Chapter 25
There was nothing but darkness.
The very beginning of my oldest memory was darkness.
Always trapped in a cold, lightless place, I was dragged around by adults every day and used as a test subject.
They’d slit my skin open with knives and inject something into me.
It was the sort of agony I didn’t even want to remember.
When they weren’t experimenting on me, I had to sit on the cold stone floor and recite martial formulas until I had them memorized.
If I couldn’t recite them within the allotted time, they beat me until I was half-dead.
In those days, the other children around me kept dying because they couldn’t endure the experiments.
The sniffling child who always said he missed his mother.
The child who, though in the same miserable boat as the rest of us, still looked after the others like an older brother or sister.
The child who burned with the will to escape no matter what.
Every one of them coughed up blood and bodily fluids from every hole in their bodies, and in the end even their flesh melted away.
Only yesterday, they’d been talking with me, and now they’d turned into a fistful of bloody slurry.
- Tch. Failed again, huh.
- Gross. Hurry up and clean it.
What had once been children was swept away with a few passes of a mop.
The faint stains left on the stone floor were proof that they had ever existed in this world.
I was horrified by those senseless, merciless deaths.
I’d been fine yesterday, and the day before that, and today too, but there was no guarantee I’d be fine tomorrow.
I might be nothing but a stain on the floor by then.
I had to get out of here.
There had been other children who tried to run before.
But they were caught soon enough, and the adults made examples of them.
Shudder—
Just thinking of the children who had died with their bones and flesh literally torn apart made my limbs tremble, but dying because I failed an experiment was even more frightening.
So I swallowed one fear with a bigger fear and moved.
The guards weren’t much of a problem.
Every day they forced us through experiments, and by the end we had no strength left even to point a weapon at ourselves, so the security was fairly lax.
But there was one thing they didn’t know.
Unlike the other kids, I still had some strength left in my body even after the experiments.
The escape happened at night.
I had no way of knowing the time in that sealed-up prison, so I only judged it by the guards’ heads bobbing as they nodded off.
I scraped at the mortar between the bricks and pulled something out.
It was a bent length of wire, something one of the children who had tried to escape had prepared.
He’d called himself a member of the Haomun, and using wire he’d secretly smuggled out, he’d fashioned this through a secret technique.
He died before he could ever use it, but I wasn’t going to.
Click.
So that thing about him being from the Haomun really had been true, because the wire opened the lock.
I slipped through the bars and crept down the dark corridor, holding my breath.
Then I heard a voice calling to me from somewhere.
- Come this way.
Before I knew it, my feet were moving as the voice led me along.
Though it was a path I’d never walked before in my life, my steps never once faltered.
What I reached was an altar of some sort.
On top of it lay a jet-black sword, tightly bound with a yellow cord and talismans.
- Pull me out. I’ll get you out of here.
When the sword, whose blade was broken halfway along its length, whispered to me again, I tore off the talismans attached to it as though I were possessed.
What happened after that was hazy.
I think I heard the flustered voices and shouts of the adults, but I’m not sure.
When I opened my eyes again, I was somehow outside the prison, holding the sword in my hand.
It was all absurd, but I didn’t have time to think about it for long.
- This way!
- Don’t let him get away!
I had to run from the pursuers chasing me.
For a child’s body to escape from adults—especially ones trained in martial arts—was impossible, but there was a way.
If I poured qi into the sword I was holding, the darkness around me would hide my figure.
Since I’d learned the basic heart method as part of the experiments, I at least had a little internal power.
Whenever I was on the verge of being caught, I used the sword’s ability to slip past their eyes.
I’d escaped because I was afraid of the darkness in the prison, but ironically, I ended up hiding inside darkness to get away.
How many days and nights had I run without eating or sleeping?
My body and mind finally reached their limit, and in the end I was caught by the tail.
- All because of this Olangkae bastard! You’re making us run around like idiots, you fucking little shit!
As the pursuer beat me senseless, blood splattered before my eyes.
The fear that came with the beating, and the temptation of blood, awakened something deep inside me.
I bit down on the neck of one of my pursuers, and warm blood slid down my throat.
It was unbelievably sweet, unbelievably warm.
I thought nothing could ever taste better.
And when I drank blood, I wasn’t cold anymore. I wasn’t hungry anymore.
When I woke up inside that cave, it seemed I was moving only by instinct, not reason.
- P-please... save me...
- Eek! Run..! It’s a monster!
Those delicious prey ran for their lives the moment they saw me, and I sucked the blood from them one after another.
- M-more. Kill more.
The voice in my head urged me on too.
The more blood I drank, the fuller my stomach felt, yet my chest only grew emptier.
Was this really what I’d escaped for?
