113.
“There’s a path inside.”
Jaka climbed out of the fireplace, brushing ash from his hair.
When we checked inside the fireplace in the drawing room on the first floor of the mansion, we found an underground passage, just as Bella had said, seemingly built for emergencies.
‘As long as I get my hands on the Heart of Merinis, I can return to the imperial capital…….’
When I thrust one foot into the fireplace, Jaka caught my arm.
“I’ll go in first.”
“But……”
Before I knew it, a lantern spreading yellow light was in Jaka’s hand.
“This means it’s only right that I go first, doesn’t it?”
Following Jaka, who naturally took the lead, Prien, the duke, and I entered the fireplace in order.
“It certainly looks like an escape route built for emergencies.”
Prien murmured.
It seemed to have been left alone for quite some time, but it was still good enough to walk through.
Soon, we found the room Bella had mentioned.
It looked like a private space someone in the Paraton family had personally arranged.
If I had to guess, that someone was probably Karl Paraton.
Relying on the lantern light, we looked around the room, which had been decorated like a study.
Dust lay thick everywhere, enough to make us cough with the slightest movement.
The writing in a half-open book on the sofa, as if someone had stopped reading midway, was barely visible.
“I found it. Is this the one?”
Just then, Jaka took out a small wooden box from inside the bookshelf. After fiddling with it in his hand for a moment, Jaka frowned slightly.
“It’s locked.”
“Can’t we open it by force?”
“We don’t know how it’s stored inside, so it would be best to be careful.”
While Prien, who had stopped me, took the wooden box from Jaka, I was looking around a little more, just in case.
Suddenly, a red light spread at my feet.
‘Hm?’
I rolled up my left sleeve. The bracelet was emitting light.
As I moved my body this way and that, the light flickered.
‘Maybe…….’
I slowly moved my feet in the direction where the flickering light grew stronger.
Come to think of it, we still hadn’t uncovered the secret behind Karl Paraton appearing as a completely different person.
Passing the sofa and heading deeper inside, I found a clean stretch of wall with no furniture at all.
Only a torch bracket had been installed beside it, one that could be lit.
Click.
At that moment, I felt as though I had heard an auditory hallucination of something fitting together and operating. In other words, it was exactly the sort of sound that would be made if something made of rusted iron, like the torch bracket before me, moved.
As if bewitched, I reached out. The bracelet’s light grew stronger.
The moment I grasped the torch bracket and pulled it downward with force.
Click.
A sound truly identical to what I had heard rang out, and then the sound of gears turning poured forth one after another from inside the wall.
What I had thought was a wall made the sound of rusted hinges, a crack forming as it retreated backward and revealed an entrance.
I stretched out the hand holding the lantern to look inside the passage, but one foot that had been resting lightly on the threshold slipped, and I fell forward beyond the entrance.
In an instant, the area around me was swallowed in darkness as I dropped the lantern. My startled heart pounded violently.
But soon, the light radiating from the bracelet illuminated my surroundings.
‘Is this like back then?’
In the center was a certain platform, and on it lay a gem that looked exactly like the crystal stone I had seen before.
“Baron!”
As if possessed, I nearly reached out and grasped the crystal stone, but at the call, I looked back.
I saw Prien forcing his way through the entrance.
“Are you all right?”
“Sir, look at this over here.”
“We don’t know what it might be, so please don’t touch it carelessly and come this way.”
Prien approached and pulled me behind his back as if to protect me.
Before I knew it, Jaka and Isitan were standing guard as though surrounding me.
“Baron, seriously, why do you keep scaring people like this?”
“I slipped.”
“And how on earth did you find this place?”
I was about to show him the bracelet when Isitan, who had been examining the surroundings, spoke in a low voice.
“We’d better go back immediately.”
Jaka, who had been distracted for a moment while checking on me, raised the lantern in the direction where Isitan’s gaze was fixed.
As the yellow light spread, a geometric pattern covering the entire wall came into view.
“It looks like traces of heresy. If so, there must be something somewhere here……”
Just then, Isitan suddenly stopped speaking. He fixed his gaze far into the distance as if he were seeing something.
“What’s wrong?”
“……”
He seemed to murmur something under his breath, but even that vanished as he closed his mouth.
I was suddenly seized by an eerie feeling and turned around.
For a while now, neither Jaka nor Prien had said a word.
“Jaka?”
