Chapter 9

My consciousness, severed clean like an actual death, returned abruptly without warning.

My vision was pitch-black, and my body felt heavy, as though a boulder rested upon my chest. My crushed bones creaked within my waterlogged flesh, and the torn, punctured muscles twitched sluggishly, circulating cold blood.

Though my surroundings were turbid and dark, there was no need to strain my senses to grasp the situation.

Upon awakening, I was submerged in water. A water burial. I did not know whether to count it a blessing that it hadn’t been cremation, or a regret that it hadn’t been an earth burial.

The instant I recognized that consciousness had returned, my mouth parted, and the trapped air burst forth in bubbles. Past eardrums crushed by water pressure, the rumbling currents of the riverbed drifted in.

How much time has passed?

That was the very first thought that came to mind. Only after that did I move my arms to grip the stake driven into my heart.

Bending my legs and bracing against the coffin lid for leverage, I wrenched it out with all my might. The unrotting flesh coughed up a gush of bloody water, dyeing the trapped liquid with a metallic stench. Grimacing at the horrific grinding sound echoing inside my torso, I dug my fingertips into the punctured flesh and plucked out several wooden splinters.

How many days have gone by? Is Ilie safe? Has the village quieted down? Did everything go according to my intentions—did he safely shed their mistrust, become a noble martyr, and receive their apologies?

As my awareness sharpened, urgency swelled little by little. The scream that had torn not at my eardrums but at my heart haunted my head with chilling clarity. I wanted to confirm Ilie’s safety as quickly as possible.

Bracing my hands against both sides of the coffin, I bent both legs and kicked the lid with full force. The sensation of the dull shudder echoing through the dark water, the unpleasant sting of silt-laden water swirling against my open eyes—those sensations remain vivid in my memory even now.

The water pressure at the riverbed made exerting strength far from effortless, but because it had been a hastily assembled coffin, breaking free was not terribly difficult.

With how densely they had driven in the nails, nearly ten scratches scored my thigh as I pulled myself out, tearing my skin once more, but that too mattered little to me.

Cutting vertically through the fierce current that pushed against my back, I surged up to the water’s surface; the world unfolding before my eyes was just as dark and silent as the depths below.

It was deep night. A night so profound that the only sound of a living creature was the howl of a wolf drifting from somewhere in the distant mountain ranges.

After staring blankly at the sky for a short while, I swam toward the riverbank. I could feel parts inside my body, which had altered on their own to adapt to the environment, squirming unpleasantly as they prepared to breathe air once more. The skin beneath my jaw that had split like gills sealed shut, and the water roaming freely inside my torso poured out in streams past my slightly parted lips.

Grimacing at the squelching sound of my soaked clothes, I stepped onto a riverbank situated quite some distance from the village. A place where the current was fierce and the water deep, where no one ever crossed despite the presence of a bridge.

Turning my head, I spotted an old wooden bridge beneath the moonlight in the distance. A ramshackle wooden bridge that no one used because it was liable to collapse at any moment, beyond the point of repair. Though it was my first time seeing it with my own eyes, I had heard of it from Ilie’s chatter.

Gazing quietly at the bridge tracing a shallow arch, I lifted my eyes. After looking at the pale moon tilting indifferently in the sky, I lowered my gaze back to the bridge.

What is this feeling?

I remember distinctly even now that such a thought crossed my mind for reasons unknown.

Everything should have returned to its proper place. Though he must have been deeply shocked by witnessing an unexpected scene, knowing my immortality, he would surely have calmed down quickly and be waiting for me. Yet for some reason, an unsettling foreboding hung over me.

Could something have gone wrong? Because of how wretchedly he had wailed at the end, had he failed to clear their suspicion and suffered some disaster?

The anxiety that had briefly receded upon stepping ashore rose once more to the top of my throat, pounding against my ribs.

Taking my bearings by instinct, I plunged into the forest. Squeezing out every remaining drop of nourishment to raise my body temperature, sharpening every sense to search for Ilie’s presence, I tore frantically through the pitch-black woods toward Luncani.

I wanted to see Ilie as soon as humanly possible. I had to see him with my own eyes.

The village I reached was eerily silent, as if emptied of all life. It was only natural since it was the dead of night, yet I felt an inexplicable dread once more.

What is this feeling? Why does this sensation keep creeping over me?

