The sound of muffled coughing filled the room as Johan's eyes snapped open, his heartbeat surging and his lungs huriedly drawing in air in a frantic pace.
He was...
Johan clutched his heart and forehead respectively, but there was no pain to be found.
"What just... I'm back...? Everything is fine...?" He voiced out as he glanced at the surroundings.
There was no water nearby, well, there was, but it was contained in a small glass bottle on the nearby desk.
The Magus was on a bed, nestled in familliar sheets. Hints of sunlight spilled in from between the window curtains as he glanced up, looking at the dim lamp hanging down from the roof.
"How did I get back here...?" Johan asked as he took a few deep breaths and massaged his forehead.
He was back in his room... well, the room he had rented in this apartment.
Johan glanced at his back, but the Mystic Code Implant was still deep within his skin, no signs of the metal wires having been deployed.
That was... odd. The Implant didn't have an automatic return function, he had always needed to do that manually after healing himself.
Johan shook his head, this was getting more confusing.
Quickly, he began to feel his inner Magical Energy and tried to reinforce the muscles in his forearm.
...It worked!
"Thank God..." It really seemed to have just been a nightmare.
His Magic Circuits were still fully there, and the Lawrence Magic Crest hadn't inexplicably vanished.
"Wait, isn't this..." As he stared at his own reinforced forearm, his attention naturally went up towards an object worn around his ring finger.
It was a smooth golden ring with Ancient Hermes words written on it.
It read...
"I am that I am."
"...AAAH!" Johan almost fell out of the bed and hit his head on the floor.
It wasn't a dream, it couldn't have been.
Instinctively, Johan tried to pull the ring out and toss it away to the other side of the room, but that sadly couldn't happen as no matter how hard he pulled, the ring didn't budge.
The Gobbler Ring that his ancestors had been chasing in all of their lives was now his possession, but Johan only wanted to curse his destiny.
"True Magic, my ass! This shit just gives you literal wet dreams..." Johan wanted to confront the ghosts of his ancestors just to insult them.
Although, even if that mindscape dimension really was just an illusion, that still begs the question of how Johan had returned to his room...
Did another Magus help him? Or was it actually the work of the Gobbler Ring...?
The Magus stared at the ancient artefact with a complicated expression before his eyebrows furrowed.
It was small, faint even, but Johan noticed that it seemed to be draining his Od at a miniscule pace.
Magical Energy was split into two classifications, Mana and Od, with each also having different names in certain cultures, such as Prana for Mana and Pneuma for Od.
Mana was the external Magical Energy that permeated through the natural World. It was basically the Earth's very own blood...
Od on the other hand, is the internal Magical Energy that permeated one's body, the life force that kept the physical vessel from crumbling to ashes.
The Gobbler Ring was absorbing his life force, and he couldn't take it off even he tried...
At this point, shouldn't he just amputate his own hand to sever the connection?
"No, no... I think that would be too drastic." Johan muttered to himself as he rubbed his hands with anxiety.
When Od was depleted, a Magus's Magic Circuits would simply generate more given time. As the rate that the Gobbler Ring absobed his Od was quite slow, it shouldn't be life threatning or anything like that...
He just had to abstain from certain Spells from now on.
Johan scratched his itchy neck as he arose from the bed, his feet hitting the floor harmoniously.
The walls were of a dull beige colouring, worn slightly by the ravages of time, yet still clean.
A single window allowed soft, muted light to filter in, the curtains drawn halfway, revealing the cloudy sky outside. On the other side of the room, there was a scratched wooden table with several open notebooks and manuscripts.
It was an ordinary bedroom at best, not one you'd expect from a Noble Magus, but it was a temporary residence.
Johan sighed, it still felt disturbing to be here after all that had happened. The contrast was almost too much for his mind to make sense of.
When he glanced at the half-filled water bottle on the edge of that table, all he saw were the faceless floating bodies and their agonized faces in the sky.
...And those figures. Now that I think about it, they didn't really make much sense, Johan thought to himself.
How was something both a person and the Sun? It didn't even have any proper features. Why is a squid called a Tyrant? Wait, was it even a squid or was it a whale-man-demon thing? And it wasn't even a White Tower, it looked more like a dancing tree—
Johan gripped his head tightly, a piercing migraine stabbing into the back of his cranium like a delusional javelin.
The Magus coughed as he suppressed a puke, but he knew that he couldn't stop this one, so he ran straight for the bedroom.
...Johan slipped on a piece of cloth and slammed his head onto the ground, further stirring the stomach contents that was about to be ejected.
He wanted to curse, but couldn't risk puking, so he just swallowed it back down his throat and just managed to reach the sink.
And then he puked out his half-digested dinner.
"God..." He exhaled heavily.
I shouldn't think about it. He convinced and forced himself not to.
It felt like one of those Lovecraft novels where just knowing something you shouldn't know could have adverse effects on both the body and mind.
A horrifying idea considering Johan considered himself to be a simple man, unfit for the role of Lovecraftian protagonist and eldritch victim.
He turned on the sink as the water flowed down and brought the stomach contents away with it down to the pipes, yet the acidic smell remained.
"And those Sequences... why do they feel so familiar?" He remembered the stone tablet that he had read before the dream ended.
Really, although he called it a tablet, it was more like a slate, a...
Blasphemous Slate.
Ah, he remembered it well, up to Sequence 7.
Although each designantion contained a maximum of three words, they were more akin to individual packets of raw information.
Johan cleaned his hands in the sink before applying face wash and other such skincare creams onto his facial features.
After washing up, he left the bathroom and immediately made a beeline for the wooden table.
"My notes are still here..." Last night, the notebook should have been swept away in the river, but the notebook on that table was perfectly dry and intact.
He decided not to think about it as he flipped to the last few pages and immediately jotted down every droplet of information that he had gained.
｢Sequence 9 — Sailor｣
Main Ingredient:
• 1 Bladder from a Merloc (it does not have to be fully-intact, but its better for it to be).
Supplementary Ingredients:
• 100 milliliters of Pure Water.
• 10 milliliters of Distilled Liquor.
• 15 drops of any type of Magical Beast-Cephalopod ink.
• 12 milligrams of Crushed Flying Fish Roe.
Instructions:
Insert the Main Ingredient in an appropriate container such as a phial or a bottle, and then mix the Supplementary Ingredients to brew the Potion.
Consume the Potion when you are in you are in your best physical and mental condition. Additionally, it is advised but not required to do so near a large body of water.
If you plan to consume the Potion at a later date, take precaution and change the container every 16 hours.
———
It was a Potion Formula... but for what kind of Potion...?
Since it was designated as Sailor, Johan decided to call it the Sailor Potion... thinking about it, would it perhaps make him a Sailor or something? But he didn't even like going on ships.
Or maybe he can become Sailor Moon...
The Sailor Potion wasn't the only Formula, it was the simply the first one of many.
Among the Sequence 9 Potions, there was the Bard Potion, the Reader Potion, the Spectator Potion, and the most mysterious-sounding of them all, the Secrets Supplicant Potion.
These names sounded a bit ominous.
...But then again, maybe this was the real treasure of the Gobbler Ring? These Potion Formulas?
Johan began to consider such a possibility...