"It’s pretty clear that all of these incidents were connected, and the only thing binding them together... was a curse," Ocean announced, his voice steady, cutting through the murmurs like a blade.

A ripple ran through the chamber. Some gasped outright, their expressions betraying disbelief, while others exchanged uneasy glances, as if Ocean had merely confirmed the suspicions they dared not voice.

Ocean’s gaze swept the room just as Davian slipped in quietly, trying not to draw attention. He maneuvered his way past a few startled aides until he reached Lyall and Sol. Standing beside them, he shot Ocean a sheepish smile, mouthing, Sorry.

Ocean didn’t react. His expression remained unshaken, his composure deliberate. He continued.

"There are generally two categories of curses," he explained, his voice dipping lower, almost as though the very word curse carried weight. "The body-bound curse—which shackles the flesh—and the soul-bound curse—which chains the spirit. And in almost every case... the caster is a demon."

He paused, letting the heaviness settle, before adding, "But there is another variety. A curse cast without summoning a demon at all—achieved by channeling only a fragment of its power."

At that, Sol flinched ever so slightly, though enough for Ocean to catch. His eyes flicked toward him briefly before returning to the assembly.

"The ones capable of such an atrocity," Ocean continued, his tone tightening, "are not demons. They are humans."

The room grew taut with silence. Breaths hitched. The thought slithered into everyone’s minds at once—the enemy they had been hunting, expecting to be an otherworldly monster, was instead a human. One of their own kind.

A single name seemed to pulse in their collective thoughts, unspoken, heavy, but present all the same. Yet no one dared to break the silence.

Ocean’s eyes drifted toward Kai, who stood stiff among the adults. For a moment, hesitation flickered across Ocean’s face. What he was about to reveal wasn’t meant for a child’s eyes—truthfully, it was hardly something grown men could stomach. Yet Kai was here, and if he was to understand the gravity of their enemy, he had to see it.

Reluctance hardened into resolve. Ocean glanced at Enora. She read the look instantly and gave a small, understanding nod before moving closer to Kai. The boy tensed at her sudden nearness but said nothing, his jaw set. Sylvia, ever perceptive, stepped quietly to his other side, her presence a silent reassurance.

Ocean strode toward the long table in the center of the chamber. Draped in a heavy black cloth, the object atop it had gone ignored until now, as though the gathering instinctively avoided it. With a steady hand, Ocean took hold of the cloth. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

The moment he pulled it back, a wave of horror rippled through the hall.

Gasps broke out, several men recoiling, others cursing under their breath. A few clapped hands over their mouths, their composure crumbling.

Ocean did not flinch. He watched them first, gauging their reactions, before letting his own eyes fall to the contents of the large glass box.

Inside lay the remains of a human body—if it could still be called that. Severed pieces floated in some foul, preserving liquid: two arms, two legs, a torso, and the most striking absence of all—a missing head. Carved into every piece of flesh were intricate inscriptions, symbols that seemed to writhe under the dim light. The skin around each mark had blackened, rotting as though the very life had been sucked out of it.

The smell seeped faintly even through the sealed glass, metallic and foul, thick enough to claw at the throat.

"Wh–what the hell is this?" one of the aides stammered, his face drained of color.

"Who would... who could do such a thing?" another whispered, voice trembling.

Even Kai, who had stubbornly kept his eyes fixed on the box, turned pale. His breathing quickened, chest rising and falling sharply. At once, Enora drew him against her side, shielding him, while Sylvia’s hand pressed gently to his shoulder, grounding him.

"Kai," Ocean said evenly, his voice softer than before, though still carrying that steady authority. "Would you like to stay and listen, or step outside?"

Kai squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, as if fighting nausea. He swallowed hard, his throat working visibly, before pushing away both Enora’s and Sylvia’s support.

"I–I’m fine," he managed, though his breath came uneven.

"You don’t have to force yourself, Young Master," Enora murmured gently.

"Yes," Sylvia added, her brow furrowed, "it’s fine if you—"

"I said, I’m fine." Kai cut them off, his voice trembling at first, then firming as he clenched his fists at his sides. His small frame straightened with surprising resolve. "I can handle this."