Unwilling to bear the mounting anxiety, rather than passing through the village with masked presence, I chose to skirt around the forest at full speed toward the cabin. The church stood in the center of the village, and approaching it while my soaked body continually left tracks behind was ill-advised.

The cabin I reached in this manner was far more grotesque than when I had left it.

As though someone had attempted to burn it down, one side of the house was charred pitch-black. Yet because someone else had extinguished the flames, the interior had not burned. It was likely Ilie. Amid the guilt and apology, an untimely fondness blossomed briefly before fading away.

Stepping quietly through the open door, the sight within differed little from the outside. Every single item I had used was gone, and the furniture I had sat and slept upon—the chair and bed—were all smashed to pieces.

Even the windows—where I had quietly leaned my shoulder to steal glances through the curtains at Ilie drawing near whenever I sensed his approach over the hill—were completely shattered.

Up to that point, it was tolerable. In those times, such reactions were only natural.

Even without being an ominous existence that threatened their lives as I did, it was an era when people believed that anything used by an evildoer had to be burned to ashes for its tainted energy to vanish. Smashing and burning everything was an expected course of action.

The reason that state ceased to be tolerable to me, who had merely been surveying the scene from outside the doorway, came when I turned my steps to head toward the church, unable to bear the waiting any longer.

When I had walked at least ten paces away from the cabin that had become a ruin.

My head snapped around, and my eyes widened.

Without even time to think, my feet turned back. Kicking open the door of the cabin I had just left, I tore through the broken, ransacked furniture.

I did so even knowing it wouldn’t be there. Because an unbearable anxiety surged up in an instant. I could not stop myself.

As expected, it was not there. Not a single quill remained, let alone the book.

A dark foreboding seized me once more.

Had Ilie arrived first? No. He hadn’t. If he had, the scorched traces of fire on the cabin wouldn’t be there. The villagers had arrived first. They must have dragged out all the belongings and smashed the furniture. They must have piled together everything my hands had touched, doused it in oil, and set it on fire. They would have burned every last scrap.

The moment my thoughts reached that conclusion, an intensely alien sensation rippled through my body.

A sensation like cold sweat running down the nape of my neck, like becoming a tiny beast bristling every hair on its body in startled terror and vigilance. Goosebumps rose uncontrollably across my skin—skin that felt closer to scales than human flesh.

Ilie might not have seen the letter.

Swept up in the villagers’ madness, he might have believed in my death alongside them.

In my mind, which had instinctively rejected and avoided such thoughts, a horrifying hypothesis finally reared its head.

The concern I had never entertained while disguising my death—no, at most considered once or twice and brushed aside—instantly transformed into a colossal menace, crushing my mind. With the feeling of something snapping clean, my body moved of its own accord.

Cleanly forgetting in that fraction of a second that I had skirted the forest to avoid leaving tracks, I ran—kicking aside not only the snow but the frozen earth buried deep beneath it. Fixing my gaze upon the church steeple faintly visible beneath the cloud-veiled moonlight, I sprinted at a speed so blinding that nothing else around me registered. I could feel vividly the muscles of my entire frame swollen to their absolute limit.

Please, let this be my miscalculation.

Not that disguising my death for his safety had been a mistake, but that this foreboding seizing my mind right now is my misjudgment.

Constantly clinging to that thought, I shoved open the firmly shut church doors and stepped inside.

The moment I crossed the threshold, I inhaled deeply until my chest expanded wide. Amid the piercing stench of heavy frankincense, decaying wood, and the stale scents native to an old church, I drew breath after breath, searching for Ilie’s scent.

Yet that sweet fragrance—the scent of him that had made me ache and thirst so countless times—failed to reveal itself even as I slammed open the door leading to the rectory and reached the door of his room.

Instead of screaming, I clenched my teeth until my jaw felt ready to fracture and seized the doorknob. As if startled by the commotion of a sudden intruder, a faint stir rose from the priest and his wife’s room.

That was all.

Truly, that was all.

There was only their scent, only their presence.

Nowhere was his scent to be found.

I clenched my teeth even harder. Lacking even the sanity to moderate my strength and avoid destroying it, I wrenched the door open, nearly tearing the wood along with the knob in my grip.

In the next instant, I was forced to hear the grating crunch of my clenched teeth finally shattering.

Inside the room shrouded in darkness, a small oil lamp was lit.

Upon the neatly cleared desk, I saw black lace draped over the edge of a slanted icon.

I exhaled a fragment of breath.

