# Chapter 50
With the crumpled blanket between us, we looked at each other. Just before dawn, the dim morning light illuminated his pale face.
“Explain properly.”
An unbelievable conjecture came to mind. With firm questioning, I scanned Kadilen’s appearance thoroughly, not wanting to miss anything. The more I focused on his relaxed eyes and dry lips, the more his emotions fiercely swirled in my mind. A heart desperately wishing for something. A heart that, despite wavering dozens of times, eventually struggles to find its firm center. A heart that willingly pushes away other things to protect a burning wish.
It was something I couldn’t fail to recognize. With that heart, I had placed him on the throne.
“Did you treat me with the bead? While you suffered instead?”
“I merely bought some time.”
He answered briefly with a composed face. However, contrary to his calm response, I sensed unstable urgency. Against the background of the bluish dawn sky through the window, there was Kadilen, painfully suppressing his emotions. Unable to hide his feelings, he wasn’t as lofty and distant as before. Rather, he was intense, explicit, and also pure. His emotions resembled the clumsy, unripe impulses that emerge from an immature child.
“What makes you so anxious?”
A momentarily bewildered look flashed across his face. I sat precariously on the edge of the chair and caught his gaze.
“Yes, I can still feel your emotions.”
“…”
“This wasn’t in your expectations, was it?”
Kadilen looked at the floor with half-closed eyes. I waited for his answer with patience.
“Perhaps the bond has strengthened. Since I used the bead to absorb the illness…”
“…Absorbed, you say.”
That was why he had suddenly fallen ill. The rough breathing even with small movements, the contorted expression as if enduring pain, the body that staggered and collapsed. All were things taken from me. The life I had saved was taking away my death. The blood that had warmly kept him alive had settled coldly, creating a face turned blue with pallor. It must have been more than once or twice that he felt suffocated by the pain that came at all hours. He was holding onto my pain instead of my affection, quietly piecing together someone else’s life just as I had done in the past.
If Luan couldn’t be found, what was he planning to do? Since he had taken the disease from me, could he have died in my place? I was angry at how he could act so recklessly. This wasn’t what I wanted.
“I didn’t save you so that you would love me.”
“…”
“I also didn’t save you so you would die in my place.”
I laid out my thoughts randomly. His gaze, which had been lowered, turned to me again. I looked at him who had been my teacher, the formula of my life, and my beauty.
“I just did it because I loved you.”
That was all. I had certainly been in pain, and there were times when I harbored sharp hatred toward him. I felt unavoidably frustrated, and sometimes it was overwhelming to handle the tangled situation. But when everything was over and I reached a conclusion, there was only one thing I would recall about Kadilen at the threshold of death. Even if it was merely the past, it was a feeling that had occupied most of my life. It was my choice, and I didn’t want anything in return from him. Also, even if I received something, I had nothing left to give back to him.
As if guessing my complex feelings, Kadilen gazed at me silently. To me, who had spilled my inner thoughts and was keeping silent, he approached gently.
“Ludin.”
With the rustling sound of the blanket, Kadilen’s body leaned toward me. The cloth that separated him and me settled calmly under his hand with strength. After examining me carefully, he whispered in a quiet voice.
“Abandon me comfortably without any effort.”
“…What?”
Completely ignoring the racing heart, he created a peaceful expression. His emotions were emptied, and emptied again, yet infinitely heavy. With a tone too tender to have emerged from there, Kadilen opened his mouth once more.
“I learned it from you, so wouldn’t I have the same heart?”
He hesitated for a moment before continuing.
“I simply came to love you.”
In the most quiet dawn of the day, he confessed to me quietly. As if to hide his trembling hand, his fingers swept across the blanket and became a tightly clenched fist. In the room where only slow breathing could be heard, I felt all his emotions that composed that short sentence intact. I knew better than anyone that this was not a heart-fluttering excitement. It was a heart like mine, empty yet silent.
“Please don’t abandon yourself, and be happy for a long time in a far, far place…”
He couldn’t finish his words.
