DKFTI 113

The Demon King’s castle was a mess.

“When will we ever fix all this?”

“Don’t tell me some idiot’s planning to rebuild all of this by hand…”

Ruru, who was carelessly answering Shanti’s words, flinched and looked at Sibel. A Demon King with a perverse taste for maintaining the castle without magic, only by hand… that was Sibel.

“Surely not, right?”

Cold sweat ran under Ruru’s soft fur. If they had to rebuild every fallen wall and tower to its original form, months of hard labor were waiting.

Sibel looked around without answering, and Ruru felt something close to fear. His skin prickled and his fur stood on end. But if it was Sibel, it felt like he really would carry out that insane thought.

“Hmm. The Demon King’s castle is a problem, but before that, there’s somewhere I need to go.”

“Somewhere you need to go now?”

Ruru and Shanti both looked puzzled by Sibel’s words. Sibel was always the Demon King who treated the castle as the most important thing. He was leaving the ruined castle aside and go somewhere else first? That was quite an interesting matter.

“Are you planning to destroy those bastards from the Holy Kingdom?”

“Are you becoming the embodiment of vengeance?”

The two looked at Sibel with excited expressions. Everyone had already realized after this incident that Sibel’s magic still couldn’t handle the Apostles, but a fight was about momentum after all.

“It’s not that… Genzar.”

“What? Genzar?”

Everyone was confused by the sudden word that came from Sibel’s mouth.

“I feel like that place is calling me.”

The two exchanged glances at Sibel’s strange words.

“Was it Lord Leviathan who called you?”

“No, it’s the land.”

Sibel gazed into the distance. Since the day he died in the dream, that place had kept surfacing in his mind.

A land buried in white snow and asleep, and a cold lake. Along with the chill in his fingertips, someone’s face appeared.

***

It couldn’t have been a coincidence that he came here.

It wasn’t a coincidence that he first opened his eyes in this world, or that he was born as a demon.

As soon as he stepped onto the land of Genzar, the fog that had clouded his mind cleared.

‘I’m back….’

With each step he took, the elusive memories in his mind began to take shape.

Where Sibel’s feet touched the ground, the ice melted, and greenery sprouted. He could feel life overflowing through his whole body. This was different from any magic Sibel had ever possessed.

He remembered memories so vivid that he couldn’t believe he had ever forgotten them. Scattered fragments of broken memory found their places and formed a picture.

All the memories from a distant past awoke.

In the beginning, the world had beings of the sky. The god who created the balance of the world, and the angels who followed him. Then there were humans, who resembled God, and the fragments of darkness.

Humans were beings made from the emotions cut off from God. He had wanted to give them only beauty, so he had to separate everything foul and shadowed. The residue that split off and gathered together became the demons.

They were once creatures driven only by destructive instinct and were treated worse than livestock.

They were like cockroaches living hidden in darkness, disgusting things with nothing beneficial to the world but stubborn vitality.

But a god who pitied them appeared. That god cast off his perfection and went down to the earth. He willingly shared his power with the demons. He gave the beings of darkness something called emotion.

After that, demons began to live as intelligent beings. Their nature was rough and violent because they were born from ugliness, but Silvaren loved them.

Silvaren wandered the world together with the first demon he had ever granted power to. He dreamed of a paradise where both humans and demons could live happily.

After countless ages and endless effort, Silvaren found the way to create an ideal world.

A single way to make a paradise where no being would die or suffer. To achieve that ideal, only one sacrifice was needed.

The death of a god. Silvaren felt joy. He could create the world he had dreamed of only through his own death. Even if he couldn’t be part of it, that was enough.

So he decided without hesitation to grind his soul and scatter it across the world. But the one who loved him couldn’t accept that decision. To that being, the god was his creator, his savior, his family, and his love.

He couldn’t stand the thought of Silvaren’s soul extinguished just for the sake of humans and demons. No matter how he weighed it, the tilted scale would never move.

So the being born from darkness killed Silvaren. To stop the god’s disappearance, he brought death upon him by his own hands.

He turned paradise into a mirage and took all the blame.

“Leviathan.”

Sibel opened his eyes, which had been quietly closed. Leviathan appeared before him. When Sibel called him, Leviathan calmly knelt in front of him.

“Lord Silvaren.”

“……”

Now he understood why Leviathan’s eyes always rippled like a lake whenever he saw him.

As Sibel looked down at Leviathan, who bowed his head politely and placed his lips on Sibel’s feet, a tear dropped from Sibel’s eye.

When the tear touched the ground, spring came to the frozen land of Genzar. The ice melted, and plants sprouted. Water flowed, and birds chirped.

His heart pounded. Everything came back. He could feel that the seat of power he had lost with death was now empty.

This world had been Sibel’s from the very beginning. His soul had only drifted through countless worlds and finally returned to its place. His memory had disguised this world as some story in a novel to protect itself.

But after countless cycles of reincarnation, Sibel had become something different from what he once was. So Leviathan couldn’t assume that the being he had waited for was the same one he used to know.

Leviathan’s lips left Sibel’s toes. He raised his head.

Inside his shining eyes, Sibel saw Silvaren. A beautiful god with long hair, slightly different from how Sibel looked now.

How could he have waited through such endless time? No, how could he have cast down with his own hands the one who had been his entire world?

“I have no regrets.”

Those words pierced his heart like a sword. Even after he had wept for a thousand years and his tears had formed a lake, he still said he had no regrets.

“Now that you’ve come to have emotions like ours, will you understand me?”

When Sibel was born in this body, he came to accept dark emotions he had never possessed as a god.

Sadly, he understood Leviathan’s heart.

Love, desire, possessiveness, resentment, hatred, emptiness, and madness. To understand another was a terrifying thing.

“Then will you forgive me?”

At Leviathan’s question, his breath grew heavy.

Silvaren would have forgiven him. He would have embraced even the choice to kill him, to tear paradise apart, and to choose ruin.

But Sibel was no longer the same. He was now an incomplete being like humans or demons.

“Forgive…?”

That couldn’t be. Such emotion was too difficult for an imperfect being.

“We could have created a world where no one would die or suffer.”

Silvaren’s memory and Sibel’s emotions mixed together like water and oil.

“If such a paradise existed without you, then it would mean nothing.”

“You’re wrong.”

Sibel’s nature leaned toward moderation. So it was never easy for him to tell anyone they were wrong.

But this time, he could be certain. It had been a single chance, and now it was gone forever.

A lost chance brought despair. Despair, too, was a feeling Leviathan had given him.

“A paradise where you’re gone, isn’t that an endless despair to me?”

It was a selfish choice. It was a decision that threw every living thing in this world into hell. Was everything Leviathan had shown while dreaming of paradise together for so long all a lie?

Unlike Silvaren, who had only felt sorrow at Leviathan’s choice, Sibel now felt a more human anger toward him. But he wasn’t sure if such emotional turmoil would help in any way.

After all, it was all in the past. It couldn’t be changed anymore. Paradise was gone. This world still turned, mixed with joy and pain.

“You don’t have to pity me. We’re not the same as before.”

Leviathan rose to his feet. At that moment, Sibel took a step back. Silvaren would never have feared Leviathan. His body had once embraced him even while a blade pierced his heart.

But despite Sibel’s reaction, Leviathan reached out his hand without hesitation. The moment his hand wrapped around Sibel’s waist, Sibel saw tens, hundreds of black chains coiled tightly around Leviathan’s body.

Chains bound Leviathan from the ground, no, from deeper than that, from the bottomless abyss.

A suffocatingly heavy aura weighed down on Sibel’s every nerve.

“Ah…”

Sibel suddenly lost consciousness at that moment.