Shifting my eyes, I saw a thick leather Bible open beside it, with a worn rosary laid atop the pages.

I exhaled a second fragment of breath.

Releasing my clenched teeth and slowly turning my gaze, my eyes finally took in the empty bed strewn with dried flower petals, and the small mirror covered in black cloth.

Ah.

A faint groan layered over the sound of my shattered teeth regenerating. I did not even register that the sound had slipped from my own mouth.

I merely stood staring at the icon of the Virgin Mary flickering dimly in the slender flame of the lamp, constantly denying the scene in the room that prayed for the eternal repose of its departed master.

No. It cannot be. How could it? How could you? How could you ever…?

I denied it again and again, but that was all. There was nothing else I could do. I knew no way to rewind the time that had already been severed for him, nor any way to divide my eternity and pour it into his time.

My breath simply caught in my chest.

My ribcage constricted from within, and air would no longer move past my throat. The tip of my tongue dried parched, and no sound would emerge. I tried to take a step back, but my feet felt nailed to the floorboards, unable to budge.

I truly did not know.

What I was supposed to do, how I was supposed to act, why I was still standing here, why he was not inside this room.

I truly knew nothing at all.

Because I could understand nothing, I could form no thoughts. I could feel no emotion. I truly, utterly could do nothing.

“Haa… haaa…”

I only continued to release the breath trapped within my body. As if vomiting not air but my very soul, I continually expelled it through my weakly parted lips.

There was a time when I believed myself omnipotent because I was immortal.

That long-standing arrogance shattered without a trace on that day, in that very moment.

“You devil bastard…!”

Never had a solitary immortality felt so utterly powerless and incompetent.

“How dare you come here! Where do you think this is?!”

How futile was an indivisible eternity, an infinity that could not be shared. I learned that only on that day.

“Die! Just die, you monster! Die before my eyes! Atoning with your death!”

The presence that came rushing in shock screamed like a wounded creature the moment she distinguished me in the dark. The sunken-eyed woman lunged straight at me, beating and pounding upon my frozen, standing frame. With hands withered like winter twigs, she shoved, struck, pulled, and seized me by the collar to shake me.

“After killing my son! After bewitching my boy and driving him to death! How dare you—how dare you set foot in this place?!”

The blows struck by her frail body did not hurt in the least. No matter how much hatred that small, frail human poured into her strikes, even if she brought a blade and hacked my flesh to pieces, to me it was an act that offered nothing more than the nuisance of regeneration.

“A bastard not even tearing your soul apart could atone for! You filthy, filthy demon spawn!”

Yet, on that day, I was in true agony. Horrific agony.

Even under those weak, clumsy blows falling with dull thuds, I felt pain as though my bones were shattering and my entire being was being crushed to powder.

Just like Ilie’s shrieks heard in the final moments of the death I had staged for the safety of him and his family, it was agonizing as though something deep inside me was being torn apart without pause.

“Bring him back… Bring him back to life! You can do it. You’re a devil… so you can do it! Whether it’s blood or my soul, I’ll give you whatever you want…”

When the woman, pouring out resentment like bile as she wailed, collapsed while clutching the hem of my clothes, I ended up defenselessly revealing the proof of my helplessness at the pinnacle of yet another pain realized for the very first time.

“Please… please. Give him back…”

My vision, fixed upon the lamp burning quietly alone in the dark, blurred into a hazy sheen. The breath I had expelled down to the last scrap filled my chest again of its own accord, and an alien heat I had never experienced across centuries welled behind my eyes.

Soon, something trickled down my cheeks and dripped off my chin with quiet drops.

Looking down at the hunched back of the woman sobbing like a strangled beast, I slowly raised my head. I looked at the priest standing as though swallowed by the shadows.

He did not stop his wife, nor did he pour out resentment against me. He did not recite prayers, thrust forward a crucifix, or scatter holy water. He merely glared at me with bloodshot eyes.

I could see a faint tremor twitching in his clenched jaw. Those tightly sealed lips and that unwavering, fixed gaze were incessantly asking me:

Is this what you wished for? Is this the outcome you desired?

Without a single spoken word, with cruel clarity, he held the love I had learned from Ilie accountable as a sin.

Only in that moment did I realize I was weeping. When the helplessness that had been dripping silently began to surge up my throat, vomiting the agony locked within my body.

Having learned what love was, what sin was, what responsibility was—I could not keep from breaking.

I could not stop myself from collapsing to my knees.

