* * *

Lydon looked up at the sky with a blank expression. The slowly setting scarlet sky had always been his favorite sight, but today it seemed different. Staring at the same sky for hours on end, even if the act was forced. It wouldn’t be anyone’s favorite.

“All internal injuries have been treated. There is no visible trauma……. You still can’t move your body?”

Next to Lydon, who stretched out on the floor and rolled his eyes without answering, sat Garuel, who had been healing him all along. He had been working to get Lydon moving again, but he hadn’t even found a clear cause yet.

‘If I had known that this power was the price of the contract, I would have pretended to accept it and thrown it away.’

Ignoring Garuel’s further questions, Lydon remembered the words the Scarlet Dragon had spoken before his limbs stiffened and he crashed.

“A strangely familiar power, I thought. Are you Hesonia’s successor?”

“You have gained the power of Hesonia, but you do not seem to know the price.”

The Scarlet Dragon knew Hesonia. And if Lydon’s guess was correct, Hesonia’s seal powers were acquired through his dealings with the Scarlet Dragon.

‘At what cost? Absolute obedience to the Scarlet Dragon’s commands? Hmm, I wish there was a maximum number of times. If I had to live under that giant lizard for the rest of my life, I might kill myself.’

Hesonia was truly a fairy who did only annoying things until he died. Lydon spat in Hesonia’s face, if only in his imagination, and frowned as Garuel imbued him with light magic.

“Cut the crap. You go find Cadel.”

“Of course, I’d love to, but Sir Lydon is as stuck as a mouse in a trap, and if I leave you alone and let you be eaten by a bear, I won’t have any face to see Knight Commander.”

Garuel shook his head, saying he had no choice, but Lydon argued that he could still use magic in this state, but the mana-depleted fairy’s argument was not very convincing.

In the end, Lydon had to meekly accept Garuel’s useless healing. If there was any trace of demonic energy left, he would use it to drive Garuel away.

While Lydon and Garuel were stuck. Van and Lumen were searching for signs of Cadel in the direction the Scarlet Dragon had flown.

There was no conversation between the two men as they ran up the steep slope. There was no trash talking as usual. They just followed the Scarlet Dragon’s trail with murderous expressions on their faces.

Van was the first to stop running, and with a sharp intake of breath, he picked up something that had fallen to the ground. Clear beads of sweat trickled down his sloping jaw.

“…….”

It was a red cloak. It couldn’t be his, it couldn’t be Lumen’s, it couldn’t be the other two members’. It had to be Cadel’s. His heart pounded harder than when he had been running.

When there was no sign of Van following him, Lumen noticed the strangeness and turned around. And then he noticed the cloak, which Van was glaring at as if he were about to go on a killing spree. For a brief moment, Lumen’s expression cracked, and he grabbed the cloak roughly from Van’s hand.

His eyes were red and bloodshot as he stared at the cloak. His normally cool aura was now filled with anger and sensitivity, radiating a chill that threatened to freeze anyone who came near.

The cloak crumpled into a mess in his strong grip. Lumen spoke in a tightly held voice as if holding back anger.

“You should have knocked him out or something.”

His murderous gaze did not meet Van’s, but it was clear who the object of his anger was. Still, Van made no response, and as he remained silent, Lumen turned away, wrapping the cloak around the scabbard of his sword and tying it off.

Lumen wasted no time in pursuit, and it was only when his back was far enough away that Van released his fists, which had been clenched so tightly that they trembled.

Disgust at himself for failing to stop Cadel burned fiercely, but it did not overcome his desperation to find him.

* * *

“……Two life options.”

The Scarlet Dragon stared at a dot on the ground, deep in thought. In front of him, Cadel scanned the Scarlet Dragon’s eyes impatiently, like a convict waiting to be sentenced.

No matter how much he pretended to live in this place as if it were real, he couldn’t ignore the fact that this world had begun as a game. For Cadel, there would always be the ‘real world’. But for those who were created and lived in this world, it was the only reality.

It was not easy to accept that your world, which you had believed to be the only one, was actually nothing more than a fiction, so Cadel tried to avoid mentioning it as much as possible, but it was an unavoidable topic when explaining the system. It all started after he was transmigrated into the game.

Fortunately, the Scarlet Dragon seemed to have little trouble accepting that his world was someone else’s creation and that it was a world that many people enjoyed.

It’s strange that in your world, this place is just a fake, and one of the options is to live in this world. I suppose it’s there because it’s worth thinking about, but…… it’s ambiguous.”

At first, Cadel thought so too, that life in this world wasn’t even worth thinking about because of course he had to go back to his original world.

But the more time he spent here, building his Knight Order, meeting the people he cared about, and carrying the burden. He began to dream of a new life, one he hadn’t even considered. A desire he now realized was absurd.

With a sneer of resignation, the Scarlet Dragon’s gaze shifted. He’d seen enough of human weakness. In his eyes, the Cadel he knew now teetered on the brink of collapse.

Ordinarily, he would have allowed the man to overcome his weakness, to be consumed by his emotions. But this man was special. A rare soul from a world he didn’t know, who had experienced something extraordinary even there. Unable to let him break like this, the Scarlet Dragon decided to give him a piece of information he’d been holding back.

“The soul trapped in that body is certainly capable of great things. I’ll grant you that it’s more dazzling than other humans, but that light isn’t natural.”

“……What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that it is a soul that has been influenced by that power, the power of the ‘system’. At first, I didn’t even notice this body, but I became aware of it when I infused energy into it. It’s an artificially created soul.”

An artificially created soul. Cadel Lytos was the protagonist of this world. In the grand scheme of things, there was nothing strange about being an artificially created soul in an artificially created world.

The Scarlet Dragon nudged Cadel, who frowned in confusion.

“It’s a half-born soul, not a whole one, like a soul made for someone’s intervention. It was half-born to begin with, which is why it was able to merge with your soul.”

“Half-born……?”

“Perhaps it was born with the ‘transmigration’ you mentioned in mind. No, that’s probably right. If you go back to your world, that half soul won’t last long and will die out.”

Cadel’s efforts to comprehend the new truth, piece by piece, crumbled as quickly as the Scarlet Dragon’s last words.

Too many stories were crammed into his head, unorganized.