Chapter 47

For the first time, the corners of Kaiyan’s mouth curled into a faint, icy smirk. His blue eyes glinted with a dark, dangerous intelligence. “Why did you wait so long to reveal yourself, Roverni’s magician?”

『The price of magic is the contractor’s most precious possession. Roverni wagered his daughter’s life for yours.』

The corpse emitted a vile, delighted cackle. Isaac remembered the rumors of the daughter Roverni cherished more than his own soul; he shuddered at the entity’s sheer joy over her death and the father’s agony.

『Now tell me. Who are you?』

The corpse had closed the distance, its hand, now crushed into a mangled mass of flesh, reaching toward the prince.

“And who are you?” Kaiyan countered, his voice laced with steel. “The one hiding in the shadows and puppeteering a corpse?”

With a swift, fluid motion, his sword severed the corpse’s wrist. The hand dropped to the floor, but it immediately began skittering like an arachnid, slowly scaling the corpse’s torso.

Isaac grimaced. A hideous insect would have been more charming.

The hand reached the stump and reattached itself as if nothing had occurred. Kaiyan watched, then decapitated the corpse without a second of hesitation. The headless body swayed, stooped down to retrieve its rolling head, and set it back upon its neck. It attached effortlessly, bursting into raucous laughter. When Kaiyan dismembered the arms, legs, and torso, the result remained the same. After a brief delay, every severed piece crawled back to rejoin the whole.

“Ugh… what in the hell is that?”

Even Isaac, whose constitution was stronger than most, felt bile rise as the fragments of flesh writhed across the floor. He clamped a hand over his mouth. Beside him, the cats began to whisper in a frantic, conspiratorial tone.

「Ash would stop it. If you sprinkle ash over every cut, the pieces cannot rejoin. And if you destroy the bead the magician planted inside the body, the corpse will stop its infernal talking.」

「But we should not tell him. He called us useless before. He also called us noisy animals.」

「Yes, yes. Let us hold our tongues.」

The three cats nodded in synchronized spite.

Isaac hurriedly rummaged through his pockets until his fingers closed around the flint he habitually carried. Tonight was not the new moon, so it was merely an ordinary tool, but it would suffice. Lacking proper tinder, he stripped off his outer garment and tore it into long, thin strips. He struck the steel, and the fabric ignited instantly. In his haste, however, he failed to notice the dry dust and wood fragments covering the floor. A spark tumbled from the burning cloth and instantly caught the parched timber.

“…Oh.”

Isaac froze.

The cats, which had been staring with wide, saucer eyes from the moment he struck the flint, erupted into a chaotic frenzy.

Flare!

「He set it on fire. He set it on fire.」

「Arson remains among the most heinous of crimes, and he has committed the act while his superior stood by, watching with unblinking eyes.」

「This is catastrophic. Absolutely disastrous.」

They are effectively pouring gasoline onto a wildfire, Isaac thought with a bitter, sinking sensation. He stamped out the burning strip of fabric and scraped together the resulting pile of gray ash.

Kaiyan cast him a single, irritated glance, then turned his attention back to the corpse as if the entire affair were beneath his notice. “We should hurry. First, I need to learn exactly who you are.” He seized the corpse by the neck and tore away its ragged, grime-streaked clothing. A corpse controlled by a practitioner of the dark arts would invariably carry the caster’s unique mark somewhere upon its flesh.

The corpse’s face contorted. Only when a wet, giggling sound burst from its gaping maw did Isaac realize that the grotesque distortion was intended to be a smile.

『Then let us hurry… and see who you are.』

Thrum!

The voice seemed to rise from the very floor of hell, vibrating in the marrow of Isaac’s bones. The corpse unhinged its jaw, opening its mouth impossibly wide, and something pitch-black glistened deep within its throat. Before Isaac could identify the object, a thick, suffocating black smoke erupted outward. It engulfed Kaiyan in an instant. The prince vanished into the heart of the writhing darkness as the smoke billowed, expanding until it choked the entire warehouse.

『Who are you?』

『What are you?』

The resonant voices battered against Isaac’s skull like physical blows. He inhaled the shifting smoke, and his stomach immediately heaved. Nausea surged through him in violent, sickening waves, as though his entrails were being wrenched and overturned. His head and eyes throbbed with a rhythmic, pulsing agony. Vertigo seized him, causing the world to tilt on its axis. His vision warped, and within that distorted sight, everything seemed to grind to a halt. It was as though time itself had frozen, while the voices continued their relentless tolling inside his head.

