After Gilead had left, Eugene sighed, “Looks like even Patriarchs have it hard.”
As expected, Eugene still didn’t want to become the Patriarch. After reaffirming this desire, Eugene walked over to the unicorn’s heart. There was no reason for him to pointlessly procrastinate, so he was thinking of absorbing the unicorn’s heart right here and now.
There were several methods for doing so.
Although eating it directly was an okay way to go about it, Eugene didn’t choose to use such a barbaric method. While circulating the White Flame Formula, he reached out to the heart.
‘This is the cleanest and easiest way to do it,’ Eugene nodded.
He would only be extracting the mana from the heart. This was the cleanest way to do it if one could exert complete control over the mana. Eugene concentrated his focus and grabbed the unicorn’s heart.
Vwuuuu!
The heart began to shake from vibrations. The mana contained within was drawn out completely before being absorbed by Eugene. Eugene did not lose focus as he examined the purity of the mana.
‘Good. There aren’t that many impurities.’
The huge amount of mana was circulated to his cores. From here on was the most crucial step. He needed to have his cores refine the mana while removing any unnecessary impurities. The trio of stars around his heart began to shine brighter as they went to work. As Eugene calmly directed the mana to flow into his cores, he fell into thought.
‘If it’s like this, it seems like I might be able to reach the Fourth Star before I turn 20.’
If the people at the main estate had heard this, they might have fainted from the surprise. In the three hundred years of the Lionheart Clan’s history, not a single ancestor had managed to reach the Fourth Star before becoming an adult.
‘Although I can’t be sure that a star will form just because the quantity of my mana increases.’
After four years of practicing the White Flame Formula, Eugene had realized something. The increase in stars wasn’t dependent solely on the amount of mana possessed but also on how deep the understanding of the White Flame Formula was and how skilled one was at circulating it through their whole body.
In this respect, Eugene held an overwhelming advantage over his predecessors due to his past life, both in terms of improving his depth of understanding and his skill in circulating it throughout his body. These were both things that Eugene was definitely capable of doing.
‘The Patriarch and Gion are at the Sixth Star. Vermouth had reached the Tenth Star.’
Reaching the Sixth Star alone was enough to get you recognized as one of a handful of the strongest warriors on the continent.
‘It looks like I’ll have to start mixing things up before I reach the Fifth Star.’
Eugene had no intention of blindly following the path left by the White Flame Formula. Since he had already learned a lot of things from his previous life, he felt that he might as well meld the formula together with everything he had inherited from Hamel.
‘But it’s still too early for that.’
Right now, he was only seventeen. There was no need to be hasty. As he thought this, Eugene took his hand off the unicorn’s heart. After all the mana had been sucked out of the heart, it had shrunk to the size of a finger. With a flick of his mana, he disintegrated the heart.
Then he took out the fragment of the Moonlight Sword that he had kept in his vest and placed it on the windowsill.
“...Now I’m sure of it,” he murmured.
The fragment absorbed the moonlight shining in from outside the window and began to emit a soft, pale light.
Eugene admired the light for a few moments.
* * *
“They cost 300 million sals,” Gargith said as he handed Eugene’s card back to him with a proud look on his face.
Eugene couldn’t help but blurt out a curse, “Motherfucker.”
“I arranged for us to deposit the payment through a public bank. If we don’t make the deposit before noon today, the right to purchase them will be transferred to the next highest bidder, so we need to hurry,” prompted Gargith.
“Can’t we just let them have it?” Eugene asked.
“No, we can’t. After all, I had to participate in such an explosive bidding war just to win the bid.”
“How much was its initial price?”
“Fifty million sals.”
“Fifty million sals for a giant’s balls… And it went up from there to 300 million sals? There really are just so many crazy bastards in this world.”
“It’s because it’s just that valuable,” Gargith said with a happy smile. “If you were there to see it in person, you would probably understand what I’m feeling.”
Eugene scoffed, “Even if I do see the giant balls in person, they definitely will just look like balls.”
