LIGHTNOVELWORLD Chapter 350: Wishing Well.
Loki looked laughingly.
He was currently inside an unassuming shack acting as the store owner of the Wishing Well stall which had become a frequent sight in the depths of Knockturn Alley.
Sometimes the store would appear with bright lights as if it was reaching out to the whole world about its presence, while other times it would simply appear well merged into its surroundings like it had always existed in its place for aeons before.
It was a store that sold wishes of different varieties for a different price each time.
Sometimes it sold wishes for a drop of your blood while other times it would sell you a wish simply because the coin flipped heads, but other times you would simply be kicked out of the store even if you wanted to sacrifice yourself.
The store had a strange rule. It only accepted one customer each time it was available. And given how sporadic its appearances were, everyone considered it to be lucky to be chosen by the store.
Yet, one thing was common among all the people who visited the store, they left the store with the biggest smiles of their lives.
Inside the store, Loki watched the man standing in front of him speak while trembling in anger. The man's eyes were red and veiny, his arms were frail but filled with hate and his body shook with the fuel of hatred.
It looked like the man had been cursed by hate itself.
"I want power! I want the power to take revenge on all those fools who took my daughter's life!!! I want to make them pay for every last bit of her pain!!"
Loki nodded with a smile as he spoke to the man in an ethereal tone, "Take this and go. Once you even so much as scratch them with this knife they'll die the most painful death anyone could ever suffer."
The man looked crazily at the small knife Loki was holding in his palm. There was a strange sense of power it radiated. It seemed as if space seemed to lightly bend around it as if afraid to touch the object in the wrong way.
"Will this work!?" The man asked with a growing sense of satisfaction in his heart.
"Of course, it will work. I promise you it will work. As long as you scratch your enemies with this they will suffer, even more than you can imagine."
The man nodded before he took the knife from Loki's hands and walked out of the store.
He looked at the moon as if reminiscing something of the past and then his eyes firmed. It showed in his next step since as the man walked away from the store his steps slowly turned more and more confident. He clenched the knife in his hands firmly as he walked deeper into the dark alleyway.
He didn't notice, but the store he'd left behind vanished as if dissolving into smoke that scattered into the air. The man who manned it similarly dissolved into the air with a smile.
A small creature rested on his head, but it fell down when the man vanished because it was sleeping peacefully.
*squeak*
The man walked unhurriedly through the darkness as he crossed several secluded alleyways where people remained hoarded around bundles of fire to escape the waning winter cold. His steps deliberate as he sought out a single destination amidst the routinely occurring horrors around him.
Soon the man stopped in front of a silent house. Its silence emerged not from its lack of occupants, but from magic that blanketed the house like a thick curtain.
The man looked at the bone knife in his hand, watching its sharp edge before palming it and walking towards the two people guarding its entrance.
"He~ Back here old man? Want to get beaten up again?" One of the guards asked with a laugh as he whipped out his wand.
The man gave him a sharp glare but kept walking in his direction.
"I guess you have Merlin's balls to come back to this place." The guard said taking aim as the man walked so close to him that he was only a breath away. "Or maybe just a death wish? Like your daughter. Or are you here to sell someone else's daug-"
The guard couldn't finish his sentence before the bone dagger turned crimson as it was dyed with blood.
"Hmm..?" The other guard looked at the scene with confusion since the first guard had suddenly stopped speaking and was suddenly gurgling.
But before the other guard could even say or do something the old man moved closer to him and swiped his neck with the now crimson, bone dagger.
Both the guards now had their hands on their necks, and their mouths leaked blood.
The man stood there waiting for something to happen and soon enough both the people he had 'killed' by slicing their necks started to tremble.
At first, they only tried to scream in pain, but the blood in their throats kept them silent. Soon they started to tremble and scratch their bodies as if there was something inside them that they wanted to tear everything and rip them apart from the inside out.
Suddenly their bodies froze in the posture they were in, their hands bent, their clothes torn, their nails scratching at their chest. It was as if someone had doused a bucket of fast-hardening wax on them.
This confused the man for a second and he frowned.
"That's it?" the man mumbled.
But that was when their eyeballs started to frantically spin around, searching for any way to escape the situation they were in. A thick trunk started to grow out of the base of their spine as its branches emerged from the base of their necks.
Their mouths hung in perpetual shock as they tried to scream to forget the madness of what was happening to them. Their eyes rolled back and their fingers trembled trying to scratch their chests but they remained frozen.
Soon branches started to sprout out of their fingers and given how they pointed towards their chests, the branches pierced them, slowly.
Remarkably even after all this, the two guards were alive. But the only indication of their life was the beating heart that was visible through the wound on their chest, the occasional tremor that showed they wanted to break out of the situation and their frantically rolling eyeballs.
Everything else remained frozen.
The old man smiled as he gripped the bone knife tighter before walking into the silent house.
A macabre art installation of trees with living bodies hung on it emerged in Knockturn Alley that night.
It was named the Silent House incident.
Loki, who had retrieved the knife after the old man had acted out his revenge, read about the incident when Ethan assigned them the task of finding out who was involved in this incident and how it had happened.
'I mean who'd ever guess that it was a knife filled with corruption from an outer god and the Primordial Demoness herself?'
'Hmmm….if Ethan is worried about this then that means people in the Ministry are taking note of the situation…it'd be a good time to spread the word about the Wishing Well store to the entire Ministry of Magic.'
'I should inform Laura about this before the matter gets any bigger so that I can have her backing.'
'I could also tell her that I'm using the store to perform a covert investigation of the darker parts of Knockturn Alley…I mean I'm half sure you-know-who is up to something there.'
'I'm sure she already knows something's up too.'
'With the rate of reports about various cults forming in the alley and still escaping our clutches along with the rising number of kidnappings, it stinks of a planned coup of some sort.'
'Someone is trying to worsen the life of people there so that they can do something big.'
'I should prepare a present for him…shouldn't I? After all the trouble he went to make me join the triwizard tournament after all…'
'And while I have an idea regarding what I want to do and what I can do, it is still hard to judge if this will work before I actually try it out.'
'If it does work, it would mean I can have the upper hand against you-know-who in a straight fight at least once.'
'It should even be enough to seriously wound him if not kill him outright.'
'But it is pretty hard to pull off…'
'I need to learn about souls to be able to do anything about it all.'
'And above all, I need to grow stronger myself…'
'I need to digest my Sequence 5 potion as much as I can before I fight him.'
'I doubt I can get to Sequence 4 before fighting him though.'
'Digesting by granting people's wishes is too slow…'
'It should speed up after I involve Laura in it though.'
'But how do I involve her?'
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