Chapter 120

That cold night, Toren realized things far beyond his comprehension. The butler immediately went to deliver him water, towel, and medicinal herbs.

Two nights after that incident, Toren had not yet recovered from the frightening hellish vision he had witnessed.

He went straight to the otherworld and met with Airen.

He took refuge inside her arms, telling her what he had gone through.

"You must have been so scared over there. Do not worry for it will not happen anymore."

"Do you mean that?"

"Of course. But you must do something in exchange."

"What is it? I am willing to do anything if it means not having to experience it anymore!"

Airen cupped his worried face and soothed it with her soft peck. "Paint the realm you saw and make it alive. Until you have done, our bargain will not be over. That will be your end-point mission. And then, you'll become a ghost and an immortal consciousness ever existing. Do you understand?"

Toren nodded, "I understand."

He then fell over her lap and rested comfortably there. Whilst drifting back and forth to a blissful hypnagogic state, he suddenly felt cold.

It made him jolt up a bit, break out sweat, and increase his heartbeat quicker. There was an eye; someone had been peering right through that solace moment once again. A pair of eyes, to be specific. They were familiar.

Toren thought that it must be his brother again, invading that personal and private moment.

Before, he was uncomfortable, yet assured of his visions.

But now that those things are completely unnecessary, he was getting more and more vexed about it.

A few days after, he went with his butler to the secret independence activist group's hideout and saw his brother burning his paintings.

"Make yourself believe that you were not the traitor," He heard again, coming from the back of his mind. And so, he believed.

A different person had grown from the seeds of evil and utterly deceived his own brain about certain things. He became morphed into something mad and unpredictable and manipulative.

Toren confronted his brother and ended up dying by the bullet he shot.

He was assured though, that he would not die because Airen said so.

His butler brought his flesh up to somewhere safe and quiet until the transcendence had been completed.

His soul got out of his own shell and things from there started going rather stale, yet downhill. The world was still burning as he fulfilled his promise to Airen.

He painted and made alive the hell vision that had been etched across his brain.

Desire slithered throughout his consciousness, swayed over the sweetness of a demon's voice, and made himself believe that he was never the traitor.

"Do you know what it means to be a soldier?" He remembered Coen asking that question.

Toren had a hazy memory of such a phenomenon. He remembered being taken so aback by it, but does not know why.

He forgot about a lot of things, but mostly, himself.

He was no longer Toren himself and the lonely chart of that change had been trapped forever somewhere in the clutches of greed and desire.

And now, as Toren floats among the void darkness, the only thoughts that swirled around his hazy mind are the different types of passions.

There are those which bring you to the limelight and reward you with things you deserve. But there is also a kind of passion that murders everything around you but yourself. Destructive, selfish, and burning. The one that crosses between the thin lines of pure love and greedy desire.

It would be willing to sell a soul to a demon, poison your internal organs horribly, and leave villages into ruin. Toren had that kind of passion.

The young prince had that kind of passion too.

That at the expense of the whole world collapsing around, you get to have that sweet and fragrant flower in your grasp.

And once it has sucked in everything that was in you, it will leave you dead and empty and crushed.