🔊 TTS Settings
chapter 34
[Ian’s Side]
From a young age, Ian had despised his damn pheromones.
And so did the other beastmen.
His regenerative pheromones overflowed uncontrollably.
Many knights and the media praised his pheromones as a divine blessing, a gift from the gods. But to him, they were a terrible curse sent by God.
A curse he wanted to cut out but couldn’t.
He wished he could excise them entirely.
That pheromone always made him feel a burning heat, as if a red-hot iron tip were piercing him. That burning brought with it a headache, like his mind was being scalded by a hot fog.
When his pheromones went berserk, it was even worse. Sometimes, he would have to lock himself in his room for over a month.
Of course, locking the door did little to help.
Still, for that child, it was the last psychological defense he had.
Once he locked the door, the pheromone surge would begin not long after.
His skin would tear, flesh ripped apart, blood flowing from every part of his body, and bones twisted painfully.
In the silent, empty room, only the cries of a child unable to bear the pain escaped.
The child writhed in unbearable agony.
Inside the room, objects were constantly smashed and broken.
Soon, the vast room would be in utter chaos.
The burning sensation attacked him with more intensity than usual.
It felt as if his pheromones would burn everything, including himself.
Every cell in his body seemed as though it were on fire and about to vanish.
Changing the sheets was meaningless.
No matter how quickly he replaced the white sheets, they would soon be soaked red, as if they had never been white at all.
The child’s eyes, once filled with fear, eventually became devoid of anything—consumed by pain, anger, and sorrow.
Empty eyes reflecting nothing but the color of void stared into nothingness.
His body, split and torn, hung in tatters like a shredded piece of paper.
It was a pain impossible to describe in words.
The smell of blood filled the room.
Extreme pain gnawed at his mind, and the excruciating torment drove him almost insane.
The child wanted to die.
He wanted death to end this suffering, which surpassed even death itself.
But he couldn’t die.
The cursed gods, who were a source of salvation for some, did not allow him to die.
Even as his skin was ripped apart and blood flowed freely, he survived.
Because of that regenerative pheromone.
It was infuriating.
The torn flesh healed quickly, and the twisted bones realigned themselves.
The pain was that of crushing twisted bones into powder to form new bones.
The moment the flesh healed, it tore open again; the instant the bones were realigned, they warped once more.
Torn flesh healed, healed flesh tore open again…
It was an endless cycle.
Pain lingered, tormenting him constantly.
His mind, eroded by this ceaseless pain, was far from normal.
The child’s psyche was tattered.
The very pheromones that others praised for their healing could not mend his mental anguish.
Only emptiness filled him.
Being alive plunged him into a despair far worse than death.
From that child’s mouth came a hoarse voice, cracked and unchildlike:
“Just… please… kill me…”
The periodic agony, worse than death, would not leave him alone.
“Please… someone… kill me…”
“Just… end this already.”
Tears fell from his empty eyes.
Alone in the room, that child longed for death more desperately than anyone else.
Time passed slowly, as if someone had stopped the wind-up key of a clock. The storm that should have passed lingered.
The process was gruesome, cruel, and grotesque.
And no one could understand him.
No one could possibly understand this suffering.
For a child, it was an unbearably harsh trial.
Being unable to die was a curse; he always yearned for the salvation of death.
If death had claimed him, he would have willingly surrendered his body.
But at that time, the head of the Cadellion family and his wife were too busy with excessive duties to even pay attention to the boy.
Naturally, rumors spread that the young master of the mansion was being neglected.
This led to harassment by many knights, his tutors, and other beastmen.
A child who couldn’t control his body and was neglected by his family became the perfect prey for those living in inferiority complexes.
They would seek him out, beat him where he was wounded, tear open healing wounds, and drag blades under his skin.
Watching a higher-ranking beastman being toyed with brought them twisted pleasure and delight.
Some threatened him to heal their acquaintances; others exploited this for money.
“Without treatment, it’ll hurt more.”
“Do you want it to hurt more? No, right?”
Even though using his healing pheromones meant absorbing more pain than the person being treated, refusing to heal only led to more beatings.
For minutes or even hours at a time.
Eventually, the boy healed others out of fear of the beatings that would follow.
Even after the pheromone surges ended, the combined pain of the burning, nausea, and beatings multiplied.
He had become accustomed to that burning, though.
