Inside the private room.

The floor was smeared with blood, and at the center lay a woman’s lifeless body. Inscribed on her skin was a pentagram, each of its five points marked with an enigmatic symbol radiating an unsettling, otherworldly energy.

The scene reeked of malevolence, no matter how one looked at it.

"If this doesn’t work, I’ll not only be facing murder charges but also get labeled as a heretical cultist…"

Sulu’s expression was grim. Taking a deep breath, he began chanting in Ancient Hebrew, his tone heavy and deliberate:

"I beseech the favor of the darkness…"
"I invoke the power of the moon…"
"O spirit wandering in the shadows... By my name, Sulu Botelli, as the caster, I summon you—return! Arise!!!"

The peculiar rhythm of Ancient Hebrew—the lingua franca of the supernatural—resonated through the room, its eerie cadence amplifying the suffocating atmosphere.

Suddenly, the candles on the table flickered and dimmed. Beatrice’s corpse, sprawled on the floor, seemed to shudder—or was it merely a trick of the mind?

“Failure!”

Sulu winced, his head throbbing as if it might split apart. His expression darkened.

He wasn’t even a true transcendent, and his mastery of this ritual was barely rudimentary. Failure was no surprise.

Thud, thud!

The sound of footsteps echoed ominously in the hallway outside.

"If I were the mastermind, I’d definitely send someone to catch me in the act… Uh, not that kind of act, but you get the idea. Either way, I don’t have much time left."

Suppressing his nausea and pounding headache, Sulu gritted his teeth and began chanting the incantation once more.

He had already crossed the threshold of no return. For better or worse, there was a stubborn streak in his character that refused to back down.

With each repetition, his chanting grew smoother, more confident. At the very least, the words no longer tripped on his tongue.

Once the feeling settled, the notes Sulu uttered grew ever more ethereal, like an eerie hymn from the underworld.

"Sir? Do you require assistance?"

The unsettling events within the room finally caught attention, and a voice from outside called out—the attendant had noticed.

Sulu's head grew heavier as he neared the final incantation.

‘This doesn’t look good... It’s probably going to fail!’

A sense of foreboding immediately overwhelmed him.

Outside, the voice grew increasingly frantic, turning into a frantic knocking, as though the door might soon be forced open.

"...By my name, Sulu Botelli, the caster... I command you to awaken!"

Sulu’s head was in a fog, but he managed to whisper the final words of the incantation.

For reasons he couldn’t explain, his voice became faint, as though another, foreign voice had somehow intertwined with his own.

The moment the second voice merged with his, the pentagram on the floor flared with a blood-red glow.

"Success!"

Sulu jolted upright, his mind suddenly clearing. "What happened? I thought it was about to fail... That last voice... It seemed mixed with..."

His expression shifted instantly.

At the final moment of the ritual, he thought he heard a whisper from another presence: "In the name of the moon!"

Buzz!

But it was already too late to undo anything.

On Beatrice’s body, the pentagram now pulsed with a vivid blood-red light, growing ever brighter.

Sulu groaned, nearly collapsing onto the floor. "Damn it!"

In that instant, he understood something—he was definitely not a transcendent!

Though the spell had worked, he lacked the proper "mana pool," so the magic had drawn directly from his life force!

On his attributes screen, his vitality stat, which had been at 0.9, plummeted to 0.6 in an instant!

It felt as though a significant amount of blood and bone had been drained from him in a single moment. His face turned ashen, and he slumped weakly onto the couch.

Buzzing!

He barely opened his eyes, and saw that the blood on the floor seemed to have gained a life of its own, swirling back into Beatrice’s chest.

Once the blood had returned, her wounds sealed up as though the knife attack had never occurred.

As the ritual concluded, the pentagram on Beatrice’s body shrank rapidly, coming to rest on her forehead, leaving behind what seemed to be a brand.

A flash of light, and the mark vanished, blending seamlessly into his skin.

But Suru could feel his mind tethered to another presence, like a rope pulling something from the other end, as if guiding a small puppy.

"It worked!"

Struggling, he issued a command: "Stand up!"

Beatrice's body stirred, slowly rising from the floor with a blank expression, her eyes shifting to lock onto him.

‘This feels a bit eerie...’

Regaining his composure, Suru opened the door that had been repeatedly slammed, his face filled with impatience. "What’s going on?"

"Uh..."

Outside the door, the anxious waiter nearly tripped over himself, quickly scanning the room.

Hmm, a man and a woman, both disheveled. The man looked pale—how much energy had he burned through?

The waiter felt a bit awkward but cleared his throat and asked, "Sir, madam, is there anything you need?"

"No... need..."

Before Suru could speak, a voice rang out from behind him. It was Beatrice—or rather, the corpse maiden!

"Sorry! I apologize for the disturbance!"

The waiter gave an awkward smile and hastily shut the door behind him.

Suru turned, his heart skipping a beat. "Damn! You can talk now?"

A corpse maiden, the most basic of servitors, was nothing more than a puppet controlled by the manipulation of a corpse, like a circus marionette. They couldn’t possibly speak.

Perhaps dark sorcerers could achieve this, but definitely not someone like Suru!

‘All supernatural rituals are fraught with danger, because you never know where they might lead… Especially those veering toward the dark, which often end in terrifying consequences…’

A fragment of demon-hunting knowledge flickered in Suru’s mind, causing a chill to run down his spine.

He looked at Beatrice. For some inexplicable reason, after turning into a corpse maiden, her skin had become even more pallid and translucent, exuding an aura of cold elegance—like an ice queen.

"Stand up, sit down, reach out, lift your leg... speak... huh? Why aren’t you speaking?"

He tried again, only to find that the corpse maiden he had created had clearly undergone some kind of mutation. She was no longer just a simple marionette, but could follow his commands, performing semi-intelligent actions.

‘It seems… I’ve made something strange! If this ritual mutation goes wrong, the chances of a bad outcome are almost ninety-nine percent!’

"Forget it."

Suru glanced around the private room, relieved to see that the blood flow reversal had truly worked. The room was only a bit disordered, but there was no blood left—nothing remained on him or Beatrice. Even the blood on their clothes had flowed back into the corpse.

He quickly donned his coat and ordered Beatrice to follow him. They left the private room, one trailing the other.

‘First, let’s go somewhere crowded, then get the hell out of here—the farther, the better!’

It felt almost like a couple, but Suru secretly issued a command.

The underlying meaning of this command was to create an alibi and get far away from the scene.

If this were a normal corpse maiden, it would "power down" and collapse once it strayed too far from the caster. But this one was clearly different.

Given the uncontrollability of the mutated corpse maiden, Suru had no intention of investigating it further. He just wanted to distance himself from the trouble as quickly as possible.

‘Sorry, Beatrice, may your soul find peace.’

Watching her retreating figure, Suru let out a sigh of relief, tightened his coat, and prepared to find a crowded spot to calm his nerves and establish his alibi.

‘This won’t end here...’

‘Damn it... how did my date turn into this? That waiter... his smile really irritated me. There was blood in the room, but I never wanted it to happen like this. Damn it!’