As the herbal liquid flowed down his throat and deeper into his stomach, Zavi's eyes widened as his heart began to pound far faster than usual, followed by a brief moment where his breathing stopped.
The bottle slipped from his grasp. The sound of the bottle shattering rang clearly in his ears at the exact moment he felt something piercing through his body, even into his bones.
His breathing slowly calmed, but a strange sensation spread throughout his entire body. It was so vivid that he could not stop himself from screaming.
"Ah..."
His scream shattered the silence of the night. A powerful spiritual pressure forced his body to collapse onto the ground.
'What is happening to my body?'
He swallowed with difficulty.
A strange sound, tense and sharp, suddenly echoed. Moments later, the pressure inside his head eased. Zavi forced himself to sit up and looked left and right, searching for the source of that sound.
However, when he turned his head back, he saw the shadow of two wolves, slightly transparent, without flesh, without blood, only a blazing dark purple aura forming their bodies.
'Why are they staring at me?' he thought as he stood with the help of his hands.
The eyes of the two transparent wolves glowed with bright purple light, staring directly at him, followed by low growls.
He had not yet realized that those two creatures were subordinate abilities of Prisoner that had just awakened more precisely, abilities he had finally gained full control over unlike before. A power that allowed him to create animal entities through the channeling of spiritual energy, bound, limited, and not free.
These animals could be controlled within a radius of several kilometers, with one absolute condition: the owner must remain completely still while controlling them. If he moved, the energy channel would break, and the animals would disappear.
A level-one ability, Error, had been unlocked.
One of them allowed Zavi to store a substitute of his body inside any object he could touch. If he touched an object, trees were not recommended, such as a watch, a wooden box, a pencil, a glass, or any other solid object, then spoke the words "Locking", a portion of his energy would be placed inside the object as a physical anchor and would rise to the next stage.
In an emergency, such as when surrounded by enemies, he only needed to imagine the location of the anchor he had previously stored and say "Return to origin", or even simply imagine it. His body would be pulled back to that point as if sliding through time, arriving instantly at the stored location, although doing so consumed far more spirituality within his body than it should.
After using this ability, the user's body would reach the destination, but his consciousness would not. For several seconds, he would be unable to move. His muscles would stiffen, his eyes would remain open, yet he would not truly see the world around him.
This state was known as "Absorption".
However, this ability had strict limitations: a maximum of two uses per day. If this limit was exceeded, the user's soul would suffer distortion or even be completely erased from this world. Even so, this rule could still be circumvented, because its consequences themselves could be countered by a sufficiently clever user through the level-one mantras, Fading and Reversal.
As for the next abilities, from levels one to six, all of them remained locked. Like a tower-based or level-based game system, each ability could only be unlocked by completing certain missions or finding the correct key to open the next level.
After confirming that the two wolves fully obeyed his commands, unlike what had happened earlier, he could no longer hold back the surge of emotions overflowing inside him. However, just as he tried to take a step forward, the strange sensation from before suddenly returned to his chest.
His knees weakened.
He coughed up a large amount of blood.
The blood pooled on the ground then slowly vanished by itself, unlike ordinary blood. In its place, the symbol of the Prisoner ability formed on the ground.
A square frame measuring twenty by twenty appeared clearly. Inside it was an illustration of his own ability. A black-and-white human figure inside a cell, with two tanuki on both sides. Silver chains wrapped around the frame of the symbol, and a unique mark appeared in the background.
'Was what he said true? About—'
Suddenly, his chest felt as if something were pressing from within. His heart pounded violently, then abruptly slowed, as if forgetting its own rhythm.
His eyes widened, then...
While clutching his clothes, a wave of nausea surged into his throat.
"Ueghhh..." Reflexively, he covered his mouth with his hand, then pulled it away to see red blood mixed with black like ink flowing out of his mouth.
'What's wrong with my body?'
He vomited again and again until Zavi himself could no longer count how many times.
Twenty minutes later, he was finally able to breathe in relief after enduring that extreme and bizarre ordeal.
"Damn it. The nausea is gone, along with the strange murmuring that suddenly entered my head." He wiped the sweat from his forehead, then looked at the two wolf figures in front of him slowly losing their shape, the outlines of their bodies fading before his eyes as Zavi staggered weakly.
A wave of drowsiness suddenly swept over him, making his eyelids feel unbearably heavy, and the leg that had previously been injured healed rather quickly.
Just before his consciousness completely faded, a woman wearing a black dress appeared beside him. No one knew when she arrived. She approached Zavi's helpless body calmly.
'Who are you?'
That thought crossed his mind in the final seconds of his consciousness, when his heartbeat seemed to recognize the rhythm it was supposed to follow.
He collapsed unconscious on the road.
…
As sunlight stretched across the horizon and its gentle light illuminated everything beneath it including the apartment in the quiet alley they had rented the previous night.
Somehow, when he woke from that seemingly endless night, he realized he was already inside the room as if someone had carried him there. Yet he had no idea who.
'My body has become this fragile,' he complained inwardly while clicking his tongue.
What he did not expect was that Moreira was lying facing left, his back turned toward him, while Zavi, currently leaning against the edge of the bed looked at him with relief.
'How can he still be sleeping? Didn't he say he could only sleep in the morning or during the day…?' Zavi frowned in confusion. After recalling Moreira's behavior the previous night, he began to understand the reason.