What are you? Who are you? What are you? Who are you? What are you…?

The nausea became agonizing. An immense, crushing pressure weighed down upon his entire body. Isaac collapsed to his knees, clutching his throat as his body convulsed. He felt as though he were dying, and in that moment, he truly thought death might be a mercy.

Then—

「The handsome one’s will is too vast. It is enormous enough to make the very barrier creak.」

「What sort of human possesses a will like that?」

「Do not block it. Let it pass through you. Allow it to move through your body like air.」

「This smoke cannot harm you. Human magic does not work upon you. So do not be afraid. Leave it alone. Do not resist it. Accept it, then let it flow through.」

The whispering voices slipped into his ears, soothing his churning stomach with quiet, measured tones. His mind was too disordered to distinguish the speaker, but Isaac concentrated on the voices with every shred of willpower he possessed. He forced himself to regulate his ragged breathing and surrendered to the immense pressure bearing down upon him.

At first, it proved difficult. His body stiffened reflexively, curling inward to defend against the foreign, repulsive sensation. Yet, as Isaac endured the nausea and slowly forced himself to accept the feeling strand by strand, the crushing weight began to ebb. Thin black streams flooded into his body and flowed out again, cycling and pulsing, until his body felt as though it had become nothing more than a hollow conduit.

The nausea faded, and the dizziness vanished. Then, a new sensation rippled through him. Images bloomed in his mind, one after another, like drops of dark ink diffusing through clear water. He was not merely seeing them; he was experiencing them, dragged through every fleeting moment.

They were memories. Memories dissolved into the black smoke and passed through Isaac, belonging to a man who had lived his entire life surrounded by a suffocating weight of awe. He had never recognized it as such, for people rarely notice what they consider natural.

Those natural forces were reverence, deference, visceral fear, and meaningless jealousy or hostility. Everyone treated him that way, even those bound to him by blood. There were no exceptions. His memories contained nothing else. Always alone. Even surrounded by those universal reactions, he remained solitary.

Yet, he did not care. He had no interest in them and scarcely registered them. He simply existed among those familiar, hollow dynamics. He did not feel lonely, for he did not know what loneliness was. No one had ever taught him. Because he did not understand the absence of connection, he could not comprehend loneliness itself. He had never felt affection, nor had he ever hated anyone, for he had never received those emotions clearly enough from another to understand their true essence.

There was no color, no light or darkness. Only a pervasive gray. That gray filled everything within him.

Perhaps that was why he had been cast away from the familiar faces of his childhood to a distant, brutal frontier. Those people feared and avoided him. They did not want his presence. And so, while still young, he was sent to a remote and alien land.

There, countless monsters and magical beasts lurked throughout the harsh, unforgiving terrain. He cut them down. Again and again. Day after agonizing day without end. Each day, their screams thick with curses and their hatred sharpened into pure killing intent washed over him. That, too, became natural.

In those numb, meaningless years, only one thing elicited a powerful sensation: pain. Pain that returned at fixed intervals. Pain that drove his body and mind beyond every conceivable limit. He could not purge it with his own strength, and no one assisted him. There was nowhere he could rest, no one upon whom he could lean, not even for a fleeting moment. He bore the burden entirely alone.

In that searing agony, he suddenly wondered: Why? Of all the things bestowed upon him, he had wanted none.

Not the people.

Not the position.

Not the curse.

Not even himself.

Everything had been arranged before he possessed the capacity to choose.

Then—he would choose something. He would desire something. He would yearn for the disappearance of the source that had orchestrated this existence. And so—he decided to erase it.

“Yes. That is why you must disappear.” A low voice flowed through the smoke, which had grown so dense that the world beyond it had vanished. “Because that is what I desire.”

The mass of smoke coalesced, moving with a deliberate, haunting weight. It resembled an enormous ball of black thread, wound upon itself into an infinite loop. A shape wrapped in the darkness raised one arm and seized the corpse by the throat. The smoke pouring from the corpse gradually withered. The darkness surrounding Kaiyan thinned, and his piercing blue eyes emerged. Beneath them, his mouth curved into a slanted, predatory smile.

“You are no ordinary magician. What are you?”

He tightened his hand around the corpse’s throat.

Crack!

The neck bent and twisted beneath his grip. The corpse’s eyes widened as it met that cold, blue gaze.

『You are… you… Your Highness… you…』

The voice emerging from its throat shifted continuously. High, low, coarse, thin. It sounded as though countless voices within the corpse were vying for control. Then, the noise ceased abruptly.

『You bear the royal family’s curse. I know who you are.』