Chương 22: The Partial Mask and the Awakening of the Void

The silence in the wooden corridors of the inn was broken only by the subtle crackle of the lamps that were beginning to go out. It was already past one o'clock in the morning when slow footsteps echoed toward Selene's room. Kurogami Ren walked with his body upright, but his mind was completely exhausted.

Exactly one hour had passed since the collapse at the mansion; the flow of his human mana had finally stabilized, allowing his organism's biological engineering to operate in silence, closing each gash and regenerating the open tissues without leaving a single scar on the flesh. Kuro stopped before the wooden door and knocked firmly, three times. The lock turned with a start. Selene opened the door with red eyes and her face swollen from recent crying, but she froze instantly upon coming face-to-face with him.

She scanned his body with her gaze, desperately looking for the sword punctures and spurting blood that Mireya had described in the lobby, but found only a sixteen-year-old boy with intact skin and a clean expression.

"Kuro...?" her voice came out choked, mixing relief with mental confusion.

"Can I come in?" Kuro asked, his voice low and hoarse from fatigue. He stepped inside even before her answer, closing the wood behind him.

"Is Liora going to be okay?" Selene crossed her arms, trying to regain her sharp posture to hide her nervousness and the tears that still wanted to fall.

"Why don't you ask Mireya? Because I was going to ask her if you knew everything," she retorted, shifting her gaze to the corner of the room. After a second of silence, she sighed, giving in.

"The Neko said she'll be fine... but it'll take time for her to be able to fight again, right? She'll have to stay in bed for one or two full days." Kuro walked to the edge of the single bed and sat down, untying his heavy boots. The psychological weight of the last thirty minutes still crushed his shoulders, and the charismatic facade he always wore felt too heavy to sustain that night.

The exhaustion was not just physical; it was the burden of calculating every variable in a scenario where any oversight would be fatal.

"Can I sleep here with you?" he let out, the raw frankness cutting through the air of the room. Selene leaped backward, her face instantly heating up to a scarlet shade of pure embarrassment. Her hands began to wave through the air awkwardly.

"W-What do you mean sleep with me?! Are you kidding, Kuro?! In the middle of a situation like this, you come at me with that kind of joking talk?!" Kuro didn't even blink. His eyes maintained that hollow calmness while he lay sideways on the mattress, pulling the sheet up to chest height.

"I am not joking," he replied, calm.

"I am not going to do anything yet. I just don't want to be alone... I'm tired, and I'm just going to sleep here. Other things we leave for another time." Selene froze in the middle of the room, her brain short-circuiting as it processed the last sentence, her face burning even more.

"What do you mean another time?! And what would this 'another time' be?!"

"Ah, you know exactly what I meant," Kuro murmured, closing his eyelids and letting the relaxed flirting tone echo in the dim light. Before falling deeply asleep, however, the lightness gave way to a dark weight. He stared fixedly at the rustic ceiling of the room. The mystery regarding the abnormal reactions of his biology in the mansion's corridor troubled him deeply.

"Selene..." Kuro called, his voice dropping to a serious tone stripped of any pose, speaking only to her alone in the dimness.

"In today's combat, when my human mana hit zero... I felt something strange awaken by instinct inside me. A cold, dense energy. I don't know what that thing living in my blood is, but the appearance and temperature of the dark mist Liora saw looked exactly like the Shadows I faced in my past. My own body hides rules that I still do not control." Selene held her breath, lying on the other end of the bed.

She remained in silence for long seconds, processing the warning and remembering when she had witnessed his arm grow back out of nowhere in the forest after the Razorback's attack. She realized the glimpse of real danger behind the calculating boy. Lacking the strength to continue the argument and disarmed by his genuine fatigue, Selene turned off the lamp. As soon as darkness took over the room, Kuro's mind plunged into a feverish and violent dream, yet far from any moral regret. He felt no guilt for the deaths.

In his nightmare, the mansion floor flooded with a thick sea of blood leaking through the cracks in the wood. The noble's daughter he had spared appeared in the gloom, but soon her features were distorted by the living darkness of the Shadows crawling along the walls. The scene shifted in a snap: Kuro found himself back in the purple forest, forced to witness Aurelia's body being brutally pierced by a blade of living darkness once more.