That night, I left Luncani.

After the woman’s weeping subsided, the priest and I sat at the table where we had once shared polite and warm meals, and spoke of the full truth behind the tragedy.

I told him everything—of the countless changes that had occurred within me after meeting Ilie in Luncani, the enlightenment I had received from him, and the reasons I had to perform that play. As though making a confession, I spoke of everything without hiding a single detail.

The priest, who had listened in silence with clasped hands as if in prayer and eyes shut tight, did not open his eyes for a long while even after I ceased speaking; then he rose quietly and walked into his room. He returned carrying an old notebook and set it down before me.

When I stared at it with clouded eyes and looked up, the priest was seated across from me once more, looking at me without folding his hands. From that moment on, he was the one who spoke.

The words the priest offered me that night tore my soul to shreds, just as his wife had wished.

According to the priest, my play had been successful. The villagers rejoiced in the fact that they had vanquished a hideous monster and sealed evil with minimal loss, and shed tears over the sacrifice of the saint who had prevented harm all that time to make it possible. Ilie was no longer an apostate, but a noble offering that had delivered the village from ruin.

With the suspicions surrounding Ilie cleared, the mistrust directed at the priest dissolved as well; the villagers offered sincere apologies to the family and joined them in prayer.

Up to that point, it was the exact picture I had hoped for.

Yet there was one fact I had overlooked. That a single moment could occur—one beyond my control, one I could not manage.

Though it had been a danger present from the very beginning, blinded by love and thirsty to protect him, I had failed to consider just how fragile a human soul could be.

“Even when I stepped out of the church to search for Ilie, who had bolted outside and not returned… the boy was still there.”

The fact that Ilie’s soul, having witnessed my death, had also been pulverized alongside the stake that crushed my heart.

“Only upon hearing that they intended to burn down the cabin did he barely come to his senses. He sprinted straight to the cabin and managed to prevent them from burning down the house… but he could not stop them from burning the belongings.”

Believing that the one who brought me into being would naturally think of my eternity first, assuming that he would think and judge just like me, whose emotions were so thoroughly blunt—that had been my most fatal miscalculation the day I penned the letter and stepped out of the cabin.

“No one blamed Ilie.”

Even though I had witnessed such a vast array of emotions while being with him, marveling dozens of times at his boundlessly rich empathy and sensitivity.

“And that very fact killed Ilie.”

With a foolishness that made me shudder in revulsion at myself, I had failed to consider the trauma he would suffer.

“He withered and died all alone, trapped in a loss that no one could ever share.”

In the priest’s hoarse voice that drifted faintly as if exhausted, there was no resentment. Though it did not waver and did not break into sobs, it carried only a grief and regret so terrible that one could not dare look away.

He looked at the notebook lying before me with listless eyes and spoke calmly. Having missed my letter, he had believed I was truly killed, suffering in solitary agony over my death while the entire village rejoiced. The cries of victory echoing throughout the village, the clueless consolations telling him that everything was fine now, that it was all thanks to him, that whatever sins remained could be washed away through prayer—those words had incessantly driven him into hell.

In the end, unable to overcome the turbulent emotions swirling within him, he had suddenly walked out of the church one night past ten days, headed toward the very river from which he believed I would never return, stepped onto the perilous bridge, laid down a fir bough to mourn me, and thrown himself straight into the waters.

They realized he was gone as soon as day broke, but only discovered that he had cast himself into the river after searching for him when he failed to return by nightfall and opening the diary left on his desk. And so, they could not even recover his remains.

Such was the full account of the tragedy that transpired in Luncani. My very first demise had been so utterly hollow.

Having heard the entire story, I could no longer utter a single word. I merely stared in silence at the notebook before me.

“I will stake everything I have to prevent what happened here from ever being recorded. Never… not a single word shall leak out.”

Was I hungry? Incongruous with the situation as it was, I recall that thought suddenly crossing my mind. Because I felt empty—so hollow, as if the inside of my body had been scooped clean. It was because I had never felt such a sensation before.

“Then what took place here will one day surely become something only you know.”

The sense of loss I had momentarily mistaken for hunger began to take physical shape and settle over me the moment I left Luncani with Ilie’s diary clutched to my chest.

“Just as my child did, you too shall bear a solitary loss that no one can ever sympathize with.”

Before the church doors that opened once more, standing with his back to the great cross dimly emerging from the dark, the priest looked at me with eyes that constricted my throat like a noose.

