SOTBW - 156

The man gazed down at the vast, snow- and salt-covered wilderness.

Faint traces of a once-thriving civilization remained in the desert, but the remnants of buildings and the sand dunes that had risen carelessly made it hard to distinguish one from the other, as people had long since stopped coming.

As the damp winter wind blew over the ruins, the snowflakes that covered the barren land floated into the air and drifted away.

The snow mixed with salt swirled in the fickle wind, scattering in all directions until they finally reached a forest full of dead, white trees.

Following the flow of the salt swirling in the wind, the man’s gaze eventually landed on the dead forest. In the middle of the forest, there were cocoons the size of log cabins, and the husks of the Seriths were stiffened and discarded. The man stuffed his hands into his pockets and carefully examined the area around the cocoons.

The Seriths were all interconnected. Though there were billions of them in this world, they were ultimately one body.

So, when one individual learned to move on four legs, another would crawl like a grub before soon walking. If one learned how to use its tentacles to strangle and kill prey, a Seriths living several days’ journey away could one day imitate the same technique.

The Seriths were not creatures driven by time, so they learned the behaviors of their kin slowly and perfectly. However, today’s Seriths were learning at a significantly slower pace.

With narrowed eyes, the man stared intently at the cocoon that glowed with a violet light.

During Astrun’s time, the Seriths learned human behavior at an unimaginable speed, as if a child was learning a game. They not only imitated human movements but also the movements of beasts, and later, even languages from various nations.

Eventually, they began to mimic the appearance and voices of the people they had consumed, driving those who resisted their destruction into despair.

Long ago, the Seriths transformed into the forms of loved ones—family, lovers, and friends—whom they had once passionately loved. They ate humans, growing in number. People were horrified and terrified, feeling an unresolvable agony as they watched a monster that resembled their loved ones devouring their comrades.

If the Seriths had learned as quickly as they had in the past, humanity would have been wiped out long ago. It was no surprise that the people of today, who could no longer properly use magic or spells, could not fight the Seriths effectively.

The spells used by the priests of the Kingdom of Bastronia were so inferior they couldn’t even compare to Aron Noctis’s techniques. Comparing the spells Aron had used with those of today’s priests felt like a child’s play.

The man folded his arms with a neutral expression.

The commander of the royal guard had reported that many soldiers claimed the Seriths had tried to speak, their mouths opening as though they were attempting to say something.

That was unexpected. The reason the Seriths were learning more slowly than in Astrun’s time was that their master—the original Seriths—had not been fully freed from its seal. Therefore, the man had expected that the Seriths wouldn’t start speaking like humans until the summer at the earliest.

The fact that their learning speed had slightly increased meant that the original Seriths was almost fully released from its seal, or something outside was significantly stimulating them.

The man noticed the sky darkening with clouds and stepped off the cliff as though walking along a path.

With each step, small spells rose from the air like ripples in a lake, only to disappear again. His steps down the void were as light as feathers.

Landing on the snow-covered ruins, the man looked up at the large cocoon. From the side of the cliff, it hadn’t been visible, but when he circled around to the other side, he saw parts of the cocoon had melted into formations resembling stalactites.

He knew what was inside the cocoon, so he kept his distance as he stared at it.

Beyond the sticky, melted surface of the cocoon, yellow eyes glowed brightly. The woman inside, as soon as she saw the man, lunged toward him like a hungry beast, but she was bound by transparent steel chains and couldn’t move.

Her body was truly grotesque.

There were multiple eyes embedded in her forehead, a massive mouth that reached both ears with elongated teeth protruding from her gums, her right arm and nails swollen to three times their normal size, her chest exposed as though it were hollowed out and the ribs splayed outwards, her lower abdomen gaunt and emaciated like a starved person, and her lower body resembling a spider’s, with several tails twitching as if to threaten the man.

The man gazed at her ribs, which were spread wide like a flower. The Seriths’ regenerative ability was unparalleled. Yet, the fact that her wounds had not healed meant she had chosen not to regenerate them.

The man smiled mischievously as he looked at the woman.

“Someone must have stolen your heart, Bersha. You seem quite angry, don’t you?”

Bending down as if comforting a child, the man examined the seals that held the woman’s body. The seals on her right arm and leg were broken, but the rest of them still held. However, the remaining seals wouldn’t last much longer.

The man smiled faintly, as if it were none of his concern, and put his hands together.

“By the way, where has the will of the disciple you cherished so much gone? It seems like his soul is still inside you... Could it be that you’re doing something pointless with my soul compass? Hmm, that wasn’t what I gave it to you for.”

As the man tilted his head and raised his knee, two arms shot up from the frozen ground below. The Seriths’ body, emerging from the earth, growled and bared its teeth at the man.

However, the man showed no signs of fear. Instead, he quietly smiled, as if accepting the dangerous play of a hunting dog.