He endured the suffering and injuries of others several times over.
Yet no evidence remained.
His healing pheromones mended him, leaving no scars or bruises.
There was no one in that vast mansion to protect him.
The beastmen he had seen as a child only used his suffering for their amusement.
Everyone was a bystander, and simultaneously, everyone was a perpetrator.
To him, all beastmen were like that.
Hateful and loathsome.
Or perhaps even contemptible—he wasn’t even sure.
Disgusting.
Himself.
The other beastmen.
His pheromones.
From the body of a child, shredded and battered from beatings, new flesh grew. The pain of healing was immense.
He remembered every beastman who had beaten him, neglected him, every beastman in that mansion.
The child, powerless on the bed, opened his eyes and gritted his teeth.
He forced open his lips, which were swollen and difficult to move.
“I… will… kill them all…”
Under the moonlight, the boy’s cold blue eyes gleamed fiercely.
In the dark room, his white hair, matted with blood, reflected the moonlight, creating a striking contrast.
Unfortunately, he could not die.
The child endured this horrific cycle repeatedly and gradually grew into a boy.
And one thing changed.
“Good evening, Lord Ian.”
“I am Allen, and I will be serving you from now on.”
Following the family’s customs, he received an assistant of his own age.
The boy silently observed the child with chestnut-colored hair.
‘You never cared before, yet you follow the family’s customs.’
‘If you were going to help, you would’ve done it already.’
He chose to ignore him.
The boy merely smirked slightly and passed by, as if he hadn’t seen the child before.
His expectations of his parents had long since been abandoned.
A year passed without Ian seeking Allen, or Allen seeking Ian.
He survived that powerless age.
Soon, he hunted down and killed all the beastmen who had tormented him as a child.
Just as he had desperately wished as a child.
He showed them no mercy.
Their skins were shredded, blood caked and congealing over the wounds.
Their bones were all twisted.
They lay on the ground, nothing more than tattered rags.
It mirrored exactly how he had looked during pheromone surges.
Perhaps even worse.
The difference was that he was alive, and they had died in the process.
‘Even though I gave them my healing pheromones as they wanted… they’re dead.’
It wasn’t that he intended to kill them at that moment.
Twelve-year-old Ian looked at them numbly.
The scene resembled nothing more than a field of broken, lifeless twigs strewn across the ground.
It was grotesque rather than tragic.
‘Ah… I wanted to go for a night walk.’
Allen, wandering the garden at night as usual, witnessed the gruesome scene.
He quietly stood behind, like a statue.
His eyes briefly reflected a ripple, but he quickly regained composure, as if accustomed to such sights.
Before him lay bizarrely dead bodies, and a boy calmly observing them.
The future lord he was to serve.
“Well… I didn’t intend to show you this.”
Ian spoke with detached indifference.
He didn’t even glance at Allen or the dead bodies, instead wiping his bloodied sword.
“You saw it. What now?”
It wasn’t genuine worry.
His expression carried no emotion whatsoever.
“It’s fine.”
Allen, the same age, spoke calmly.
“Don’t worry. There must have been a reason for their deaths.”
“Whatever that reason is.”
Allen looked Ian straight in the eyes.
After a pause, he continued,
“As long as it’s not me, it’s fine.”
For the first time, Ian looked directly at Allen.
Allen was selfish.
But that was how he survived.
“I will also report this incident to the Duke.”
“Do you think the Duke will care? Will he even notice?”
Ian twisted his lips into a cold smile.
“But it’s better for the Duke to hear it from a report than from rumors,” Allen said logically.
He calculated the situation, proposing the course most beneficial to Ian.
After all, his duty was to assist Ian.
“Judging from how you left the bodies, you have no intention of cleaning them up.”
Their gazes met—chestnut and pale, calm and void.
Crickets sang quietly in the summer night.
The shadows of dark trees surrounded them.
The wind blew, causing chestnut hair and white hair stained with blood to sway in the moonlight.
“Do as you please.”
Ian’s low, coldly cynical words ended the conversation, and he walked away.
He expected nothing from a beastman.
Allen began his first duty as Ian’s assistant: to report on the bodies Ian had left.
An unusual start.
And it marked the second meeting between two abnormal boys: Allen and Ian.
Following Allen’s report, the head of the Cadellion family, his wife, and Louise realized something was amiss with Ian.
