# Chapter 7: Toothpaste, Conceptual Plaque, and Soul Stains
"Give up, Aster Vale. Or we'll use force."
The one-eyed Inquisitor's voice echoed through the narrow alley behind the wine warehouse, carrying the weight of authority that made the air feel heavy. The twelve silver-robed mages behind him slammed their wands against the ground in unison. A silvery dome of light—the High-Grade Mana Suppression Formation—sealed Aster and Kaelen inside. The air within the dome turned thick as mud, forcing anyone with mana in their body to their knees.
Beside Aster, Kaelen Drago did not kneel.
The protagonist's ruby-red eyes blazed in the darkness, radiating a boiling, blood-red aura that growled like a cornered beast. Steam rose from his shoulders, melting the night dew clinging to his robes. Kaelen was ready to detonate his mana core, a suicidal act that would destroy half the district and kill the Inquisitors, while also triggering fatal backlash in his own body and inviting the wrath of the World Law.
"Mr. Drago, please don't." Aster held Kaelen's shoulder with one hand, his voice perfectly calm even as his heart pounded against his ribs like a sledgehammer. 'If you blow up here, we'll both die! And if you die, who's going to save the world from the Abyssal Wave?!'
Kaelen turned and looked at Aster's hand restraining his shoulder. In Kaelen's shattered mind, rebuilt through one hundred and forty-seven loops of time, this simple gesture carried a far deeper meaning. 'Master Aster... is holding me back. He doesn't want my hands stained with the blood of these Clydes family's dogs. He wants to handle them himself as part of my test of patience!'
"All right, Master. I'll stand down," Kaelen whispered. His blood-red aura slowly faded, though his eyes remained fixed on the Inquisitors with thick murderous intent.
The one-eyed Inquisitor—Vance—furrowed his brow, slightly shocked that Kaelen Drago, the academy's monster, would obey a scholarship student who did not even possess a magical aura. But the arrogance of the Magic Tower quickly swallowed his suspicions.
"Hand over the Cracked Stone and the mind-altering artifact you used on the black market," Vance ordered, raising his lightning-rune-engraved wand. "The Clydes family accuses you of colluding with a dark sect. The Magic Tower is merely carrying out a purge."
Aster sighed softly. 'A purge? You call extortion and robbery a purge?'
Aster reached into the wide pocket of his robe, touching the small cylindrical object he had made that afternoon. His original reason for making it had been very simple: he had run out of toothpaste in the dormitory, and he had been too lazy to go to the store, so he had tried recycling a flattened, empty toothpaste tube by filling it with a mixture of chalk powder and wild mint leaves from the backyard.
He pulled it out. It was a dented aluminum toothpaste tube with peeling paint and a cracked plastic cap.
Vance stared at the object in Aster's hand, then laughed derisively. "What's that? A miniature alchemical bomb? You think you can threaten the Magic Tower with trash?"
"This isn't trash, Inquisitor Vance," Aster said flatly, staring straight into the man's single eye. "It's a cleaning tool. And it seems all of you have quite a lot of... buildup."
Aster twisted off the cracked toothpaste cap, then aimed the tube's nozzle at the silver dome and the Inquisitors. He pressed his thumb into the dented aluminum tube.
Pshhhht.
The System in his head shrieked with blinding mint-green light. [Item: Recycled Toothpaste Tube (Quality: F-)] [Error: Material does not contain standard cleaning agents.] [Absolute Compensation Implanted.] [Concept Granted: Absolute Conceptual Plaque Removal.] [Defining 'Plaque' as: Any form of magical enchantment, murderous intent, hidden contracts, and soul stains clinging to the host.] [Cleaning all the way down to the roots.]
Thick white foam glowing with a soft light erupted from the cheap tube's nozzle. It did not fall to the ground. Instead, it expanded through the air at an absurd speed, carrying the sharp scent of mint leaves and ozone, strong enough to make the Inquisitors' eyes water.
The white foam slammed into the silver mana-suppression dome.
Crackle... krrrak... ting!
