CH 130

In the dark room, the portrait of Madame Artingus shone softly.

“Madame Artingus.”

[You, who woke me up, want to see someone’s past.]

“Yes.”

[Looking into the past. It is to look into the world of a person who has lived through years of hardship.]

“…Seeing her world, I want to understand.”

A calm warning followed.

[You can come face to face with the very naked truth. That truth sometimes destroys the mind and heart.]

“I do not care.”

Madame Artingus smiled strangely.

[You are already prepared… So, what kind of past do you want to see?]

With his eyes as dry as the desert, he called out her name as earnestly as having a sip of water.

“Berylia Spinel.”

Madame Artinguis closed her eyes. Her eyelids moved rapidly as she saw what was in it.

[I will show you the past related to you.]

But after a while, the woman in the portrait whispered sadly.

[…However, her whole life is in contact with you.]

“What do you mean?”

At the time when deep doubts swirled. Rixus felt his hand that was holding the portrait slowly glistening and sucking him in.

At the same time, consciousness sank into the deep river.

Soon his soul was swept away by the raging waves. Tak, the lights of the world had gone out.

In the darkness, a single, thin voice was heard.

“God, forgive me of my sins.”

A whisper like a candle in the wind.

“When hardships pile up one after another, hold my trembling soul and do not let it fall.”

A girl was hugging her muddy body in the swamp and praying. A body that was as thin as bones.

With a ripped dress and dirty hair.

It was an appearance that Rixus knew.

‘Berylia’s childhood.’

He looked at the girl affectionately, as if he had encountered a piece of missed memory.

He wanted to go right in and hug that skinny body.

But Rixus could not intervene. So he only eagerly looked.

Even the vision was neither bright nor dark. It was more like black and white.

‘Sometimes the light comes on…’

When it was so terribly dark that the girl escaped the swamp for a moment and met the morning light.

Occasionally, the sight became bright.

But they were very fleeting moments in a long life.

Berylia. The past years went like seconds for him… 

Thanks to this, Rixus was able to see her daily life in its entirety.

‘Berylia…’

The young Rixus.

The boy who had left her alone in her hut.

The figure that he had been curious about was right there.

The girl living alone without him…

It was more miserable than expected. It looked a lot more lonely than he thought.

Every night when the girl curled up and slept in a damp swamp where there was no moonlight… 

A deep bruise was engraved on Rixus’ chest.

But still, not a single step from him could reach her.

The voice of Madame Artingus drifted into his boiling ears.

[The reason why people are troubled by thinking about the past… It must be because of the feeling of helplessness that they couldn’t change even a single thing now.]

He had no choice but to sympathize. In view of his own plight now.

She had a routine even in her miserable life, and her daily life was precarious.

She endured each day like that, and finally she became a full-fledged monarch.

It was an appearance that Rixus knew.

However, the scene didn’t last for long. He himself suddenly showed up.

To be precise, the figure of him and Ires from the past.

“The protagonist of the oracle that will destroy the world is the Queen of Spinel…”

“Do you want to organize a subjugation squad?”

“I will go myself.”

The former self, which Rixus could not remember, quickly got on a black horse and raised his sword.

And he wore a black helmet. It was only used when he absolutely had to kill an enemy.

‘What am I going to do? …Is that figure from Berylia’s past?’

And it was his own past.

Was it a past that he couldn’t even remember?

‘He’ rode his horse after Berylia, giving and taking several dangerous blows back and forth.

Every time ‘he’ chased her as if he was going to kill her, Rixus kept moving towards them, even though he knew he couldn’t stop them.

‘Stop. Stop!’

Clutching his throat, he screamed, but his voice didn’t reach in.

When ‘he’ finally pierced his sword into her blue roses…

Rixus was unable to breathe in the shock, like his body had been dismembered alive.

“Berylia Spinel, you are the worst human being that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.”

‘Don’t talk to her like that.’

“Even if you disappear, no one will be sad.”

‘Please… Shut up!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Could that be our past?’

He actually… There was no way he could hurt her.

But it wasn’t until the next moment when she was reborn and repeating her life in the swamp that Rixus realized.

She returned.

It actually happened.

At that time, a certain belief of Rixus, some sort of last defense against himself, had collapsed.

He stared blankly at the screen as if he had been mutilated.

He was so emotionally stunned that he couldn’t feel anything.

So while watching her second life, he realized a certain fact.

That faint light that shone occasionally.

What that meant.

It was the happiness that sometimes came in a dark life.

The proportion was so low because she saw light only for a moment in her densely lonely and extremely dark life.

Rixus’s heart broke again and again, collapsing.

And her second death came.

‘No… Please, stop.’

Third death.

‘Please.’

Fourth death.

‘Damn, please stop! Damn it!’

Fifth. sixth.

Gradually, she stopped praying to God.

Even the light she occasionally saw had disappeared altogether.

Rixus clenched his chest and wept.

Her life, which he had ruined, was repeating itself.

The woman, his darling.

That expression towards him, guarded from the beginning.

Even if she tried to hide it, the anxious eyes that she occasionally showed.

Her emotions were hot and then cold.

It was the moment when he fully realized the reason, all the causes.

It was all because of himself.

Because of what he did, she had a hard time.

In her seventh death, which was finally approaching, she pleaded anxiously.

“I too… want to live a worthy life.”

The choked breath from Rixus’ mouth spewed out like blood.

‘Berylia…’

He was arrogant. The person who loved more was him, and that was what he was always confident about.

It was also a miscalculation.

What he thought of as her being always scared and pushing away.

She opened her heart to the man who had hurt her seven times… 

How impossible was the love she showed.

With such impossibly great courage, she loved him.

It was only now that Rixus realized it.

Tired of the sensation of his heart breaking into little pieces, he faced an unfamiliar past.

In the moments of seeing and feeling her troubled years, it was like real pain to him.

It was not until the eighth life that he knew what he knew.

The warm hours they spent alone in the hut… 

It was very warm for him. But…

What would it mean to her life to rescue and take care of the man who killed her?

“…I just forgot.”

Now it all made sense to him what she had said before.

Picking up flowers from the lake and giving it as a necklace, all these. Berylia had said that she had forgotten all of those memories.

…She just forgot to live.

It would had been a good time to forget a hundred times or a thousand times. To her.

But something unbelievable happened.

A bright light was suddenly shining into her dark past, which had long remained dim.

In a life that was all black, only the times in that hut were bright and clear.

…It was her feelings that he could not have guessed at all.

Rixus’ blue-purple eyes shook as if they were about to break.

From painfully contorted eyes, hot tears streamed down his cheeks.

He clenched his teeth and looked at ‘himself’ and her. The shining times when she felt happiness… 

He had to tightly cover his mouth with his hand, just in case his sobs could be heard by the girl.

Under the glorious sunlight, the girl whispered.

“It’s strange. Just looking at you makes me feel at ease… as if I was at home.”

The boy, who had gone blind in his eyes, licked his lips before he said,

“Then think of me as home, Candy.”

Then the boy hugged the girl and whispered.

“So come back to me every day, wherever you go…”

But in the end, he himself left her side.

With bone-chilling regret, Rixus let out a bloody breath.