Isekai Journey Of The Magic Archer

[Eon's POV: ]

"Oh, you're finally here!"

Apparently, President Zodiac received a simple mission from the headmaster to go and look into a certain viscount of a certain region.

It was a small task that didn't need many people, and since it was confirmed that this particular individual wasn't deeply connected with the evil cultists, it was safe to send only the president who was dying of boredom in this place.

"Yeah, I'm back… haaa."

He had just come back, with SanSan wrapped around his neck like it alway is. However, both of them had a strangely exhausted look right now.

"Hmm? What's up? Did something happen?"

His task was simply to investigate a small noble who was involved in the distribution of a particular kind of poisonous grass which was getting pretty popular lately.

'It was simple, difficult to detect even for the high ranking mages, and it was a pretty continent as well.'

It was not only perfect for assassinations, it was also being used as a kind of depressant drug among the younger nobles of rich families.

'Seeing this product being distributed on such a large scale was strange actually. Not many knew about it but this particular grass grew only around the demonic plains and that too, not because of the demonic energy but because of the negativity that was produced around the demonic plains due to the presence of the demonic beings.'

This grass, this unique plant type that grew on negativity was quite unique in its own manner, but still, it was a harmful substance that turned anyone into a mindless monster after a prolonged consumption.

"This is strange, you know? That place… it was strange…" He sighed again as he said that and sat down in his seat.

We were in their office right now, so there were only three chairs for the four of us, with Cradle sitting on top of the desk as usual.

President Zod had gone to that place while Rein and I were preparing for our exams. Cradle was fooling around with her girl friends so she wasn't as bored as the president, but she was still not having any great fun nowadays.

"First of all, there was practically no unique security. It was like I was infiltrating some common person's house.

There was only a (tier-5) mage as the guard of the viscount, and even that guard was embezzling funds from the viscount with his assistant.

Looking through their books was so dumb I even thought that the viscount was an illiterate person for a moment. His sign wasn't consistent on the documents! Can you believe that?!"

President looked pretty surprised right now. But more than surprise, there was a unique light of embarrassment in them.

It almost seemed like he was trying to find something good about that viscount being a noble of that place, but even after his tries, he could not find anything that would make that person worthy of that noble title.

'It was a common thing among the nobles to pass down the titles to their heirs, but unlike the empire, the qualifications of those heirs wasn't judged by the ruler of that land.'

The titles were just that, hereditary titles that could be passed down to anyone within the bloodline of the person that had initially received the title from the monarch of the land.

'It seemed like he found it funny that there was some moron that couldn't even understand simple accounting or what he was even doing and somehow had become a lord.'

But, realistically, this is pretty common among many of the countries.

There are even people that don't even know how to write their names among some high ranking nobility of some small kingdoms, but still, there is always something unique about those holding the noble title.

'In this case though, it did not seem like the person that had that title of viscount had anything particularly special about him.'

However, that didn't seem to be the only reason he had that expression.

"Also! I looked through some stuff about that place… can you believe that that bastard's grandfather who had received the Viscount title from the (Grandmaster of Silver Axe) was a valedictorian of his batch? From this academy? Like, can you believe that shit?"

We didn't know much about this mission since it was assigned to him, but when Cradle told us about what he was doing, I certainly found out about the current viscount as well as his grandfather who could have become a great Alchemist had he not had that terminal disease.

It was pretty easy to understand why the Three people who were mentioned in the documents that president received from the headmaster might have chosen that faraway place to grow that certain grass.

"I went into their mansion's underground office and there were hundreds of people working on an artificial garden, using some strange things to cultivate that strange purple grass.

I didn't know what those things were at the start, but then we found out that the thin red fluid that they were using was in fact blood of alive children, and the green soil upon which they were making all of that, was in fact created with the remains of demons."

An artificial cultivation method that Necromancers are pretty fond of.

Most of the time, it was used in the cultivation of special materials like the Vampire flowers, or the Ash flowers that I loved the most among the other flowers.

'They used certain kind of dead bodies and a Catalyst that could bring out a unique kind of effect from the artificial environment to grow things that had a very specific environment that they grew in.'

They only used it for crucial materials though… but these people had turned that method into something that was used to grow poisonous grass containing negative energy which…

"All the people working there seemed more like zombies than humans."

Yeah.

That's exactly what happened when someone was dealing with negativity on such a large scale in the presence of demonic energy which wasn't even suitable for humans.

The fact that those humans were humans anymore wasn't much surprising for us. Not for me, not for Rein, and certainly not for Cradle.

"But, the humans weren't the only ones working there… there were demons as well."

However this certainly surprised us, all of us.

"Well, not particularly demons from hell as we know it, but demonic beings. Ogers, Dark Trolls, can you believe I even saw an Imp in that place. The lowest ranking, one of the most common demonic creatures of hell!

In that basement!"

That was NOT something you would see in a faraway place like that. But, as we all knew, when it comes to specific demonic creatures like the one president Zod just mentioned, seeing them in a basement filled with demonic energy was not actually something impossible.

What was more surprising here though…

"That Imp was perhaps the manager of that place, and the rest of the demonic creatures, including the humans could not see it.

It was also not doing anything mischievous as it should have been, it was simply observing everything that was going on in that place.

And, no. It didn't even seem like it was being controlled by anything or anyone else… it was trained."

As simple as it sounded, this news was more concerning than a LOT of things that we have found out about the Evil cultists in the past few months.

"They can control the demonic creatures?"

"More like training the demons, Del. That's some crazy fantasy stuff you're saying."

"An Imp is inherently untameable. They are beings that would take their own lives before submitting to anything else.

Not even a demon king could make them submit to themselves, much less make them do something that they did not want." That was simply the reason they had special Experimenters who condition Imps and special creatures like them who have high intelligence but nearly no common sense or understanding of what they were doing.

They were one of the most instinctive beings that did something simply because they wanted to do it. They were even famous for hindering the high ranking demons, that's why they weren't liked even in hell.

But they were unimaginably useful if one knew how to use them well… in some cases, they even had potential to become a high-ranking demon themselves if they gained a higher form of intelligence.

'But that was a rare thing… which is the main reason I'm so worried right now.'

I couldn't help it anymore.

An Imp acting as a manager in a small place's small basement? And in a place that didn't even have much 'fun' things to do?

'An Imp that was simply Observing?'

This was crazy news. A little too crazy actually.

"Well… yeah."

An incompetent lord, who was sacrificing the blood of the children and the lives of his subjects just to make profits?

A person like that had an Imp working in his basement?

"What qualifications did he have to have something like that…?"

This is crazy. Why would you give something so important to someone that didn't even know how to hide it from the eyes of the people like them?

Just how dumb did they have to be for them to keep the key to such an important place under their freaking armpits?

"Is this… their conspiracy? A test or a warning…?"

Was choosing a dumb one like him a mistake from their side or did they really just accidentally reveal the fact that they had the ability to Tame demons?

Or was it something else…?

"We should go to the headmaster-."

"We have to. What other choice do we have?"

Things were pretty quiet for the last few months actually. We didn't really receive much information about the cultists, and there wasn't any big commotion either. Discover stories at empire

Things were going well, but, in fact, it was just calm before a great storm…

They were simply waiting.

Preparing for something… much, much worse than Lakmer, or at the Academy island.