Chapter 30: The Mentally Unstable Family

Magna looked around, finding himself unable to move anything except his eyes.

A second ago, he had been inside the dim cave. Now he was in a clearing surrounded by trees, with the sun shining bright overhead.

’Did we just teleport? How?’

The man holding him upside down was definitely a man.

According to the book he had read back in the cave, men were not supposed to have any power to use mana or cast spells.

Yet this man was throwing out frost spells and teleporting across long distances without saying a single word.

Magna was beginning to wonder if everything in that book had been a lie. Then he finally noticed the two other figures standing in front of him.

One was Faye. Her eyes were red from crying, and she stared at him with a mix of worry and anger that still had not faded.

The other was a woman.

She was so beautiful that Magna could not help but compare her to Terra, the AI he had designed and built with his own hands back in his old world.

Her long golden hair seemed to shine in the sunlight, and her blue eyes carried a cold, distant look that seemed to come naturally to her.

More importantly, her facial features were almost identical to Faye’s.

She looked less like Faye’s mother and more like what Faye herself might look like years from now.

Even her expression stayed calm and almost without feeling, making the resemblance impossible to miss.

Celeste glanced at him first, then turned her cold eyes toward the huge man. Her voice was icy. "Titus, he is just a child."

Titus understood the order hidden in her words, and he lowered his head a little. "Understood, my Lady."

The ice holding Magna’s body broke and melted at once. Before Magna could even react, Titus let go of his ankle, and he dropped headfirst onto the dirt.

"Titus..." Celeste’s voice was even colder this time, with a hint of anger in it.

"My apologies, my Lady," Titus said, bowing his head again. But he did not look sorry at all.

Meanwhile, Magna held his throbbing, dizzy head, trying to understand what kind of messed-up family he had just fallen into.

’These people seem even worse than that foster family who tried to force feed me broccoli at dinner.’ The grim memory from his past life came back to him as he made the quick comparison.

Celeste stepped forward and stood right in front of him. Her voice grew much warmer, and she gave him a soft smile, one she had rarely ever shown Titus.

"I am Celeste Winterborne. As you can see, Faye’s mother." She introduced herself smoothly, keeping her gentle manner. "I have already heard a few things about you, Magna. But there are still a couple of details that don’t quite add up. Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?"

Magna looked up at her. She seemed civilized and truly kind, nothing like the frost-armored gorilla who had dropped him. So he gave a quick nod.

He knew he had no right to make demands, only to obey. If answering a few questions was what it took to stay alive, he was ready to do it.

"Good." Celeste’s voice gained another layer of warmth as she posed her first question. "Which family do you belong to?"

Thanks to Titus’s full report, Celeste already knew everything that had happened inside the cave, including the fake spells Magna had used to trick Faye.

Though the spells were fake, the physical gains Magna had shown were very real.

Within only a few minutes, he could change his body and grow strong. This led both Celeste and Titus to believe he had an extraordinary bloodline.

Women were not the only ones who could inherit special traits from their family line. Men could carry them too.

So it made complete sense to believe that Magna was born with great physical strength, or with a trait that let him change his body, if he came from a family known for their physical power.

Unfortunately, Magna had no real answer to give. "I don’t know. I was abandoned right after I was born."

He simply told the truth about his situation, since he saw no harm in it.

When they heard his answer, Celeste and Titus let out a quiet sigh at the same time.

It was not a surprising thing to hear. It was fairly common for families to abandon children born with defects or limits, seeing them as nothing more than a burden.

Magna did not fall into either of those two groups, but he was still born a boy. That alone was reason enough for a noble family to cast him aside if they already had enough male heirs.

"I can only pity them for being so blind as to throw away a gifted child like you." Celeste knelt down and reached out her hand to gently stroke the poor boy’s head. "So you grew up in that goblin cave all these years?"

She glanced sideways at the mother goblin’s body lying in the distance, putting the pieces together in her mind.

It all made sense now, especially why Magna was constantly carrying that corpse on his back while traveling with Faye.

A goblin that could learn magic would naturally grow humanlike intelligence and awareness.

She guessed that the creature must have taught itself using human books. It must have developed a mother’s instincts, found Magna as an abandoned baby, and taken pity on him. So it raised him as its own.

And when she thought about the sad ending, where all the goblins in the cave were burned to ash and the very mother goblin who raised Magna died by her own spell, it gave the whole story a deeply emotional and dramatic finish.

"That goblin truly deserves a proper grave, doesn’t she?" Celeste said to the boy, sharing his sorrow with real feeling.

Even Titus seemed moved by the story. He walked over to the body and touched it, slowly freezing it to protect it from further decay, at least until they could lay her to rest in a proper grave.

The only one who could not seem to put the pieces together was Faye. She simply stood there and watched the conversation unfold.

She had only understood one thing from everything they had said, but that single thought was enough to occupy her mind.

’He really grew up alone in that cave all those years?’

Faye couldn’t imagine what it would be like to spend her entire life alone.

She had only recently started sleeping in her own room without her mother, and even that had taken some getting used to. The thought of Magna growing up in a dark cave with nothing but a goblin for company made her chest tighten.

The more she imagined what his life must have been like, the harder it became to hold back her tears.

Magna, meanwhile, looked between the three of them with a thoroughly confused expression. ’What exactly is going on here?’

He couldn’t decide whether this family was supposed to be kind or terrifying.

One moment, they acted so cold and detached that he could barely sense any emotion from them. The next, they were looking at him with genuine sympathy, as if his tragic childhood had suddenly broken their hearts.

It was as if the whole family shared some kind of split personality disorder passed down in their blood.