“Atone in that manner at least. Throughout that cursed life of yours, unable even to follow him in death… for eternity.”

The priest’s voice, the last words I heard before leaving, became a curse in itself and settled upon me. A curse I could not shake off—no, a curse I did not wish to shake off. A curse I had to preserve at the cost of my eternal life.

From that day until this very moment, a curse I had never forgotten for a single instant, bound to the name he gave me.

In the wake of the shock that had crashed down without warning like a ferocious storm, nothing remained but an inescapable void.

For a time right after leaving the village, I was unbearably enraged. It felt as though, beneath the hide that formed my body, every negative emotion in existence had taken the place of my entrails.

If I had followed my impulses, I would have annihilated all of Luncani entirely. I flared with anger at my own callousness for failing to think from a human perspective, then grew angry at Ilie for succumbing to shock and failing to remember my true nature, and in the end, murderous fury inevitably surged toward the villagers who had driven the situation to such an extreme.

I wanted to rip the throats out of every human who had driven Ilie to his death, heap a mountain of corpses for God to see, stand atop it, and swallow the blood of dozens spouting like fountains. That was how I wished to mourn him.

Yet at that time, I did not possess even the slightest ounce of strength to put those thoughts into action.

The tears that burst forth for the first time in my existence refused to dry for days, as if pouring out everything accumulated over the past several hundred years. His one and only trace, cradled dearly against my chest like my own heart—the worn diary Ilie left behind was the sole driving force that kept me moving.

In the place where fury subsided, a terrible guilt settled.

The reality that had befallen me, a reality that remained unaltered no matter how much I denied it, was exceedingly cruel.

My chest, awakened to far too many emotions all at once, knew not how to relieve the agony crashing in. How was I to breathe? How was I to shake off this regret and self-loathing? How was I to stop yearning for him? How was I to escape this horrific torment?

I desperately wanted to know, yet wished to never know for the rest of my life. For bearing all of it felt like the single thread of penance I could offer.

And so, for a long while, I remained ignorant. I merely wandered, weeping and weeping like a young beast lost in a deep, treacherous forest.

Before I even realized when the two feet he had grounded upon the world had lifted again, I became once more a nameless, identity-less something, drifting through frozen time.

Because his death made me realize that even if the flesh could never die a single time, the mind could die hundreds of times over, I only managed to open Ilie’s diary—carried close as if it were my last remaining life—well over two months after leaving Luncani.

It was because, on my way out of the Balkan Peninsula, I happened to hear news of Luncani in a village I was passing through.

It was shocking news: having lost his child to some incident in the village, and his wife having taken her own life from that grief, the priest had gone mad, slaughtered everyone in the village in the dead of night, and set fire to the church.

Given that a man bearing God’s name had committed the most heinous sin of murder rather than practicing forgiveness and understanding, rumors were attached that the child’s cause of death was presumed to be misunderstanding or persecution by the villagers.

They said the priest’s body was discovered before the church cross, charred black in the exact posture of kneeling with clasped hands.

All that was left behind was a single page of a testament.

And that testament is currently in my possession. When I emerged from my first coffin, I inquired after its whereabouts, tracked it down, stole it, and have kept it ever since.

What was written upon it was merely a prayer.

Беззакония моя аз знаю,
For I know my transgressions,
и грех мой предо мною есть выну.
And my sin is ever before me.

It was a verse of penitence frequently repeated in the liturgy. To anyone ignorant of what had occurred there, it would appear as though the priest were begging forgiveness for his own sins. But to my eyes, it was another curse and warning directed at me.

Know your transgressions and look upon your sin. That was what he was saying.

The priest—no, Ilie’s father—kept the promise he had spoken with his own mouth. To make the monster his child loved remember his child for eternity, he broke all his honor and convictions to uphold it.

Only after hearing that news did I finally summon the courage. The courage to endure the agony that would tear my heart apart once more and murder my mind.

The night I heard that news, I finally halted my aimless wandering, took a room at an inn, secluded myself, and opened the diary. And there, for four days and nights straight, I read and reread only his written words.

With every page I turned, my molars shattered. Blood burst out, I spat out the broken teeth, new teeth grew back, and I crushed them again dozens of times.