The supposedly High-Grade magical dome, capable of withstanding the rampage of a full-grown dragon, did not explode. It peeled away. The magical runes that composed the dome dissolved into the white foam, as if they were nothing more than stubborn rust or plaque being scrubbed clean by an invisible toothbrush. In two seconds, the dome vanished, leaving behind fresh night air scented with mint.
"W-What?!" Vance took a step back, his eyes widening in horror as he stared at his wand. The lightning runes on his wooden wand were peeling away, leaving behind smooth, clean ordinary wood without a trace of magical energy.
The white foam continued spreading, sweeping over the twelve Inquisitors. They were not physically injured. Yet every time the foam touched their skin, the mana inside their magic cores felt as though it were being brushed away until empty. The murderous intent and arrogance that had been burning in their hearts abruptly vanished, replaced by a clean, refreshed feeling and a powerful desire to go home, rinse their mouths, and go to bed early. Their magical weapons fell from their hands, transforming into gleaming ordinary metal and wood.
Kaelen Drago stared at the scene, his breath catching. 'The Magic Tower's Suppression Formation... high-grade weapon enchantments... all rinsed clean with a single spray of white foam?! Master Aster thinks the Magic Tower's prized magic is nothing more than dental plaque that needs to be cleaned off in the morning?!'
"Y-You erased our enchantments?!" Vance's voice trembled as he collapsed to his knees, drained of mana and robbed of his will to fight by the feeling of being "clean." "What kind of magic is this?! Who are you really?!"
"I already told you," Aster said, slipping the now-completely-flattened toothpaste tube back into his pocket. "It's just a cleaning tool. You should all be more diligent about maintaining your... personal hygiene."
Aster turned, intending to drag Kaelen away before the Magic Tower's real reinforcements arrived. However, some leftover white foam from the spray slowly descended and landed on Vance's chest, directly beneath his silver robes.
And that was when the real nightmare began.
The moment the mint foam touched Vance's bare chest, the one-eyed man suddenly screamed. It was not a scream of physical pain, but the cry of a deeply rooted causal bond being severed.
The toothpaste foam detected a conceptual "stain," or "plaque," hidden deep within Vance's soul. It began scrubbing and forcibly pulling the stain out.
"ARRRGGGHHH! STOP! STOP SCRUBBING IT!" Vance roared, clawing at his own chest.
Before the stunned eyes of Aster and Kaelen, the skin on Vance's chest split open without shedding blood. From beneath his skin, a pitch-black tattoo shaped like an eye with tentacles was dragged out by the white foam—the emblem of the Abyss Sect. The tattoo shrieked at a high frequency that shattered the windows around the alley.
Aster froze. 'Wait. What?!'
In the original novel, Inquisitor Vance was the Magic Tower's loyal dog. But the "plaque-cleaning" foam had just exposed a truth that had never been written in the novel: Vance, and perhaps many other high-ranking members of the Magic Tower, had been infiltrated and controlled by Abyss parasites for years! The Clydes family had not sent the Magic Tower to capture Aster. The Abyss Sect that had infiltrated the Magic Tower had hijacked the arrest order, using legal authority to seize the Earth Dragon Heart Scale (the Cracked Stone), the only artifact capable of warding off the Abyssal Wave!
The black parasite forcibly pulled from Vance's chest did not die. Sensing its existence threatened by the concept of "absolute cleanliness," the black mass shot upward, pierced through the roof of the wine warehouse, and exploded in the academy city's night sky.
The mass formed a gigantic dark-purple beacon that pulsed like a heartbeat, transmitting coordinates to another dimension. The purple light illuminated all of Aethelgard's night sky, bathing the city in a horrifying light of death.
[Critical Warning: Abyss Summoning Beacon activated.] [The Abyssal Wave (Abyss Tide) that was supposed to occur in Chapter 50 has been accelerated.] [Time until arrival: 72 hours.]
Aster stared at the pulsing purple sky, the empty toothpaste tube slipping from his hand and falling to the ground.
"I guess..." Aster muttered, his voice utterly exhausted and hollow amid the academy warning sirens beginning to howl from every direction. "...we just made them really angry."