1. Prologue
“I can’t tell if you’re bold or just overconfident.”
The one addressing Yuri with only the corners of his mouth pulled into a smile was an unfamiliar face. He seemed vaguely familiar somehow, but there was no way Yuri could have forgotten someone as strikingly handsome as this.
Even with a considerable distance between them, the man’s noticeably tall frame and broad chest stood out, drawing Yuri’s gaze. The man, who suited his knight’s armor so perfectly, appeared to be of exceptional ability — mana blanketed everything around him.
“Who are you…?”
“You’ve even become a mage, so you can’t be stupid….”
The man stared at Yuri, who had asked about him with a rather dumbfounded expression, as though he were genuinely puzzled.
Mage — a title that could only be used by those who had formed eight or more rings within their heart, even among the dwindling few who still walked the nearly extinct path of magic.
At the word mage the man had uttered, Yuri’s heart dropped with a thud. It had been over ten years since he had used magic. The fact that something no one should know anymore had come out of someone’s mouth left him flustered.
“A mage? Wh-what do you mean?”
“It’s been a while. Uriel.”
The man, who felt as imposing as a great mountain, not only knew that Uriel was a mage — he knew Uriel’s name as well.
The fact that this man, who was threatening at a single glance, knew his identity filled Yuri with fear. If that were all, it might have been bearable. The emotion reflected in the man’s gleaming eyes was fierce, furious rage. At that gaze — one that looked ready to tear him apart — Yuri stumbled, stepping back one pace, then another.
“Eugh—”
He tripped over a carrot he had been humming to himself while pulling from the ground just moments before. He toppled backward in a thoroughly undignified sprawl, but he had no room to care about that. Yuri pressed his palms against the earth to put even a little more distance between himself and the man. The man’s brow furrowed faintly as he watched Yuri, now a mess from having fallen on the slightly damp soil.
The tips of Yuri’s fingers trembled faintly where he’d fallen. Because the moment the unfamiliar man knitted his brows, a face had flashed through his mind. A child from a hazy memory, from a very, very long time ago.
No. That can’t be right. That child wouldn’t know this place. By now, he should have forgotten everything — not just this place, but everything about me.
Hoping he was wrong, Yuri parted his lips.
“Don’t tell me….”
“Ah.”
At Yuri’s quiet murmur, the man let out a short sound of realization — one that seemed to confirm his guess was correct. Hearing it, Yuri’s already pale face drained further, going from white to a sickly blue.
The man, who had been silently watching the face that had gone pale because of him, broke into a brilliant smile. It was a smile of genuine delight, as if asking whether he had finally been remembered.
“I never imagined you would have forgotten me. So you remember now?”
“Avelos…?”
“Did you and I not live side by side for eight years in this very place? I’m hurt. Uriel.”
That was half right and half wrong. It was true that Avelos and Uriel had spent time together — but to call it living side by side was hardly fitting. If anything, kidnapped and imprisoned or abused came far closer to describing what those years had been.
As if to prove it, the inner depths of Avelos’s black eyes flickered with violet even as he smiled broadly at Yuri. The Avelos standing before him was clearly smiling, yet a murderous intent so bone-chilling it made the skin crawl radiated from him. His frame — far larger than an ordinary grown man’s — and his brutal air made even his smiling expression frightening.
Yuri realized that the unfamiliar man standing before him was Avelos, and despaired. He had given the boy a memory-erasing drug and safely sent him back to his original home — so why had he come back?
Yuri remembered the day he first opened his eyes in this world. He had taken his heart medication as usual and fallen asleep, only to wake up staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. Before he could even begin to process anything else, the memories of a foreign body came flooding in all at once, and through them, Yuri understood.
This was the world inside the book a friend had lent him during the roughly month-long hospital stay — the one his friend had mentioned had a male lead with a name similar to his own.
Yuri chose not to deny this strange new world, but to accept it. He supposed some people might want to return, but at least he wasn’t one of them.
His heart had been weak from birth, so hospitals had been as routine as meals, and school life had been far from normal. His parents had struggled just to keep up with his medical bills, and in the end, his mother ran away before he even reached high school.
Because of that, the one younger sibling he had resented him. His father, too, though he never showed it openly, had found him a burden — a drain of money for no gain. Thanks to that, he had learned nothing of worth well into his mid-twenties. So he’d thought: maybe this is for the best. At least for those first few years.
