Demon's Virtue

"Adapting, huh? Well, that sounds about right. But why are you saying it like that's a bad thing?" Eiro asked with a raised brow as he flicked his wrist. From one of the cupboards, he quickly pulled a teapot, some teacups, tea leaves, and a carafe of water, starting to prepare some tea for him and Boju.

The highland orc seemed hesitant to respond, "W-Well, I... It's not a bad thing directly. He's just being very over-the top in every way right now. He eats all day, he gets into fights with everyone around him, and just goes wherever he wants and does what he feels like..."

Immediately, Eiro straightened his back, "Excuse me? He's causing that much trouble?"

"No, and that's the worst part..." Boju groaned, rubbing the bridge of his nose, "In order to eat that much, he goes out of the city and hunts large game, and he obviously can't eat everything, so we've been able to stock up on and preserve some meat, and we have a lot more leather to work with.

The ones that he gets into fights with are either young warriors that he's actively training, or older warriors that are usually cocky and causing trouble. And even when he wanders around town when he's not supposed to, peeking into places he has no right to be, he always ends up solving some problem or another."

Eiro hesitated to answer. He wasn't sure exactly what the issue was here, and clearly, Boju knew how he sounded when he said this. Eiro poured Boju a cup of tea, having helped the infusion of tea-leaves into the water along quicker, "So, what are you worried about, then? Sure, he might be acting a bit impulsively, but as long as he's not causing any long-term trouble, I feel like that's fine.

He's still adjusting to his new abilities. Becoming my servant has quite an effect on one's personality."

Boju quietly nodded, "Right... But that would all be fine if he would at least be doing the things that he's actually supposed to do... with him doing whatever he wants, my workload almost doubled."

Eiro froze. He looked away from the teacups and back at Boju, "That is an active issue, though. Why didn't you start with that? You're already busy enough as is."

"Yeah, but it's not that big a deal, I just need to work a bit harder and-"

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"When you go back to town, if he tries to push his work onto you again, just say the word 'Teacup' to him. I'm going to make sure that I'm alerted whenever he hears that word, and I'll pay attention. And if I notice that he's trying to get out of work, I'll tell him off from here. I can exert some level of influence like that from here, at least," Eiro explained, and Boju laughed slightly.

"If it comes to that, I will consider it, thank you," Boju carefully took a sip of the tea, "But more importantly, I have a lot more reports for you to look over."

"Of course," Eiro responded, quickly grabbing the pieces of paper laid out in front of him.

---

"Oh, to hell with it!" Eiro groaned loudly, staring at the book in front of him with nothing but anger and frustration. He slammed his hand into the table and stood up.

"What, too hard for you?" Sarius scoffed, lounging on the armchair in the corner.

"Fuck off," the demon replied, walking up to the bookshelf in front of him. This room was at the true 'top' of the tower. Different to the clean and 'official' looking space that made up the rest of the tower, this area was small and seemed almost lived-in, as though this was the place that the different incarnations of Morgan la Fey lived while they were the elemental plane of fire.

It was actually a nice change of pace compared to the rest of the tower; darker walls, wooden floors, comfortable furniture. It was quite pleasant and almost nostalgic to Eiro.

The issue here was just that the things inside of this room were extremely, extremely annoying. The walls were covered in bookshelves that held not only some trinkets collected throughout this realm, but also the books that the overseer had mentioned.

The trinkets were... interesting. Nothing useful, just things that were bought at random stores that the past incarnations would find interesting. Frankly, Eiro would have probably picked those exact trinkets if he walked around with the intention of buying a souvenir, which felt a little annoying to him.

The idea that his personality was like those of the past incarnations of Morgan la Fey, that the path that he walked on was not dictated fully by this very life... made him feel like shit. The books didn't help with that either.

Because every one of those books was locked in a unique way. Not a single one was the exact same. Some were similar, sure, but they were filled with the unique experiences of each incarnation and brought to the highest degree of their paths. Some were locked through the highest degrees of Sealing Arts, others applied barrier magics in ways that Eiro had never seen before.

There was even one that was simply locked physically using an enhanced, unbreakable, magic-resistant metal that Eiro had never encountered before, and you had to unlock it via lockpicking. He thought that this one was going to be on the easier side to unlock, but it had hundreds of pins that had to be pushed in a particular order that changed every sixty seconds.

At the same time, with each pin that was pushed, the physical strength that was needed was physically beyond what Eiro was capable of using without breaking the tools he had available.

It was like, instead of trying to keep their secrets safe, the past incarnations were actively trying to annoy the shit out of any of the subsequent incarnations in a unique way. Like they were competing with their past lives. And the worst part was that Eiro completely understood why they did that and would probably do the same if he were to add his own book to this collection.

"Okay, whatever. Let's just take it one at a time," Eiro sighed. The only good part about this library was that the books were sorted in chronological order, and if all of the books were just as annoying as each other, he might as well go one after the other.

Eiro walked up to the oldest book. This one was locked using incredibly ancient arcane magics that came together to form a magical lock. It was like a puzzle that the Demon had to solve, but each small segment was one of the most complex things you could ever imagine.

Looking over the magic imbued into the fabric that the book was bound in, he could at the very least figure out a few points of approach. Since this book was probably placed here by the first incarnation of Morgan la Fey, or at least one of the first, it wasn't made in that bothersome, competitive manner yet and was a bit more straightforward as well.

He stared down at the page, glancing over the patterns. Within the mental library, half a dozen mental duplicates were working together to try and break down the magic. And frankly, just doing this raised his understanding of arcane magic many times over, like he was staring right into the face of what 'Arcane' truly meant.

"This is... ridiculously impressive," Eiro muttered. And this was from thousands of years ago? Sure, the quality of magic did always undergo some fluctuation here and there, hitting high points, degenerating for some time, before then soaring higher than ever before. That was just the natural flow of things in regard to magic.

And while Arcane magic was practically a lost art, there was no way that it was much more advanced than other kinds of magic were... or was there?

Considering the nature of the ancient language, being so deeply intertwined with arcane magic, there had to be some sort of high-point. It being close to the age of the gods made sense as well, since that was the start of the arcane filling this world.

"But even so, who the fuck was this Morgan la Fey?"