Ethan opened his eyes slowly. The surrounding darkness had softened—no longer sucking in the light but allowing it to slip through its cracks. The cracked stone ceiling of the cave seemed closer than it should, as if bending down to choke him with silent stares. The air was heavy, damp, saturated with the smell of dried blood and cold ash.
He lifted his head slightly—a movement requiring tremendous effort. And he saw.
Niklaus.
He lay on the opposite ground, his long body stretched out. His black cloak clung to his body with frozen blood that had turned it into a heavy armor. His chest rose and fell heavily—each inhale and exhale a small battle. His broad forehead glistened under a thin layer of sweat, despite the cave's bitter cold. His hands lay outstretched by his sides, stiff, pale, as if two pieces of black stone hastily carved. His palms were covered in blood, the wounds on them only partially healed.
And the little girl lay curled up, hugging Niklaus's side, her small head pressed hard against his shoulder. She made no sound, but silent tears streamed down her cheeks, mingling with the sweat on his forehead and his clotted blood. Her small, pale hand pressed violently against the wound on his shoulder—a wound that had already stopped bleeding thanks to the potion... but the pain, that beast lurking deep inside, never stopped.
Ethan sat up slowly, moving his body as if testing it for the first time. No pain. No annoying headache piercing his skull. He reached under his torn shirt and touched his skin. The deep wounds that had torn through his body hours ago, that had brought him to death's door... were gone. Completely healed, leaving only smooth tissue under his fingers. As if something great, something enormous, had been rebuilt from within.
Then his eyes fell on the empty vials lying on the stone floor.
One... with a pale blue seal. A medium-grade healing potion. Enough to close a wound, perhaps, but not enough to kill the pain or achieve full recovery.
The other... its seal was bright gold, shimmering even in the cave's dim light. A high-grade potion. Rare, precious, capable of rebuilding torn flesh and extinguishing the fires of pain in an instant.
He understood in a flash—like lightning piercing the fog of his mind.
He had received the high-grade potion. The golden one.
And Niklaus... had settled for the medium. The blue one.
Ethan gasped—a short, sharp sound, as if the air had turned to knives in his throat.
He raised his eyes again to Niklaus. The boy who stood like an immovable mountain before the fiercest storms, whom Ethan had never seen collapse like this—not even during his coma—now lay sprawled, exhausted to the marrow, his body trembling from internal pain. Without asking. Without complaining. Without screaming.
The boy who carried an entire empire's worth of blood on his shoulders... had carried him. Him. The former slave who had been bought and sold. The one worth less than a speck of dust in the scales of noble laws and their towering palaces.
Ethan crawled forward on his knees, a short crawl across the cold ground. He reached out his trembling hand. He grasped the edge of Niklaus's limp cloak—the coarse fabric soaked in blood and sweat. He did it carefully, as if afraid the boy would dissipate like smoke before him if he pressed too hard.
And in the moment his fingers touched the black cloth...
The gates of memory burst open—powerful, painful, harsh, burning more than any whip or hot iron he had ever endured.
He looked at Niklaus, now sunk into a restless sleep, his body occasionally twitching, his sweat wetting his neck and tangled black hair. His lips tightened, twisted, as if breathing a living nightmare that wouldn't let him go.
Niklaus... hadn't bought him from the slave market because he needed a new servant. And he hadn't done it out of pity—the noble's pity for the poor wretch. No. He had chosen him. Chosen him on that distant day, just as he had chosen him today, when he gave him the golden potion that he himself deserved more.
But...
Why?
Why do all of this for someone worthless in the empire's scales, in the equations of power and nobility? Why endure pain in silence, never groaning when wounded, never asking for help even while teetering on the edge of torment? Why sacrifice a high-grade potion—rightfully his—to heal a burden like him?
Then Ethan's gaze shifted to Adele, the little girl clinging to Niklaus like his shadow. Where did she come from? How did she know him? Why did she hide behind his cloak and cry silently, as if she had known him for a long time?
He remembered the bitter fight. The attackers moving with deadly coldness. Their words cutting through the noise: "Where is the weapon?" Then, more terrifying: "We need to take the boy with the crimson eyes alive." Were they after the child? Or Niklaus himself? Or were the two the same target in their eyes?
And he also remembered those past nights at the inn. Nights he would wake suddenly, standing in the dark, feeling... something watching him. A vague sense of a ghost standing behind the door, or sometimes sitting beside him, breathing silently. He had thought it was exhaustion-induced hallucination, or remnants of old slavery nightmares.
But Maria... never denied that feeling when he asked. She would look away, her face mysterious. And even Niklaus, when the word slipped out accidentally, never denied it... nor explained.
And now... here was the truth, harsh and clear as blood on his hands. Maria wasn't just some mysterious innkeeper. She was a skilled alchemist. Niklaus hadn't stayed at the inn to rest from the journey—he had been learning from her. And the ghost was nothing but this little girl.
Ethan looked at Niklaus again. At the man Maria had called, with that strange mixture of tenderness and reproach, "my troublesome apprentice." How much he had been ignorant. How shallow his view had been.
Why did he take him along? Why not let him die?
Ethan didn't know the answers. He didn't understand the full circles Niklaus moved within.