He crawled down from the bed, then realized something that made his body stiffen, his real leg stood on its own without the help of wooden sticks.
'I knew it would end up like this. An equivalent exchange, huh?'
Zavi stared blankly, trying to deny the possibility that the mysterious woman who always interfered at crucial moments had truly approached him before his consciousness faded.
He stood up and stomped his foot several times to test his balance, then walked back and forth inside the room a few times as confusion tightened its grip on his mind.
'Yes… I know. What kind of thought was that just now?'
He was certain that the woman who had met him, and the moment he regained consciousness after the ritual, Zavi knew that mysterious woman had disguised herself as Aurora and come to meet him again but for reasons that were far from clear. That lack of clarity only made his head hurt more.
Zavi swallowed hard to suppress the panic that began rising. He took two steps forward just as the bedroom door opened.
He walked along the corridor for several seconds, then decided to head toward the far right end of the house near the stairs on the second floor. There was a room there, Celvira's room.
Knock... Knock... Knock...
The knocking echoed for quite a while in the corridor. He waited a few seconds, but received no response.
Time seemed to slow, the air inside the apartment suddenly flowing faster through the vents, slipping into his pores and making Zavi reflexively swallow again.
"Why is it so quiet?" he muttered, his hands tense.
Waiting several more seconds without any answer darkened his mood. He turned around, intending to return to his room, but his steps stopped after only a few steps.
'Wait… wait. Something is wrong.'
Then he looked back as a chilling sensation pierced his mind.
'Huh? I can't even feel it. Is it going to happen again, death?' he thought, holding his breath.
A kind of rejection was occurring inside his body's system, as if his body realized something foreign had entered him. It wanted to expel it, yet could not. It wanted to ignore it, but its presence made his body feel wrong.
That was why Zavi suddenly seemed absent-minded at this moment, even the previous night. Moreira, who from Zavi's perspective appeared to be asleep, was actually awake lying down while reading a newspaper and had even spoken to him, yet Zavi did not respond at all, as if an invisible wall stood between them.
When Zavi walked toward Celvira's room and knocked three times, Celvira had actually come out on the second knock. But everything happening before Zavi's eyes and inside his mind felt as though it had never existed.
Yes, all of it was the doing of the woman in the black dress, none other than the woman who had disguised herself as Zavi's female friend, Aurora Chevalya.
Meanwhile, Celvira and Moreira watched him from a distance with confused and doubtful expressions.
"Has he gone insane?" Celvira asked in disbelief, suspecting the interference of another being.
"Maybe..." Moreira replied hesitantly. However, he had reached the same conclusion as Celvira.
Then what should I do to help him?
'Mr. Lamena has been strange ever since I found him sleeping in front of that empty house. Can I still fully trust that cooperation?' Moreira wondered, hesitant to continue.
Thinking about it made Moreira's heart grow increasingly uneasy. His thoughts became entangled again with something that had long imprisoned his emotions, physical death and psychological ruin.
Yesterday, after obtaining the potion ingredients, the two of them walked calmly through the southern streets of Kirei to find a horse carriage that could take them to eastern Kirei.
While waiting, Moreira overheard a conversation between two men who happened to pass by beside him. They talked about the sudden destruction of Moran City, suspected to be the result of terrorist activity. Wanted posters were now beginning to spread across various cities, and some people claimed strange animals were behind the city's destruction.
Hearing that, Moreira immediately drew two conclusions.
First, the destruction was most likely caused by the same terrorist group that had previously targeted Tezny, the destruction of Eaurealis Castle, and the collapse of two cathedral towers in the center of Nythic City, Havanuheta Province.
Second, Chapena District could potentially become the next target, considering that his three friends currently lived in an apartment on Main Street No. 1 Cosdever.
"What do you want to do next?" Celvira asked calmly, pulling Moreira out of his thoughts and forcing him to consider the question.
"I don't understand," Moreira replied with a sigh.
"I don't understand," he repeated as if he had not said it before. "Aren't you an evil spirit, not even from this world? You should understand things like this."
'A strange creature pretending to be innocent to lure its target,' Moreira complained irritably.
The two stared at each other. The tension made the corridor fall silent as winds blew through the gaps of the apartment and the ventilation, while the cathedral bell rang several times.
Then calmly, Celvira turned around and walked with steady steps down the stairs, intending to leave the apartment and let the question linger like smoke in the air.
'That woman… I don't know how her mind works. She is not human, yet she dares to take the form of others without feeling the slightest guilt…'
'And... how many people has she killed while existing in this world to maintain that form?'
After thinking for quite some time, he looked forward again, leaning against the edge of the wall separating the two rooms while observing Zavi's face. The earlier confusion had faded, replaced by an expression of sadness, like a lost child standing in the middle of a crowded street after being abandoned by his mother.
Moreira was startled and immediately walked toward him, searching for a way to fully return his consciousness to his body.
'Ah… this is exactly what I experienced back then. Even until now.'
He was already tired of it. He had warned him not to do it, yet it had still been done.
Moreira realized he had no right to control another person's life. But was it wrong if he forbade him? He did not want anyone else to end up like him and die in a terrible way.
"Ah… this person is really troublesome right now," he muttered in disbelief. On the other hand, if it were not for Zavi, he might have already died together with that robed group, including Albert and the others, without exception.