The pale-faced man, Damian, quietly sat down and opened his bag.
Inside were various items including bread, dried meat, and jerky made from the thinly sliced meat.
And let’s not forget the fish fillets, smoked to remove moisture and dried to a crisp with charcoal smoke.
Although it looked shabby, it had a certain completeness to it.
Damian picked up a piece of jerky and slowly shoved it into his mouth.
It should have tasted salty—yet he felt nothing.
The jerky wasn’t the problem.
The problem was him—
*
“Wow, you’re looking healthy!”
When Damian appeared in response to the call, that was Ceres’ first remark.
A monster that had consumed countless lives—the immortal king, the blood-walking man, and so on. Damian had been called by all sorts of names.
But he was still human, after all.
The magic had granted him a life nearly infinite—endowing him with all the lives that existed in the lands where he had once reigned as king, yet he remained human.
Whether an eternally undying human could still be called human was up for debate, but even after hundreds of years, he had not aged a bit nor had he died.
As such a being, Damian was quietly revered near the Great Desert as an object of local faith.
“…Your uncouth manner of speaking hasn’t changed, priest. Start by explaining why you called me.”
His deep, pleasant voice resonated.
Damian frowned slightly as he looked at Ceres.
Although he had become a great lord of the demon realm infused with the power of the celestial god after its death, such things held no value for him.
Having been a king, burdened by the lives of his people while living with regret for his past, what did being a great lord of the demon realm mean to him?
“Alright, I suppose.”
The blood that had been gushing from his wrist had finally stopped.
Ceres, wiping the blood that had gathered on his healing wrist, faced Damian and smiled broadly.
“It’s time to fulfill your wishes. For the awakening of your people, and for your death as well.”
At those words, Damian’s eyebrows twitched.
The title of the great lord of the demon realm and the banner of the realm’s existence meant nothing to him.
He had been deceived by an unknown deceitful sorcerer who had swallowed his kingdom whole, and the screams of his people had dissolved into a handful of blood. All those lives now belonged to Damian, and as a result, he lived on, burdened by the weight of countless lives, filled with sorrow and regret.
It melted away. The lives of those people became entirely Damian’s, and as a result, Damian now lived burdened by countless lives, filled with regret and sorrow.
The vengeful spirits of his people who perished due to his mistakes—their enlightenment.
And the death of Damian, who made such mistakes.
These two things were like monumental quests for him.
He became an unwanted object of faith, and as a result, he received the power of the dark god and became the Archduke of the demon realm.
Such things held no value to him; only that quest was the grand ambition he wished to fulfill.
“Speak the truth, priest. Since you have mentioned my quest from your lips, there must be no falsehood whatsoever. Only state the facts.”
“I’m not lying… When have you ever seen me lie? I’ve only told your Archdukes beneficial stories, right?”
“Your introduction is long.”
Too much unnecessary chatter.
Lacking dignity, grace, and elegance.
Having such a woman as a priest only lowers the status of the demon realm; it does not help at all.
—At least that’s what Damian thought as he glared at Ceres.
“The saint has appeared. The saint. Do you understand?”
—Saint.
At that word, Damian shut his mouth.
The saint, the very saint also known as the divine agent.
He didn’t have much knowledge about her, but he had faintly heard of her.
“You’ve seen her, you know, in Semek.”
The great catastrophe in Semek was also his doing.
And he quietly watched them from the shadows cast over Semek—
Ceres was sitting right in the middle of the distorted star of reverse shape.
It was somewhat rude behavior in front of Damian, who was once a king, but seeing Ceres sitting cross-legged, resting her chin on one hand while grinning, made the thought of getting angry fade away.
Ignoring Ceres’s attitude, Damian sifted through his memories.
When you live long enough, your memory just isn’t what it used to be. Was what happened yesterday really yesterday, or was it the day before? A week ago? A year ago? Ten years, a hundred years, a thousand years—
After a long while of rummaging through his memories, he finally recalled something.
“That white-haired…”
“No, not her. Remember the little girl with red hair?”
Was that so?
There were indeed a few of them.
Red hair, red hair… yes, there was one.
I remembered a tall, manly guy walking along with a spear in hand, looking every bit the Warrior.
“Is she really the Saint?”
“Yeah. She’s the Saint. The first one to appear in hundreds of years since the first Saint.”
The first Saint, Sonia.
Damian knew that name all too well.
Back then, he wasn’t so desperate for death and didn’t care much about it at all.
With all the goings-on regarding the demon realm and the sudden appearance of the celestial beings after the God of Heaven disappeared, nobody had the time to worry about the demon realm. Now, it seemed like they were going mad about trying to settle things down, but it was already too late.
“The Saint, the Saint…”
The word lingered on Damian’s lips.
A peculiar word.
“Yes, the Saint.”
Ceres, who had been sitting, suddenly stood up with a noise and began to circle around Damian.
It felt as if her emotions were transmitting straight to him.
A strange joy, and a sense of excitement—
“Devour the Saint.”
“Hmm.”
The one who wields the divine power of the Celestial God is the Saint herself.
Damian was human, not a Demon, but the roots that made him were purely those of sorcery.
Cunning, and also distorted.
Sorcery has a stronger recoil against divine power than even magic itself.
“You are basically the essence of sorcery. So, devour the Saint. She is like the Celestial God descending to this world, so your wish will be fulfilled.”
At Ceres’ words, Damian fell silent.
“Devour the… Saint.”
The idea wasn’t entirely impossible.
After all, the Saint is a being granted power by the Celestial God, a literal embodiment of divine power. Since divine power is the total opposite of sorcery, it would mean that the Saint and Damian are also opposites. So if he were to devour such a Saint—
“If divine power floods your body, you’d die even if you tried your hardest. You’ve tried every possible means to avoid death, and if that’s all that’s left, then what else could there be?”
Ceres said with a sly smile as she looked at Damian.
And since that statement was quite persuasive, Damian kept his mouth shut without responding.
*
Honestly, he couldn’t even remember when he last had a sense of taste.
A gritty texture, and the sensation of chewing.
That strange feeling as it slides down his throat.
Recalling those sensations, Damian quietly looked at the Saint—Priest Vigrind.
What a truly bright girl.
She shone like sunlight, and the way she scolded the priests following that divine being was indeed very saintly.
Though she looked drastically different from the girl he saw before, compared to that girl, this one was a complete transformation.
‘Is that the Saint… truly beautiful.’
A woman must be petite to be feminine—this was the ideal of beauty in the era he lived, and Damian stared at Vigrind for quite a while, lost in thought.
‘Is my time to end drawing near?’
While he couldn’t be certain, he felt it was the highest possibility.
Saint’s blood was nothing less than poison for him; drinking her blood would be akin to consuming poison.
If a large amount of that blood entered his body, he would suffer extreme agony.
The millions of lives he bore would start to extinguish one after another, and in the pain of that extinction, even Damian’s life would ultimately be consumed.
The death that awaited at the end.
How sweet would that death be?
The silence of all things, the stillness of all things, the serenity of all things, the hush of all things—
The end he had desperately sought was now revealing itself right before him.
Damian closed the box.
After placing the closed box beside him, he slowly rose to his feet.
Clad in a deep navy evening coat, Damian stood up, yet nobody paid him any mind.
With each careful step, he walked toward the Saint.
Approaching that red-haired Saint, Damian continued to draw closer.
Beneath his evening coat, something thick and dark, like mud, began to slowly seep down.
With every step he took, that black substance began to spread out wherever his feet touched.
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