HPV 56

There were some good things about being in a ten-year-old body.

Because of the smaller size, the amount of bathwater felt plentiful.

There were downsides, too — if he wasn’t careful, he might end up sinking straight into the wooden tub.

Riarun carefully climbed into the tub with the help of a stepping stool.

Only after getting in did he realize —How am I going to get out? He called out to the man who was surely standing just outside the bathroom. Since he figured the man was listening anyway, he got straight to the point.

“Come pull me out when I’m done bathing.”

Thinking about it, whether his body was big or small, nothing really changed. He was still hopeless — still relying on Banwes.

“You heard me, right?”

There was no answer for a while. Just as Liarun was about to say something more, the door swung open with a bang.

Standing there was Banwes, looking like he had forced himself to make a painful decision.

He spoke seriously.

“I think we need to check if there were any traces of the demon even back then.”

He was thinking about the spell that had affected their group —a spell that reverted their bodies to how they were ten years ago.

If they examined his current body, they might learn something about what happened that day.

Banwes didn’t really believe there would have been a demon possessing this small body even back then…But since the opportunity was here, there was no harm in checking.

The hot, damp steam clung to his eyes.

Banwes knelt by the tub, lowered his gaze to meet the small face staring up at him, and asked for permission.

“Can I touch you?”

Riarun response was blunt and to the point.

“When did you ever ask for permission?”

It was like being struck across the back of the head with a club. Banwes swayed violently, so much so that Riarun glanced around, wondering if Bzhan had secretly hit him.

His own hands looked hideous and monstrous, as big as cauldrons. Feeling overwhelmed with guilt, Banwes placed his palm carefully on the back of Riarun’s small neck.

He had questioned before whether his existence was harmful, but this was the first time in his life he genuinely felt he had committed a terrible sin.

The young body stiffened, breathing faintly and shallowly, waiting for the man’s judgment with closed eyes.

Soon, Banwes’s teeth ground together with a soft grit. Not even sure what emotions he was feeling.

“Could it be… the demon was already there ten years ago?”

“No. Strictly speaking… I don’t know.”

He had been wrong.

Even if their bodies had reverted, their states remained as they were in the present.

For example, Yurichen had returned to the body of his nineteen-year-old self —before he became High Priest —yet his divine power was still that of a twenty-nine-year-old.

Likewise, Riarun’s body might be that of a child, but the demon’s taint still lingered from the present.

Banwes had no way to know what things were like ten years ago. All he could do was feel that the demonic presence overshadowing this small body struck him even more harshly, deepening his rage and shame.

Banwes opened his eyes and rose to his feet. His gaze, moving absently, fell on Riarun’s side through the rippling water —and he noticed a yellow bruise.

The moment their eyes met, Riarun flinched, his arm splashing lightly against the water’s surface.

“How did you get hurt?”

Riarun didn’t even think to heal it. Even if he had, it would have been hard to do discreetly, since they were constantly around others.

Riarun felt like he was being pelted by a cold downpour just from the man’s question about the bruise.

Do you really care about me? If I were to say I had been hit by someone, how would you react? Would you think it’s no big deal compared to what you’ve endured yourself? But something in those eyes made him feel like Banwes wouldn’t think that way.

And so, he almost spoke up —maybe even about the Order, about everything —but some kind of binding spell on his words forced him instead to say, “I must have fallen.”

He answered casually, but inside, he was crying. The man turned away easily, as if he hadn’t been moved at all.

A quiet murmur dropped at the doorway and slipped into Riarun’s ears.

“Careless.”

But once the door closed, Banwes himself felt confused. Whenever he tried to say something else, his throat tightened shut. Maybe it was because he had spoken more to Riarun in the past few months than he had spoken to anyone else in his entire life.

Maybe it was because, even at this age, every feeling still felt like the first time.

***

Count Ikaran had never acknowledged the child born twenty-eight years ago as his son.

He considered him a disgrace and cast him out. Penzey had been called a genius, but he was never formally recognized as the family’s official mage. Thinking there was no point in behaving properly, he tossed aside the title of “genius” like an old rag.

