Chapter 77
<Baby.>
Adele felt like her head was about to split apart.
<Come wake me up.>
When she opened her eyes, she was in a completely different place.
Her instincts told her immediately—this was another world.
But the first thing she saw was a friend leaning against a cave wall, coughing up blood.
With every rough cough, a handful of blood spilled out.
Shuzer?
Adele recognized him because of his purple hair.
This wasn’t a dream. It was real.
Adele remembered the warmth of Madeleine’s hand she had been holding until just moments ago.
If she hadn’t thrown herself forward to make Madeleine dodge the spear—Madeleine might have died.
I saved her.
“Me, coughing up blood… what a joke.”
Shuzer let out a helpless laugh, wiping the blood from his lips with the back of his hand.
When he turned around, his eyes met Adele’s.
They had been in the Special Class together for a month, but this was the first time their eyes had truly met.
Surprisingly, Adele—though forcibly transported through the portal—was uninjured.
She still clutched the golden key she had found in the temple, holding it as tightly as her own life.
Perhaps it was coincidence, but the moment the incident began, she instinctively tightened her fist around it.
“Where… is this…?”
Farther away, Kasmahan slowly opened his eyes.
He sat up, but the Crown Prince seemed to be breathing air filled with madness for the first time in his life.
The Demon Realm.
He realized instantly.
They were in the Demon Realm.
A world he had only read about in books. He had learned that it had been sealed long ago—but that wasn’t the important part right now.
The air of the Demon Realm is different from the Human Realm.
For a prince who used sword techniques powered by sword aura, this was lethal.
It meant he would have to re-learn everything from the very basics.
His overwhelming strength meant nothing here.
To use aura was to push against the flow of air.
But Kasmahan’s swordsmanship was adapted entirely to the air of the Human Realm.
Of course it was.
Who would ever imagine coming to the Demon Realm…?!
“Michael…!”
Young Adele’s voice didn’t tremble, though it should have.
She ran toward Michael, whose body was covered in blood.
Michael was conscious, but couldn’t lift his upper body.
No.
No, this can’t be happening.
Adele’s mind went blank.
Was Michael really going to die here?
Suddenly? Just like this?
I was only studying.
Where did everything go wrong?
Whose fault is this?
Her spiraling thoughts shattered when Michael squeezed her hand.
His blood is too hot.
“Milady… I… good…”
“Sorry, Adele. Step aside.”
Shuzer didn’t have time to explain and pushed her away.
With severe injuries and sudden exposure to the polluted air of the Demon Realm, Michael’s condition was worsening rapidly.
He had already accepted his own death and was about to give Adele his last words.
Shuzer knelt beside him and crossed his hands over Michael’s chest like a crucifix.
“vos, meae carissimae animae.
(A precious being, life itself.)”
He must save him. That was the only thought in Shuzer’s mind.
Originally, Adele should have been the only one transported through the portal.
But Shuzer had clearly heard the sound of the portal opening—
Like the sound of a soul being eaten away.
So at the last moment, he reached for Adele and pulled them both through.
But instinct told him they needed to fall somewhere safer, so he burned through his holy power to force it.
Holy power—resistance against them.
He had paid for it by coughing up blood for the first time in his life, but thanks to it, they landed in a cave rather than the heart of a nest full of them.
“Urgh…”
Michael groaned, and Adele shrank back in surprise.
Kasmahan moved beside her and grabbed her shoulder.
“commodo valetudinis tuae.
(Allow your breath to continue.)”
Shuzer chanted holy words.
Michael’s blood dispersed, and his wounds began to heal rapidly.
A clear white light flowed from Shuzer’s body.
Kasmahan, recognizing the purity of that power, grasped the situation without needing explanation.
So this is Shuzer, the one rumored to be the youngest ever candidate for pope.
“Haa… haa…”
Michael’s breathing stabilized quickly.
His purple eyes opened again—clear and aware.
He sat up suddenly, dizziness washing over him, but he was alive.
Shuzer wiped the cold sweat from his forehead.
Adele hugged Michael tightly.
“I’m so glad you’re safe, milady.”
“I thought you were going to die… Michael!”
Kasmahan’s expression twisted into something indescribable.
“This is not the time for that…”
The prince noticed that all the creatures within a certain radius of the cave had vanished.
All thanks to the holy power Shuzer had instinctively unleashed.
Their bodies, which had been cluttering the floor, dissolved into the mud with a faint gurgling sound.