Today I finally decided on a name.
Adrian.
I think it suits him well.
Its etymology and origins mean from the sea, and dark.
What must it feel like not to know who birthed you or when, or even what you are? What on earth must it feel like to have no other existence like yourself in the whole world?
Whenever I think about it, my heart aches.
It hurts this much just imagining it for a moment—yet he must have endured it all alone for a vast span of time I cannot even fathom.
So I truly hope he will accept the name.
He is no longer a ‘something.’

I lingered for a full day on the page he had written on the day he gave me my name.

Truly pathetically and shamefully, I wept yet again. Seeing how he had chosen a name for the monster that would one day lead to his death, pressing down on the pen as if it were something precious, proved too difficult to bear.

On the day he ended his life, following the entry stating he was heading to the river where I was submerged, what was written on the final page was a prayer in Church Slavonic, just like the priest’s testament.

Господи,
Lord,
даруй ми слезы покаяния,
Grant me tears of repentance,
Да плачу о гресех моих день и нощь.
That I may weep for my sins day and night.
Да не уснет душа моя, но да бодрствует,
Let not my soul fall asleep, but remain awake,
поминая вечно то, еже погубих.
Remembering eternally that which I destroyed.

That day, staring at the diary whose final page I could not turn past, I murdered myself dozens of times. So much regret and self-reproach surged in that I had no other recourse.

If only I had never known. That warmth, that tenderness, that fond affection. If only I had never known.

Those gleaming blue eyes, that soft voice, that burning blood. If only I had never known. If only I had ignored it to the very end.

Had I done so, things would not have turned out this way.

He would not have died, and I would not be in agony.

If only we had never met.

If only he had not loved me.

If only love with me had not been a sin.

If only I… had been human.

Though I did not believe in God, nor in the afterlife, and thus held no faith in souls, in that moment I truly felt it. I felt my soul shattering and fracturing hundreds of times, moment by passing moment.

There, I died and died again. I died so thoroughly that my only regret was that I could die no more.

Such was the nature of helplessness. It was that cruel.

Since I had been eternal and alone for my entire existence since birth, mine was a life of only losing everything. Everything I saw, heard, and came to know changed, declined, and vanished. That was my life. A life where loss was all too natural.

Even so, this was my very first loss. For it was the first time I learned that losing something could devastate me so completely.

Once again, he was my first.

After leaving the inn, I continued to walk. I lingered nowhere.

I crossed mountains and traversed fields. I boarded a decrepit boat that seemed ready to break at a single wave to cross the sea, walked beneath the aurora in the dead of night, and wandered endlessly beneath the setting sun across uninhabited plains.

I did not know how many years passed. Because I made no effort to remember, I could not recall.

I simply walked wherever my feet led me, and whenever I lifted my head to find a place of beautiful scenery, I erected a headstone. Ilie Cristea. I wanted to engrave that name across the entire world. So that, within this eternity like a curse, I could commemorate him anywhere, at any time.

What halted those footsteps—whether drifting or wandering, I could not tell—was an autumn when I realized the diary held in my arms was growing old.

Since it rested against my chest, it ought to have halted alongside me, yet his time left behind to me was flowing away, leaving me alone once again. When that truth suddenly struck me, moisture welled within my chest, which had dried up without my knowing. My body grew increasingly heavy, as if the ground beneath my feet were entirely a swamp.

Not wanting to collapse in some unknown place, from that point on I moved to seek a coffin. I needed a place to hide my wretched, broken, and shattered self.

Walking endlessly on and on, I set foot upon a familiar continent. Though I did not immediately recognize it due to the changed scenery, as I walked the mountains along the continent’s edge, one place suddenly came to mind.

A shepherd’s shelter somewhere on the alpine plateaus, where I had stayed long ago.

High in altitude, no travellers visited; built in a secluded corner of a rugged, rocky mountain to avoid wild beasts; and stacked of stone so that, being close to the sky and open on all sides, nature would not easily tear it down—the likelihood of it crumbling with the passage of time was low.

It happened to be an ideal coffin.

Even by the standards of that era, it had been nearly half a century since my visit, and even back then it had already lost its owner; yet I did not think it would have fallen into a state where I could not use it.

Of course, there was no basis for that belief. It was merely my desperation.

Arriving there after walking endlessly for days and days, I found, fortunately, a small stone cottage that had not changed much from the image in my memory.

For the first time since leaving Luncani, a sense of relief settled over me. How comforting it was to know I could lock away all the emotions crushing me; the feeling of my shoulders slumping down was vivid.

Approaching the coffin with slow, exhausted steps, I turned my head as though drawn by a sudden gust of wind. It was the hour when night drew to an end and dawn broke. Across the dark blue sky, faint light was spreading.

