There Is No Hidden Villain in This Novel Chapter 44

Even if I get beaten up from now on, I’ll have to barely survive by selling the honor of this moment! As I was thinking like the Little Match Girl, the principal, who had strode up to me, bellowed.

“Cassis, you rascal! Who told you to use a martial art I didn’t tell you to?”

“Is it a problem?”

I had a lot to say about this. I mostly have active skills, but there are plenty of people in the world with passive abilities. Wouldn’t they have a much greater advantage when fighting with a staff, huh? And the only restrictions were not to use qi in our weapons and not to use magic, and I only focused the Heavenly Scripture Art in my eyes and fought with only basic weapons…

“It’s not a problem. I wasn’t trying to reprimand you in the first place! This little brat has such a filthy temper. Won’t even let me get a word in.”

Despite saying that I wouldn’t let him get a word in, the principal grumbled on for an incredibly long time before finally grabbing me by the collar.

It was the verdict.

“The winner is Cassis de Millang!”

Yeah…

This feels damn good.

As if on cue, a round of applause began. Someone even whistled, and a few people were staring back and forth between the two of us, genuinely shocked. I gently shook off the principal, who had raised my arm, and gave them a stylish, aristocratic bow.

With blood magic, I just had to stand still and squeeze out some blood, and it would move on its own, but with the Heavenly Scripture Art, I had to move my muscles, so it was quite exhausting. I wondered when was the last time I had run around so passionately.

“Your head has cooled down.”

At that moment, someone placed a hand on top of my head. It was a hand where I could feel the bones beneath the rotten leather. What a surprise. A punching bag that would let me maintain my “Cassis de Millang with extreme mysophobia” concept had walked right into my hands.

I took out a handkerchief and gently pushed away the bony fingers, smiling neatly.

“Could it be as cool as the principal’s head?”

Then, the bald zombie started to go wild. What was he saying? He was yelling at the top of his lungs that he didn’t mean it like that, but was congratulating me on having developed a flexible way of thinking. Whatever he said, I decided to remain immersed in my moment of glory.

Ah, what a truly exhilarating afternoon…

But strangely, that night felt a little different from the day. Ryuseong fed me thin rice gruel, gave me the antidote, and tucked me into bed, and then, as I leisurely dozed off, I had a dream.

And the content of that dream was…

‘Not erotic. Really, it’s not.’

…I’ll leave it to your judgment why this sentence doesn’t feel credible.

‘But it’s really not. It’s not…!’

Anyway, in my dream, I was standing in a strange place.

This place was, in my opinion, a truly strange place. Because everywhere my eyes landed was bright red.

The ground was red, and the sky was red. The heavens and the earth were crimson. Redness overflowed.

Twilight was falling.

And I was looking at a world made of red.

Why am I looking at this? I wanted to turn my head, but my neck wouldn’t move. It was around then that I realized this was a dream. No matter how hard I strained my eyeballs, I couldn’t look in any other direction. I was fixed in my original state, as if the dream wouldn’t allow movement.

But if this is a lucid dream, I should be able to move my body, yet none of the characteristics of a lucid dream fit.

Still, if I had to keep my gaze fixed idly, I wanted to change the scenery. This place was too red, and everything was garish. No, rather than garish, it was as if the only colors left in the world were black and white, so the saturation of the red was intensely piercing my mind. It was almost painful to look at.

The few black things were collapsed rafters. They were soot and acrid smoke. Was there a fire? Every time I breathed, it felt like I had shoved my nose into a pile of ash. Was that why everything looked so red? Something stirred beneath the broken blue tiles. I thought I shouldn’t look at it, but the body in my dream naturally shifted its gaze.

There was a person there. A person.

—Is it a person?

At that moment, the glass in my head shattered. The lack of awareness that had separated me from the scenery broke. I didn’t want to empathize, but I understood everything, yet I was trapped, unable to even turn my gaze, so I couldn’t even gag.

The nightmare held my gaze. It pulled it taut and nailed it down. Nailing a person was a clear form of torture, and so, like a person dying on a cross, I had to feel the blood chilling from the tips of my limbs.

What I witnessed beneath the blue tiles was a person.

A person.

It once was.

The being, once defined as a person in the past, was now, thanks to the time-honored tradition of undertakers, defined as a corpse.

But on a battlefield devoid of the living, the only undertakers were jet-black crows, and so it was a piece of meat to be pecked at by beaks.

But it was alive.

No, it looked alive. Because the tattered mess of torn-out entrails swaying in the wind reminded me of a small child waving its hand.

I now understand that if you cut an adult in half, they become the same height as a child.

The burnt smell was acrid, like when you overcook dalgona candy.

