Misfortune of Cortes

A few weeks ago, we approached Farrel about Lucifer Castle, and it seemed that there were others seeking entry into the castle as well. We decided to cooperate, and recovered Magical Paraffin and Gluttony Bone Dust for him. Farrel hired Veronif to break the seal, which used magic to distort time and space. Some forest monsters attacked, and we defended Veronif, while Farrel turned tail and ran for it. Veronif revealed that those Garas monsters are a sort of chimera, i.e. combinations of different life-forms.

After that, we went pass the seal, and followed the Red Hair Fighter, who vanished along the way. We recovered some protein as well as several experimental body parts for Veronif. She revealed that those monsters were made out of 3-6 different types of living cells plus an inorganic substance.

We returned to the castle entrance, and entered the basement laboratory. We returned to Veronif with a shiny item from the basement, and she said it was a Time Piece. Time Pieces are allegedly pieces of significant history that crystallized into material substances. The first Time Piece flashed an scene before us, allowing us to see into the past...

In the induced vision, Count Cortes failed in another human experiment, and Viscount Montoro brought forth Death Wraiths to help Cortes in his experiments. It seemed Cortes still lived after all. Previously, Cortes was petrified due to our disruption of his ritual in Caebolan, then he was revived with our Katovic Soup and defeated, which led to the recruitment of Selva. Now, Montoro had revived him once again.

We went deeper into the castle basement, where the warehouse was located and found another Time Piece. This piece showed us another vision in which Montoro claimed that normal humans cannot contain the vast powers, resulting in mental collapses. His solution was for Cortes himself to become a subject. Ignoring his objections, Montoro forcefully transformed him into a huge petrified form - Stone Cortes.

According to Veronif, Count Cortes himself had experimented on living humans, so there was a kind of poetic justice involved. Technically, as a viscount, Montoro's rank should be lower than Cortes, who was a count, so he was really an upstart... See [Quest] Lucifer Castle Admission and [Quest] The Misfortune of Cortes for actual quest details.