He deliberately dabbled in magic that flirted dangerously with black magic. Rebel, heretic — he welcomed every nickname.

Such a Penzey had returned to his homeland after nearly ten years.

He was exactly as he had been the day he was thrown out.

Just the way Count Ikaran would remember him. Penzey’s murky eyes faced his father’s corpse. The funeral of a mage family was a quiet affair.

Following the continent’s traditions, there was a token priestly rite, but it was minimal. A priest Riarun had never seen before recited a short prayer.

Penzey, draped in a black cloth, kept his eyes fixed firmly on the ground.

The pitch-black clouds hanging in the night sky devoured the white crescent moon without leaving a scrap behind.

He even stayed long enough to watch the gravestone being placed over the man he had never once called “father” — then turned away.

A dark shadow slid along the street, its pace gradually slowing until it came to a complete stop. Standing at the main gate, clad in white, was a priest watching him.

He stood there for a long time, steeped in the chirring of insects and the deepening dusk.

As the mage passed him by, there was a soft rustle, like cloth slipping through fingers, from the High Priest’s robes. The two of them walked down the street side by side.

“Why didn’t you say anything when my face changed?”

Penzey asked — and only then noticed that Yurichen was dressed in mourning black.

Even his hair was hidden beneath a black veil.

Then why had he seemed so white to Penzey’s eyes?

“I have no interest in the tricks of a mage,” Yurichen answered.

“A mage can change their skin, their flesh, anything at all with ease. What does it matter?”

Penzey watched the other’s profile carefully. So pale — so bright it almost hurt to look at — and yet, unmistakably youthful.

The faint wrinkles around his eyes were gone; his forehead was a little rounder; there was a dusting of soft down on his cheeks.

This face.

The face he had looked up at through the prison bars ten years ago. Was it fate’s cruel joke?

That Yurichen had been dragged into the same alchemical accident aimed at Penzey? His thin lips curved, forming the edge of a crescent moon.

At eighteen, Penzey had been half-expelled from his family, causing chaos with magic, and had ended up spending his coming-of-age locked away in prison.

Prisoners who were mages had to be guarded by priests, whose divine power could suppress magic.

Before Penzey had stood a young and beautiful priest.

Someone who seemed unbreakable, no matter what pierced or slashed him.

There was an air of arrogance about him, as if he looked down on all the world. The young mage had been like a wild beast —even chained and caged, he would thrash and spill blood.

Whenever the priest tried to preach, Penzey would insult him to his face. Whenever the priest tried to soothe him with words, Penzey would respond with crude jokes and a blackened tongue. Back then… they had both said many things to each other that couldn’t be unsaid.

Maybe it was fortunate that they could chalk it up now to the recklessness of youth.

“I never thought that when we met again, you’d be a connoisseur of beauty. I didn’t believe it even when I heard it.” Yuricheon, with the face of the past, murmured.

Those violet eyes, nearly red. That beautiful appearance so unlike the rest of his family. In his family, they said Penzey’s beauty was the mark of a demon’s breath. That his striking looks were a gift from a demon.

If one understood how much hatred and contempt the word “demon” carried in this era, they could understand the childhood Penzey had endured.

The mage, once a prisoner, had despised Yurichen — not so much for being a priest, but for being beautiful.

He had hurled all kinds of sexual insults at him,yet here they were now, walking side by side.

As if beauty itself were a sin and a trial, he had feared every beautiful person he met. He had even hated his own face, and if his restraints had ever loosened, the first thing he tried to tear apart was always his own face.

People sneered at him, calling him “the mage of lies and deceits” for hiding his face and his disgraceful exile from the family.

“When it came to flirting with beauties,” Penzey said, as if confessing a sin, but with an infuriatingly casual air,

“I always preferred men over women.”

“Because, being men, they’d never fall for me. That made it easier.”

But he had come to understand later, with age —The abuse from his family hadn’t been because of anything complicated.

It had simply been because he was born to a different mother.

That cheap, worn-out story —his so-called father’s mistake, had been packaged up nicely to make Penzey fear his own face.

“And so, you freely cloaked yourself in falsehoods around Riarun, too,” Yurichen said.