I Revived My Maid, Now She Hungers for My Blood

The second those words left her mouth, Amanda’s grumbling choked off. She snapped her head around, violet eyes glaring at Pandora. She looked like a cat whose tail had just been stomped on.

“Leave? The hell you’re leaving!”

The elegant lethargy evaporated, replaced by an almost flustered indignation. “Absolutely not! You still want to leave? I already tore the door off its hinges for you!”

Realizing her tone might have been a bit too sharp, she cleared her throat, forced her pace to slow, and tacked on a follow-up, jerking her chin toward a specific corner of the garden:

“...See that? That thing isn’t just for decoration.”

“I’m not asking for much.” Amanda slipped right back into that languid, ennui-drenched tone of hers, though her eyes remained locked onto Pandora. “Call me Mentor. That’ll be your welcome gift.”

Pandora raised an eyebrow and followed Amanda’s line of sight. Amanda was pointing at the tightly furled black rose that had just burst from the chest of the attendant she had misidentified. Its petals were clamped shut, pitch-black as ink, with a crystalline luster shifting across its surface—yet infinitely deeper than mere crystal.

So this thing... wasn’t just for jump scares. It actually did something?

The thought flashed through Pandora’s mind, but her mouth didn’t skip a beat: “Mentor Amanda.”

Clear, crisp, and zero hesitation. It was just a title. It wasn’t like saying it cost her a pound of flesh. She’d shout it a thousand times over if that’s what it took, without a second thought.

Amanda blinked, her eyelid twitching slightly. A subtle, complex look flickered through those violet eyes. Sure, she’d said it, but the effect was entirely different from what she’d anticipated.

The apprentice “she” had pushed onto her was nothing like the naive teenager her appearance suggested. Instead, she gave off the vibe of a seasoned operator—mature, pragmatic, and maybe just a little bit... slick? She was what, sixteen? Seventeen? How was her mind already so mature?

Amanda’s thoughts churned, but she wasn’t about to go back on her word. She raised a hand, extending a slender index finger, and gave the crystalline black rose a light tap. Simultaneously, she offered a warning in that languid, tired voice of hers:

“Mhm. Heard you. Now, take out that Grimoire you’ve got on you. Yeah, the Quicksilver Blood Meditation one. Hold it out... and catch!”

As the last word left her lips, the crystalline black rose abruptly bloomed.

Pop~

A faint sound, like a bubble popping. Under Pandora’s increasingly awestruck gaze, the pure-black petals unfurled completely. The petals seemed to swallow every scrap of light, bottomless and abyssal.

There was no stamen in the center. Instead, a single drop of tainted, pitch-black, visibly active liquid dripped from the tip of a petal, landing dead-center on the cover of the Grimoire Pandora was holding out as instructed.

Plop.

Instantly, it was like a drop of water hitting a searing hot pan of oil—except the pan made no sound. The inky liquid spread across the leather cover like a living thing, rapidly creeping along the textured grain.

Under the effects of Amanda’s “welcome gift,” the battered Grimoire began to change before her very eyes. The scuffed edges and the grooves of the etched text were overwritten, swallowed by a much deeper, profounder shade of black. The entire book took on a heavier, unfathomable quality, as if it were suddenly shouldering the weight of ancient history.

But the craziest part—without Pandora even touching it, the Grimoire flipped itself open! The pages fluttered rapidly, rifling straight to the very back.

From the spine, where only a few empty pages had remained, fresh, tough pages shot out like rapidly growing vines! Line after line of brand-new, pitch-black script materialized on the fresh pages, as if being penned by an invisible hand. The handwriting was steady and elegant, pulsing with an ineffable rhythm.

“This is...” Pandora’s eyes went wide as she stared at the text, murmuring in a daze, “The Rank-6 content of the Meditation... So The Quicksilver Blood Meditation was incomplete too?”

Amanda stood behind her, nodding lightly. “Naturally.” Her tone carried the weight of obvious fact. “Without the Academy purposely dropping them, do you really think the good stuff would just fall into an Apprentice’s lap? Unless it’s an Academy-made ‘copy’ that they can stamp out a dime a dozen, it’s gotta be a relic scavenged from the corpse of some dead Wizard in the aftermath of a battleground. After a ridiculous amount of screening and evaluation, they toss it into the Cultivation Zone.”

“A Wizard’s most prized possession turning up as ‘relic’? It’s never going to be in mint condition. They’re almost always broken or missing pieces.”

Amanda paused, her gaze resting on the script still blooming across the pages. “Yours is already incredibly good. At least the core of the first five Ranks of the Meditation are intact. That makes it ‘top-shelf’ as far as relics go. And you did great, too,” she added, a rare hint of approval creeping into her voice. “You didn’t settle for the generic, easy-to-acquire Apprentice-tier Meditations. You held out and found this one. This is pretty much the highest-quality Grimoire you can scavenge in the Cultivation Zone.”

“However,” Amanda pivoted, “the Wizardry inscribed in a Grimoire has to be sought out, learned, comprehended, and physically written in by the owner. The moment the owner perishes, the pages of Wizardry they wrote and supported are obliterated along with them. So don’t kid yourself—no relic Grimoire is ever going to have the previous owner’s spell pages left inside. The Meditation method is pretty much the only thing that survives.”

“Alright.” Amanda suddenly clapped her hands, snapping Pandora out of her daze. “Looks like you’re pretty happy with the welcome gift. Put it away for now. You’ll have plenty of time to read and digest it later. Right now, let’s get back to why you came looking for me.”

Pandora dragged her eyes away from the Grimoire, which was still slowly sprouting pages and generating text. That pitch-black, active fluid was still subtly weaving between the pages. The integration of the Rank-6 content was still ongoing.

But she could already sense that this wasn’t just a brute-force patch adding late-game content. A Grimoire wasn’t a normal book. The “knowledge” housed within wasn’t just static text.

With her current grasp of the Wizard system, she knew full well that Wizarding knowledge operated on a different wavelength than normal stuff. It was a... much more active concept.

As the Rank-6 content was slotted into place, the earlier sections of the Grimoire—the stuff she had already mastered and integrated into her own meditation cycles—would inevitably undergo subtle shifts. The knowledge she thought she understood would likely be corrected, deepened, and imbued with entirely new meaning.