Yet difficult was not the same as impossible. Jared steeled himself. He would restore his friend even if it meant tracking down Arthur. He was rumored to be able to resurrect the dead as easily as others brewed tea. If he could pull souls from ash, surely he could weave flesh around a living fragment.
Inside the hollow mountain, the Vermilion Demon Lord drifted from wall to wall, brushing stony ridges as if they were the faces of old comrades.
Suddenly, he stopped. In the far corner, two faint, overlapping hearts, scorched into the rock ages ago, still shimmered. He went completely still, the cave’s silence wrapping around him like winter snow.
“I never imagined… Her hearts would still be here,” he breathed, the words so soft they barely stirred the dust.
Watching that frozen reverence, Jared realized there was more to the demon lord than swagger and battle scars. And the mysterious “her” was unmistakably a woman.
“Who was she?” Jared asked, his voice gentle, unwilling to trample on reverence. The Vermilion Demon Lord turned. Nostalgia, devotion, and a knife-thin ribbon of pain tangled in his gaze.
“Long ago, on level nine,” he began, his tone weather-beaten by centuries, “My name alone could hush a battlefield… I lived wild, collected allies by the dozen, and earned enemies by the score, until the day I met her…”
“She was Selene Moonridge, a prodigy from a reclusive sect. Her clan was small, but its roots ran deep. Every disciple learned to bend raw spiritual light into wonders the rest of us could scarcely describe. Our paths crossed by accident… I was bleeding from a dozen wounds, hunted through a mountain valley, and moments from oblivion when she appeared.”
“She wore white, nothing else. The cloth glowed as if moonlight had chosen her for a vessel. Without hesitation, without fear of my reputation as a Demonic Cultivator, she placed her hands over my chest and poured a river of pure, gentle power into me. It sealed my wounds and, more miraculously, quieted the storm that had always lived inside my heart…”
“From that breath forward, I knew our fates were forever tangled. We roamed the world side by side. Ruins, lost relics, monstrous foes, we faced them all. Her kindness balanced my recklessness; my boldness shielded her gentleness. Those days… They were the happiest I have ever known.”
He paused, the brightness snuffed out. “But happiness, like borrowed starlight, never lingers. In time, her elders learned of us, and the sky itself seemed to darken.”
The cave echoed with the hush that followed his confession. Even the cold stone seemed to mourn the moment when joy had slipped beyond his reach.
“Back then, they branded me a monster of the demonic path, light and darkness could not co-exist, they said, so they set their faces against our love. Their elders laid intricate snares, determined to erase me from existence…”
“Selene would not stand idle. She shattered her sect’s sacred rules and fought beside me, yet their numbers swallowed us whole and drove us to the brink. With a single heartbeat left, Selene cast a forbidden art, ripping open a path of escape for me at the cost of her own life.”
“I watched her dissolve before my eyes—moonlight scattered by a violent wind, and I could do nothing. In that instant, my heart tore apart. Pain and fury dug so deep they twisted everything I was. Since that day, I have lived on rage alone. I vowed to drench the heavens in blood for her sake…”
