Mage Manual
Chapter 350 - Chapter 350 Chapter 296 Diyas First Doubt

Chapter 350: Chapter 296 Diya’s First Doubt Chapter 350: Chapter 296 Diya’s First Doubt Void Realm, Time Continent, three mages were driving away from the lair of the Chen Spider Dragons, leaving behind a burning mining pit.

It was a perfect raid: the cave entrance was just big enough for a sports car to enter, so they drove straight in and ran over five juvenile Chen Spider Dragons, then used poison to kill the other twenty-four.

Facing the overlord creature, the Widow Spider Dragon, whose home had been destroyed and family killed, they paid utmost attention, setting fire and then beating it, giving it a neatly arranged, dignified funeral.

Terrain kill, fire attack, mobbing, they had become very familiar with this sequence of operations, transforming tough battles gradually into monster-killing slaughters, so much so that Diya became somewhat sentimental: “If there’s a god in the Void Realm who protects sentient creatures, should we pray for forgiveness for our sins?”

“If there really is one, then it should be praying to us,” said Sonia, patting down Diya’s silly tuft of hair. “Let’s hope our fellow mages don’t find out.”

“Speaking of which, I once read a fairy tale picture book where there’s a story called ‘Don’t Get Found by the Mages’. The protagonist is a Technique Spirit that tries various ways to escape the control of the mages…”

“Did it succeed?”

“No, it was captured and brought back.”

“That’s indeed a good fairy tale.”

While the two close friends were bonding over their banter, suddenly a man’s voice intervened: “Do you think, your mothers are proper mothers?”

Upon hearing Ash’s sudden question, Sonia was nothing short of polite: “What else? Are you saying your mother came wholesale?”

After the spat with Ash the night before, their interactions had become much more casual, not to mention that Ash even dared to touch on a softer spot in Sonia’s heart. If it weren’t for the Witch being there, Sonia might not have responded so gracefully.

“No, I’m just feeling a bit emotional because of recent events,” Ash replied. “Different societies, different regions, different cultural traditions, and different people all nurture different fruits of kinship.”

Mothers, kinship, recent events?

Diya’s ears perked up, and she observed Ash through the rearview mirror.

“If relationships were a cup of seasoning, then my relationship with my mother would probably be three spoons of sugar, five chili peppers, a small cup of bitter melon juice, one slice of lemon, and a few marshmallows mixed into a dry dish. When I’m about to face hardships, just a dip in this dish helps me chew through it.”

Hmm…

Huh!?

Both the Witch and the Sword Maiden gave Observer a peculiar look–wait, you have a mother too?

Although everyone has a mother, in Sonia’s and Diya’s understanding, the Observer should belong to the ancient beings who had been sealed for thousands of years and had only recently risen from their coffins. Given his long life, the childhood spent with parents should be but insignificant specks of memory dust, right?

But they weren’t sure, after all, they were both girls in their twenties–how could they possibly understand the psyche of someone who had lived for hundreds or thousands of years? Perhaps, this nostalgic, sauce-flavored attitude towards life was the norm among the immortals.

Sonia thought for a moment, “My relationship with my mother is probably two spoons of sugar, one spoon of vinegar, one spoon of soy sauce, and then tempered with hot oil…”

“Why is there hot oil?”

“I’d like to know why there’s hot oil too,” Sonia said lightly. “Fate really is quite a rule-breaking Chef.”

Then both turned to the Witch, and Diya hesitated for a moment: “I…I’ve never met my mother.”

After a brief silence, Sonia asked, “What resource point are we heading to next?”

“Let me see,” Ash said. “We’re almost back to the Star Hall Area that has a detailed map, but there aren’t any unmissable resource points at the edge of Star Hall. Let’s keep moving forward and see if there are any worthwhile spots to plunder…”

Although both teammates were very observant and quickly changed the topic, Diya didn’t want to let it go just yet: “Observer, why did you suddenly start talking about kinship issues, has something happened in reality?”

“Nothing much.” Ash thought for a moment and said, “It’s just that I’ve been through some things recently and discovered that the relationship between children and adults can also be a naked alliance of interests.”

“Oh wow,” Diya’s eyes grew larger, her body instinctively leaning forward slightly: “That’s a peculiar relationship.”

“I’ve also seen children use interests to threaten adults into submission.”

“Wow, anything else?”

“Between the adults and the children, there’s no basis of trust, Contracts are more trustworthy than emotional ties.”

As the similarities grew, Diya’s body couldn’t help but tremble, her speculations seemed to be gradually confirmed. Suppressing the turmoil inside her, the Witch casually asked, “It’s the first time I’m hearing this… By the way, the child you mentioned, how old are they?”

Ash thought for a moment, “Hmm… about eight years old?”

The witch was startled, “Only eight years old?”

“I didn’t ask in detail, but it should be eight years old, right?” Ash wasn’t very certain.

