MTM 39

When Zed went down to the first floor, the dining hall was still crowded. The number of people seemed to have increased.

Zed stood near the stairs with the bundle of papers in hand and asked a server who was delivering beer to a guest where he could throw the trash.

“Trash? Just go throw it out in the back yard.”

The server spoke as if the question was pointless and then disappeared into the kitchen.

When Zed stepped outside the inn, the air had cooled because dusk had begun to fall. Children ran and laughed in the street, and merchants moved busily to open for the evening. Belnok looked different now. If there had been no commotion earlier in the day, the city would have seemed completely peaceful.

“…This is excessive.”

That thought lasted only a moment. Zed froze the instant he turned the corner of the inn. In the back yard, a mountain of trash piled up in a mess.

Discarded clothes, broken dishes, rotting straw, and heaps of things that seemed to have no purpose were tangled together like a hill. It was such a mess that the lack of any foul smell was strange.

“There’s the reason.”

Zed looked at the ground between the piles and saw holes in the dirt. Inside them, squirming breath worms and moss worms moved. They must have made their habitat here.

Why had creatures that fed on moisture and purified air gathered in a place like this? Zed remembered seeing the same worms in the underground prison and the candy shop. Maybe someone had raised them, abandoned them, and they had settled here afterward.

“So they were abandoned…”

Zed thought of Harto, he had also chosen a strange place to live. The cabin where he had been living was in a forest rarely visited by people, but it had not been a place where monsters lived.

‘I was really sick when I was little. Back then… humans helped me a lot….’

Harto had spoken about his past, but it was hard to believe. Unless it was in the Carseon Kingdom, which bordered Silpirnoa, the land of monsters and spirits, humans were rarely kind to monsters. Harto did not seem to know much about Silpirnoa either.

Harto was suspicious in many ways. Zed remembered what he had seen in Lindel Village through the cat.

That night before dawn, when Harto had leaned over the well, what had he been doing? If Zed had not imagined it, what had that pillar been that blocked the ambush during the duel?

Maybe those things had been nothing. Harto was a curious creature. He could have simply been interested in the well water, and the mysterious pillar might have been an illusion from the sunlight.

Yes, that must have been it. Zed decided not to doubt it. After all, this was Harto. Harto was not someone who pressured him, and he was a naïve being who knew nothing of Zed’s true identity.

With that conclusion, Zed smiled. Just thinking of Harto made him smile without reason. Then he wondered if he had ever cared this much about anyone before.

In Regnovar, he had never cared for anyone, nor had he trusted anyone. From the moment he was born until that day three years ago, he had never taken a single peaceful breath.

At six years old, his earliest and most vivid memory was that.

‘Ah! Lord Ares! Y-your hand…!’

That day had begun like any other morning. When he tried to wash his hands in the basin brought by a servant, his fingertips blackened before they even touched the surface. Poison had spread in the water. The toxin’s presence had been hidden by magic, but the holy power overflowing in Ares’s body since birth could not be deceived.

The culprit had been the old nanny his mother trusted most. The woman had followed them from Carseon to Regnovar, but she had been under a spell. His mother had her executed by beheading. That was her last act of mercy.

‘Ares. From now on, you must doubt everything. Even family. That includes me.’

His mother had warned him. She told him to distrust and guard against everything he ate, drank, touched, and saw.

After that, people died almost every day. It was horrifying for a child, but because death became a daily sight, Ares grew unable to grow attached to anyone, not even his siblings. Feeling pity, his mother had given him a rabbit from Silpirnoa for his twelfth birthday.

Its fur was white as snow, and its eyes were black and beautiful. He could still clearly remember the heartbeat that throbbed in his small hands and the soft warmth it gave. But before long, the rabbit died from a snake’s bite. No one knew how the snake had slipped into its cage, but it had coiled around the rabbit in Ares’s room, and the creature had bled black before dying.

The rabbits of Silpirnoa were not ordinary animals. They were a species mixed with monster blood, and when faced with danger, they released thick mucus from their bodies and died. The snake that did not know that attacked the rabbit and died. The rabbit had died in place of Ares.

Because of the constant assassination threats, Ares changed rooms frequently. Most of the rooms assigned to him had no windows, but sometimes he was moved to one that had at least a single window. Of course, the window could never be opened. Even a trace of poison powder carried by the wind could cause fatal harm. His room always was dark with its windows tightly locked, and a knight stood guard outside the door each night.

He never knew when he might die or whom he could trust. He had to stay on edge, obsess over even the smallest thing, and live each day in silence. That life might have been more painful than death.

He escaped that torment only after leaving Regnovar and joining the Night Rage. When Ares Carseon abandoned his name, Zed finally gained room to breathe.

A man who had lived as a prince of Regnovar all his life could not have avoided hardship in a new world, but three years had allowed him to find his true self. Zed Shaden’s life gave him a fulfillment that could not be measured by any price.

The change appeared not only in his heart but also in his body. He could transform the holy power that once needed to be offered periodically to the Cathedral into elixir, and when he placed his hand on another’s head, he could see what he wanted.

He had long understood the use of elixir, but in the mercenary group, it had little worth. There were healers already, and he thought it best to hide his power unless the situation was dire.

But Harto was different. Zed was glad that he could heal Harto with the elixir and give him good food and clothes.

‘Zed! You’re really smart!’

‘…Of course Zed had everything planned!’

‘Yes! I’m so glad I could help.’

Whenever Zed saw Harto rely on him, he smiled without meaning to. He had heard similar words countless times from his fellow mercenaries before, but Harto was different. There was something unique about Harto that he couldn’t describe.

Clunk.

“Oh dear heavens! Why are you standing there like a statue…!”

At that moment, an inn servant came out carrying a sack of trash and shuddered in fright when she saw Zed. What startled her even more was that Zed was smiling. Before he could say it was a misunderstanding, she threw the trash onto the heap and hurried away.

“Ahem…”

Zed cleared his throat awkwardly and finally set the bundle of papers beside the pile. He brushed his hands together and turned away as a breeze blew behind him.

Shhhh.

A black feather drifted down among the papers. When the feather fluttered near the holes where the worms lived, one moss worm wriggled out. It moved around as if sniffing, then caught the black feather in its mouth and slipped back into the hole.