His words echoed in the chamber, striking deeper than anyone expected. The adults, who had moments ago recoiled in fear, now looked at the boy with something like shame—and then, with renewed determination. Several men straightened their backs, steeling themselves once more, as if taking courage from the resolve of a child who refused to falter.

Ocean’s gaze lingered on Kai, measuring, weighing. The boy’s courage was genuine, though Ocean could see the struggle behind it. Still, he allowed it. Sometimes, will alone was a weapon.

Ocean’s eyes then went over to Sol who looked impassive though Davian had his hand over his shoulder.

Ocean’s eyes swept across the room, lingering briefly on each face—gauging whether they were ready to stomach more. Silence hung heavy in the chamber, broken only by the faint hum of breath and the rustling of fabric as someone shifted uneasily. Then, with a steady calm, Ocean continued.

"I happened to find a grimoire in the collection of books you entrusted to me, Archmage," he said.

Silas’ brows furrowed, a deep line carving into his forehead. "Do you mean to say... you read all of them?"

Ocean inclined his head once.

Silas’ frown darkened, suspicion laced with something like unease. "Impossible. Some of those tomes are written in dialects so ancient even I can’t decipher them. And there are volumes that bear languages long forgotten by men or elves alike. How did you..."

The question trailed off, his tone hanging somewhere between disbelief and accusation.

Ocean gave no reply. He couldn’t—at least not truthfully. He could not reveal that he bore the Gift of Linguistics, a blessing bestowed upon him by Goddess Athena herself, back when he had first encountered the Supreme Aqua Dragon. To speak of it now would only invite more questions, more scrutiny.

Marquis Fairisles who noticed Ocean’s silence cleared his throat.

"It’s useless to linger on how he deciphered the text what’s important is the contents of that grimore." Marquis Fairisles said and then turned to Ocean, "What does it say, Marquis Ocean?"

Ocean shot a grateful glance at Marquis Fairisles before he shifted his gaze to Roan, who stepped forward at once. With both hands, Roan presented him a thick, black-bound book. Its cover looked like it had been stretched from some kind of leather, though the origin was far from ordinary. Upon it gleamed a grotesque symbol, a ram’s skull with curling horns, etched so deeply it seemed almost alive, as though the hollow sockets of its eyes might blink.

A chill ran through the air. Some of the aides instinctively stepped back, their instincts prickling with unease at the book’s aura.

Ocean accepted it without flinching. Setting it down upon the table with deliberate care, he pulled open its heavy cover. The old binding groaned, releasing the faint scent of iron and burnt herbs, as if the parchment itself had been steeped in blood and smoke.

He turned the vellum pages with gloved precision, each one filled with spidery, alien script and strange illustrations. The writing meant nothing to the others, but Ocean moved through it as though he’d walked these roads before. Finally, he stopped.

"This," he said, flattening the book for all to see.

On the page lay a disturbing sketch—an illustration of a human body, meticulously divided into parts. Limbs severed, torso dissected, inscriptions curling across each segment in grotesque spirals. The resemblance to the body within the glass box was uncanny, almost exact.

The words surrounding the image were utterly unreadable to anyone else—lines of jagged script that twisted and curled, like the scrawls of a madman. Yet Ocean’s eyes followed them fluently, his expression grim as he recited the words written near the illustration.

"Behold, the curse herein described binds both flesh and soul, and upon its planting doth it awaken calamities manifold in the lands where it lies."

A hush fell over the room. The connection between the corpse and this grimoire was undeniable, and the thought that such knowledge had been deliberately recorded, deliberately preserved, turned their unease into something darker.

Sol stepped forward with the others, his frown deepening, as though something in the grimoires struck a chord he’d rather not recall.

Ocean rested his palm on the opened book, his voice steady yet resonant enough to command the entire hall.

"These grimoires were not written by ordinary men," he began. "They were the works of high-class mages—or rather, what history once named Witches and Warlocks, practitioners whose craft specialized in curses. Such curses were not trivial hexes, but weapons wielded long before the Dragons descended. In the earliest days of the Great War, demons did not immediately launch sieges upon cities. No... they first made certain that mankind drowned in despair."

