# Chapter 120
Raziel trembled his eyes and furrowed his brow.
“You like them? Humans?”
He let out a short, hollow laugh, as if he couldn’t believe what he had just said.
“Did you not see those memories? Are you deceiving me, pretending to have absorbed the second fragment?”
Even as he interrogated Levi, he knew there was no way Levi could have pretended to absorb the fragment.
He had seen with his own eyes the fragment being absorbed through the black hand, and it was he himself who had laid the completely dormant Levi in the black water to revive his memories.
Above all, since black fragments instinctively sought to return to their original body, the second fragment would never have ignored Levi whom it had not met for so long.
How could Levi say he “likes” humans even after recovering the memories of suffering at their hands for hundreds of years?
Raziel bit his lower lip as he threw down Levi’s dagger that he had been holding.
“From the beginning, your duty was to give ‘death’ to humans. So why are you trying to interfere when I offer to make you human and take on that role instead?”
“I wasn’t born to kill humans.”
Levi’s black hand covered Ion’s hand, which was embracing him from behind.
“I was born for balance.”
Raziel didn’t want to deeply understand what his former ‘original body’ was saying. He pretended not to know, even though he did. Only then would the justification for him becoming the original body remain intact.
Raziel’s confused eyes fell on Ion standing behind Levi. Ion was preciously embracing Levi as if he had forgotten he’d been stabbed by him, while his eyes remained highly vigilant toward Raziel.
Looking at Ion’s blind devotion to Levi, Raziel finally realized what he had overlooked.
Seeing Levi return to him, he had thought that Levi had not opened his heart to Ion. Until he was captured by Ion, Levi had harbored extreme wariness toward him, and Raziel believed his feelings wouldn’t have changed since Chepel’s last report.
Above all, Levi had ‘lied’ to him.
“I can’t trust Iellin or Ion Verdit.”
“The only one I can trust is Raziel.”
Perhaps it would have been understandable if it was during the time when he wandered among humans for a long time like the second fragment, but now, having not yet enjoyed this life for even a full year, he was like a pure child. It was questionable how he could say such things to him when he didn’t even know what a lie was and could only agree with others’ words or tilt his head in confusion.
“Raziel, did you lie to me?”
Come to think of it, when Levi was heading to the stone chamber back then, he asked Raziel for the first time if he was lying. He even articulated clearly why he thought so.
He should have noticed something strange at that point.
Being able to distinguish lies meant that he also knew how to define what a ‘lie’ was.
The easiest method humans could employ to deceive others.
Levi understood that well. Well enough to deceive him.
‘Perhaps it was that Ion Verdit who made Levi understand this.’
And it was surely because of that man that Levi could say he liked humans despite recovering the painful memories of the past.
Raziel, clutching his shoulder, felt his strength gradually leaving his body and his vision blurring. Ion’s blood, which had entered through his shoulder, was persistently interfering with the fusion of the core.
Thinking about it again, Levi had stabbed Ion too calmly. As if he genuinely found him irritating, bothersome.
Seeing him standing before him with that bloodied dagger, Raziel had firmly believed that Levi too had come to hate humans. After all, he himself, having been forcibly awakened by the ‘real Raziel,’ had never once liked humans during his entire existence.
He wanted to kill them all.
Knowing that even after he swallowed Levi’s core and became ‘death,’ their nature wouldn’t change, he didn’t want to suffer such treatment again.
He thought Levi would feel the same, but his answer was completely unexpected.
The one who made him give that answer was probably that Ion Verdit.
The root cause that made Levi like humans despite recalling his hellish past.
Fierce killing intent filled Raziel’s black eyes as he glared at Ion.
‘Such petty emotions…’
Because of one Ion Verdit, you would erase the hatred and anger that should rightfully be directed at humans? I’ve been fighting with those cursed emotions every day until now.
Raziel had been fighting an invisible disease due to his hatred for humans and fear of mortality. With his mind already thoroughly devastated, he had repeatedly pondered how to shake off both.
The answer he came up with was the extermination of humans through war.
It was about fulfilling Levi’s long-held wish while taking for himself the eternal life and mission that Levi had to bear.
Now various parts of his body were starting to creak.
