Ryn?
Ryn!?
Ryn...
With her voice becoming soft and delightful, I shook my head violently. My vision grew less blurry as the chirping of birds and the awakening of nature and dawn could be heard. The water's flow was calm and steady, just as before. I tried to move my body and my legs, but they seemed to have gone numb. I questioned myself: How long have I been frozen like this?
Lysandria spoke up. "Nearly four hours. Maybe five."
I looked toward her with a bit of confusion, and she frantically added, "You murmured it out loud. It was quite audible."
I stood as my legs partially woke up in the light of dawn, amidst the chirping of birds and the remnants of drying dew drops. I walked, wondering how I could have frozen for that long. She was saying something else, but due to the noise of my own thoughts, I was only able to catch one thing: they had all awakened and panicked, thinking I had run away again. I couldn't blame them; even last time, I had simply handled Mira's enrollment and then vanished, so it was a natural reaction for them to assume the worst.
As I entered the cave, the coldness and the silent screaming of the air hit me. The delightful environment outside seemed to belong to a totally different realm than the inside. The dripping water, the silence of the others, and the heaviness in the air were all colliding and overlapping—like a courtroom where a death sentence had already been written, just waiting for the criminal to arrive.
As Lysandria and I entered the heart of the cave, I could feel the different gazes shifting toward me. Some held fear, some held disgust, while all the rest burned with rage and frustration. The warmth of the bonfire, the sound of laughter, the gentle weight of my sister against my knee, Clover's playful attacks, the cries of care, the desperation to defend—all of it, I had figured out last night. Yet, I hadn't accepted that it was all a dream. A somatic dream whose aftermath was pure anxiety, resulting in a paralysis born not of physical pain, but of a desperate avoidance of reality.
I stood firmly beside Lysandria, putting my hands behind my back. The others stood in front of us, forming a semicircle. At the center stood Seraphine, flanked on either side by Mira and Eron. No one stood beside them, as Elara was still sitting in a far corner opposite the entrance.
Before the silence became suffocating, and before anyone else could speak, Mira knuckled her fists. In an irate tone, she demanded, "Brother! What the heck are you going to do next? First, you try to touch a girl with manly, selfish desires, and then you try to commit suicide!"
I couldn't explain why, but my body felt completely frozen. My voice wouldn't leave my vocal cords, as if I had lost the ability to speak entirely. I wanted to explain the future I had seen, the deaths I had witnessed, and the threat to my life posed by the Curse Weaver. But the only thing that escaped my body was a deep, ragged gasp.
Eron yelled, "Speak, Ryn! Give us a reason to forgive you, to oversee your actions, to prove you are still that calm, innocent brother we once knew—the one raised by a mother who taught him to respect girls' boundaries and not to recklessly hurt others for his own benefit."
Listening to those words, all I felt was a deep regret, a crushing anxiety, and a profound sense of apology. Yet, I still couldn't bring myself to say that what I did was completely wrong. It only felt wrong to them because they didn't know what was waiting for us—things far worse than my actions.
As my mind raced and dragged up memories of the past, I remembered moments where speaking up would have helped, where my bravery could have changed the outcome, and where my shortcomings had only made the situation worse. I remembered that I had always been an overthinker, never an over-explainer. Or rather, I was never an explainer at all; I would just act, hoping that my acting out of character would catch people's attention and force them to understand. But it never worked. It never worked, and now I was standing here, facing the exact same result as always.
Seraphine stepped forward with a smirk. "It's useless to ask a predator why he attacks his prey. He is just another pathetic human who doesn't know how to interact with other species and races."
The surrounding sounds faded. My vision grew blurry, leaving just a single, echoing word in my mind: Useless. To others, it was just a word. To me, it was an entire era. An era when I used to hear that exact sentence again and again from the very people I desperately desired to satisfy. Yet, the only lesson that era had ever taught me was a bitter one: you cannot satisfy people with your efforts when they are already dissatisfied with their own lives.
"Ryn, you could have performed better than that."
Those were the words my memory recalled. I couldn't remember the person, their face, or their speeches—just those words remained as the last remnants of that miserable era. As I lost myself in the loudness of my thoughts, Eron lowered his head in deep disappointment.
I balled my hands into fists and started frantically scratching the lower part of my thumb again and again. The rage and regret of that era, combined with the guilt of hurting Seraphine just for my own survival, flared up alongside the echoing voices of the people whose presence had once been my only source of comfort.
Seraphine sneered with a final taunt. "Now that you carry the blood of the Great Devil of Wrath, you had better prepare yourself for the Devil Inheritance Tournament happening in the next three years. Know this: there won't be any barriers to limit my power there, and there won't be a team to cover for you. I will end it there, once and for all, to restore my pride and to eliminate the faulty heir of the Wrath Devil."
I listened to her words while continuing to scratch my hand as she moved toward the cave's exit. She twisted her neck back, casting a final gaze over me to mark her departure. She chanted something under her breath that I couldn't hear or decipher, and then she stepped forward to leave.
Suddenly, a tight sensation gripped the skin behind my ear, right on the flesh of my neck. It felt like a wound that bled internally, never breaking the skin or dripping down. It wasn't something I could see, but I could feel the formation and stitching of something eerie taking shape, raising a deeply disturbing feeling inside me. Still, I didn't move; I just watched her go.
From her back, muscles shifted and expanded, forming powerful wings. With a violent swirl, she took to the air like oars dividing an ocean, flying off toward a certain direction.
Once she had gone far enough to be lost to sight, I finally tried to touch the wound. The exact second my fingers grazed it, a scream echoed out. It didn't come from anyone else in the cave, but from inside my own mind—a frantic, disturbing voice screaming words I didn't understand, shouting to me the moment I touched the mark behind my ear:
"Ryn, run from the ghost! RUN!!!!!!"
(guys so I had to cofess smth ,editing now is really damn jarnning and since now I planned to improve plot and all other system and character It take normal then usual so with a deep apology we had to shift from 1 ch per 3 days to 1 ch per 4 days as I solely write edit proof read and do all thing this is minimum time I would require hope you understand)