World: Origin —
Time thinned and slipped by, like a white colt flashing through a gap in the fence.
He no longer knew how many years had fallen like leaves.
He could always feel where it was—near as breath at his shoulder—yet his hands met only empty air.
Fear pressed first, a tight fist in his chest; then it loosened into quiet water.
Seasons shed like snake skins. Survival forced him to bend, to root in this new continent while still hunting that shadow.
He let roots take the strange soil and called it living.
When his hair grew long, he bound it; when longer, he cut it with a shard of stone.
When his clothes tore, he stitched pelts from trapped beasts—crude, but warm as winter moss.
Strangely, the more he settled, the fainter its scent became, like fog thinning under a pale sun.
Anxiety pricked, then eased; he felt it too grow less panicked, less despairing, as if learning its new rhythm.
It—a strip of shadow—his only friend.
If it lived well, perhaps not finding it was a wound he could leave closed.
Middle-aged to gray, he lay in a hammock woven of vines.
Sun spears filtered through cathedral trees, softening as they fell like warm rain onto his frost-streaked hair.
To grow old alone on this land—like a lone pine clinging to a cliff—perhaps that wasn’t a tragic fate.
Sleep tugged at his eyes; relief unfurled in his mind like a gentle banner.
But fate loves its little jokes.
—A ship cut the horizon, sliding past like a blade through mist.
…
The sound of thunder-chariots rolled, iron hooves sweeping the forest.
A black light-mist, over three meters wide, flew like a shell from the girl’s swinging palm and roared at Ye Weibai.
The mist was pure, no grit in its glow, yet it carried a warped omen—darkness distilled until the air bent.
Wind howled, dragon-throats crying; the black haze slammed toward Ye Weibai in an instant.
Ye Weibai didn’t move. At a hand’s width before him, the fury melted like ice under a scorching sun.
Black filaments steamed up, visible threads as if an unseen loom teased the mist apart, stripping its energy to nothing.
All darkness and despair fall under the Demon King’s dominion. They heed his decree, and they can’t lay a finger on him.
The black-haired girl’s face hardened, serious as carved stone.
Blocking that strike wasn’t strange; she could feel the power thrumming in him like deep thunder.
But to swat it aside so lightly—she had to take him seriously.
And the words he’d nearly spoken pinched her brows; who was he to know such distant, hidden truths?
“Ugh, what a hassle,” she sighed, like yarn tangled around a sleepy cat’s paw.
Seriousness sagged into weariness; she drew back her pale, slender arm, stretched, and settled in a lazier sprawl.
She tilted her head; her gaze slipped through the curtain of black hair veiling half her face and landed on Ye Weibai.
Her lids half-lowered; she muttered, drowsy as a cat that never wakes, “And you are… who?”
Watching her, Ye Weibai felt no sting of insult.
He saw only a girl not yet grown; his mouth curved gently, and his voice came soft as dusk.
“I’m your dad.”
Her hair spilled aside, revealing half her face.
Deep-blue glass held the black-haired youth; her cherry lips parted, and a startled sound slipped out: “Huh?”
…
In truth, people didn’t care much if the World ended; they shrugged like reeds in far-off wind.
It felt too distant; from oldest myths to now, a thousand years drifted, and the World still breathed.
They still breathed.
It wasn’t indifference to the Demon King; it was habit hardened like old stone.
Habit is a frightening tide; it turns gifts that deserve gratitude into things taken for granted.
They treated the Hero King, his Companions, his battle and triumph over the Demon King, the saving of the World—as inevitable.
They called it Truth.
For 9,679 Cycles, the facts agreed: the Hero King always saved the World.
So when that truth began to crack, when “inevitable” stopped feeling inevitable, fear gnawed like rats in the walls.
They forgot: no law says the Hero King must slay the Demon King, or Justice must crush Evil.
All there ever was—clear flesh and bright blood—was sacrifice and giving, a red river under a gray sky.
Still, they refused to grasp it; they scraped for reasons to mend their broken habit, to patch the sudden hole in their days.
They tried every angle and forged a reason: the Hero King was bewitched by the Demon King.
They wrung their brains dry, dug through records, stacked proofs—real and imagined—into shaky towers.
Their conclusion glittered like brittle glass: the bewitching was temporary.
At the final breath before the Demon King destroyed the World, the Hero King would recover, reclaim divine power, and kill him.
Those proofs couldn’t survive scrutiny; their logic tangled like vines.
It didn’t matter. People don’t believe what’s reasonable; they believe what they want.
They chose “bewitchment” because it soothed them, hid their fear like a cloak, and let them return to the Cycle and the everyday.
It seemed to work; their fear pulled back like a tide at dusk, leaving wet sand shining.
But that retreat was only a skin.
A bomb under cloth doesn’t vanish; a covered wound doesn’t heal; without endings, sacrifice, the usual Cycle, no heart rests.
—Except Aerin vanished, like a candle snuffed by a sudden wind.
