Several days have passed since Maka left Hogwarts. Originally, no one knew about his journey. Where had he been in the past few days? What did you do again? No one even knows.
But in fact, these days, he has been staying in the same place and has never left.
This place is called the Tomb of Despicable Herbo.
In the deepest part of the underground palace where he couldn't even see his fingers, Maka was still sitting on the floor. A thick notebook was floating steadily in front of him, and he was writing quickly on the parchment page.
Beside him, a soft glow rose and fell, floating slightly up and down, providing him with ample illumination.
It's just that this stone room is too big, even this light group cannot completely illuminate it, and most of the rest of the space is still submerged in endless darkness.
Suddenly, Macana's right hand stopped writing rapidly and coughed twice. The sound was not loud, but the underground palace was so quiet and empty that his coughing sound spread far away in an instant.
He shook his head slightly, then raised his eyes and looked ahead.
Directly in front of his current position is a huge ink-colored stone monument. The size of this stone monument is astonishingly huge. Even though the main tomb chamber is wide enough, it still occupies more than half of the place.
At this time, most of the stone monument is still in darkness, so what is Maka looking at
But I saw him casually picking up the staff beside him and gently pressing the tip against a certain point on the ground. Suddenly, a stream of magic power flowed from the body of the staff to the top, and was continuously transported out.
Suddenly, several blue light spots lit up silently, and quickly flowed into lines on the ground, quickly spreading from the point touched by the staff.
Along the way, the blue fluorescent lines appeared with a large number of complex branches, and every time they passed some branches, several strange symbols would light up. Soon, these lines and magic runes surrounded the black stone tablet, forming a large rune array that seemed to have no rules.
When the array that almost occupied most of the open space was all lit up, the stone stele that was not originally in the darkness suddenly reacted - on the originally smooth stone stele, purple-black shapes quietly appeared. Text.
Maka, who was sitting on the ground, seemed to be used to all this, and did not show the slightest expression of surprise. This is natural... because just after completing this formation diagram two days ago, he has seen this scene several times.
Now, as the words on the stone tablet appeared, Maka immediately compared them with the contents in his own notes. At present, the magic power he can use is very limited, and the time he can use to activate the rune array is not long, so he has to seize the time every time.
Most of the characters in these words are not unusual. They have no magical power in themselves. They seem to be just a combination of ideograms.
However, these characters that look like simplified Chinese paintings look familiar. If anything, they are actually somewhat similar to early ancient Egyptian characters. But even people like Maka, who have studied ancient characters and symbols deeply, don't remember that they have ever seen them in that ancient book or rubbings.
Therefore, he had to go through a series of interpretations and translations in order to transform the words on the stone tablet into specific content that he could understand.
In fact, this kind of work of analyzing ancient texts is the most time-consuming and energy-consuming. Whether in the Muggle world or the magical world, those scholars often spend their entire lives on an unsolved text.
Fortunately, a small part of the text symbols displayed on this black stone tablet are real rule runes.
Words containing magic have a natural advantage in conveying meaning, because they allow wizards to intuitively feel their own meaning. Therefore, even though Maka's understanding of the rule runes is still very superficial, it has brought great convenience to his analysis and translation work.
There is no doubt that this kind of writing is a unique narrative system centered on regular runes, with ordinary hieroglyphs as auxiliary interpretations.
If he could find more inscriptions like this, it might in turn help him speed up the process of analyzing the rule runes.
At this moment, it was the last time he activated the rune array. And all he had to do was compare it with the original text again to check whether there was any deviation in the text he originally copied.
As for the content of these texts…
"...The following half of the text should be some kind of ritual from ancient times?"
After comparing the original text and finding that there were no errors or omissions, Maka stopped transmitting magic power and returned her gaze to the pages of the note.
In the inscription that appeared, some objects were described very straightforwardly. They were a long sword, a mirror, a dagger, a cup and a box.
