Since I was little, “Hero” burned in me like a lantern against winter wind.

Not for the crown’s glory. An old grandpa in our village told me a Hero could be a windbreak. If Lorin ever rose, even peasants born in backwater soil might stand under the nation’s sheltering eaves.

I wasn’t like nobles with polished crests. I came from a hamlet with fewer than ten homes, a pebble on the map. My dream was simple, a hearth-fire dream—guard the uncles and aunties who spoke to me warm as spring rain.

I did reach it. In the Hedon Kingdom, people bowed to the Hero’s name like waves kneeling to the moon. Yet the villagers who adopted me, who raised me from a squalling chick, were gone like smoke from a doused stove.

I only learned one night over clattering cups. Border sentries, back from watchposts dusted in frost, spoke in low voices. The day after I left, demon-god zealots passed through and butchered my little mountain village, leaving the soil ink-black.

If the war against the demon gods hadn’t just ended, if our army’s spirit hadn’t been threshed thin, I’d have dragged those demon-god rats into daylight and sliced them to ribbons, one by one, under a cold sun.

In truth, I don’t think I’m a proper Hero. In my own heart, my armor feels full of sand; I don’t fit the title’s steel.

Plenty in Hedon stand above me. The brightest star is a woman called Bingtang. When I was only a trainee Hero, that daredevil carried a blade of frost and felled a dragon, splitting the sky like glass.

She ended the demon-god chaos. She stepped between two kingdoms and quenched their feud, like rain on brushfire. If Hedon needs a Hero, her saga shines with the right blaze.

But she never wanted the stage. “I just want to spend a steady life with my wife,” she said, voice flat as a quiet lake. “Run around the country every day to ‘train’ like a Hero? Sorry. This princess has no such mortal craving.”

She meant it. I snuck to Mida Village to check on her a few times. Day after day she knelt among furrowed rows, coaxing strange crops I’d never seen, leaves silvered like hoarfrost at dawn.

She’s a bundle of contradictions. Human, infected by a ghost-spike plague, yet free of demon-god strings. An ice-element mage, yet she fights like a berserker, a snowstorm that hits like an avalanche.

Her feats could fill nights and spill into mornings. Praise and scorn tangle like vines. In Hedon, people call her the “Princess who governs.” In the Marl Kingdom, they say “villain” fits her blade’s edge.

What’s my impression? A cloud that won’t pick a side. Not wholly wicked, not clearly kind—chaotic and neutral as twilight fog.

She once kidnapped a neighboring dragon princess. She leveled thirty thousand elite soldiers inside Dragonbreak City as if they were wheat before a sickle. She could be a leading light or a perfect foe. She just doesn’t care to know which mask she wears.

“Didn’t I tell you?” she’d snap whenever I loitered in Mida Village. “My village doesn’t feed idlers. And you, Hero—you’re supposed to be roaming for a cure to demonization. Can a guy who squats here for weeks really turn Jade Ring Long back into a human?”

After the demon-god war, I roamed the continent like a lone gull, chasing a way to break the Demon Hand’s hold over minds. Every trail died to ash.

I had a gut-feel this princess could help. Pride choked me. I kept my mouth shut and carried my hunger like a stone.

Strangely, she bristled at me, sharp as sleet. I feared I’d wronged her somewhere. I even sought the Fountain of Truth, a spring that sees roots beneath roots. The water mirrored everything but the reason for her hostility.

Maybe I’m just a failed Hero.

Back home, I faced Jade Ring Long, caged and silent, and my heart tasted like a bitter-sweet brew.

She gripped the bars with numb hands, eyes empty as a puppet’s glass beads. Her skin had lost human warmth; it was purple-black, bruised like night. In the demon-god chaos, the Four Heavenly Kings forced a fusion with a Demon Hand into her flesh. Its power seeped in like cold ink, eroding her mind. I could only lock her away and guard her, like a candle cupped against gale.

I don’t know if I can restore her. I still want to try. Want burns like a coal that won’t go dark.

Jade Ring Long is special to me.

Before I ever wore a Hero’s mantle, she walked beside me through the roughest roads, boots muddy as spring thaws. We braved the most dangerous labyrinths, where echoes bite like wolves. We challenged the strongest monarchs, swords ringing like ice. In my most ragged, lost hours, she was there, a hand in the dark.

Whatever I’ve achieved, her thread runs through the weave.

I won’t toss away my chance to save her for the sake of face, a flimsy paper screen. If I did, regret would gnaw me like winter mice for life.

“So that’s why you dare ask if I can save Jade Ring Long?” When I finally swallowed pride and went to seek this mercurial princess, her smile was a crooked blade. The blood-red Demon Hand on her arm lay bare, a coiled serpent. The air pressed down like storm-weighted clouds.

She might be more dangerous than the demon gods themselves.

My scalp tingled. I forced my neck to nod. “If you have a way, Princess, I’ll do whatever you ask.”

“Oh? What if I ask you to die?”

“Eh?”

Her tone teased, but it didn’t sound like a joke. I couldn’t square her venom with memory. Not long ago we fought shoulder to shoulder, blades twin comets. Now her words cut for my throat.

“You said it yourself,” she purred, closing in like dusk. A crimson fingertip lifted my chin, a devil’s hook. “Hero, your so-called courage won’t stop at this little fence, will it?”

My limbs went soft, not with fear, but with the weight of my own smallness.

Then breath steadied. Jade Ring Long gave and gave for me; why shouldn’t I answer with fire for her?

It’s only a life, a ghost wandering the mortal road.

If it buys back light for the girl I love, then it’s an equal trade under heaven.

“If you can bring Jade Ring Long back, Princess, Lorin’s life is yours.”

I’ve already lost too much, a Hero who dropped his pack in the river. If I lose my life at the end of this trail, the world won’t clutch at me like a weeping child.

I knelt on one knee. My sword rasped down and bit the floor, a cold root in earth. With all the power of a Hero, I swore—an oath like a mountain shadow.

…

She didn’t answer me right away. She stood there, the same and not the same, her face clouded with a storm that wasn’t mine. The pressure in the room thinned like fog under sunrise.

“Damn it,” she muttered, words like tossed stones. “I hate righteous protagonists who act like the world’s script hasn’t collapsed.”

I didn’t understand that riddle. But the way she exhaled sounded like a grudging yes.

I thought curing a mind seized by the Demon Hand would demand months of setting stones and tracing stars. It didn’t. That very night, she solved the knot I’d chased for years.

Her tool was a plain yellow Talisman, a strip of paper quiet as straw, glowing soft as dawn.

My understanding of this princess snapped and realigned, like ice under a cracking lake.

“Done. We’re square,” she said, placing Jade Ring Long—human again, warm as a sunlit peach—into my arms. She didn’t spare me a second glance. Her steps headed for the door, light as drifting snow. “I did this for the times you guarded Mida Village. If trouble comes again, don’t look for me.”

She is a gentle princess.

Even if she never admits a drop of kindness lives in her.