Cyber Era Witch
Chapter 141 - 141 124 The Warlock of Aizu City

141: Chapter 124 The Warlock of Aizu City 141: Chapter 124 The Warlock of Aizu City The Aizu City public cemetery added 17,534 lines of death information, the sum of all residents who died in the Rat Tide.

Tomb Keeper Izumi Yamazaki and his family had dedicated themselves to this profession for generations, striving to remember every deceased person in the city.

Just like the Suzuki Family, guardians of sea monsters, the Yamazaki Family also once had a glorious tradition on the surface, which declined due to the changing times, eventually moving to the Underground City.

The Yamazaki Family revered an ancient book; according to ancestral teachings, they were only qualified to protect it, not to read it, and must wait for the “Warlock” prophesied to come and take the ancient book away.

According to the dates, the person to take the ancient book would come soon.

This year, Izumi Yamazaki was 65 years old, the oldest person in the city.

He knew that the death rate in Aizu City was 4.75% per year, averaging 39 people dying every day from different forms of disasters such as violence, malnutrition, and mental breakdown.

Next to the public cemetery, he built a simple two-story self-constructed house.

The so-called public cemetery was itself a cluster of servers, collecting and updating death information in real-time, divided into double layers.

The inner layer held large storage devices for archives, like the scriptorium of an ancient monastery, with archive disks of different death dates stacked in a staggered formation.

The outer layer looked like an internet café, with terminal machines placed side by side, providing access to 780,000 lines of death information, the sum of all deaths since the establishment of Aizu City.

Whenever people missed their deceased loved ones, they would visit the Aizu City public cemetery, look for their relatives’ death messages on the outer terminals, and pay 50 funds to access the archives, to maintain server operations.

Excluding the expenses for server room maintenance, Izumi Yamazaki saved roughly 200,000 funds each year.

He was also a lonely man, empathetic to the orphans left behind by the deceased who ended up on the streets, so he spent these funds on the children.

He built an underground school next to his small building, and now it had gathered 600 children, divided into 6 grades and a total of 20 classes.

The cemetery, the Tomb Keeper’s Home, and the public cemetery school were arranged in this order.

He hoped the school bell would not disturb those souls sleeping in data form.

Most classes were led by robots, and Izumi Yamazaki was responsible for teaching geography.

He enjoyed traveling and had visited many places in the world when he was younger.

Izumi Yamazaki had seen the coconuts of the Taiya Archipelago, the six-legged snow bears of the Great Northern Region, and the vast rice fields of the White Elephant Continent, as well as the glittering gold and splendor of Xin’an Prefecture in the Xia District.

In line with the concept of “Infinite urbanization”, every inch of soil was covered with concrete and steel.

In Xin’an Prefecture, there were no transitions between cities anymore; highways and air routes were laid out like rulers right amidst the cities, with buildings connected to one another, overwhelming him completely.

Above Xin’an Prefecture soared resort hotels, mega-buildings, and luxury apartments reaching into the clouds.

The closer one came to what was traditionally known as the ground, the more complicated the roads became.

He had once lost his way between the fifth and sixth floors amid small stalls selling rougamo and huo shao.

Whenever he remembered the vastness of the world, Izumi Yamazaki felt insignificant.

Having never saved up money, after his youthful prodigality, Izumi Yamazaki returned to his family, taking over the work of the Tomb Keeper and awaiting the Warlock’s arrival to take the book.

There were no nights in Aizu City; he would only retreat to the cemetery for rest when the evening bell tolled.

He was a by-the-book teacher, not fond of downloading ready-made teaching plans from the internet, preferring to prepare lessons himself.

He also often stayed up late, tending to the orphans with headaches and fever, personally escorting them to the automated doctor at the other end of the street, to prevent them from being snatched away by sneaky human traffickers and perverts.

The public cemetery was located at the very edge of Hui City District, close to the natural underground rock walls, a place even rats deemed unworthy of attack, which was a relief to Izumi Yamazaki.

That day, he taught late into the night, the evening bell having tolled three times before he returned to his little house.

From here, he could see the server room graveyard downstairs, each screen emitting eye-searing blue light.

Izumi Yamazaki took off his shoes and stepped into the entryway.

On the wall was a family photo, his wife and daughter both smiling sweetly, only Izumi Yamazaki with a stern face.

They were all young then, making the aged Tomb Keeper lose himself for a moment in thought.

His wife was a corporate worker, often apart, and had passed away early.

His daughter went missing on her way home from school at the age of 17.

After spending 110,000 funds and searching for a month, they found her in a den for organ harvesting, dead for having been hollowed out of her organs.

Izumi Yamazaki just felt timid, regretting not having walked the final journey with them and shamelessly clinging to life till this day.

But he had to live on until the family’s ancient book was taken, fulfilling the responsibility passed down from his ancestors.

The only consolation was an orphan girl he adopted from the public cemetery school eight years ago, who resembled his deceased daughter.

He named her Yuko Yamazaki, and she was now also 17 years old.

Yuko was beautiful and full of vitality, making him feel as if his daughter had come back to life by his side.

He regarded Yuko as his own and prepared to pass on the duty of the Tomb Keeper to her.

He heard a strange noise coming from the living room, like a cow stirring inside, and the lights were on.

As he opened the door, he saw Yuko pinned to the tatami, a disheveled, burly man moving on top of her with his back to Izumi Yamazaki.

Yuko was silent, bleeding profusely.

Izumi Yamazaki’s legs went weak, and he trembled as he collapsed backward.

On hearing the noise, the burly man got up from Yuko, pushing her lifeless body to the side with a satisfied grunt, fastening his belt, turning to face Izumi Yamazaki.

