A brave man may not live, but he cannot die

Chapter 152 Hook
The night flowed peacefully and quietly, with the occasional rustling of pens and soft chewing sounds echoing in the living room. An arcane academy teacher was writing sheet music, while a graduating genius student was eating fried chicken. The sheet music, the food, and the people all seemed to come from another world, yet they coexisted in a strange and harmonious way.

Chopin, Beethoven, Maksim—the works of those geniuses who shone like meteors in the history of the piano are reproduced flawlessly by Quinn. The mainstream music world favored classical music, so he wrote the Hungarian Rhapsody and the Moonlight Sonata.
What will Celia's future be like after I'm gone?

Her future lies not in the war against demons, but in the struggle for the British throne. Quinn doesn't know if the girl knows her true identity, nor can he predict whether she can reclaim the throne and avenge her parents with the support of the Eternal Cult and the Royalists. But no matter how you look at it, her future is not that of a pianist in a small mountain tavern.

But
Quinn put the completed score aside, tore off a new sheet of paper, and casually drew musical lines that were straighter than calipers.

It's hard to say whether he projected some of his complex feelings for Mi Yutong onto Celia. But he always felt he should do something, not that he had a responsibility to do anything, but simply that he wanted to.

If Celia can have an ordinary future that she likes, then Quinn hopes that when she plays the piano in the tavern, she can think of the piano teacher from her youth and then show a genuinely happy smile.

Quinn's youth was so quiet that he didn't realize he was already an adult before he even realized it.

He didn't encounter any schoolgirls in uniforms that made his heart flutter, nor did he have any playful moments filled with friendship. There were no books or beautiful memories worth reminiscing about. He simply sat under the lamplight in the countryside, writing those exercises over and over again, standing in front of the sink in the kitchen watching his classmates run past outside the window, calculating his scholarship and medical expenses, and then speeding up his dishwashing.

He knew what it felt like to carry bitterness and resentment.

If one day Celia kills her uncle and becomes the queen of millions of people in Britain, will she be happy sitting on the throne? Quinn was writing sheet music, but the face of Mi Yutong kept appearing in his mind.

What price will this still innocent and carefree girl have to pay?

He didn't know, nor did he have the ability, to arrange a lifelong safety net for those close to him, like the omnipotent protagonists in novels. He couldn't find a father for Amamiya Nene, nor could he offer any help to Celia. He occasionally thought about it, but didn't feel regret, only a slight sense of melancholy.

So Quinn removed the piece of paper that evoked images of death. Leaving Celia with these completely useless sheet music wasn't a particularly meaningful thing; he just wanted to do it.

The plate was set aside, and Lin, like a ghost, brought Quinn two pieces of fried chicken and half a pizza.

So much time had passed, yet Quinn still couldn't sense Lin's presence. He subtly turned to the side to block the sheet music, and given Lin's height, she couldn't really see what Quinn was writing. She had only come to bring Quinn food.

If there's any real change in their relationship over the past two months, it's that Lynn now saves two slices of pizza for Quinn, the cheap cook, no matter how hungry she is.

And those are the two pieces with the most cheese, and they look the most delicious.

Perhaps because she had prepared two portions of food today, Lin gave him an extra lot. Quinn knew that the little girl could definitely eat a little more, so he asked in confusion, "Aren't you going to eat anymore?"

She shook her head.

"Save some room, we can eat it tomorrow." Lin then asked impatiently, "Tomorrow, in the city, are there really any super delicious pizzas?"

“Yes.” Quinn took the plate and said calmly, “Tomorrow is the biggest holiday of the year in Eswell. Trust me, there will be super delicious pizza.”

Lin nodded without hesitation.

"Pinky promise, take me there."

Quinn reluctantly extended his little finger and hooked it with her icy little finger.

"Didn't we already pinky swear?"

“Quinn,” the little girl looked at him earnestly, “you are a good person.”

"You can't say that to a man, it will make people think of being rejected when you're courting him."

"A proposal?" She sat back on the sofa, her hands resting obediently on her knees, and thought for a long time. "If Harry agrees, we can get married."

Quinn chuckled, "Just so you can eat pizza every day?"

The little girl nodded as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"However, I do not have the ability to reproduce." Her voice became inexplicably softer.

Quinn, recalling Lynn's strange discussion in the abyss, said while writing on the staff, "Of course you don't have one; it's illegal to be that small."

