[498] Despair. Despair. (1)
Life is pain.
Gaold said so.
"Uncle."
Gaold had returned to Tormia and was busy trying to climb the Association's ranks.
Kangnan, a sixteen-year-old strolling through the Association gardens, plucked a single red flower that had grown by the railing and held it up for Gaold.
"Isn't this pretty?"
It was a brilliant bloom she'd never seen before—not in the barren desert where not a blade of grass grew, nor in her southern homeland.
Gaold looked at the flower with indifferent eyes.
His magic ranked among the strongest for his age, but politics required another kind of talent. Worn down by infighting within the Association, he had grown indifferent to everything.
Kangnan understood that, so she didn't wait for an answer. She held the petals up to his face and asked, "There are so many pretty flowers in Tormia. What's this one called?"
"Pain."
Kangnan lifted her eyes to Gaold. "Pain? That's the name of this flower?"
"I don't know what its name is. But whatever it's called, it is pain."
Gaold strode over and looked down at her.
He'd been irritable lately, but today his expression was colder and more terrifying than usual.
"But the flower is beautiful."
He snatched the bloom from Kangnan's hand.
"Kangnan, every living thing can only feel the world through pain. Pleasure is merely one way of accepting pain."
"Uncle, you seem to be having a hard time these days. You should rest."
Kangnan softened her reproach. She knew better than anyone how much Gaold had to bear. But because he had never once shown his own unhappiness, she didn't want to see him speak like this.
Gaold cast a spell and cleanly sliced the stem where the petals had been torn.
"A flower is beautiful to pass on its kind, but from birth to withering it never once knows who its mate is. It cannot see what its offspring will look like. Kangnan, life is pain. Our five senses, the nerves beneath our skin—they are functions made only to accept the pain of life."
"Life is… pain."
It wasn't a philosophy Kangnan liked, but she couldn't deny the possibility that Gaold was right. To one degree or another, the world any being perceives is filled with pain.
Pain amplified a hundred million times — Air Press.
Whoom!
All the fallen angels surrounding Gaold vanished as if evaporated, leaving only a few droplets of fluid.
It felt as if the sky had slammed into the earth.
Of those within Gaold's radius, only the archangel Yuriel still stood in form.
Yuriel's halo expanded into a hundred-meter-wide ring and spun menacingly.
He showed no visible physical tremor, but just from how rapidly his mind was accelerating, one could grasp Gaold's power.
'Is this really human power?'
If you asked whom Yuriel would name as a being beyond humans, he would point only to Miro. Even so, Gaold's ascetic extremes had clearly exceeded human limits.
"Kraaaah!"
But this was not something Gaold had always possessed.
The aftershock of twenty years' hatred detonating at once was immense.
All that could be felt was pain.
Gaold rolled his eyes white and trembled, losing reason as he screamed. His jaw came unhinged, and sound poured from his throat alone.
"Kraaaa! Kraaaaaaa!"
He ran like a madman.
Driven almost by instinct, he charged in the given direction toward Kangnan.
Thud!
As the second Air Press unfolded, the fallen angels and maras vanished as before.
"Kreeeee! Kreeeee!"
Life is pain.
The hundred-million-fold pain sensation Gaold experienced turned every scrap of information in the world into searing agony simply by existing.
The shock was far too great for flesh and blood to bear. From Gaold's upturned face, tears of blood flowed.
It was as if the soul trapped in a body was about to go mad trying to flee its miserable prison.
Gaold writhed under the yoke of pain assigned to living things.
* * *
Kingdom of Tormia.
Isabel, a certified Grade-3 grand mage and former custodian of the Association's magical archives, lay in the Association's private hospital a kilometer from the Magic Association in the capital, Bashka.
A respected scholar and mage, she had been drawn into the Association's political conspiracy and tortured for forty-eight hours for defending Gaold.
The torturer Sakiri, a certified Grade-5 mage, had—true to his word—not used the Association's unregulated method, the "Scales of Truth."
But his hands were cruel beyond mere lack of feeling; Isabel felt malice in them. She endured every second painted in the colors of pain and knew no comfort.
In the end, Isabel survived the forty-eight hours and bought Gaold's team the time to reach heaven.
She had lain unconscious for over a month, sustained by life support, and only woke at dawn yesterday.
Doctors and surgeons checked her condition and asked many questions, but she has not spoken since.
She only blinked and stared up at the ceiling, wallpaper white.
Knock, knock.
When someone knocked on the ward door, her gaze didn't turn.
But at the sound of the man who entered, her pupils fluttered and she slowly moved her head.
"Are you all right? I heard you woke up at dawn yesterday."