For the latter two, Maka had no idea yet, but the first three forced him to make a series of associations.
Of course, his purpose this time was not these dangerous and weird rituals or magic props, but one of the rule runes that appeared in these inscriptions.
This regular rune is located in the center of the stone tablet and is larger than other text symbols. If the other content is showing an unclear ancient ritual, then what is expressed around this rule rune is exactly the meaning represented by the rune.
What Maka is currently translating is the content of the inscription, and part of the content in the inscription is translating a rule rune. Although this was the purpose of Maka's trip, he did not expect that the result would be manifested in this form.
The last time he was just conducting experiments on mice, he inadvertently saw the fleeting appearance of this rule rune. He thought that this time he would definitely fight against the rune for a while!
After reading the contents carefully again, Maka closed the notebook and packed up all the scattered things around her. Immediately afterwards, he walked directly towards the side of the stone room.
"Miss Schon, it's time to eat."
In a corner of the stone room of the underground palace, Helen was leaning against the rough wall with her eyes closed, looking rather haggard.
To be honest, Maka didn't abuse her. Not to mention the abuse, even for the three meals a day, even if Maka canceled her meals because she was too busy, she never missed one meal.
But after all, Helen never seemed to have any appetite, and he had to force her to even eat.
"Hey, it's time to eat!" Maka said without raising her head while taking out the dry food and water, "If you don't eat, will I force you to eat again?"
As soon as she heard the word "forced", Helen finally reacted.
She pursed her lips slightly, then opened her eyes and sat upright, silently reaching out and picking up a piece of bread. Although there was a jar of delicious orange jam standing next to it, she seemed to not notice it at all and just started to nibble on it.
In fact, for the first two days she had been silently refusing to eat. Maka, who didn't have much effort, after trying to persuade her several times to no avail, simply used magic to mix bread and water together, and then poured it into her throat.
Although under the influence of magic, it basically felt like drinking a large amount of water, but the sticky taste made Helen retch for most of the day.
After that, she finally gave up her plan to go on a hunger strike. It was obvious that Maka didn't want her to die, and if Maka didn't let her die, she felt that she probably wouldn't die.
The young wizard was astonishingly powerful, more powerful than any wizard she had ever seen.
At least in her past mission experience, she believed that she could be said to be the natural enemy of wizards and had very strong resistance to most spells. But in Maka's hands, she was captured without even resisting a few times.
"Miss Schoen, actually you don't need to be so vigilant all the time." After Maka put all the food on the blanket, she sat next to him and grabbed a piece of bread, took a bite and said vaguely, "Don't you have nothing? Do you want to say something?”
Helen naturally heard Maka's words, but she didn't want to respond at all. For her, the final outcome was already doomed before the task was completed, and she didn't want to say anything at all now.
But Maka didn't pay attention. If he had to say it, he had spent hundreds of days alone before, talking to himself and so on, it was just a normal thing. Others might find the silence awkward, but he didn't feel it at all.
"Okay! If I say that what you are going to do, I will only temporarily stop it..." He looked at Helen and said, "Can you give me a different reaction?"
As soon as she finished speaking, Helen's little hand holding the bread suddenly tightened so much that the soft bread deformed. She paused and looked in Maka's direction, with a trace of doubt in her eyes.
"… What's the meaning?"
Probably because she hadn't spoken for several days, her originally clear voice became a little hoarse.
"Isn't your mission to sneak into Hogwarts and break the Mirror of Erised?" Maka smiled casually and said nonchalantly, "Although I don't understand why you are so persistent, in fact, you still have The opportunity to complete your mission. All I want is for it to come later."
"Really?" Helen asked hesitantly.
"Of course, do I need to lie to you? What's the point?" Maka said, swallowing the food in her mouth, and said very simply, "How about I let you break it now?"
When Maka said this, Helen's expression changed several times, apparently causing more confusion and doubt about Maka's words.