As the tangled memories of Yuri’s possession sorted themselves out, the ending of the book came back to him. The keywords of the novel he had possessed were dark, serious. And on top of that, the character he had possessed was one whose fate was already sealed — to be torn limb from limb by the main character and burned at the stake. His name was Uriel, a tragic prince whose country had fallen to war, leaving him enslaved by the conquering empire.
When the kingdom fell, what had once been Uriel’s pride — his appearance — became his downfall instead. His brilliant golden hair, golden eyes, and beautiful face that seemed to flaunt his noble bloodline were the very things that allowed Uriel to survive alone. When all others vanished as dew on the execution grounds, the fact that he alone had kept his life was the beginning of his misfortune.
The reason Uriel had been spared was Crown Prince Luios of the empire, who had coveted him. He had kept Uriel alive and made him his own pleasure slave. A man of aberrant desires, he treated Uriel with extraordinary cruelty. He forced Uriel to be violated before his eyes by other knights and slaves, and left permanent scars across that pale body without the slightest hesitation.
In the novel, Uriel endured the abuse that was no different from torture, silently waiting for any chance to escape. Eventually, he succeeded — seducing one of the knights and managing to flee.
But before long, the pursuers sent by the crown prince quickly caught up to Uriel. At the end of a fierce chase, the knight who had been protecting Uriel was killed. Only then, realizing that he had loved that knight, Uriel fell into profound despair.
The knight’s breath had ceased, and Crown Prince Luios — the one who had abused him — had arrived almost at his doorstep.
The moment Uriel gave up on everything, his body fell, as if by miracle, into an ancient mage’s dungeon. It was something the great mage had arranged and left behind to prevent magic from disappearing from the world. Inside, it was revealed that Uriel possessed a rare constitution similar to that of an ancient mage, and Uriel inherited everything the mage had left — including his magical power.
By the time Uriel emerged from that place, having taken on the mage’s abilities, the crown prince who had tortured him and used him as a pleasure slave had long since died of old age.
However, the half-broken Uriel could not distinguish between Crown Prince Luios, who had abused him, and Prince Avelos, Luios’s great-grandson — and kidnapped him.
He then subjected Avelos to all manner of experiments and branded him with a slave brand, just as had been done to him — his twisted act of revenge.
After escaping from Uriel, Avelos met a main companion of exceptional holy power and returned with him to the empire together.
And Avelos, having become a Sword Master within the empire, sought out Uriel and tore him apart. Not satisfied even with that, he placed the corpse on a pyre and burned it. The novel ended with Avelos living in obsessive devotion to his main companion — the only being who could hold and soothe the wounds of his childhood.
The first thought that came to Yuri after remembering the novel’s ending was exactly this: I cannot die like this. A young, healthy body, and wealth enough that he could spend it all his life and still never run out — all of it felt like compensation for the misery of his previous life. He didn’t want to lose it all so meaninglessly.
Since he couldn’t kill someone just to save himself, the solution he came up with was to send the boy back.
Ten years passed after sending the boy away, and Yuri had believed he had successfully broken free from the flow of the original novel. Though he could no longer use magic, he was living a satisfying second life with Uriel’s wealth and magical artifacts.
Until Avelos came for him like this.
“You’re Avelos? How did you get here…?”
“Shouldn’t you be asking why I came, rather than how I found this place?”
He didn’t even need to ask. Avelos in the novel was portrayed as cold and ruthless by nature. Those traits became even more pronounced after he became emperor — he never forgave anyone who defied him even slightly.
Thinking of the Avelos in the novel, the reason he had come looking for Uriel was obvious. It couldn’t be that he’d come all the way out here just to exchange pleasantries.
Behind Avelos, things glinted as light struck them. Of course he hadn’t come alone.
The glinting things were knights clad in silver armor. They kept their distance but had closed in to encircle the area entirely. There was no escape route in sight.
A Sword Master and hundreds of soldiers — what that meant was clear. He was going to die right here, today.
Yuri looked up at Avelos with eyes filled with fear. The terror and tension that had risen in his golden eyes must have been plainly visible, yet Avelos simply kept smiling.
That sight made Yuri even more afraid.
Avelos’s demeanor was relaxed and unhurried from start to finish. It was as if to say: someone like you — I could kill right now, this very instant, if I chose to.