Although the sun had not yet set, the Seriths, seemingly determined to protect the woman in the cocoon, quickly rose from the ground and lunged at the man.

One of the adults bared its teeth and bit down on the man’s back. The once-white land was stained a bright red, so vivid it was painful to look at. The adult, intoxicated by the taste of human blood and flesh after a long period of hunger, suddenly sensed an eerie gaze and hurriedly looked down at the man.

Their eyes met as the man tilted his head back.

The man was smiling, as though being eaten didn’t hurt him in the slightest.

However, the adult, starving from protecting the cocoon for so long, ignored the feeling of danger and opened its lower jaw wide to devour the man’s head.

The adult’s mouth expanded like a shark’s, only to freeze in place. Unable to move, it looked down in panic, realizing that its lower body had solidified into a stark white mass, as if covered in lime powder.

Salt...

Its entire body was turning into salt.

The adult struggled to escape, but it was too late. As the cold wind blew, the adult’s body shattered into a white mass of salt. Piles of salt, once part of the Seriths, now lay where it had stood.

The man, as if it had never happened, absentmindedly rubbed the healed side of his torso and chuckled.

“Sorry about that. I didn’t mean to make a mess around your home.”

The man, smiling casually, snapped his fingers toward the chaotic ground, which had been overturned by the appearance of the Seriths. The ring on his fourth finger gleamed briefly, and the land quickly returned to its original state.

The man watched the earth settle back into place before once again putting his hands in his pockets and turning his gaze back to the woman.

“Kieron’s will isn’t here, and the seals still have a long way to go before they’re completely undone...”

Sighing, the man gazed at the piles of salt and muttered in irritation.

“None of this is resolved. I really dislike situations like this.”

The man’s eyes were empty as he gazed at the barren plains. His expression remained mischievous and relaxed, but his brightly shining eyes were filled with cynicism and detachment toward every moment.

Though the man was young and beautiful, he seemed like an old man who had forgotten the brightest moments of his life due to a time that never seemed to end. Yet, because he knew there was still a hint of hope left, he seemed like a foolish and pitiful young man who could not let go of it.

Scratching his head, the man pretended to sit, and the salt gathered to form a solid chair.

The woman trapped inside the cocoon struggled desperately to free the chains around her neck and abdomen, trying to rush toward the man. In her eyes, the man looked like a delicious piece of meat.

The woman had no rational thought left. All that existed within her was the instinct to satisfy her hunger and survive.

The man, crossing his legs, looked at the woman as she howled in fury and made a pitiful expression.

“Why does Kieron think you’re Bersha? I can’t understand what’s going on in that fool’s head. Everyone calls you by that name, so I’ve been calling you that as well... But you’re really just the body of Bersha Guicilio. Is it right to call a body without Bersha’s soul by that name?”

At the man’s words, the woman writhed in agony, struggling. She couldn’t eat the man right in front of her, couldn’t satisfy the hunger boiling inside her, and so, in despair, she began to tear at her own flesh.

Whether she had ever satisfied her hunger this way before or whether it was the Seriths’ way of filling their bellies, the cocoon she was sitting in was stained with dried, dark-blue blood.

The man did not blink at the horrific sight of the woman. Instead, he watched, impassively, as she began to tear into her own stomach, as if he felt no emotion at all.

It was because, during Astrun’s time, the man and Astrun had been able to seal the Seriths in the northern ruins of the Astien Empire—they were intelligent enough to be controlled.

The Seriths were creatures without intelligence, where instincts dominated reason. However, at the critical moment when the sealing was either going to succeed or fail, the first Seriths controlled its instincts for the first and last time, and, with a face of reason, it obeyed the humans.

The first Seriths, sealed by the giant spell that encompassed the entire ruin, had eyes that shone with the light of sacrifice.

The man had met countless people over the long years, but those who were willing to sacrifice themselves to protect their loved ones were so few that, even after thousands of years, he had almost never forgotten their names.

Having witnessed every moment, he was certain. The first Seriths had been deliberately sealed by the second star of Astrun, Sylin Bastronia, who had led the sealing.

It had been the final farewell of a man who had dedicated his entire life to the beliefs he held dear, to his beloved partner.

“…Love, love, love. It’s all because of that love. Me, Mahilen, Kieron, Emaydis...”

As the man stood up, the salt chair scattered like sand.

The woman, too consumed by tearing at her own flesh, paid no attention to the man’s movements.

“Even if you wait here, your disciple will not return. I thought he might come back if he caused trouble for his master, but it seems he’s gone quite far.”

Sighing, the man showed a look of disappointment. The woman did not respond. It seemed she was too absorbed in eating her own flesh.

The man silently observed the woman as she repeated her hollow feeding, then quietly disappeared without a trace.