This body had become unable to accept a complete core. Ion Verdit’s blood might be a blessed elixir for humans, but for ‘death’ like himself, it was nothing but a foreign substance that prevented proper functioning.
Raziel’s body staggered before finally dropping both knees to the floor.
His breath was escaping.
The power of life gripped death’s neck, slowly crushing and taking away sensations one by one.
The strange sensation that spread from his shoulders had already gathered at the center of his collarbone, beginning to press relentlessly on the small black fragment there. Levi’s core, which had remained in his right arm where the black hand was, also just trembled without advancing further.
‘How ironic.’
Raziel couldn’t help but sneer at himself as he looked down at his own figure with blurry eyes.
He had told Levi to wield weapons smeared with Ion Verdit’s blood to deal with the army that possessed the power of life. Because for the immortal army, Levi’s power of death was an unstoppable natural enemy.
That wasn’t just applicable to the immortal army.
It was as if he was receiving his own strategy back in full, and of course it was ironic.
In Raziel’s downcast gaze, he saw black feet. As he raised his head, which had become sluggish and difficult to move, he saw Levi approaching and looking down at him.
“Raziel.”
Strangely, even as everything before him was gradually blurring, only Levi’s face remained distinctly clear. Even the name he called.
Levi knelt on one knee as he faced Raziel. Matching his eye level, Levi cupped Raziel’s cooling face with both hands.
“Are you scared?”
Raziel only then realized from Levi’s words that he was trembling. It wasn’t because his body was getting cold, nor because the core inside him was vibrating anxiously.
“…Yes.”
He admitted it freely.
How could he not be afraid when the death he had so desperately wanted to avoid was now so close?
“It’s okay.”
Levi pulled Raziel’s face toward him, letting him rest against his chest as he stroked his back.
“You’re not dying. You’re being reborn.”
Lacking even the strength to push Levi away, Raziel chuckled weakly in his embrace.
“Do you think we can reincarnate too?”
That can’t be possible.
He too, like Theodore, was just ‘a shadow created by humans.’
Unless he becomes the original body, death would simply be the end.
“We… are not human.”
Because they were not human, because they were different from humans, because they could not become human, they didn’t even have the opportunity for reincarnation.
That’s why death had been more frightening. Unlike humans, this life was the first and last.
But Levi shook his head.
“I was told that you, Theodore, all of you are human.”
While still embracing Raziel, Levi looked back at Ion over his shoulder. Ion, meeting his gaze, gave a bitter yet tender smile.
Levi knew one thing that Raziel hadn’t realized.
“If we were so different from humans, how could we have given birth to ‘life’?”
“What are you saying…?”
“If we were mere fragments, we shouldn’t have emotions or will. But even if you were copied from another human, everything you did afterward was your own choice, wasn’t it?”
Levi’s words were unwavering and firm.
He believed that Raziel and Theodore were ‘complete humans.’
Raziel’s toes and fingertips gradually began to crumble. As fine black ashes began to pile up where he sat, Raziel murmured as if sighing.
“I see…”
Raziel couldn’t believe Levi’s words, yet he had no choice but to believe them.
“Theodore…, we…, were human after all.”
Theodore loved a human woman, and moreover, a woman who possessed the ‘power of life’ contrary to the power he held, and even had a child with her. If Theodore hadn’t been human, it would have been impossible for Ion to be born in the first place.
Thinking about it that way, he felt something in his chest becoming peaceful.
It wasn’t that his hatred for humans had disappeared. He still hated and disliked humans just the same.
Just one thing.
If he too fell within the category of humans, then even if he crumbled and disappeared like this, it wouldn’t be the absolute end—that thought gave him relief.
Perhaps he had been jealous of humans.
The humans who had carved such painful memories into him were so hateful, yet how could they, as if blessed by God, be able to ‘reincarnate’? His teeth had clenched with envy.
‘But now it doesn’t matter.’
If this wasn’t the absolute end, that thought felt sufficient.
“The same goes for you.”
Raziel closed his eyes, feeling his body crumbling away, and continued.
“They say only humans can lie for the sake of others.”
Raziel whispered to Levi in the warmth emanating from him.
“You have been ‘human’ all along.”
With those final words, Raziel turned completely into black ashes.
Amid the emperor’s clothes and black ashes.
A perfect black bead appeared, without even a trace of having been broken.
