Chapter 77
Chapter 77
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 77
Chapter Title: Agony in Chains
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Feeling pain in my wrists, I opened my eyes.
Where am I?
He turned his head left and right. All he could see were gray walls.
He checked his body. His wrists were bound to the arms of the chair. His legs were tied the same way.
He twisted his body with all his might. The chair didn't budge, as if it were bolted to the floor.
Breathing felt difficult, like his lungs were filled with water. Where am I? Why was I captured? And where is Riselra?
"Honey! Riselra! Can you hear me?"
He shouted at the top of his lungs. His voice echoed back hollowly.
He called for his wife over and over. How much time passed? A dry cough came out. His throat was hoarse in such a short time. The inside of his throat felt torn, tasting of blood.
"Why are you doing this to me? If it's money, I'll give you everything. Please just let me go. My wife is sick. If you leave her alone, she'll be in danger."
He begged with his head bowed. Barely holding back the nausea from his anxiety.
"Not yet."
Where had he come from? A middle-aged man stood in front of him. He strained his neck and lifted his head.
"What about my wife?"
"She's fine, so don't worry. Look around instead."
"Where is Riselra right now? She's a patient. She can't be without me!"
"Don't shout like that. It hurts your throat."
The middle-aged man placed food at his feet.
"I'll untie you. But don't harm yourself. If you care about your wife, you need to stay healthy, right?"
Two men standing behind the middle-aged man approached him. He tried to resist with a scream, but the moment something touched the back of his neck, he lost consciousness.
When he opened his eyes again, his hands and feet were free. He panted heavily as he rummaged through the room. There had to be an entrance.
He wandered around for a long time. He returned to the chair and slumped down. No door was visible. It was a completely sealed space.
If only it were a dream—the stinging soles of his feet told him it was real.
"Riselra."
He covered his eyes with both hands and buried his face in the floor.
Why does God only give us trials? We'd finally reached the end of our misfortune, only to be pushed off again.
Where does this fall end? Is my wife okay? What do they want?
Even as he cursed God, he sought God again.
If you save me just this once, I'll live my life as you wish. Whoever you are, if you show your power, I'll offer everything as your servant.
He prayed and prayed to nameless gods of all kinds.
There was no answer.
* * *
"This is truly enigmatic."
Enigmatic. No word fit better. Kalligo concluded his impressions of the underground cavern like that.
"My job involves earning the resentment of others, so my senses for detecting grudges are highly developed. I can tell just from their eyes. That person's cursing me."
"Grudges."
Guchi muttered as he stepped inside the iron bars. Scratches made by fingernails, broken nails fallen to the floor, and smeared blood.
"By my senses, the resentment here feels stronger than in Stoa Room 6. The hatred of those imprisoned here must have been extraordinary."
"Do you see ghosts too, by any chance?"
Guchi asked with a serious face. Kalligo pondered briefly. Whether to keep teasing this gentleman with his innocent side.
Normally, he'd put on a show of being possessed by a ghost for the finale, but today he had to hold back.
It involved no one less than the Commander's wife.
The information found here would determine the Commander's future actions. He knew better than anyone what that meant.
"The dead don't speak. Even if they hold grudges, what's the use once they're gone? Necromancers claim to read grudges and summon ghosts, but I have no such talent. So, Guchi, don't make that face. Living people are scarier than ghosts. Ghosts play pranks, but people stab you in the back."
"There are ghosts that kill people too."
"Would those be common? Look at this instead."
He pulled Guchi to the side.
Guchi had exceptional eyesight. Whether it was a hunter's instinct or personal trait, he didn't know.
In any case, he had better discernment than the underlings trained in the inspection unit.
"This is…"
Guchi closely examined the marks on the wall.
"What do you think?"
"At first, I was too shocked to look properly, but now it feels different."
"How so?"
"I thought they were desperately scraping, begging to be spared. But looking closely, it's not rough scratches—it's curved like drawings. Strange. It might sound odd, but it seems like they enjoyed it."
"Enjoyed it? Good. That matches my opinion."
"You think so too?"