The limply swaying muscle fibers and nerve bundles could not chase away the crows, and thus could not save it from the fate of being treated as a mere piece of meat by a lowly creature.

So, as I watched it, I wondered, was it a person? I mean, the thing being treated like that.

Is it a person? And.

‘My thoughts, fuck.’

Blood. Mire. A sea of filth.

A trash can. Worse than a sewer.

Disgusting and repulsive.

‘Think about something else, you bastard. Don’t get invested in some fucking nightmare…’

Death ran rampant. It swirled crazily across the stage like a ballerina, recklessly swinging an axe. If it is the axe’s destiny to go up and then fall down, was gravity designed to cut off legs? Droplets of blood flew and scattered, and screams ate themselves. When pain exceeds its limit, a person cannot even scream, so the crows cried out instead. No, they laughed. The undertakers invited to the banquet preened their glossy black feathered coats with their beaks and bowed their heads, which they had raised like gentlemen greeting each other.

And then, they slowly pecked at the meat with their beaks.

They were innocent. They were. Because they were crows. Because they were allowed to be. But I couldn’t be. Yet the death laid out before me was endlessly innocent. So much so that I couldn’t even tear my eyes away.

‘What the fuck kind of dream is this, fuck.’

The reason my vision was entirely red was because everything was soaked in blood?

Then all those mannequin-like things scattered to the horizon. They were all once alive? They once cried and wailed and smiled and loved each other. They were really people…?

‘Fuck, please, let me wake up from this dream.’

I tried to wiggle my fingers to wake up quickly, but nothing moved. Wow, fuck. I’ve never been this severely paralyzed by sleep in my life; shouldn’t I get an exorcism or something? God the Father, Buddha, Allah. All the gods of all mythologies, please save me. Ah. But I think there was a separate creator god here.

I prayed to every god I could think of, but my fingers wouldn’t fucking move.

Instead, something else moved.

Squish.

The sound of footsteps.

As if someone had stepped in a pool of blood.

Squish, squish.

The sound was getting closer. Getting nearer. It’s getting louder. Is it fast? No, it’s not. But.

Squishsquishsquishsquish.

The speed is gradually increasing. It’s getting faster and faster, closer and closer, and my heart is now pounding heavily, like it’s about to burst. I haven’t turned around, but I can tell. Something is trying to grab me. And finally, at this most unwanted moment, my head, which had been frozen like a stone statue, is about to turn. No, please. Whatever it is, I don’t want to see it. Don’t suddenly show me a ghost. I hate jump scares. And then, without my knowledge, my facial muscles move unconsciously, and everything—

Tick, tock.

“—Ah.”

Everything changed. My vision was pitch black and stark white, but there was nothing rolling around like a mannequin. And it was bright. I could feel my eyelids trembling and moving. So, can I move? I slowly raised my hand and covered my eyes. It moved.

A breath escaped me like a sigh.

I opened my eyes at an angle from the side of my hand. It was the same morning as yesterday. The sunlight was pouring in from outside the window, and the gentle sun cast a soft golden glow. The sky was sky blue. The second hand of the clock was moving, keeping a regular beat. There was no blood-red color anywhere, and we are at peace. Beside me, Ryuseong’s breathing sounded soft, as if muffled by a cozy blanket. So there was really nothing to be concerned about.

Nothing…

‘Fuck, of all the dreams to have.’

Is this some kind of ritual to ward off evil? This won’t do. I need to go find Shin Myohan. I felt like I needed her to stamp a verdict saying that since I had this dream, only good things would happen from now on. If not even that, I felt like my mood would be utterly ruined. I knew for sure that I had sleep paralysis, but has my body become weak or something?

Come to think of it, it probably was weak. I had a duel not long after being poisoned. So a ghost took that opportunity to pounce on me, is that it?

‘This sucks, for real…’

If I had dreamt of being pounced on by a ghost, I wouldn’t have felt this way. I may enjoy seeing the protagonist’s life go to shit, but I’m not the kind of bastard who gets excited by snuff films. The scenes, so vivid they were imprinted in my mind, were so repulsive it was infuriating.

Should I just go do a good deed or something? If I pray for something like this to never happen to me again, huh? If you ignore that sincerity, you’re no god, fuck. To just move on as if nothing happened, cold sweat was pouring down my body like rain.

So I did a good deed.

“Hey, hey, are you crazy?”

“What is? Your sanity?”

By the time I had just committed my good deed and was heading to school, the cadets seemed to no longer have the mental capacity to even make way for Cassis de Millang. Logan, who had come to meet me in front of my room, seemed displeased, but I stopped him.

At times like these, if just one person shouts, everyone will know.

What I had done!

“Th-th-th-the, the cheat sheet is out…!”