He tried to scream, but the ground gave way, plunging his body into an endless free fall toward a gélid, bottomless abyss. Instinctively, searching for an anchor of physical reality against the cold of that emptiness trying to consume him, he reached his hands out in the dimness and wrapped his arms around Selene's waist. The warmth of her body was the only refuge capable of breaking the fall and keeping the nightmares away that night.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. The sun had barely crossed Oakhaven's horizon when firm steps trod the corridor outside. In the improvised laboratory, Mireya had just finished stabilizing Liora's last bandages. Worried and irritated by Kuro's disappearance, Mireya marched straight to Selene's room to give her a piece of her mind. The scientist knocked twice on the wood. No one answered.

Since she kept the inn's spare key in her apron pocket and her patience with Selene's heavy sleeping had already run out, Mireya turned the lock and pushed the door open all at once. The scene inside the room made the scientist's Neko ears rise in a straight line, followed by a violent bristling of her tail. Kurogami Ren and Selene were sleeping deeply in the bed, with the boy firmly gripping her waist.

Seized by an instant surge of anger, jealousy, and the feeling of having stayed awake all night working with advanced molecular alchemy while the two enjoyed that comfort, Mireya did not hesitate. Instead of a scandalous reaction, she walked with heavy steps and slammed an empty glass vial hard against the bedside table. The sharp crack of the glass against the wood echoed loudly in the room. Selene let out a shriek, waking up with a desperate jolt, her body trembling from the shock of the abrupt awakening.

However, on the other side of the mattress, Kuro stood up and sat on the bed without showing a single shred of fear, reaction, or surprise. His eyes instantly assumed that cold, fixed, and hollow look. He didn't flinch because his mind was already focused on the next tactical step, accustomed to an atmosphere of constant threat. The protective shell of his personality had fallen away for a few seconds, revealing the coldness underneath.

"L-Look here, nothing happened like what you're thinking!" Selene began to stammer desperately, trying to explain herself to the scientist who crossed her arms with her eyes narrowed in fury and a cutting expression. Kuro did not say a single word. He got out of bed in silence, ignoring the tension and the loud argument of the two girls, and walked straight out of the room.

He crossed the inn's corridors and went straight to Mireya's room, the place where Liora was bedridden recovering, to evaluate the situation up close. Upon pushing the door open, he found Liora awake, sitting in bed with her back resting against the pillows. Although she was still a bit pale, her red eyes maintained their usual sharp focus.

"How are you feeling?" Kuro asked, approaching. Liora looked at her own bandaged arms and then stared at Kuro with a confident half-smile.

"I've been worse, Kuro. Mireya's treatment accelerated things. My strength is returning... tomorrow I'll already be able to wield my daggers again," she answered, her firm voice proving her physical endurance was formidable. A practical sense of relief passed through Kuro's mind seeing that she would recover without permanent damage. He turned his body to face Mireya, who was entering the room right behind him with a gélid look of irritation. He went straight to the practical point of finances:"Where is the money?"

Mireya stamped her foot on the floor, her cat tail whipping the air in frustration, but she opened the nightstand drawer beside Liora's bed and pointed to the heavy cloth sack.

"It is here with the stored coins," she replied, her voice laden with an acidic jealousy.

"But I have already spent exactly two legitimate gold coins on reagents, tubes, and rare materials for the alchemy laboratory." Kuro approached, picked up the sack, and weighed the metal in the palm of his right hand, assessing the economic balance analytically.

"Right. Two gold coins less," he decreed, "we are going to the capital." Upon hearing the mention of the capital, Selene stepped hurriedly into the laboratory, adjusting her still-disheveled clothes. She narrowed her eyes, crossing her arms with a tense face: "The capital? You just want to go there to inflate this harem of yours even more with the students from the capital's academy, don't you?!" Kuro ignored the girl's acidic provocation, walking toward the window to observe the dawn over Oakhaven's trees.

As he watched the reflection of the sunlight crawl across the pavements washed by the storm, his thoughts receded to the bizarre structure of that reality. This world is composed of exactly eighty percent women, Kuro analyzed, his internal logic unyielding. In the beginning, when I arrived in this isekai, I thought this was a dream... everything I had ever wanted. After all, around here, the legal age of majority is reached at fifteen, making everything even more bizarre and politically complex than on Earth.

There were two days left until the journey.

"We are going to the capital," Kuro stated, turning away from the view.

"I intend to start a new project... something that will allow me to enter the country's politics and meet Queen Liria."