Witch Training Manual: My Water Magic Is Wrong

After burying Matt's body.

Emily walked over, covering her nose.

"Sir, is this all resolved?"

Wayne nodded.

Emily's gaze fell on the silver bowl.

This seemingly ordinary piece of tableware almost caused all the sixth-level powerhouses in the entire capital to turn a deaf ear and nearly drove their master to the brink of despair.

"This thing... almost killed you, sir?"

"Yeah. This is it."

Emily's gaze fell on the pile of freshly turned soil not far away, and she remained silent for a moment.

"...Sir, that child."

Wayne paused slightly, without turning back: "A mortal body cannot withstand the power of a forbidden object. From the moment he was parasitized by that thing, there was no turning back. The only thing I can do is to let him suffer less in his final moments."

Emily quickly caught up, standing beside Wayne: "Those thieves' guild members, that cultist, and that bowl... they all deserve to die."

Wayne put the silver bowl back into his pocket.

"Let's go, everything here has been taken care of."

Outside the cemetery, the manure carts had begun to leave one after another. Most of the onlookers had also dispersed, but a few informants remained, crouching on distant earthen slopes, craning their necks to peer into the depths of the cemetery.

They saw Wayne emerge from the cemetery unharmed. His robes were dusty, but his steps were steady, and he did not appear to have been seriously injured.

The group started discussing it.

"It's out! It's out!"

"He actually made it out alive!"

"What happened to the forbidden item? Was it disposed of?"

"Who knows... He doesn't seem to have many injuries, maybe he really did manage to subdue him?"

Ignoring the stares and whispers, Wayne walked straight to an inconspicuous carriage parked by the roadside.

Emily also got into the carriage.

Inside the carriage, Emily chattered on and on.

"Sir, how did you come up with that idea? Using feces... I mean, how did you know the Gluttony Vessel was afraid of that?"

Wayne made up an excuse.

"A hint from the goddess."

"...Liar. How could a goddess tell you something like that?"

"So how do you think I knew that?"

Emily opened her mouth, but after thinking for a long time, she couldn't come up with a second reasonable explanation. In the end, she could only mutter, "...Anyway, I don't think the goddess would care about this kind of thing."

"So what do you think a goddess should care about?"

"It'll manage... manage prayers, manage blessings, manage the salvation of believers' souls and stuff like that," Emily said, her voice growing increasingly unsure. "It certainly won't concern itself with trivial matters like whether a bowl is clean or not."

Wayne chuckled and stopped teasing her.

"Okay, stop guessing. As long as the result is good, that's all that matters."

Emily looked at him, her gaze complex. "You know, sir, I really thought you were going to die. The aura of the Gluttony Vessel was so strong that I could hardly breathe even across half the cemetery. If you had really died, I wouldn't know what to do."

"Everything's fine now, isn't it?"

"That's because you're smart enough to come up with that... that unconventional method." Emily's tone became more serious as she said this. "But you can't always push yourself to the brink before you come up with a solution, can you? You won this time, but what about next time? And the time after that?"

The carriage was quiet for a while.

"You're right." Wayne looked at her. "This time, I was indeed unprepared. I underestimated the danger of the forbidden item, thinking that with my late-stage fourth-tier combat power, I could at least probe its details. In the end, I almost got myself killed."

He paused for a moment, then said, "There won't be a next time."

Emily's smile returned after hearing this assurance: "That's good."

News of Wayne dealing with the Gluttony Vessel spread to every corner of the capital even faster than he returned to the city himself.

The first to receive the message was the royal palace.

After hearing the report from her bodyguard, Queen Evelyn paused, her hand holding the cup of red tea pausing. "You mean he... used excrement?"

The guard bowed his head, maintaining his kneeling posture, his voice completely flat: "Yes, Your Majesty. According to observations on the scene, the head of the Vacuum Cleansing Company mobilized all the city's dung carts to pour dung into water magic, thereby suppressing the Devouring Vessel's devouring ability, ultimately forcing the forbidden object to voluntarily interrupt its devouring process and accept the seal."

Evelyn was silent for a moment, then slowly put down her teacup.

"How did this kid come up with this?"

The guard did not answer the question.

Evelyn didn't expect him to answer.

"How is he doing now?"

"He has consumed a lot of magic power and looks visibly tired, but he has no serious external injuries and his mental state is normal. He has already returned to the Marquis's manor by carriage."

Evelyn smoothed her hair.

She had thought that the best-case scenario would be if Wayne could walk out of the cemetery alive. As for the Gluttony Vessel, her most optimistic expectation was that Wayne would simply drive it back to some corner, temporarily preventing it from causing trouble, and then she would find a way to seal it completely.

To her surprise, Wayne not only came out alive, but also brought back the Gluttony Vessel itself.

He carried a living, highly dangerous forbidden object in his arms and swaggered across half the city to his home.

She suddenly realized that the eight bodyguards she had sent were less to provide combat support for Wayne and more to be his spectators.

Evelyn withdrew her gaze from the distance, gently placed the report of victory regarding Wayne on the table, and changed the subject.

"Where is the King? How is the situation today?"

The guard immediately answered truthfully.

"His Majesty is still asleep. Today marks the thirtieth day of His Majesty's slumber. This slumber has lasted ten days longer than the last one."

"...Thirty days. Ten days longer than usual."

She put the teacup back on the tray.

"Understood. You may leave."

The bodyguards disappeared silently into the shadows of the corner.

When Wayne stepped into the house, Alice had been waiting in the front hall for quite some time. She saw Wayne walk in unharmed, and her shoulders visibly relaxed.

"Brother, you're back."

"Yes, I'm back."

Wayne nodded and sat down in the chair opposite her.

"Brother, is this round of contraband retrieval finally over?"

"That's a temporary reprieve." Wayne took the silver bowl from his arms and placed it on the table. "But the other seven forbidden items are still undecided. And there are only five months left until the Thousand-Day Purple Sun."

"Brother, what are your plans for the future?"

"The recovery of forbidden items cannot stop. But we can no longer rely on last-minute reactions and head-on confrontations like we are today. I need a truly functional intelligence network that can locate the forbidden items before they get out of control and make preparations in advance. Otherwise, if I run around alone, by the time I find all eight forbidden items, the Millennium Purple Sun will have already arrived."