To You, Who Will Die Alone in Paradise Chapter 59

Dandeleon wandered the boundary between illusion and reality. A memory he didn’t have ripped through him, mixed him up, and melted him into a shapeless mass.

Before he knew it, Dandeleon was bound on the desk.

When he blinked his eyes in shock, he saw the demonic beast crying as it looked at him, and when he came to his senses, it was Dandeleon himself, and then it was the demonic beast again.

“Blood… please.”

The demonic beast pleaded.

“Revenge on him….”

The demonic beast’s voice was pitifully desperate, and the word “revenge” that he offered was as sweet as honey. Dandeleon felt his heart pound.

If he could return the pain he had suffered to Herma, then.

Dandeleon slowly approached the desk. As it happened, a small knife lay on one corner of the desk. He placed the candlestick on the desk and picked up the knife.

Dandeleon raised the knife and slit his palm. He felt no pain. He had been broken so many times, with knives, with saws, with awls, with everything a human could imagine. A wound from a well-sharpened blade was not pain. True pain lay in a deeper, more distant place.

“Aah… noble blood….”

The demonic beast’s eyes filled with ecstasy. Dandeleon slowly brought his hand closer to it.

He felt no fear. He wasn’t confused about what he had to do. Dandeleon, led by an intense call from within, tilted his palm. The red blood that had pooled in his palm trickled down. Into the demonic beast’s wide-open mouth.

“Aah… aah-aah…! Aah-aah-aah-aah!”

The demonic beast, having swallowed Dandeleon’s blood, thrashed and screamed in agony.

Dandeleon was not surprised. No one had told him, but he had vaguely expected this would happen. He wasn’t happy about its pain. He felt sorry and regretful, but it was something it had to go through.

A butterfly struggles with all its might to tear through its chrysalis and emerge. If it cannot make even a small crack in the chrysalis, birth is a distant prospect, and the cradle soon becomes a tomb.

But, if it could overcome its suffering and tear its shell to shreds.

“Aah-aah-aah-aah!”

The demonic beast twisted its whole body and continued to scream. But Dandeleon noticed that the color of the scream had changed. Amidst the agony, he felt a sense of ecstasy.

It wasn’t just the scream that had changed. The demonic beast was actually transforming. The knife wounds on its skin were gradually healing, and new scales were growing where they had fallen out in patches.

Even before he noticed, the demonic beast’s body had been getting bigger and bigger. Its arm, which had been as thin as a slum orphan’s, filled out with flesh, and its nape and forearm grew thicker. Its severed lower body did not grow back, but it was clearly recovering.

“Aah….”

The demonic beast, realizing its own condition, muttered in a voice full of rapture.

“I am becoming complete. With Zarmash’s blood… I am becoming complete….”

The demonic beast’s body swelled until it filled the shackles to their limit. When the beast moved its arm a few times, the shackles that had held it so tightly broke apart with a snap, as if they were nothing.

Snap. Thud.

The demonic beast broke off the shackles that bound its neck and waist with its one remaining hand. And then it slowly raised its body.

Dandeleon watched that moment of birth as if dazzled. It had only one arm and no lower body, but that didn’t matter. If he gave it just a little more blood, it would become more complete. Then it, we, would have our revenge together.

As if reading his thoughts, the demonic beast looked at him and smiled.

“Noble blood….”

The moment the demonic beast extended its hand toward him.

“Leon!”

The demonic beast was engulfed in flames before his eyes.

“Aah-aah-aah-aah-aah-aah!”

The demonic beast screamed from within the flames. It was not an ordinary fire. The blaze that had shot up right in front of Dandeleon’s nose had no heat at all. And yet, the demonic beast writhed in agony and screamed within it. Its body distorted and grew smaller and smaller.

“No!”

“Leon! Get a grip!”

Someone pulled Dandeleon back from behind. Dandeleon struggled to escape from his grasp.

He had to save his child. If he didn’t give it more blood, it would die just like that. After all that suffering, it was finally about to become complete, all that was left was to take revenge, why, who dared to interfere?

“Let go of me…!”

“Leon! It’s me! It’s Kellewen!”

Dandeleon, who had been in a state of confusion, was jolted to his senses by that name.

“Kellewen?”

Dandeleon grabbed the hand that held his waist. He felt a familiar touch and warmth. When he turned his head, he saw Kellewen’s face, pale with shock.

“Are you back to your senses?”

He asked, caressing Dandeleon’s cheek.

“Are you okay? You’re not hurt? The blood… did any of the blood get on you? In your eyes, or your mouth….”

“Kellewen.”