But the one thing settling deep inside him now—heavy and painful—was that he had never understood Niklaus. Not once. All through this journey, all through the years of knowing him, he thought he knew him... thought he saw the boy behind the mask of nobility and coldness. But now he realized, bitterly, that he had only been a blind man trying to distinguish one shadow from another in a dark room. Every time he thought he understood, he received another slap.
Now, Niklaus slept. Or so it seemed. His eyelids were tightly shut, but beneath them his eyes moved rapidly, as if chasing something in the dark. He twisted sometimes—a slight contraction in his shoulder, a spasm in his fingers. The medium-grade healing potion fought the physical pain, but his body... despite the potion... still burned from within. Old fires no potion could extinguish.
But even in this nightmare dream, even while diving into a sea of internal torment...
He didn't groan. Didn't speak. Didn't call out. Didn't ask for help.
Ethan felt his soul choking. A hot lump rose in his throat, pressed against his eyes until they teared. This silence... was heavier than all words.
Then he leaned closer. He whispered in a faint voice, barely piercing the cave's silence, as if afraid to wake the sleeping boy's nightmares or disturb the little girl's silent tears:
"You..." He paused, as if the word had stuck. "You're like no one, Niklaus." He whispered again, a broken voice mixing with the whispers of the wind. "No one... no one in this world full of masks... is like you." He paused, his breath trembling. "And how strange I am too... because I... I never understood... why, all this way, all these years... why do I follow you?"
The questions hung in the damp air, unanswered, like Adele's silent tears on Niklaus's cloak.
Niklaus was drowning in nightmares beyond the bounds of reason. This time, not just fragmented images—but a plunge into a pit of tangled scenes, like a dream within a dream, each layer stranger and more obscure than the last.
He was fighting. A figure with a blurry, unclear face—their swords clashing in a metallic clang echoing through the void. But his own form was strange: branching black lines like a poisonous spiderweb covering his body from neck to wrists. The opponent wasn't attacking fiercely, but with painful hesitation. Despite the blurriness, Niklaus realized the man was crying. The swords clashed, and the man stabbed him in the chest. Niklaus felt no pain. Instead, he smiled. A smile with a strange relief in it, as if he had finally gotten what he wanted. The sword sank deep, dark blood overflowing.
The scene suddenly flipped. He lay in a woman's lap under the shade of a giant tree. A strange warmth enveloped him, the scent of flowers he didn't recognize. The woman's face was unclear, but her hands were soft, stroking his hair. "Nik..." the woman said, as if calling him by a special name. A feeling of peace washed over him—a strange peace he had never tasted in his waking or unconscious life. But it didn't last.
A jolting leap to a dark, damp place. Chained with heavy shackles to a cold stone wall. The black threads on his skin were now thicker and fiercer, writhing like living creatures. He looked older, thinner, more fragile. People in mysterious clothes spoke beside him—their voices muffled, but a few words got through:
"...must control his power before he destroys everything..."
"...the threads are growing faster than expected..."
Then he saw himself: covered in blood from head to toe, kneeling on the ground, his bare hands digging into the earth with insane force. Nails broken, fingers cracked, blood coloring the soil. There was a profound despair in the posture of his body—like someone digging his own grave with his bare hands.
Suddenly, a sharp female voice cut through the fog, filled with heart-melting pain. Empress Elisia—who had died—her voice was here, real, close, agonizing:
"My child! Wake up! Don't let the darkness swallow you!"
She was pushing him violently toward a distant patch of light, her tears falling on his face like drops of fire. "Go back! Go back now!"
Niklaus woke with a muffled gasp, sitting up suddenly as if stabbed. His weak hand flew to his chest—to the place of the dream's stab—searching for the wound. Nothing. But the pain in his head was real. A sharp headache, as if knives were pounding inside his skull. He clutched his head with both hands, his breath ragged, his crimson eyes wide with shock and confusion—rarely seen on his face.
What was that?
Were they future visions? Or buried memories of the real "Niklaus" from the novel's events? The bigger problem: they didn't feel like someone else's scenes. The pain, the despair, the warmth of the woman's lap, the sword's stab, the Empress's voice, even the smell of soil and blood... all were physical sensations he had lived. As if his own memories were leaking into him.
What the hell is this world? And what is my connection to it? Why do I dream all this? Who am I really?
The shocking idea shot through him like lightning:
Am I the real Niklaus? Or am I Arthur who entered a novel character's body?
He clenched his teeth until they nearly cracked, tightening his fists. This novel and this body were truly starting to toy with him in a way hard to overcome—making him doubt his identity. But he wouldn't let them play with him.
"I am Arthur. I entered this novel. This body's thoughts, its memories—they're trying to take control. That's all."
He repeated it inside himself like a desperate charm, gripping his mind before he lost it entirely in this vortex.
He remembered his leap from the tall building in the real world. A death he chose to free himself from the existential emptiness that had followed him since birth. But that emptiness he jumped from... was now expanding here, in this mad world. Becoming a black spiral swallowing every certainty he had. Worse: the emptiness was starting to fill with something. Memories not his own. Strange feelings. A sense that he had always lived here.
He hated this more than anything. He couldn't accept his form in those dreams—even if they were memories of this body or its future—because deep down he felt something strange he didn't understand and never wanted to understand.
"My lord Niklaus? You're finally awake! I thought you'd sleep forever!"