The Golden-Haired Summoner - Ch. 9
The mana inside my body resonated with the spell, filling the small room and starting to hum.
I felt the flames of the candles suddenly flare up.
The air in the room, with its tightly shut windows, began to stir uncontrollably.
At that moment, an even stronger light burst forth from the contract circle, which had still been glowing. Startled, I instinctively shut my eyes tightly.
It felt as though mana was being forcibly drawn out from inside me.
The sudden loss of mana brought a sharp abdominal pain. It was as if someone was ripping large chunks of mana away from me.
Who…
“…Huh?”
The small commotion subsided in an instant.
It was as if a breeze had swept through and disappeared, leaving everything eerily calm.
The surroundings, which had been bathed in flashes of light moments earlier, were now enveloped in silence. The only changes were the reduced mana inside me and the goosebumps covering my body.
As I rubbed my arms and looked around, I realized the mana solution that had filled the contract circle was also gone.
Fairy dust lingered faintly in the air, sparkling like fireflies.
It was proof that I had successfully activated the contract circle, yet no matter how hard I looked, the spirit was nowhere to be seen.
Had the summoning failed?
Had I just wasted my mana for nothing?
If the summoning had succeeded, the spirit should have appeared above the contract circle.
But no matter where I looked, I was the only one in the room.
“…Spirit?”
I called out just in case, but there was no response.
Honestly, I had been so confident, and now my disappointment was surprisingly crushing.
For spirit summoners like me, who received specialized education early on, it was common to summon their first spirit successfully in their late teens.
However, actually being acknowledged by a spirit as its master and forming a contract was only possible in one’s twenties.
The reason was none other than mental strength. Without maturity, one could not handle a spirit, so becoming a full-fledged spirit summoner typically required adulthood.
Spirits demanded not only affinity but also strong mental fortitude from their summoners.
In simpler terms, spirits were extraordinarily picky beings that refused to follow commands from those weaker than them.
“I thought I could do it.”
Summoning a spirit at ten years old was almost deemed impossible, a feat only the most extraordinary geniuses could achieve. But I wasn’t an ordinary ten-year-old, so I thought I could pull it off.
If I included my previous life’s memories, my mental age was well over twenty.
“This is strange. My body may be immature, but my mind should be more than qualified…”
Was Master Yael’s assessment correct?
Was I still too young to form a contract with a spirit?
“No, no way. It must be that this contract circle is too old to function properly. It’s practically an ancient artifact… ”
I had heard that outdated summoning circles like this often failed to summon spirits. That had to be it.
Even if I wasn’t a genius, there was no way my mental strength was insufficient to summon a low-grade spirit.
Master Yael had once explained that modern contract circles were direct summoning systems that targeted a specific spirit. In contrast, the old-fashioned circle I used operated like casting a fishing line into the ocean—an indirect, luck-based approach.
A spirit that happened to resonate with my voice and felt inclined might respond.
With such an unreliable system, it was no wonder these circles had fallen out of use.
“The problem must be the contract circle. Definitely!”
While I was desperately trying to convince myself and salvage my crumbling pride, I noticed the candlelight shadows beneath me wavering dangerously.
Why did I keep sensing strange disturbances in this closed room? The ritual was already over, and there was no longer any reason for the candles to flicker.
When I looked up at the ceiling with a puzzled expression, I felt faint tremors all around.
They were entirely unnatural vibrations.
The sound was too faint to hear clearly, but it was definitely a voice.
Like a dolphin’s ultrasonic waves, it was a voice humans shouldn’t be able to hear.
Focusing all my senses on the faint tremors echoing around me, I shouted.
“Spirit? Are you here? Where are you? Let’s make a contract!”
I’ll treat you well!
The moment I shouted, “Let’s make a contract!” while glancing around, the voice became clearer.
[Name… Give me a name…]
So, I succeeded.
I smiled, but I still couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from.
It felt less like a voice and more like a faint, precarious vibration in the air on a rainy day.
“Where are you? Why can’t I see you?”
Could I have accidentally summoned a ghost instead of a spirit?
Thinking about it, what I was doing now wasn’t too different from playing with a Ouija board.
Lighting candles in the middle of the night and using a magic circle for a summoning ritual—it couldn’t get more ominous than this.
[Name.]
“A name? Spirits have their own names, don’t they? Like Sylph or Salamander…”
[Of course, light spirits do.]
I flinched and stiffened.
Light spirits referred to the elemental spirits of fire, water, wind, and earth—the major four. But beyond them existed…
The dark spirits Master Yael had always warned against.
The very reason this contract circle had been abandoned by humans.
Could it be that I had accidentally summoned something like that? Was I such a wicked person?
I panicked, horrified.
“No way! You’re not a dark spirit, are you?”
[No. I am neither of light nor darkness. I am the only one of my kind in this world.]