“Say you’re okay, Leon. Please.”

“…I’m okay.”

Dandeleon muttered blankly and turned his head. He had intended to check on the burning demonic beast on the desk.

But the demonic beast was no longer there. On the table was only a handful of ashes, and a small, pathetic flame attached to those ashes. Even that flickered out after a moment, as if it had lost its strength. A black powder similar to ash remained on the desk, and then even that vanished without a trace, as if dissolving in water.

Nothing remained on the old desk. Only the shackles scattered on the floor proved that someone had suffered here.

The strength drained from Dandeleon’s body. As he staggered, Kellewen tightened his grip on him.

“Leon…? Leon!”

Kellewen cried out in a desperate voice. Dandeleon leaned against his arm for a moment. He wanted to deny everything that had unfolded before his eyes, but it was now too late to run away.

“Explain.”

Dandeleon put strength into his feet and stood up straight. And he pushed away Kellewen, who was hugging him.

“Pardon?”

Looking at Kellewen’s bewildered eyes, Dandeleon recalled the demonic beast’s violet irises. At the last moment, it had broken its shackles and smiled at him. It was a smile filled with gratitude and awe. It was not a dangerous situation at all.

But he couldn’t explain that to Kellewen. Dandeleon knew instinctively that the conversation, the communion he and the demonic beast had shared, would not be understood by anyone. So Dandeleon did not reprimand Kellewen for burning a harmless creature to death.

“I’m telling you to explain why there’s a demonic beast here.”

However, this was a question that absolutely had to be asked.

Kellewen couldn’t answer right away and avoided his eyes.

Dandeleon took a deep breath. There was the damp smell characteristic of a cellar. That was all. A moment ago, a living being had burned to death, but there was no trace of it.

The power to completely annihilate a demonic beast from the face of the earth.

Those flames must have been Kellewen’s magic. Dandeleon tried to count the number of times he had used magic for him, but gave up. It was a meaningless act at this point.

“Did you bring the demonic beast here?”

As the silence dragged on, Dandeleon asked again.

A part of him hoped Kellewen would deny it. That he had come down here because he had found the overturned carpet and the open secret door, and had been surprised to find a demonic beast when he came down. So he had used magic reflexively… If he said that, there would be no logical inconsistencies.

But in another part of his heart, a completely different wish was growing.

He was sick of the lies. He was fed up with a peace riddled with pretense. Dandeleon wanted the truth. No matter how cruel and harsh it might be, he wanted to see it with his own eyes.

Dandeleon wanted to hear Kellewen’s true feelings.

“…It was unavoidable if I was to stop Herma.”

So when Kellewen answered, Dandeleon actually felt relieved.

“I had to divert his attention to something other than you. To do that, an ordinary incident wouldn’t be nearly enough….”

“So you kidnapped the demonic beast Herma was experimenting on? You didn’t just let it go, you brought it here and tortured it again?”

Of course, his unpleasant feelings hadn’t entirely disappeared. And most of that unpleasantness stemmed from pity for the demonic beast.

The image of it weeping and pleading with him was vivid in his mind. As if being tortured until its body was cut in half wasn’t enough, it had to be trapped and suffer again in this small, dark place.

“Torture, I would never do such a…!”

Kellewen waved his hands in surprise.

“I merely spirited the demonic beast away for a short time. After letting it be seen by others first, I just brought it here. Its lower body and one arm were like that since I found it….”

“There was a knife.”

Dandeleon cut him off with a firm voice and pointed to one side of the desk. The knife he had used to slit his palm lay there. Seeing the sharp, blue-tinged blade, his palm began to ache as if just remembering. The bleeding had stopped, but the pain was clear.

“That’s….”

“There were wounds on its body too.”

Kellewen clamped his mouth shut and said nothing. Dandeleon noticed a flicker of defiance in his eyes.

Kellewen stared at Dandeleon, frowning as if he couldn’t understand. When Dandeleon didn’t back down and pressed for an answer with his eyes, a long sigh finally escaped Kellewen’s lips.

“…I needed blood.”

Kellewen reached out to a corner of the room and pulled over a chair. Dandeleon hadn’t even known there was a chair there. Seeing how familiar he was with the room’s layout and furniture placement, it seemed he came here more often than he had thought. Kellewen slumped into the chair and covered his face with both hands.

“Don’t you think the contamination had to spread consistently within the royal palace for them to think the demonic beast was alive and still on the run?”

Dandeleon’s imagination painted an unpleasant picture in his mind. It was a scene of Kellewen hacking at the demonic beast with a knife in a dark room. No matter how much the beast pleaded, he would not have listened.