chris stared blankly for three seconds before sticking his tongue out. "...Crap, you have a point! Lord Shumanton, then what are we dawdling for? Let's run! Old Lady Pu-Ying is still waiting for us to get back!"

  "Oh? You mean Miss Pu-Ying? Why the hell did you leave her all by herself over there?"

  "I've been wronged, Lord Shumanton! Why don't you mention how you abandoned me and the old lady to go take a nap? I came to town to buy a horse! After all, the last time General Shelton attacked, that useless horse of ours got blasted into popcorn!"

  "Mind your phrasing, Chris! That's highly disrespectful to the horse!"

  Bantering without a shred of tension, the two quickly pushed past the crowd of onlookers and vanished down the end of the road.

  However, their overly conspicuous behavior had already been deeply ingrained in the minds of the surrounding villagers. Not long after, when the Empire's small scout planes roared overhead, the money-hungry villagers scrambled over each other to point out the direction the duo had fled in, happily collecting the hefty bounty handed out by the Empire...