“No, it’s different,” Gargith insisted. “Overwhelmingly so.”
“At the very least, I’m sure that they’ll definitely be overwhelmingly big. Were they hairy?” Eugene asked in morbid curiosity.
“They looked really neat after they had been spruced up.”
“Don’t say another word because I really don’t want to imagine what that looked like. Anyways… how do we go about making that deposit?”
Eugene and Gargith had arrived at Pentagon’s public bank. They were here to deposit the cost of the balls into the auction house’s secret account. Eugene was feeling flustered, as this was his first time at a bank since he was reborn, and he didn’t know the first thing about making a deposit into another person’s account.
“Is this really your first time at a bank?” Gargith asked.
Eugene hesitated to admit it, “Um….”
“I can’t believe it…,” Gargith trailed off in shock. “I had heard that Gidol was in the boonies, but they don’t even have banks there? How is something like that even possible?”
Gargith was looking at Eugene with a sincere expression of disbelief. Eugene simply couldn’t accept being treated like a bumpkin by someone with shaggy hair, strong body odor, bulging muscles, who wore frilly clothes, and who had bought giant’s testicles for 300 million sals.
“Gidol has a bank as well,” Eugene insisted.
“Then why are you acting like this is your first time?”
“Because I never had a reason to visit it….”
“So it turns out that you’re a country bumpkin.”
“Don’t spout such bullshit. You can grab any passerby and ask them who looks more like a country bumpkin between the two of us, and we’ll see what they say.”
“It’s wrong to judge people by their appearances.”
“This son of a—”
Although Eugene really wanted to curse at him, Gargith’s words were more or less correct….
Eventually, Eugene came up with a rebuttal, “...Is it really the right thing to call someone a country bumpkin just because they’ve never been to a bank before?”
“You just need to go up to one of the windows and tell them that you need to make a deposit to this account,” Gargith explained.
“Why aren’t you answering me?”
“You would usually get a ticket number, but since we’re transferring such a large amount and even have a black card, there shouldn’t be any need to wait. Follow me.”
“Answer me, you pig bastard.”
“I’m not a pig.”
Right up until they reached the counter, Gargith refused to answer his question. Sure enough, once they approached one of the bank employees and showed them the black card, they were immediately escorted to a private VIP room.
“Thank you for visiting our bank,” the head of the bank came out personally to accept the card while bowing his head.
Before too long, they had finished setting up the deposit, and the bank manager returned with the card.
The bank manager began peddling his services, “Do you have any interest in opening up a separate personal account? If you make one now—”
“No need,” Eugene interrupted as he took the card and headed out of the bank.
Smiling happily, Gargith followed behind Eugene.
“Let’s head to my place,” Gargith suggested.
“Why?” came the curt response.
“They said they’d make the delivery as soon as they received our deposit.”
“Are you telling me to go all the way to your place just to get a look at those giant balls? Are you insane?”
“If you see them for yourself, you’re sure to change your mind about them. I’ve said it before, but if you want, I can give you some of their extract once it’s been made.”
“I said that I wasn’t going to eat any of that shit.”
“I just can’t understand you….”
“...For now, let’s head to your place.”
“Have you changed your mind?”
“Apart from the giant’s balls, there’s something else I want to see.”
Although he didn’t have any interest in those balls, he was interested in the Red Flame Formula that Gargith had inherited. While he had already taken a look at Gerhard’s Red Flame Formula, rather than that mostly unmodified Formula, he wanted to see the Red Flame Formula that had been improved by Gargith’s family.
‘Because their version is probably a lot better,’ Eugene thought.
He wanted to compare theirs to the White Flame Formula to see where the differences lay. While thinking about this, Eugene stepped out of the bank.
As he was heading down the stairs, Eugene’s body suddenly froze to a halt.
“...Huh?” he gasped.
In the square below the bank, among the teeming crowds, he had spotted a glimpse of purple hair.
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