I looked down at the mountain mist spread thick as if the sky were beneath my feet. I looked toward the far side of the mountain where the moon had set and the sun prepared to rise.

“Sometimes I think it would have been better if you were truly a demon, Master.”

Ilie’s voice suddenly came back to me. The voice whispering with his face buried in my chest on the day I held him for the last time.

“Then I could have sold my soul to become an existence like yours.”

Right after, a small breath—a faint ha—burst from my lips. Whether it was a hollow laugh or a sigh, I could not tell. Perhaps it was a breath that burst forth because weeping had welled up.

Only the faint impression remains that, for the first time in a very long while, it felt as though an airway had opened.

Chewing blankly over his voice, I looked down at the ground beneath my feet. Scanning the area, I found stones of suitable size and picked up one flat stone and one angular one. I carved Ilie’s name and drove it deep into the earth to face the direction of the sunrise.

Afterward, entering the coffin, I spent several decades asleep just like that. Clasping Ilie’s single diary to my chest, looking as wretchedly exhausted as on that day long ago when my memories first began.

It was a very deep sleep, entered for the first time with no thought of awakening.

From some point on, I occasionally find myself wondering.

Perhaps even then, while I lay asleep, he had been reborn and was wandering the world searching for me.

During the nearly century-long span before I encountered his second incarnation, Michael, had he—who cursed himself with the prayer on the diary’s final page—already discarded two or three lonely lifetimes?

Was my guilt, my regret that drove me to entomb myself in such a remote place, yet another selfish and callous misjudgment of mine?

Because the me who writes these words today can think in a way remarkably close to a human, it makes me lament all the more.

When I suddenly opened my eyes in that first coffin where I had sought to entomb myself, time had already leaped forward toward the end of the century.

Awakening amidst thick layers of dust and cobwebs, I sat up, feeling a gruesome hunger. I brushed away the dust clinging to my damp face and exhaled a long breath that had stagnated in one place for decades.

When my consciousness, drifting hazily through the void, finally returned to its place, the very first thing I checked was his diary, which I had wrapped in folds of my clothing and held close as I slept.

Though the leather, which had already begun to fissure like an old man’s decrepit skin before I slept, had unavoidably hardened and cracked, fortunately the paper had not rotted away.

I sat still for a while, gazing down at it. I looked and looked again at that pitiful form, which had once more rushed ahead through time all on its own to fissure and crumble.

Until I found the strength to rise, until the desire to hunt stirred within me to replenish the vitality drained to the bottom in the aftermath of a sleep entered with no intention of waking.

Only after spending several full days more in that state did I get to my feet and step out through the doorway of the weathered stone cottage that had concealed me for so many years.

The first him, my Ilie. That was how I let go of my first love.

And I lived on. Even if my soul had shattered hundreds of times, my eternity had not ended.

It was a dreadful thing.

The human world I stepped into again was quite different from the one I had known. Humans were always like that. Even while living ephemeral lives, they changed ceaselessly. Not a single one of them remained still.

To me at that time, it was truly distasteful, yet I lived on disguised as a human once more. Pretending to despise humans, I constantly sought to become human. It was a laughable, desperate struggle.

I usurped the position of a nobleman who had gone missing in some province to live as an aristocrat, and indulged in sumptuous feasts, unreservedly devouring those who recklessly threw themselves at me, blinded by my superficial exterior.

Because I did not want to acknowledge the emotions that abruptly twisted in my gut without warning, I lived even more debauched than before and became an even more brutal monster.

I lived, trying my utmost to pretend nothing was wrong. I thought that by doing so, I could return to what I was before—living as an arrogant entity that viewed humans merely as a lower species and prey.

Yet the void quietly accumulating in my gut ultimately warped me.

I could not bear it at all. No, I did not want to bear it. I was enraged by everything, and everything felt empty. I kept detesting humans, and controlling myself grew harder and harder.

And so I stepped into the wars of humans as well. I spewed out my aimless rage and sense of incompetence through atrocious violence.

Despite having loved a human, lost a human, and suffered over my inability to become human, I bared my teeth at humans once again and committed sins. Truly, I was an existence deserving to be called a monster.

However, apart from sin, that outburst was also a beneficial choice for me.

For my performance there caught the eye of Margrave Eisenhardt, leading me to Belsenburg, where his reborn self awaited.