Sakiri, the Grade-5 mage who had tortured Isabel, entered with a composed expression.
Memories of that time surged, and Isabel's heart began to race.
But the tremor in her pupils subsided, and her face steadied.
He was the last man she ever wanted to see.
Yet Isabel did not stop him. She had paid the price of sacrificing her body to gain answers to the long mystery surrounding Gaold.
"So? What happened?"
Sakiri pulled a chair to her bedside and sat. "What do you mean?"
"Did Gaold… reach heaven?"
"He did. But he hasn't returned yet. He may never return."
Sakiri exhaled and watched Isabel sink into thought before continuing. "The Association dispatched Cage B team, but they're also out of contact. The situation is complicated."
Sakiri's words barely registered with Isabel. That was not what she truly wanted to know.
"…Did he transcend?"
Sakiri didn't answer.
"Gaold—"
She clenched her right hand and trembled with shame and despair.
Through every torment, Isabel had cursed being born a living thing thousands upon thousands of times.
She had snapped.
It felt like falling endlessly toward something less than human.
If she could stop this pain, she would do any ignoble, shameful, filthy thing.
That was the fate of living beings.
Humans are doomed to be dominated by pain.
'But how… Gaold, how did you…'
Isabel raised the arm with the clenched fist to cover her eyes. Tears streamed relentlessly between her eyelids.
"Gaold—"
She burst into sobs and shouted, "Did he really transcend? Did he overcome pain, the yoke of humanity, the fate of being alive?"
If life is pain, birth is a curse.
But if it was Gaold—if he could become something truly freed from pain—then Isabel could endure.
She could overcome the loathing of humanity that had taken root in her mind and live again.
Sakiri, drawing on years as a torturer, answered frankly. "You can forget pain. But to overcome it—that's impossible at the level of living beings."
He turned his head to the window and stared beyond the sky. "But if there is a possible case, then Gaold would be the only one in this world."
* * *
Whoom!
The third Air Press reduced the fallen angels and maras to roughly half their original number.
Now even the enemies themselves began to grasp the overwhelming force that made them vanish on contact.
"Aaaahhh!"
Gaold, become the incarnation of pain with no direction or purpose, rampaged heedless even of Kangnan, who was tied to the battlements.
With his jaw unhinged, arms flailing, and blood tears streaming, Gaold resembled a fiend.
"Uncle…! Uncle…!"
Kangnan, terrified like the girl who had sent him to hell ten years ago, froze in fright.
Life is not pain.
That wasn't Gaold's true face.
"Then why do we exist at all?"
Gaold walked to the flowerbed and posed another question. Kangnan pushed aside thoughts of pain to clear her mind.
"Isn't it strange? Humans experience pain from birth and feel it until the moment they die. So is life just a bastard child of the universe's curse?"
While Kangnan searched for an answer, Gaold dug up soil in the flowerbed and replanted the flower.
"Can it survive without roots?"
"Maybe it'll put down roots again. It'll be a very painful process, though."
Gaold looked back at Kangnan as she approached the flowerbed.
"But Kangnan, that's what life is. Because it's alive, it blooms even amidst pain."
He watched the flower struggle toward life with a satisfied smile, then turned to her. "Therefore, life is the most beautiful flower in the world. Our lives are beautiful, just like this flower."
For the first time, Kangnan saw him.
Before the madness, his true face—so gentle and beautiful—was revealed.
"Kraaa! Kraaaa!"
Gaold howled.
His tongue had been pulled out, his face twisted like a demon's, and his expression seemed to hold nothing but pain.
Kangnan shut her eyes tight and began to sob watching him.
"Aaahh…! Aaaahhh…!"
Gaold had to live with a self-propagating mutation—perhaps a god-sent curse—and yet he had said life was beautiful.
The man she loved most, the most beautiful man of all, was collapsing.
"Release! Please, release!"
Kangnan struggled to free herself from the that held her hands.
"Let go! I said let go!"
She shook as if her arms would break, but the bond absorbed the force, so no impact registered.
'I can't let this happen!'
Even if her body were torn apart, she had to get down. She had to jump from the wall and reach Gaold.
"Kreeeee! Kreeeee!"
Each of Gaold's screams felt like a thousand threads tearing through Kangnan's heart.
"Uncle! I'll come! Wait a little longer!"
She cried and struggled harder, but the had no intention of opening.
As her life collapsed into utter helplessness, she hung by the cuffs and let out a miserable scream.
"Aaaaah! Aaaaah!"
To watch the one you love suffer and be able to do nothing is an infinite anguish beyond any word for tactile pain.
Only now did Kangnan understand Zulu's words.
"Aaaahhh! Aaaahhh!"
The human heart is hell.