"We'll need to look more, but for now, yes. I've seen it before, at the Alpesia camp. A half-mad murderer whose hobby was drawing on walls. He chewed his nails for blood as paint. Quite a sight, smiling like a child while painting with blood."
"Those imprisoned here weren't sane either. By the way, what was that Stoa Room 6 you mentioned?"
"A torture chamber. But we call it the graveyard among ourselves. Almost no one comes out alive."
He said with a smile. Guchi frowned and stepped back.
"Any other opinions? Your advice helps me, Guchi."
"Does an amateur's word mean anything to an expert?"
"Nothing in the world is useless. Everything has its use. Anyway, what do you think? See anything else special?"
"Not something I'd say in front of Lander, but it looks like children were imprisoned here too."
"Spot on. Here and here—the heights are gauged by these two spots."
"I don't even want to imagine it."
"Don't imagine it, Guchi. The filthy stuff is my specialty."
He meticulously organized all the information in the iron cage into his mental library. Carefully, so he could retrieve it when needed.
"Let's check the other areas closely. I'd love to bring in my capable underlings to dig deeper, but conditions don't allow it."
It wasn't that he didn't trust his underlings. It was just that the responsibility was overwhelmingly huge. Too burdensome to even tell his trusted ones.
He investigated the cavern with Guchi. Passing the iron bars and living area, they entered a circular space with a table. Second time seeing it, but it still gave him chills.
"'John' must have used people here on this altar for something. Magic or ritual, whatever—plenty died here."
"Forty years, maybe much longer, locking people up. You're right—people are the scariest."
"Now we have to grasp the psychology and actions of that scary man, John. We're in a position to love John more than anyone."
"Love? What horrific nonsense."
"Striving to understand the target, getting frustrated when you can't, yet unable to give up and keep thinking about them. What else is love? From today, we must be John's ardent lovers. Imagine the invisible him and uncover everything about him. You too, Guchi."
"You do the romancing alone. I'll curse the bastard and watch from a third perspective."
"That's not bad either."
He picked up the journal of this place's owner, 'John,' who'd been murdering women for forty years. No name known, so John it was.
"These bizarre symbols seem like the language of mages."
"You think so too?"
"A pattern emerges then devolves into chaos. Every specialist scroll I've seen from mages was like this."
"Can't decipher it?"
He nodded firmly.
"No one but the mage who wrote it can read a mage's language. It's an expression of their Mental Realm. Even the Empire's greatest mage couldn't. Mage language is intensely personal and independent."
He skipped the pages covered in bizarre symbols and extracted only the readable text.
"John clearly has an obsession with leaving records. Even with nothing much to say, he wrote them down."
"At the end, it says: 'I'll leave everything behind. God, eradicate me through your agent. Use these to stop me.' Seems like the only reason he left records. Isn't it odd? Asking to be stopped."
"Some famous murderers deliberately left evidence. To prove their superiority at committing crimes without getting caught."
"Is this man—John—psychologically the same?"
He pondered briefly before answering.
"Can't say for sure yet. Humans are complicated. It might be genuine. Maybe he wanted someone to stop him."
"Crazy bastards everywhere."
"No one with normal thinking would do this. However…"
"However?"
"It depends on how you define normal. We might seem abnormal to someone. Think flexibly. Rigid thinking won't help understand John. Set aside morals for now and explore the god he cries out to."
Analyzing John by conventional behavior would hit a wall. As he reviewed the journal to set the investigation's direction—
"What about Gilliud?"
Guchi asked. Gilliud. The man who lied constantly and stayed in the building John left. Riselra, whom he paraded as his wife, was likely a victim.
"If he's still alive, John must be at least late seventies."
"Not strange if he entered the grave tomorrow."
"Late seventies is long-lived. The journal shows he's passionate. Some unjust incident with his family made him resent God, and he dedicated his life to confronting God. Whatever it was, he wanted to see the end with his own hands."
"When physical limits hit, he set up a successor?"
He held back his answer. That was the question. John was a man bound by obsession. All his desires converged on one: the fierce will to meet God. His life's greatest wish. Achieved by another's hand?
"John's wish is to meet and kill God himself. Nothing else matters. If the journal is his true heart, a proxy fulfilling the dream is pointless."
(To be continued)