Mind Demon's Path of Domination

"Shin, tell me what this is," Mark said, showing the leaf in his hand.

Shin looked at it with wide eyes. "Benefactor, isn’t that a leaf?"

Mark’s eyes twitched again. "No. This leaf had limbs, eyes, and mouth a second ago."

"Ah, that!" Shin hit his palm with the bottom of his fist. "We call it many names. When we use it to frighten girls, we call it the Leaf Freak, but when we are all adults around, we call it the Leaf Walker. It has a human mouth—with lips and all—four legs, ears, and eyes. And it also does weird magic, so we keep it away from our village with Leaf Burning Incense."

"So this is not a Savage?" Mark looked at the little thing with a disappointed expression. "What magic does this thing do?"

The black-haired young man gauged Mark and finally gained some courage as he saw Dona’s antics. A butterfly had landed on the nose of Mark’s demoness at some point and she had froze, staying unmoving on Mark’s back. She looked at the winged creature with a strange expression.

Shin explained while struggling not to stammer: "The Leaf Walker can appear anywhere with a lot of trees, legends say that it is born from the trees after they drink too much moonlight at night. The little leafy thing walks and runs around, repeating what it has heard someone saying. It’s like a parrot."

Mark frowned, cupping his jaws. The Leaf Walker that he had caught had been screaming ’I was here!’ and ’I was caught. So sad!’ So it was repeating what it heard someone say?

"I understand that it mimics what it hears but how is that... magic?"

Shin shook his head nervously. "It does not only mimic what it hears. It can show what it sees, touches, and even feels. Anything it lays its eyes upon will be remembered by the creature forever, and if someone ever dips it into the water, they can see everything it experienced."

Mark looked at the Leaf Walker in his hand with a weird expression.

Yuri poked Mark’s shoulder. "What is he saying? What is he saying?"

"Oh, you can’t understand him..." When he was just a Demonling, Mark had gotten the blessing of being able to talk all languages from the Will of the Demon World. Yuri had never gotten such a thing and was thus incapable of understanding Shin’s foreign language.

Even though it sounded foreign to Mark too, he could instinctively understand the meaning. For now, he didn’t dwell on the matter and explained what the Leaf Walker was to Yuri in the same words Shin had used to describe it.

Yuri held Mark’s hand with the Leaf Walker on it tightly but gently as she examined the creature. Her curious purple eyes looked up at Mark’s face and asked, "So are you telling me these things are natural-born drones?"

"Is it even alive?" he asked in turn.

Shin said, "It is alive. My elders always said that when you put a Leaf Walker in water, you are killing it. The images and sounds it releases are its blood and life, and when you put it in water, it is leaking out. It is only because it is underwater that we can’t hear its screams... or so I’ve heard."

"What did he say? What did he say?"

Mark explained.

Meanwhile, Dona blew at the butterfly on her nose and it flew away. Only to come back a second later to land back on her nose. She glared at it. "You—You dare!" she muttered and blew at it again.

It flew around and landed on Yuri’s cheek. The scientist was distracted and her hand went straight for the kill instinctively. Dona’s hand moved even faster and clenched around Yuri’s wrist, stopping her.

The butterfly flew away.

Suddenly, the creature in Mark’s hand—the normal-looking leaf—grew legs and jumped out of his grasp onto the land and jumped once more, moving some meters away from him with just that. He stared.

Shin blurted out: "It is incredibly fast once it escapes, you can never catch it again!"

The creature jumped again but this time, Yuri moved, slipping her hand out of Dona’s grasp elegantly. Her legs planted firmly against the ground and the shadow below her suddenly blurred, then, Yuri herself blurred and both of them appeared beside the running leaf.

"I got caught. So sad!" it shouted.

Yuri couldn’t catch it. It had escaped!

"Faster than her?" Dona asked in disbelief.

Yuri moved once more, her short but elegant form jumping against a tree as her hands neared the leaf. It comically escaped her, using its little limbs to jump against her own skin.

"I was here!" It shouted.

Mark tilted his head. "I can’t have you escaping under my watch after you recorded me, can I?" If someone else saw the footage inside that leaf, it could be trouble. Mark readied himself to move, correcting Dona’s position on his back.

She held him tighter, her breasts pushing against him. Her hands would have choked his neck had he been weaker.

He didn’t have to move and in a second, the leaf jumped against Yuri again. But this time, it didn’t escape into solid land but into a puddle. The creature suddenly froze and melted into the water—Yuri froze and Mark moved, appearing beside her.

The puddle transformed into different colors and then began showing different scenes.

It was incredibly vivid.

"It’s better than any cameras I’ve seen," Yuri said.

To cameras, there was something called FPS. Frames per second. The more frames per second that a video had, the smoother it would be. The motions would not have a slight crack between them if it was a video of high enough FPS.

If it is at the very least 24 FPS, the human eye can watch a video rather well. In fact, that was the standard for movies for years. If the FPS reaches 60, then the footage would be even smoother. If it reaches 120 or even more, the smoothness will increase even more.

But after that, no matter how many FPS you increase, a normal human eye can’t see much difference. In fact, to most, 120 FPS and more look the same. But that was different for Hunters and Demons.

Their eyes could follow things traveling at immense speed, and the frame rate of the footage was the same. This thing was exactly such a thing.

Dona looked at the image in the puddle with a weird expression. It was a video of her on Mark’s back, blowing at a butterfly with puffed-up cheeks.

"Benefactor, if you put salt into the water, you can turn it into ice, and you can watch this as many times as you want."

Dona brought her hand forward and as everyone watched, the water in the puddle evaporated.

Mark sighed, "I wanted to take that."

"Just watch me if you feel like watching me," Dona said and licked Mark’s cheeks.

Mark shook his head with a smile and brought out a small boulder from his World Space. He sat down on it and looked at Shin.

"Now, tell me about the savages."

Shin took a step back, his hands clenching.