Exhaustion clung to the girl like wet cloth; she stepped into the wooden hut with Ye Weibai steadying her.

Creak— The door groaned with rot, and dust pattered down like ash, speaking of years without breath or footsteps.

As Aerin lifted her foot and crossed the threshold, a strange peeling seized her—the sense of a vast invisible hand ripping a tight, clinging film off her skin.

She shivered and halted, fear she’d barely tamped down swelling again like smoke; just then, the black-haired boy spoke softly.

“Not going to look?” he said, voice light as mist.

Blank-eyed, the girl lifted her head and swept the hut’s interior with a glance like a lost bird.

In the dim space, an oil lamp burned in silence, spilling smoky amber light that sketched the room’s outlines like ink on rice paper.

A table and chairs, a small bed; the set crouched in the corner, two bowls and chopsticks on the table, quilts folded neat as bricks on the bed.

Aside from the thick, visible veil of dust on the furniture, it looked like any ordinary home, plain as unpolished wood.

So familiar it blurred her vision, déjà vu rising like tide—she felt she’d seen this scene somewhere before.

“So ordinary. Nothing special,” she said, lifting her face to Ye Weibai, her eyes carrying a plea and fear she didn’t yet notice, like rain behind glass.

Ye Weibai didn’t answer her gaze. He pointed at the wall opposite, where a calligraphic scroll hung under a film of dust, like a moon behind clouds.

He said softly, “There.”

Then he let go of Aerin’s arm. His voice cooled like steel in water. “Go look—Aerin.”

“Master Bai…” She almost stumbled to the floor; her palm braced the wall like a lifeline before she steadied and turned back to him.

This time Ye Weibai met her eyes. His irises, black as ink, held her gold-bright gaze that burned even in the dim room. “Go look—Hero King.”

To Aerin in that moment, those three simple words—Hero King—swelled huge and warped, a weight like a mountain sliding toward her.

It hit like a hammer to her breast. Her heart raced, pupils pinched, mouth went dry; dizziness washed her sight. She staggered back, grasping for anything like a drowning swimmer.

Her back met the wall with a dull thud, and her hand found the scroll like a moth finding flame.

Her fingertips barely touched it, yet it felt as if her whole arm plunged into a furnace—or an ice cellar. The bone-deep pain jerked her hand back at once.

“Will you run?” The black Demon King looked at the fragile Hero King. “Will you flee without even looking, my Hero King?”

Ye Weibai’s voice carried a faint, razor-thin mockery, like frost on glass.

…No.

She’d never felt Master Bai press her like this. She gritted her teeth, turned, and set her trembling palm to the scroll. Then she swept left to right, clean and sharp, wiping away the heavy dust. As grit lifted, that peeling sensation returned; something not hers evaporated off her skin like mist in sun. It felt so real that her body suddenly felt light, like a kite caught by wind.

She let out a small breath and blew the dust from her palm like ash. Then she lifted her eyes and saw the words that made her reel—

“Demon King’s Lair.”

In that instant, Aerin’s breath—and even her heartbeat—stalled like a clock whose pendulum froze.

“W-what does that mean?” It felt like a century before she let go of the held breath, her voice fogged with confusion and fear.

She turned and fixed her gaze on Ye Weibai like an arrow finding its mark.

“Literal.” He kept it short, words clipped like blade-edges.

“No—but—” She scanned the room again. This time her right hand gripped her sword, shoulders raised, every muscle strung tight like bowstrings. Terror writhed in her shaking golden eyes. The hut looked as quiet as before, yet to her it seethed with hidden blades and undercurrents—because the name Demon King itself is Fear given shape.

Ye Weibai said, “Different now, isn’t it?”

“Wh-what?”

“Only a label changed. Essence stayed the same, yet what falls into the eye turns into something entirely different, right?”

Aerin froze, thoughts stopping like birds mid-flight.

“Besides, we came to find the Demon King, didn’t we?” Ye Weibai said. “Why feel fear now because of the name?”

Her breath still ran quick like a chased deer, yet the taut wire of her mind eased a notch. Master Bai’s words didn’t free her heart, but his voice alone felt like balm, a hand smoothing ripples on water.

Just like the groundless fear outside the hut, Aerin didn’t know what she feared. At the arena’s center she had prayed for this World’s Demon King to come quickly. She should have felt joy at the meeting—yet when the moment to face the Demon King truly arrived, her heart quaked like leaves in a storm.

The unease sprang from the Demon King, and yet not from the Demon King himself, but from a deeper, stranger Truth. That truth should have been well hidden, yet as she drew closer to the Demon King, the black curtain over it was being lifted, thread by thread.

What waits beneath that curtain… what?

Aerin shivered, then forced her mind to sidestep the thought like stepping past a pit.

“Master Bai, where… where would the Demon King be?” the girl asked, words trembling like candle flames.

“Here.” Ye Weibai pointed down into the present like tapping a drum. “The Demon King is, of course, in the Demon King’s Lair.”

He said it so matter-of-fact that the girl’s tongue tied itself like a knotted ribbon.