It refers to her body. Lin's age is listed as sixteen according to the information, which is as legal as it gets in Temuran.

"Marriage isn't something you can just casually bring up because of a pizza, you know."

Quinn casually asked, seemingly unintentionally, "Since you remember your hometown language, do you remember your hometown customs? Like marriage, dating, or anything like that. Maybe we can find out by looking at those characteristics."

This time, Lin didn't say "I don't know" directly, but instead thought for a long time without blinking.

"The sun," Lin blurted out a word out of the blue.

"sun?"

"The sun is very small."

Quinn was stunned. Lynn meant that the sun in her hometown was smaller than the sun in Temurian. The sun of Temurian, as the creator god, appeared so large from the ground that it seemed like a star approaching the sky, and at noon it could even occupy a quarter of the sky, while the sun on Earth looked much smaller, and people often described it as "hanging high in the sky".

“That’s really disrespectful,” Quinn commented from the perspective of the Temurians, since saying “the sun is getting smaller” in this world is tantamount to telling Catholics that Jesus should be effeminate.

Lin murmured, "There are also very tall buildings, towers, things that fly in the sky, and lots of magic."

"magic?"

"Colorful lights, glass that lights up, cold wind," she said, then fell silent for a long time. "I was too young to remember."

Quinn stopped writing.

"That sounds like a nice place. If I have the chance, I'll definitely help you find your hometown."

"Really?" Lin didn't say "pinky promise" this time, because she herself didn't know if this "hometown" in her memory really existed.

Quinn extended his hand.

“Pinky promise, if I can find your parents, I will tell them not to worry about you.”

Lin stopped taking her time and instead jogged over, hooking her little finger together again.

"Don't tell me I eat pizza every day."

"Ah."

"What arcane magic will we learn today?"

"Not today, let's talk about it tomorrow."

With nothing to do, Lin returned to the sofa. She could sit there all day, doing nothing and thinking about nothing.

As payment for the pizza, Lynn had to teach Quinn arcane magic. However, even after advancing to Hero Sequence Eight, Quinn found that his control over arcane magic was still lacking; even with serious practice, he could only reach Celia's level at best. These days, he was less focused on learning arcane magic and more on learning its principles. Whenever he had questions after reading in the library, he would return to Lynn and ask her.

Lin seems to know all kinds of arcane arts, and even all kinds of magic, such as the "magic that makes hairstyles look better" she previously had. She is a genius girl who is expected to rival Merlin and lives up to her reputation.

However, she couldn't always explain things to Quinn. After all, the little girl's thought process was quite unique. Listening to her required reading comprehension, like consulting machine-translated documents in a minor language. Combining this with the obscure knowledge of arcane magic made it quite difficult to understand.

However, Quinn wasn't trying to learn anything; it was just a way to build relationships.

"Aren't you going back?" Quinn asked casually, seeing Lin still sitting on the sofa.

Lin looked up at the clock.

"It's not bedtime yet."

Only Quinn could understand that the sentence meant 'I want to stay here with you before I go to sleep'.

"it is good."

The soft rustling of the pen continued to flow with the night.

Like a plagiarist, he copied over two hundred classical piano pieces, adding various technical notes to the complex and important parts. The scores piled up into a thick stack. It was late at night, and when he turned around, Lin was nowhere to be found. The clock on the wall pointed to eleven o'clock.

Quinn stretched and stuffed the stack of sheet music that would one day explode like a nuclear bomb in the music world of Tamulan into an unremarkable leather bag. This was an arcane artifact he had bought for 330 gold pounds, and its internal storage space was more than twice as large as it appeared.

It also contained two jars of Starflower that would be used for trading tomorrow.

The bag full of coins, worth about 1200 pounds, was all the wealth he had accumulated over the past few days from the Adventurers' Guild's rewards, loot, and the profits from selling Starflowers.

A revolver with its eyeballs already fed.

A black snake scale.

Five potion bottles, two arcane scrolls.

And wrapped tightly around the sun pendant, inside which lay a pen called the Gates of Heaven.

This is Quinn's last night at the academy.

He stared coldly at the extinguished fire in the stove. Tomorrow, he would use these things to kill the girl who had just made a pinky promise with him.

Just as the Demon King had planned when he descended into this world, he would kill the hero—

(End of this chapter)