Chương 22: Neither Heaven Nor Hell Would Claim Him

Ch 22: Neither Heaven Nor Hell Would Claim Him Dororo had the second book open on the table before I'd even finished sitting down, which told me, more than anything he could have said out loud, that whatever he'd found this past week hadn't let him sleep properly.

"You look terrible, Senior."

"I look like a man who spent six consecutive nights arguing with a piece of paper," he said, not looking up.

"Which is precisely what I did. Sit. Bleed. Let's finish this properly, the two of us, before my patience for waiting outlasts my patience for living." I didn't need to ask what he meant. I'd learned, over the last several weeks, that a little of my blood was the only key either of these books had ever recognized as legitimate. The first cut this time barely stung at all.

I pressed my thumb flat against the deeper script on my grandfather's letter the section that had refused every attempt at translation until now and felt the old, familiar drink-and-thirst sensation of the vault accepting what I offered it. The ink didn't just settle this time. It rearranged. Symbols folded into new shapes in front of both our eyes, script older than the sect itself surrendering, layer by layer, into something Dororo's decades of study could finally close its hands around.

He read in silence for a long moment before his voice, when it finally came, had lost every trace of its usual dryness.

"My son, if you are reading what I could never bring myself to say to your father directly then know first that I loved him more than I ever managed to show a boy who deserved better from me. Everything I withheld, I withheld to keep him safe from a truth that has hunted our blood since before either of us existed to carry it."

"Keep going," I said, quieter than I meant to.

"Our line does not begin with a sword, or a sect, or any ordinary founder's ambition. It begins with a union that neither side of Creation was ever meant to allow a Warden of the Aetherium Court, sworn to Heaven's service, and a bound Duke of the Abyssal Wastes, sworn to no one but himself. What passed between them was never meant to produce a child. When it did anyway, both Courts agreed, for perhaps the only time in recorded history, on a single point: that child should not be permitted to exist."

The room had gone very still. Even Dororo, who I suspected had already read this section alone before I arrived, sat with his hands pressed flat against the table like he needed the wood to remind him it was solid.

"That child lived anyway. Hid anyway. Founded a mortal sect on a forgettable mountain on a forgettable continent, married a mortal woman, and prayed genuinely prayed, to whichever side might still be listening that a bloodline diluted across enough ordinary generations would eventually stop mattering to anyone still counting.

"It has not stopped mattering. Not to Heaven. Not to the Abyss. Both sides have spent centuries sending quiet hands to make certain our blood never grows strong enough to remind the world it exists. I do not know, even now, which side sent the hands that finally found me. I only know that I felt them closing in long before they arrived, and rather than lead them to your father's door directly, I chose to vanish instead and let them believe the trail had gone cold with me.

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"It seems it did not stay cold forever. If you are your father's child in more than blood, you will already have guessed the rest that whoever ordered the ruin of our sect was never truly interested in a rival's ambition. They were interested in erasing a mistake two Courts have never forgiven themselves for allowing to breathe." Dororo closed the book gently, as though it might bruise. For a long while, neither of us said anything at all.

"... Angel and demon," I said finally, testing the words like they might not survive being spoken aloud in an ordinary room, over ordinary tea.

"That's what's sealed inside me."

"That's what's sealed inside your entire bloodline," Dororo corrected, not unkindly.

"Diluted, generation after generation, exactly as your grandfather hoped it would be. And yet." He gestured, almost helplessly, at the space around me — at an Avatar the System itself had once failed to classify, at a body the Legacy System treated like something worth an emergency's worth of attention on its very first day.

"And yet it isn't diluted in me," I finished for him.

"No," he said.

"I don't believe it is. Whatever else you carried into this body from wherever you actually came from, child it appears to have woken something your bloodline spent generations trying to keep politely asleep." Main Quest Complete: Uncover the Secret of Your Bloodline Reward Granted: Synchronization +10% (Current: 24. 00%) Reward Granted: [Egg of Unknown Origin] Bloodline Status: SEALED (Unlock available — Requires Host confirmation) I stared at that last line longer than any of the others. Unlock available.

One word, one confirmation, and whatever my grandfather had spent his entire disappearance trying to keep contained would finally be mine to open on my own terms, instead of his.

"You're not going to press it," Dororo said. It wasn't a question.

"No." The certainty in my own voice surprised me a little.

"Not yet. Not until I understand exactly what I'd be waking up, and exactly who'd come looking for it the moment I did." I closed the panel before the temptation could linger any longer than it already had.

"My grandfather disappeared to buy his son time. I'm not going to waste it by rushing into the exact mistake he spent his whole life trying to prevent." Dororo studied me for a long moment, something that might have been approval settling into the deep lines of his face.

"Good," he said finally.

"Then you've learned the one lesson two centuries taught me faster than it taught most people half my age." He reached for his tea, found it cold, and drank it anyway without complaint.

"Power that isn't ready to be held properly rarely waits patiently to be picked up on a more convenient day. You've done well to recognize that before it recognized you first." I sat with the weight of it a while longer a Warden of Heaven and a Duke of the Abyss, folded down across centuries into a ten-year-old boy who'd once been someone else entirely, in a life that hadn't asked either Court's permission before ending and beginning again in this one.

Two impossible inheritances, stacked inside one small, exhausted body. Neither Heaven nor Hell would claim me, I thought, and felt, for reasons I couldn't entirely name, less afraid of that thought than I probably should have been. Fine. I was never particularly interested in belonging to either of them anyway.

"There's still a second half of that book," Dororo said, nodding toward the pages I hadn't yet touched.

"Your grandfather wrote considerably more than a confession. Whatever comes after this I suspect it's less about where you came from, and more about what he expects you to do about it." I reached for the next page.

"Then let's find out," I said, "what an old man who vanished for his son's sake actually wanted from the grandson he never got to meet."