He let the words sink in before continuing.

"And what, you may ask, could break humans in bulk?"

His gaze swept the table, then lingered on Zach.

Zach’s eyes widened as understanding struck, his voice no more than a whisper: "Epidemics."

Ocean inclined his head. "Epidemics. Droughts. Unquenchable fires. Famines that left nations skeletal. Calamities so unnatural they made even the faithful believe that the Gods had abandoned them."

A murmur rippled through the gathering, but Ocean’s voice cut clean through it.

"Now, you may wonder... why orchestrate such suffering? Why not simply begin the war, when the demons already possessed overwhelming might?"

Some of them nodded unconsciously, the unspoken question tugging at their minds.

Ocean’s hand hovered over the dark vellum page as his expression hardened. "The demons were restricted. Their essence could only thrive where evil and despair were already rooted. They needed humanity broken first—faithless, hopeless, hollow. And so they turned to proxies. They targeted chosen individuals, gifted them fragments of their power, and bound them into covens. Through those humans, disasters spread like wildfire across the world. Not random chaos—designed strategy. A war carefully prepared, executed with one goal: destroy the world as it was... and rule its ashes."

Silence fell, taut and oppressive. To many in the room, it sounded less like history and more like a mirror reflecting the present. The notion that the war with demons was no longer a memory but creeping into their lives again settled in every chest like lead.

Several opened their mouths, desperate to ask, to deny, to demand clarity—but Ocean’s unyielding presence silenced them. He wasn’t finished.

Ocean rested his hand against the glass box, his gaze sweeping over the grotesque collection inside. Each body part had been retrieved from different locations, scattered as if someone had gone to great lengths to ensure they would never be found. That was why he had dispatched Nox. The owl’s sensitivity to mana made him invaluable, capable of tracing the faintest residues of dark magic. Without Nox’s guidance, those pieces might have remained buried in obscurity.

But it was only after retrieving something strange from Denril that Ocean began to suspect a curse was at work. The thought had lodged in his mind like a thorn, sharpened when he returned the following morning to inspect the remnants of the ballroom chaos. Among the splintered remains of the great clock, a severed arm jutted out, half-buried in the wreckage. The cleaners hadn’t noticed it yet. Ocean seized it quickly, his expression unreadable, and carried it away. Since then, he had been turning over the disturbing question in his mind—why would a severed, curse-engraved arm be hidden in Denril’s royal palace?

The question gnawed at him until he heard of the sudden unrest in Ryujin and he rushed back to Sestia. There, another arm emerged, engraved in the same twisted manner. And in that moment, the truth had clicked. The limbs were not isolated horrors, not chance discoveries of cruelty. They were pieces of something far larger, fragments scattered deliberately, like bones of a puzzle waiting to be reassembled.

"The right arm of this body was found at Oasis Foundation School, the same day the fire broke out," Ocean said, his finger tracing across the map before shifting to the next point.

"This second arm, I uncovered in Denril, buried in the clock tower—the very one from which those black spectres emerged."

Gasps rippled through the room, sharp and uneasy. Those who had been with Ocean in Denril stiffened at the memory, the color draining from their faces.

"This left leg," Ocean went on, voice steady though the air grew heavier with every word, "was retrieved from an abandoned barn in your territory, Lord Snake."

The man’s fists clenched at his sides, his jaw tightening, though he said nothing.

"And the remaining body parts were discovered within the lands of Lord Hawke and Lord Devil." At this, both men froze, their postures taut and defensive.

Ocean’s gaze lingered on them only a moment before he continued, his tone carrying a faint edge. "It was fortunate that your defenses were strong. Otherwise, the enemy’s desired outcome may have already been realized."

But then his eyes fell upon the empty space above the torso. His voice dropped lower, weighted with a grim tension.

"The head is still missing. Without it, we can’t know who this person truly was." A shadow crossed his expression, grim and thoughtful.

"If it isn’t hidden in the places we’ve searched... then it must lie somewhere Nox cannot reach." He paused, letting the weight of his words sink in. "Either too far—or far too close."