Diya suddenly lost interest like a deflated balloon, stopped disturbing the driver, and buried her head in the Sword Maiden’s arms to ponder.

Though Diya and her sisters had been watching the drama unfold through a mirror throughout, they were also struck by the peculiar mother-daughter relationship between Qinna and Hanna and discussed it endlessly in Liss’s consciousness.

Now that the Observer had come to the Void Realm and brought up the topic of mothers, Diya naturally made a peculiar association–

“Could the Observer be Ash?”

This association wasn’t spur of the moment but had built up over many days.

After all, Liss spent her days with Ash, and Diya spent her nights with the Observer; even if she hadn’t thought in this direction initially, over time she still developed a strange sense of deja vu: Are your brains from the same broken place? How can your thinking patterns be as similar as if they were rotated 360 degrees?

And you are even wearing the same style dark red overcoats!

More importantly, in the battle with the broken family office last night, Diya and her sisters vaguely saw Ash casting a warm yellow barrier to protect Hanna.

And the most commonly used Sword Barrier by the Observer was also a warm yellow barrier!

Of course, most of the Defense Miracles related to the Earth Magic faction were primarily yellow, but all these coincidences piling up, along with the topic of mothers as a catalyst, solidified Diya’s suspicion of “Observer Ash,” prompting her to subtly inquire about the Observer’s real situation.

At first, she thought the Observer was talking about Hanna and Qinna, but the Observer mentioned an eight-year-old child, and obviously, Hanna wasn’t young to that extent; clearly, Diya guessed wrong.

Diya snuggled in the Sword Maiden’s arms and thought carefully, why did she associate Ash with the Observer?

It was primarily that dark red overcoat.

If you look from behind, the figure of Ash wearing the overcoat and the Observer from behind were almost identical.

But the problem was that the dark red overcoat was bought by Liss as a gift for Ash! And the reason Liss bought this gift was that she thought the Observer looked handsome in a dark red overcoat, so she bought one for Ash.

It turns out, Liss deliberately dressed Ash to resemble the Observer’s image; of course, Ash would look like the Observer.

As for their thinking patterns and speech styles, upon reflection, they weren’t that similar.

After all, the Observer spoke very freely, often mocking himself and occasionally sharing some adult jokes with the Sword Maiden — with explanations from the White Queen and the Black Butler, Diya also understood what adult jokes were.

In contrast, Ash was somewhat careless but his attitude was still gentler and his conduct more proper; he hardly ever made adult jokes in front of Liss and even when Harvey and Igula discussed horrifying content, he would immediately cover Liss’s ears, very caring towards others.

As for the warm yellow Defense Miracle… It must indeed be just a coincidence!

After separating the Observer and Ash in her mind, Diya found this to be more logical: the Observer could observe herself anytime and anywhere, why would he need to disguise himself as Ash and lurk around her? Not to mention that Ash was chosen by Liss herself as her Contractor; it was impossible for the Observer to have calculated that far.

Although Diya hadn’t known the Observer for long, she knew that the Observer wasn’t someone who liked to lie. Since the Observer mentioned having an eight-year-old daughter, then he was definitely not speaking about Hanna, but was narrating a story about another parent and child that she didn’t know.

…..

Liss is about eight years old, right?

When the witch brought it up, Ash realized that he didn’t even know his foster daughter’s age, but Liss’s appearance was indeed deceptive: her teeth were even more aligned than Ash’s; he didn’t know whether she hadn’t changed her teeth yet or already had; her height was about the same as a fire hydrant, seeming to be under ten years old, but she could also be malnourished.

Yes, it was actually because Ash witnessed the abnormal mother-daughter relationship between Hanna and Qinna that he speculated about his own special situation with Liss.

The focus was on himself, not Hanna.

After all, Ash was sitting on the fence properly; capitalist bosses and their feudal noble mothers having a dispute over interests, what did it have to do with him, just a poor worker? Initially, Ash felt somewhat sympathetic when Hanna was tragically beaten by Qinna, but he didn’t expect that it was actually the daughter who calculated against the mother first; Bronze Ash declared he couldn’t meddle in such an expert-level situation.

After the mother and daughter reached a consensus, Qinna placed them–or rather imprisoned them–in the second-tier city of Vatican Mura. It was then that Ash and the others realized that the division of Vatican Mura’s second-tier city into six areas was deliberate, facilitating each Emblem family’s possession of one area.

In the past, when reading novels or seeing anime about the three big families in Star City, it was at least a combination of ‘few family members’ + ‘majority commoners’, but Vatican Mura was thoroughly dominated by six big families–this city had no one outside of these six big families; everyone in the same area was from the same family, and family members had the closest blood ties and also strongly repelled outsiders.

Rather than calling it a city, it would be more accurate to say it was a continent formed by the merging of six nationalist countries.