The man was about two meters tall, dressed in a linen bodice embroidered with light blue stars and purple rings, an old-fashioned style, topped with a dark brown leather overcoat, which was this year’s new fashion.

“The book,” he demanded, grabbing the Magic Wand from atop the heater and issuing a short command to Izumi Yamazaki, “give me the book.”

“The book?

No, no…” Izumi Yamazaki’s mind went blank as he lay back on the ground, crawling backward, “The book…”

“Where’s the book?” the giant stomped past Izumi Yamazaki, his gaze sweeping through the room, “She doesn’t know anything.”

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“What…

what have you done…” Izumi Yamazaki lifted his head, hoping what he just saw was only an illusion, but Yuko was still lying there, bruised all over, with clotted blood sticking to her legs.

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Why?

A raw feeling piled up in Izumi Yamazaki’s throat.

Yuko?

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“You don’t know how far I’ve traveled for this, it’s what I deserve,” the burly man said, “Now give me the book, and your family won’t have to keep protecting this secret anymore.”

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Seeing Izumi Yamazaki’s complex expression of horror, sorrow, and disappointment, the burly man knew he would not get any intel from his mouth.

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The burly man shook his ebony magic wand, chanting a warlock spell, and a pale silver phantom light covered Izumi Yamazaki’s head.

The burly man began to peer into his memories, while Izumi Yamazaki’s expression turned vacant.

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Many of the warlock’s powers were specifically developed to target witches, and the mind-penetration series of spells was one of them.

No secret of any witch could escape under a warlock’s interrogation, allowing them to preemptively learn the intelligence the witches had mastered.

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Used on ordinary people it was even more effective, their thoughts were crystal clear, like flipping through a children’s book.

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Good…

very good…

The burly man nodded slightly; he now had all the information he needed.

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When the witches were powerful, the warlocks almost vanished.

Therefore, the surviving warlocks from various places chose to compile their lifelong learnings into books, entrusting them to various trustworthy mortal families for protection, waiting for the time when the witches would decline, and the warlocks would then reclaim these hereditary books.

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There are a total of 10 sets of such heritages, representing 10 vastly different warlock systems.

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The witches have passed away, and just as they hoped to collect the collections, the world-spanning “Corporate Alliance” emerged.

The warlocks knew that once their abilities fell into the Alliance’s hands, they would inevitably become a new tool for the company to control witches, with no freedom to speak of, so they hid their tracks even more and stayed away from civilized society.

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Now, the good times were finally arriving.

The controlling “Corporate Alliance” had collapsed, the “Error Crisis” had thoroughly humiliated it, and various large corporations were officially dividing the world.

Amidst this chaos, the secluded warlocks declared that the era of revival had come, and they began to retrieve these ancient books to reshape the warlock’s world.

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After checking Izumi Yamazaki’s mind, the burly man left the old man unconscious on the ground, satisfied.

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He found the wall in Yamazaki’s home where family portraits hung, threw the photographs to the ground, opened an old-fashioned safe with the code he had sought out, and took out an extremely thick book with a black cover, concealing it inside his coat.

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What to do next?

What if someone dug into their brains, plucked out the memories, and eventually exposed the warlocks’ whereabouts?

The company had such technology.

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They couldn’t let generations of effort go down the drain; the guarding families’ sacrifices could not be in vain.

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Burn them.

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He walked into the living room, found a stack of files in a cabinet that seemed to be a set of children’s medical records, health reports, and physical examination results.

He lit these files with a lighter, and the flames quickly spread.

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The Tomb Keeper’s Home, built by its occupants, was quite rudimentary in terms of fire-resistance.

Once ignited, the flames slithered across the ground like venomous snakes.

The burly man made another couple of rounds inside the house, lighting curtains, wardrobes, and every door.

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After the bodies were consumed by fire, the company would not be able to extract any information.

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The blaze became so intense that it would soon turn this whole house to ashes.

The warlock used the spell “Phantom Light Unseen” to make himself disappear into thin air, taking the spellbook with him.

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The legacy of the warlocks, reclaimed successfully.

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Hours passed after that.

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In the Rat Paths, a grey-furred Rat Sentinel was leading Seeking Shadow ahead.

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It occasionally looked back with worry; the Rat Sentinel had never imagined a human would use a Rat Communicator to establish contact with them.

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“Don’t be afraid, you are the partner of justice,” Seeking Shadow said, bending over to crawl forward, “and I am the Great Savior of the Shadows.” This was also a line from an anime that Seeking Shadow had learnt and added to her language database.

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“Squeak, squeak…” The Rat Sentinel had no concept of this.

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As they reached the exit of the Rat Path, the Rat Sentinel sat on the edge of the ventilation duct, sniffing ceaselessly outside.

It smelled something burnt.

The giant fan rotating above ruffled its fur, and Seeking Shadow had to lie flat on the ground to avoid being cut by the blades.

She lowered her head to see that the Tomb Keeper’s street had been leveled by a huge fire.

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What a terrifying fire…

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“The Yamazaki residence has been burnt down,” Seeking Shadow communicated to Xu Yang, sending him the images captured by her camera, “along with the neighboring cemetery and a schoolhouse, all burnt to the ground.”

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Xu Yang received the onsite report; the sight was shocking.

The fire had burned for a long time, turning everything to ashes.

Aizu City’s cemetery had stored death information in the form of a computer room, and now the entire server cluster had been torched through.

Aizu City had lost its most important historical record, and countless people had lost their last traces.

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“…Go to the scene to look for clues,” Xu Yang said.

“Figure out who started the fire.”

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