Confession
Three months had passed since Yena began living in the house.
On that day, Yena had endured something terrible at Yurin's hands—until Yura stepped between them and mediated. For a fleeting moment Yura had wondered whether Yurin, looking at the girl, had somehow sensed that she was Seon-ah's daughter. But Yurin, lost in her own delusions, had already begun to regard Yena as her child. Watching it unfold, Yura could not bring herself to reveal the truth: that Yena was not Yurin's daughter at all. She was terrified that Yurin, who had only just clawed her way back toward sanity, might shatter all over again. Worse than before, even. As if she somehow understood Yurin's fragile state, Yena never confessed either—never told her she was not her daughter.
And so time slipped by.
Yena clung to Yura and Yurin for the love she had never received from her own mother. At first she had carried herself in ways no ordinary child would, but little by little she opened her heart, even allowing herself to act spoiled with the two of them. She no longer resisted when Yurin played at being her mother. On the contrary—she called her Mom and reached for her affection. Whenever anyone asked about her real mother, Yena would frown and sigh, and from that alone it was plain her memories of the woman were anything but kind. Seeing her like that, Yura thought she understood well enough why the girl so desperately sought a mother's love from them. Clearly things had not been good between her and her mother.
Or so she believed—until the day she discovered Yena's true form, and learned the whole of what had happened.
Yena was counting the months since she had last seen her father, Seon-ah.
She had not forgotten a word of what he had told her when he sent her through the Gate to Earth. Go to the police station, ask them to take her to the house of a woman named Park Yura. Conceal her identity. Keep everything about her mother a secret. Three simple instructions. She remembered his face as he spoke them—the sorrow in it, the quiet grief of a father forced to let his child go.
The reason Seon-ah had no choice but to send her to Earth. The greatest reason she hated her mother. Her father had sent her here to save her—because she had been chosen as the Demon King's new vessel.
Her mother, the Demon King, had never treated her as a child. She had regarded her as little more than a new body into which to transfer her soul. What her mother had done to her defied description. To force her growth, she had used biomagic, wracking Yena's body with the agony of accelerated development; to forcibly awaken her mana, she had flooded her with raw magical power in violent surges. Her father had wept and screamed at the sight of her suffering, but that devil who called herself a mother treated her as a tool and subjected her flesh to every kind of biological manipulation. The body she ended up with was already nearly that of an adult. Simply knowing her body was being rewritten under biomagic had been terrifying enough. She could at least believe her mother's claim that the remodeling would leave no side effects—after all, the Demon King would hardly want the vessel she meant to inhabit to break.
Tonight Yena had released her transformation magic for the first time in a long while and returned to her true form. On Earth, where mana barely gathered at all, she sometimes needed to slip back into her original body—out of Yura and Yurin's sight—to draw what little power she could. She knew she must not be seen like this, and yet returning to her real self after so long felt like she could finally breathe. The body her mother had warped was still more convenient than the small one she wore by day.
That thought brought her father to mind—not the grief of those days, but something brighter. If he ever escaped her mother's grasp and crossed from the Demon Realm to Earth, she wanted him to share the happiness she had found here. She sank so deep into the daydream that she never noticed someone approaching behind her. Never realized that Yura was walking toward her with a look of pure shock on her face.
Yura had sometimes wondered whether Yena, who already looked so much like Seon-ah, would grow into a face even closer to his. It had seemed only natural. And yet, looked at another way, Seon-ah's features were a blend of his father Hyuntae's and his mother Mina's—and if one had to choose which parent he favored more, it was Mina. So wouldn't Seon-ah's daughter resemble Mina as well? It had been a idle thought. Tonight it proved true.
In the middle of the night Yura had come out to the living room for water when she heard a rustling from Yena's room. She eased the door open, meaning to comfort the girl if she was lying awake missing her father. What she saw through the crack stopped her cold: a five-year-old girl's clothes discarded on the bed, and the naked figure of a grown woman stretching both arms high overhead as if luxuriating in her own body.
Yura shoved the door open in shock. Yena spotted her at the same instant. Neither of them could hide their astonishment.
Yura had known Yena was a monster. She had believed herself prepared for anything. But a monster that could change its form—that was something she had never imagined. Yena, for her part, could only stare. Yura had always been so careful around her as a child; nothing like this had ever happened before.
They stood in stunned silence until Yura found her voice first.
"Yena… what is that form…?"
"This is how I really look… I'm sorry I hid it all this time."
Yena had concealed her appearance because she was obeying her father's instructions. Seon-ah had known that if she arrived on Earth seeking shelter with Yura not as a five-year-old but as a woman past twenty, Yura would either think her insane or refuse to take her in under circumstances too absurd to accept. A body that had aged past twenty in a mere five years was as good as announcing she was a monster—and Yura, who had lived as a hunter, might well have tried to kill her. Yura knew Seon-ah; she did not know a monster who merely wore his face. So Yena had had no choice but to hide her true self.
In the end she began to tell Yura everything she had kept secret—and why she had come from the Demon Realm to Earth. Only the details about her mother, the one thing her father had sworn must never come to light, she left unspoken.
As Yura listened, her expression hardened. The biomagic experiments that had forced her body to mature too fast. The endless injections of mana and the agony they brought. Her father screaming and begging her mother to stop. And above all, the memories she shared with him. Yena poured story after story out to her.
Dawn was breaking when Yurin's voice called for her from the living room. There was so much more she wanted to say, but Yena promised she would tell the rest later, then used her transformation magic to return to a child's shape. She walked out to the living room and greeted Yurin as if nothing were wrong.
Yura watched her go, no longer certain which was real—the cunning monster who had just stood before her, or the little girl now nestled in Yurin's arms, hungering for a mother's love.
Five years earlier. The Demon Realm.
Between two sets of bars, the First Elder stood in the center of the chamber.
"We're still too busy for me to dig this up myself. Better to bring in an interrogator."
Two prisoners. Mina had been taken on the First Elder's orders—to investigate why an armed human force had invaded the Demon Realm. To uncover the truth of the incident, they had abducted Mina, the expedition's commander and the head of that force.
Looking at Mina's body, the First Elder felt the pure, overwhelming tide of mana raging within it. Her flesh was a vessel of critical importance for the Demon King; he instructed the interrogator to extract information without inflicting any physical harm.
The interrogator considered how to proceed. The foundation of torture was to break a captive monster with bodily pain until it talked—and now she was being told to discard that foundation entirely. Few assignments could have been more unreasonable. But it was not long before she learned that the beautiful human male locked in the cell across from her was the son of the woman she was meant to question. From the conversation that passed between the two of them, she found her direction.
The heart of interrogation was not simply forcing a mouth open through torment. It was drawing out the flood of information a subject spilled, then coaxing them further. Plenty of people broke under physical pain, but those who ended up in the Council's interrogation chambers were rarely so simple. Most were rebels who had risen against the realm, or monsters of noble blood—creatures determined not to give testimony that would harm their own. This time, however, the situation was different. She had been told not to harm the woman. No one had said a word about the man.
The interrogator studied Seon-ah's face and body with care.
What a delicious little thing.
She ran her tongue over her lips as if savoring the thought. A suitably effective technique for making her subject talk flashed through her mind.
I wonder if she'll still keep her mouth shut when her own son is violated right in front of her.
Hungry to enact a torture steeped in her own foul desires, the interrogator began gathering soldiers she knew from within the royal castle.