“So it’s you.”
“I didn’t expect introductions in a situation like this… I’m Shuzer of the Duchy of Zabenritz, Your Highness the Crown Prince.”
“So you’re the one who had a girl deliver a letter saying you wanted to swear loyalty to me?”
“Well, my younger sister is… a bit immature.”
Shuzer smiled innocently, but Kasmahan showed no reaction.
A girl had handed him a letter once at the academy—it was so common he accepted it without thought.
But it had been written with a writing tool popular only among male students at the time.
And the contents had been strange.
Not a confession of love—but that the writer wished to choose him as their lord to help unify the continent.
How arrogant.
The sense of wrongness had been striking.
So it was you.
If not for the current crisis, Kasmahan might have found Shuzer interesting.
His instincts as a ruler told him Shuzer could be a valuable subordinate—capable, intelligent, talented.
But…
Purple hair.
A knight with purple eyes clinging to Adele—Michael.
And Shuzer with purple hair.
Between the two, he could not decide which he hated more.
To Kasmahan, it was a disqualifying flaw.
Of course, Shuzer had no idea.
“We need to get out of here first.”
“…I believe my father opened this portal.”
Michael spoke slowly.
Adele and the two men turned to him.
Ashamed to even look at them, Michael lowered his head.
But it was true—it was his biological father.
[Don’t you think someday there will be a portal connecting the Demon Realm and the Human Realm?]
He had dismissed his father’s ominous words, but now that he recalled them—
He had been smiling.
Like a child excited about a planned picnic.
“The Marquess of Rozov?”
“Yes. And if my guess is correct… I am likely his weakness.”
Michael bowed before the crown prince.
“Please allow me to kill him myself.”
The hierarchy of them was absolute.
The highest level was the Eight—called the First Rank.
And above even them was the ruler who granted them their power. (They famously called this being “Master.”)
Beneath the First Rank were the Second Rank—those assigned individually as servants.
Below them, the countless mindless creatures and hybrids—Third through Fifth Rank.
“When receiving First Rank power, one must offer a weakness in exchange—something they cherish most. Through it, they can be killed.”
Michael knew his father cared for nothing.
Once hailed as a hero of the empire, something had changed him—twisted him into a traitor serving them.
What would the Marquess have offered as his weakness?
The house he once ruled and discarded without hesitation?
The Haspelt Empire he once served?
My mother, whom he coldly cut down because she begged him not to leave?
“It must be me. His only child.
The First Rank is nearly immortal, but helpless before their weakness.”
“…”
“Please allow me to kill him.”
The Knight Captain of Alkibiades knelt before his prince.
Begging permission to kill the man who had given him life.
“If the caster of the portal dies, the portal will close.
Only then can we save the ‘Child of Prophecy.’”
<Do not take the difficult path.>
The heavy atmosphere was shattered by a sudden voice.
Adele clamped her hands over her ears.
“Milady…?!”
“Adele…!”
Their voices sounded distant, like echoes from far away.
What pierced her skull was a voice far clearer, colder, unbearably bright.
A voice as blue and white as frost.
<Hurry and come wake me.>
Am I losing my mind?
Adele had heard voices before—too many—but never like this.
It wasn’t like the spirits.
Not like the voice she heard from Goschen.
A strange sensation, as if she were separated from Michael and Kasmahan by an entire world.
<You are the door that will open me.>
…Can I trust you?
But suddenly, she knew—the owner of this voice felt like a divine beast.
The divine beast that had slept for hundreds of years.
The one only the Child of Prophecy could awaken.
Can you save me?
Can you save us?
The earlier conversation had been complicated, but she understood the gist.
Michael would go kill his father.
And that was the only way home.
But the divine beast was calling her.
Begging her to wake it.
But how?
How does she wake it?
If I am the door, then the key is…
It was already in her hand.
<Pierce your heart.>
The voice sang softly—gentle, seductive, irresistible.
Was it an angel’s whisper or a demon’s temptation?
If Adele were going mad, hearing illusions…
or if one of them was manipulating her into suicide…
Then raising the key toward her own heart would be insane.
But Adele believed.
And she didn’t want to give Michael another horrible trauma.
She wanted to save them all.
If I wake you… will you send us home?
Without hesitation, Adele plunged the key into her own heart.
Adele!
Kasmahan’s face twisted into a scream no words could express.
But she pushed it in deeper.
The world flipped upside down.