“In fact, every Demon King is the same,” Ye Weibai said, voice calm as old stone. “From the first—to the previous—to this, the nine thousand six hundred seventy-ninth, all are born in the Demon King’s Lair.”

Her eyes widened. “All in this little hut?” She couldn’t picture it: the Demon King of legend, a terror whose voice and mere influence could stain pure hearts, born in a simple, tiny hut—like thunder in a teacup, as if the Demon King were only a common human.

“Is it because this is—the Witchwood Forest?” Aerin asked, hope flickering like a firefly.

“No. It has nothing to do with place.” Ye Weibai shook his head, slow as a falling leaf. “This is the Demon King’s Lair, but without the birth of a Demon King, it’s just a common hut. In truth, a Lair can be anywhere—a gilded palace, a traffic-choked street, the sacred halls of the Church of the Divine… a bustling, roaring arena… Wherever a Demon King is born, that place becomes a Lair.”

When Ye Weibai spoke of a “bustling, roaring arena,” the girl’s features tightened like a pulled bow. She remembered meeting Master Bai in the arena, the moment her life flipped like a cart on a rocky road.

Aerin also recalled Master Bai lowering his gaze and softly asking if she believed the Demon King stood by her side. He asked first in the Hero King’s manor, and again not long ago in Witchwood Forest. Each time his face stayed calm, like talking about breakfast. Yet remembering it now made her whole body tremble like a struck chime.

“M-Master Bai!” Aerin blurted out, flustered, words scattering like leaves, and only after a long moment managed, “Are we—”

Ye Weibai didn’t let her escape. “Aerin, do you know where the Demon King is right now?”

Earlier she had asked where the Demon King would be. Ye Weibai asked—where the Demon King is now, like pointing at the ticking second.

“I…”

The question was sharp as a blade. Aerin couldn’t answer. She only looked at Ye Weibai with pleading eyes—the same despair as when she begged him not to say the Demon King might be right beside her.

This time, Ye Weibai still spoke, his words dropping like pebbles into a still pond.

“Right here.” He paused, met the girl’s eyes as shadow veiled them, and said softly, “The Demon King is here now.”

He traced a circle in the air around the two of them and the hut. Then he repeated, “The Demon King is inside this little wooden house right now.”

“Master Bai…” The girl bit her lip and clenched her fists, bitterness rising like smoke. “You clearly promised—clearly promised—”

She shut her eyes in pain and shook her head, like closing shutters against a storm. “You promised not to say things like that anymore.”

Ye Weibai smiled and shifted the current. “Aerin, do you know which corner of this room the Demon King will appear in?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” She shook her head hard, and tears surged from her eyes like spring water.

Ye Weibai stepped forward. He slid a chair out from under the table, flicked the dust off with a sweep like a breeze, revealing wood laced with fine golden grain, and set it before the girl.

He looked at the sobbing girl and let out a soft, drifting sigh. His hand rested on her shoulder. He held the scroll marked Demon King’s Lair in his gaze for a long beat, then said, “Sit.”

When Ye Weibai said that single word, “Sit,” it sounded gentle, yet it drew on all the strength in him. Not muscle, but the heart’s strength—the kind that can be spent by one look, one expression, like a candle burning down in a breath.

Aerin obeyed Master Bai—as she always did. From the moment she met him, sheltered in the light behind his back, she’d never doubted him. What he did for her, what he asked of her, was always for her good. After losing her only family, he had become her lone pillar, straight as a pine in winter. Whatever he asked, she wouldn’t refuse. All the more when it was just… to sit.

So the weeping girl sat down, obedient as a dove folding its wings.

As she sat, Ye Weibai half crouched, bringing his gaze level with hers like two stars meeting on the same horizon.

The black-haired youth looked into the golden-haired girl’s eyes and spoke the words that would decide the World’s fate.

“Aerin. Do you like being the Hero King?” Ye Weibai wiped her tears, then gently took her soft hand and asked, voice warm as sunlight on water.

The girl went still. It wasn’t “Do you want to be the Hero King?” It was—“Do you like being the Hero King?”

No one had ever asked her that. His easy tone was like asking if she liked donuts, if she liked detective stories, if she liked flowers.

Language is a magic with teeth. Change one word, and the whole sky shifts.

If someone asked whether she was willing to be the Hero King, she would say yes. If Master Bai asked, she’d hesitate, then still say yes—as she had countless times. But when asked “do you like it,” she felt, for no reason, with no logic, with no weight, that she could speak her heart plainly, like opening a window to fresh air.

Because she truly didn’t like it, a truth as simple as a stone in the hand.

Thinking that, she spoke. “I don’t like being the Hero King—really don’t,” the words leaving like bitter tea spat from the tongue.

“Good,” Ye Weibai nodded, then said softly, “Then let me be it in your stead.”

Her eyes flew wide. “W-what?”

“I mean—congratulations, Aerin.” Ye Weibai cupped her lovely cheek and smiled. “You’ve successfully become the Demon King,” his words falling like petals onto ice.

…

…