“……”
I snatched the lantern from his hand and held it close to his face.
His eyes were unfocused.
“Jaka!”
He was still, as though he could neither see nor hear anything.
All three of them failed to respond even when I shook their shoulders. The moment I judged that this was no ordinary matter, tension surged within me.
Wondering if something might be wrong with me as well, I quickly checked my entire body, but at least within the range I could perceive, I felt no particular sense of discomfort.
‘Why is it only me again?’
It was fortunate, amid misfortune, that at least I was fine, but even if I somehow dragged the three of them back to the original room, I didn’t think that would solve the situation.
I looked down at the bracelet.
‘Maybe I should have just ignored it.’
But regretting it now was meaningless.
It wasn’t as though I had the ability to turn back time.
Instead, I approached the platform where the crystal stone I had discovered when I first fell into this place was set.
Honestly, I didn’t know what this place was for, why this thing was here, or even whether it really was a crystal stone or not.
What was clear was the fact that the bracelet had been pointing to this all along.
Without hesitation, I reached out and grasped the palm-sized gem.
Then I drew the dagger from my waist.
I had already done it once, so doing it a second time wouldn’t be hard.
Back then, everything had returned to normal after I smashed the crystal stone, hadn’t it?
However, the moment the tip of the blade I swung touched the edge of the gem.
Along with static, a new scene unfolded before my eyes. It was clearly the same space, but as if it were this place in a different time, I saw three or four people standing before the platform.
‘It seems all it can do is look into memories and manipulate them.’
‘Yes, this time is another failure.’
‘Let’s try a little harder. If we succeed, with our own hands…….’
As the voices faded, the sight scattered as well, as if glass had shattered into pieces.
It was a strange experience.
As if I had truly existed in that time, as if I were standing there in that place, all my senses were thrown into confusion.
I tightened my grip. If I just broke this, everything would be all right.
But when I lowered my gaze, my palm was empty.
At that moment, someone swept right past the tip of my nose. Startled, I lifted my head.
A man I had never seen before was approaching somewhere, completely ignoring me as though he couldn’t see me at all.
Bang, bang, bang, bang!
Then, of all things, he began pounding the floor wildly.
I looked around.
It was a place I had never seen before.
‘Why am I here?’
After kicking the floor a few times, the man spat.
“Hey. Did you really go and die? Why isn’t this orphan bastard begging me to spare him this time? How boring.”
He kept talking down at the floor, then set down the bag-like thing he had brought beside him.
He took tools out of the bag and began prying up, one by one, the wooden planks nailed to the floor.
Once he had lifted the floor away like that, I could see there had been an extremely narrow space beneath it.
And inside it was a scrawny boy.
There was no telling how many days he had been trapped in there.
Dragged out onto the floor by the scruff of his neck, the boy looked as if he did not even have the strength to hold himself up.
When the light struck the boy’s dust-coated hair for an instant, revealing its true color.
I doubted my eyes.
His soft, pale blue hair, like the summer sky, reminded me of someone.
“You’re hungry, aren’t you?”
The man took a piece of bread from his bag and placed it in front of the boy’s face.
“If you promise to behave from now on, I might give you something tastier. How about freshly roasted meat, dripping with juices? Something that melts in your mouth……”
Just then, the boy’s eyes flew open, and he spat at the man’s face.
The man’s features were too blurred to see clearly, but I was certain of one thing: his face twisted like that of a demon.
At some point, the space changed again.
It seemed to be deep in the mountains in the middle of the night, when suddenly something enormous shot out from behind me.
I saw a black beast pounce on someone who had been running ahead.
The beast’s chilling roar, a stifled groan.
After a horrifying, teeth-gritted struggle to the death.
Not long after, someone pushed aside the now motionless beast and sat up.
The boy, drenched in blood, wiped his face with the back of his hand. In the moonlight, his eyes shone gray.
“Jaka.”
The moment I called the boy’s name, the scene changed once more.
A scream so dreadful it made my hair stand on end was echoing in every direction.
Several burly men were pinning a single boy to the floor. Something heated in the fire dug into the boy’s side.
“It’s done.”
The men stepped back. The boy slid limply to the floor and collapsed, panting weakly. Involuntary tears streamed down his face and wet the floor.
And the pattern branded into the boy’s side was……
I stopped breathing.
It looked exactly like the heretical symbol Isitan had once shown me.