Chapter 40 - The temple to their love

Words : 1344 Updated : Sep 29th, 2025

Chapter 40 of "The Girl Who Hacked The Magic System" opens revealing intense scenes: Chapter 40: Chapter 40 - The temple to their love Okay, that scorpion seems dangerous, but... Keep reading!

Chapter 40: Chapter 40 - The temple to their love Okay, that scorpion seems dangerous, but at least it doesn’t look able to get out of that chamber. Just to double-check, I cast Appraise Object on this barrier. ---------- Juno’s Inner Sanctum Barrier A barrier that seals a monster-type creature. Extra Information: A barrier into which anyone can enter, but nobody can exit. The barrier was created 1,328 years, 10 months, and 3 days ago. ---------- Hm... So, was it created to seal that scorpion? It looks weird to seal a monster in this place. Well, at least it won’t come to hunt me, so let’s leave it aside and do some exploring on the floor above. I might have passed the place where Cailleach is without noticing. I backtrack, going up the staircase onto the other floor. ::: One entire hour has passed, and there’s no sign of where Cailleach might be. This place has a grand total of eighteen chambers. All of them are decorated with motifs of the divine couple. It really does look like a museum dedicated to the lovers. There are even some personal items, like a comb, exposed over a pedestal. Using the Appraise Object on items gives snippets of their story, but they are all from when they were together. In the paintings, Juno is always depicted as a solemn woman with dark brown hair and blue eyes. It’s really rare to see her with a smile. She wears sober clothes. Some are common to this world; a couple of the depictions show her with distinctly roman-style clothing, and one shows her with a very modern t-shirt and jeans. On the other hand, Cailleach is shown as a black-haired girl with Japanese features and black and red dresses full of frills and laces. Sometimes she looked like a goth lolita straight out of a manga. I mean the dressing style, not that she looks like a child. And she is always depicted smiling or laughing. Like a very charismatic, upbeat girl, the kind who would be very popular at high school. ::: At some point, I hear some weird noise coming from the room at the side. I approach the doorway as silently as possible. I was in that room a few moments ago, so I wonder what could be making that noise. I sense the mana shifting and a sort of cooling in the air that makes my hair stand on end. I peek into the room and get completely bewildered by what I see. A metallic rod had come from the roof. At the end of the roof there’s a blue crystal, which is humming an aria. The aria is sending a cool breeze through the room, cleaning everything. It’s like a magical automatic laundromat that cleans rooms instead of clothes. The air carries some water and a faint lavender scent. So that’s why everything is looking too pristine, even though it’s so old. It looks like that air has some sort of restorative effect on the objects as well. I keep my full attention focused on the aria the gem is humming, trying to understand the words that compose it. After it finishes, I quickly take a small notebook and a graffiti pen from inside my backpack and then scribble everything I managed to get from the aria. This will certainly prove useful at some point. ::: Ugh, I’m tired. I’ve been walking around this floor, appraising everything I set my eyes on. My head is aching with the amount of information that has been poured into it. And still, there’s absolutely nothing about Cailleach’s seal or whereabouts. Only about the life they lived together. I wonder who created all of this. Was it the goddess herself? Was it Cailleach before the betrayal? Some emotional follower? This doesn’t look like a lived-in place. So it was not their home or anything like that. Everything is too artificial, too much for show. It reminds me of those abusive relationships in which the couple would post a lot of stuff about how they loved each other on their social media. Like they were trying to prove to themselves that it was a beautiful relationship. But where is that girl, after all? According to the barrier, she is still alive and awake. And she must be inside this place. I’ve also been looking for any secret passages, to no avail. The only place that I haven’t searched thoroughly is that inner sanctum place. The one with the scorpion. So, maybe, there’s no way around fighting that thing. The entrance to where Cailleach is sealed might be hidden in that room. So, I take some time to rest, eat, and drink some water before going down the stairs again. ::: All this time, the scorpion didn’t change its behavior. It is still going madly at the walls. I happen to get here right when a rod with a crystal, similar to the one in the other room I saw earlier, comes from the ceiling and puts its magic to work. The walls get completely rejuvenated in an instant, like they were never hit before. Right in front of my eyes. The screeches of the creature get louder as it tries to hit the rod. The ceiling is too high, though, and the scorpion never manages to reach it. I wonder for how long this same scene has been repeated in this place. The scorpion doesn’t seem to have any source of food or water in here. Maybe that’s what’s inducing its madness? Of course, the isolation as well. It should be maddening as hell to be in a place like this for god knows how long. Has it been here since the barrier was set up? Or has it just wandered in later? It should be the latter; otherwise, it would’ve died of hunger and thirst long ago. But being sympathetic to it won’t get me any closer to my goal. I’ll need to kill it, as any other monster. But first, I need to make sure I can get out of that barrier. It won’t do if I get enclosed in there the same way that scorpion is. ::: I spend the next two hours looking around until I find it. A very small amulet that was hidden inside a disguised hole on a wall. I was only able to notice the hole because I sensed a very faint mana coming from inside it. It was perfectly camouflaged. Appraising the amulet told me what I needed to know. It lets the wearer bypass any ’Juno’ barrier. Now, then, let’s get to it. ::: The first thing when fighting a monster so apparently powerful is, of course, to analyze it to see if I can get its strengths and weaknesses. So I turn on my Creature Analysis skill and focus on the scorpion. ---------- Name: ??? Race: ??? Level: XXXX HP: ???/??? MP: ???/??? FP: ???/??? ---------- Okay, this is new. Never have a monster analysis given a result like that. I’ve never seen a monster have a ’name’ entry, for example. I’ve seen pets with it, but not a wild monster. Unless this was a pet or a trained monster. I’ve never heard about something like that, but it isn’t unthinkable. The first weird thing is that it didn’t give me barely any concrete information. Normally, creature analysis does a series of rolls or something to define what it would show me. The more powerful the monster, the harder it is to get more information in one analysis. I’ve never failed so completely before, though. The only information I can get from this is that it’s a named monster, and its level is in the four digits. Which can be anything between level 1,000 and level 9,999. For comparison, I’m at level 141, after the monsters I killed in this dungeon. So its level is very probably at least ten times higher than mine. Even though it looks weakened and too mad to fight properly, it doesn’t look like a good prospect for me.

Chapter 40 - The temple to their love

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