Every time that thought surfaced in my instinct-swallowed mind, the emptiness felt even more brutal.
No. I had just wanted someone—
Right when that lingering question was growing deeper, he appeared.
- And here I was, waiting for you all this time.
He was standing among the prey I’d mistaken for people trying to hurt me.
The instant I saw him appear just as I was about to devour the greatest prey of all, every hair on my body stood on end.
It was the first time.
The first time I’d thrown everything I had at something and still couldn’t touch it, not even by a toe.
With nothing but a single sword, he cut down everything that stood in his way.
Even worse, the energy I felt from that sword was enough to make my skin crawl.
My mind wasn’t clear, but that scene felt burned into my memory all the same.
In the end, deciding I couldn’t win, I ran.
Hiding myself with stealth did no good.
He could find me no matter where I hid, and he chased me all the way to the end like some ghost.
- Tag’s over.
- Is that all your little tricks amount to?
The fear of not knowing when I’d be caught.
The terror that if I were caught, I’d be killed like the other children.
His pursuit, which couldn’t kill me or shake me off, stirred up feelings and memories that had been buried for so long they’d nearly rotted away.
And just as the sleeping part of my mind began to wake under that pressure—
I heard a voice inside my head.
- Come to me.
The moment I heard it, all the thoughts writhing through my skull vanished.
With my mind gone still, I only faithfully followed the voice’s command.
- Pull me out.
- Give your power to me.
I had a bad feeling about obeying it, but like always, I couldn’t resist.
And when I finally gripped the sword as instructed, something changed.
An immense force came flooding into me like a tidal wave.
Even as my body was torn to shreds with pain, I couldn’t let go of the sword.
The sword would not permit it.
I’d held it before, many times, but this time was different.
My body moved as the sword commanded, and my mind was forcibly dragged down.
Frightened that if it was suppressed this time, I might never wake up again, I resisted with everything I had.
Then, unconsciously, I reached out.
For a hand no one had ever taken before, and would never take.
As I groped through that empty darkness, I saw light between my fingers.
It was a star.
That star glittered in the night sky, but unlike the others, it was red.
Some people might have taken it as an omen, but I wasn’t one of them.
...Pretty.
Even as my consciousness was sinking, I thought that star was beautiful.
That red light was not the same as the blood-red hue that had once warmed the cold sinking into my bones.
I couldn’t explain why, but somehow I knew.
That red light was the red of struggle and refinement.
Just looking at it made me feel strangely relieved.
The star drew closer at terrifying speed.
The star that had fallen to the ground was no star at all, but him.
He had come after me again.
The sword that had seized my body began to fight him.
Radiance bloomed from his blade.
It was starlight, not that ominous energy from before.
He swung a sword wrapped in starlight.
The starlight that flashed as he deflected the attacks looked almost like a meteor.
As my consciousness kept sinking, I found myself staring at that light.
I’d heard it once a long time ago.
That if you make a wish on a falling star, it will come true.
I don’t remember when or from whom I heard those words, but those words alone, I remember clearly.
I squeezed out the last of my slipping consciousness and said,
"...Please, let me—"
"Yeah. Of course."
"!?"
My eyes widened at the reply—at a reply that had never once come before.
I hadn’t expected anyone to answer.
But even as the sword’s power tried to silence me, my consciousness was already closing its eyes.
And with that, I made one final wish.
Please. Please let me not have imagined it.
* * *
"Hey, kid. Wake up."
From within the darkness, I heard someone calling me.
It was different from the voice I’d always heard.
At a voice that held no malice or chill at all, my eyes slowly opened.
My vision hadn’t fully returned yet, so I cautiously reached out with a blurred gaze.
"Ahh... uhh..."
I wanted to say something at the emptiness where nothing could be grasped, but after going so long without speaking, no words would come.
Tap.
"Heh. We go to all this trouble to save you, and you’re a sleepy one, aren’t you?"
"U-uhh... uhhh....!"
Then a rough, callused hand but one firm with strength took mine.
At the warmth passing from hand to hand, the child finally realized it.
My wish had at last become reality.
Yes, I had always wished for this.
For someone else to save me.
For someone to take my hand.
Tremble—
I wanted to see the face of the person holding my hand, but tears welled up in my eyes and I couldn’t.
"Waaah!"
The child burst into tears, crying out all the sobs he’d held back for his whole life.
* * *
The child cried for a short while that somehow felt very long, as if he were trying to pour every last tear from his body.
By the time the front of my clothes was soaked through, the sobbing finally stopped.
He had cried himself exhausted and fallen asleep.
"Haaah..."
Holding that child in my arms, Geom Mujin let out a quiet sigh.
"What am I supposed to do with you now?"