Relieved, I let out a deep sigh, abandoning my doubts about my virtuous nature.
“Then what are you? If you’re not a light spirit or a dark spirit… are you a ghost?”
[Those are merely human labels. If you must know, I would be classified as a ‘non-attribute’ spirit, by human standards.]
I vaguely recalled something like that from a lesson.
There had been a lecture about the classification of spirit attributes.
If my memory served me right, spirits without defined names apart from light spirits were the primary focus.
Thinking about it, spirits were nature’s spiritual entities. Limiting them to just a few categories was overly simplistic.
After all, the world was made up of more than just fire, water, wind, and earth.
Not everything in this vast world had a name.
“So… I just need to give you a name?”
[Yes. To manifest my power in the human realm, I need a contract symbol that represents my existence—something to anchor me here.]
“A name.”
If that were the case, it was incredibly important. As I pondered over the spirit’s request for a name, a crucial issue suddenly dawned on me.
Oh no.
“Wait a minute! Before talking about a contract, I need to know what you are first!”
[…]
“So, tell me! What kind of spirit are you?”
I almost made the foolish mistake of signing a contract without reading it.
[There are no words in the human language to accurately describe me.]
“What if you’re dangerous?”
[Spirits only follow the summoner’s will. If you cannot control me, I could be dangerous. But if you handle me properly, I will become a great power for you. We are like swords. We exist in the hands of the wielder. How we are used depends entirely on the summoner’s will.]
The voice that had sounded like a chorus of many gradually converged into one distinct voice.
As the conversation went on, the mana within me continued to drain. At this rate, it would run out soon.
I had to make the contract quickly to reduce the amount of mana being consumed.
An uncontracted spirit required significantly more mental strength and mana compared to a contracted one.
“You’re really not dangerous, right?”
[As long as you are not a dangerous person yourself.]
I wanted to interrogate further, but my dwindling mana left no room for hesitation. I needed to hurry.
I didn’t know exactly what this spirit was, but it claimed not to be a dark spirit, and there was no way I could summon something dangerous enough to destroy the world.
I nodded reluctantly.
I trusted in my laziness.
“Alright, then…”
[Contract!]
Most importantly, I didn’t sense any danger from this spirit.
At least, my intuition told me so. And as a spirit summoner, I was naturally attuned to the flow of nature, which made my intuition fairly reliable.
“Let’s make a contract. I’ll become your master!”
Convincing myself that this spirit was just a rare type, I managed to settle my doubts.
Maybe it was a spirit of something trivial, like nails, buttons, or ribbons—something cute like that.
Considering it appeared to me for my first contract, that seemed reasonable.
“But I only have enough mana to contract with a low-grade spirit.”
[That is sufficient.]
“So you’re weak, huh?”
[I possess infinite power. Unlike light spirits, I do not have a rank, so my strength depends solely on my master’s capabilities.]
“A spirit without a rank?”
I thought spirits were strictly divided into ranks: low, intermediate, high, supreme, and spirit king.
[I cannot have a rank. I am the only one of my kind.]
“Ah… is that even possible?”
[Humans do not yet fully understand us.]
Everything I had learned in class was entirely different from this. Classes really were full of useless information when it came to real-life situations.
[If I must describe myself using human terms, I would be… a spirit of minerals—or rather, metals.]
“A spirit of… metals?”
That was new.
Finally, I looked around at the faintly vibrating objects in the room.
The candlestick, the washbasin, the metal hooks on the curtains, and the nails embedded here and there—they were all trembling slightly, producing the spirit’s voice.
All the metal around me seemed to be part of the spirit.
[Most things beneath the earth belong to me. However, I hold no dominion over rocks or soil.]
“…You’re rare, I’ll give you that. But what’s a metal spirit even good for?”
[…That aside, hurry. At this rate, I will be reverse-summoned.]
“Oh, right. A name! I need to think of a name…”
This wasn’t the time to be pondering. I should have trained my mana more diligently—running out like this was careless.
If a spirit was reverse-summoned due to a lack of mana, the resulting internal damage could be severe. I had to be careful.
“Hmm! Are you male? Or female? It’s hard to tell just from your voice.”
The spirit’s gender was important for naming—whether I’d go with something like Gamsuni or Gamdori.
[I have no gender.]
“Right, most spirits are gender-neutral, aren’t they?”
[In my case, I am genderless. Most spirits are neutral, though some high-ranking ones choose their own gender. However, such distinctions are meaningless since we generally don’t need genders.]
That made sense. I’d never heard of spirits getting married and having kids. Gender would be a pointless concept for them.
“Then I guess a neutral name would be best.”
Lacking creativity, I wracked my brain for ideas but couldn’t come up with anything significant.
So I went with the first thing that came to mind, something casual.
“Rai.”