Wrapped in emotions so fierce it was dizzying, I tried to distinguish my own. The damned bead had bound his heart and mine together, making it impossible to know where my emotions ended. The boundary weakly collapsed, allowing his to invade mine unrestrainedly. As I blankly moved, approaching him more perilously, a creaking sound came from the chair. As if morning had just dawned, a faint light seeped in through the window behind him. My heart had already reached a state of saturation, filling the inside enormously.
I slowly extended my hand to his eyes. Kadilen received my hand without any resistance. I blocked his gaze and took a deep breath.
“I can’t distinguish. You’re too…”
It was an emotion so intense it was dizzying. As if I still loved him, my heart was full of familiar yet strange affection. I gave up and lowered my hand again. Kadilen wasn’t closing his eyes.
“You tell me.”
“…”
“Which of these feelings are mine?”
A long silence followed. I swallowed, standing in the center of a storm. After moving his lips several times, he eventually whispered with an awkward smile.
“There’s no reason to distinguish, is there?”
“…”
“Because you can’t possibly feel the same as me.”
* * *
Like having just returned from a noisy square, the emotions didn’t function properly in the sudden silence that came. After frantically running away from him as if fleeing from a wild beast, the emotions that had risen to my throat subsided instantly. My mind, having seen off a visitor, only echoed like sounds heard underwater, leaving me in a daze for a while.
Having told Jiman the reason for Kadilen’s illness, all I could do was hope for appropriate measures. Anyway, if I were to leave the palace, he would be unable to take my disease due to physical distance alone. Considering that the emotional transmission intensified the closer we were, the bead couldn’t possibly affect places very far away. In fact, the problem wasn’t Kadilen being ill itself. We knew the cause and had a solution. What confused me was my own heart.
I had so many questions for myself, but I couldn’t extract what I needed in any language. I remembered the emptily hollow heart, but I also remembered the heart that seemed like mine, intertwined with his. I couldn’t tell if it was an easy mistake due to the affection I had harbored for so long, or if an old emotion had truly been revived.
But there was one fact I knew. A person who has stayed in one place for a long time doesn’t realize they’re actually outside even after leaving. I had realized this several times, both in my previous life and as Ludin. Perhaps the feelings for Kadilen were already deeply embedded in me, still keeping the pain even after being torn away. If it was something that would disappear in an instant, if there was no room to be shaken by the other’s response, I wouldn’t have strived so desperately to save him. Such confusion was inevitable.
“Rio. That’s enough. Come here.”
Leaning on the chair watching the child, I realized that he had been working for an hour already. At my call, Rio looked at me with a pouting face.
“There’s too many.”
“You don’t have to finish it all today.”
To keep Rio away from the infirmary that was in an uproar due to the bedridden king, Jiman had confined the child to my room. Giving him a box full of medicinal ingredients and assigning him sorting work was a ploy to prevent Rio from seeing Kadilen. Not knowing the real reason, the child had been excessively diligent since earlier, perhaps thinking he had to complete all the tasks by nightfall.
“It’s really okay, come here.”
When I called him with a smile, Rio seemed somewhat relieved and scurried over to me. His hands were quite dirty with dried leaves and powders stuck to them. I sat the child on my knee and slowly cleaned his hands.
“Everyone is very busy. They’re even shouting.”
Despite Jiman’s efforts, Rio seemed to have noticed the situation in the infirmary somewhat. His small hands moved delicately through my wet handkerchief.
“Are you scared?”
“No. Doctors are always like that.”
The child answered nonchalantly. I was impressed by his mature thinking, but at the same time, I became more curious about Rio’s thoughts on doctors. The child, who resembled Jiman so much, always knew exactly what task he was in charge of despite his young age. That was also why I still hadn’t decided whether to take him with me or leave him behind in the palace.
“Do you really want to become a doctor, Rio?”
“Yes!”
I gazed at the child who nodded vigorously and stomped his feet. Rio, noticing my gaze, smiled broadly. Though I raised the corners of my lips with him, I felt complicated.
“What kind of doctor do you want to be?”
“I want to be the coolest doctor in the palace. Like Master Jiman!”
Rio held his thumb high. The child’s face was full of pure admiration. Although there were times when he was unmistakably childlike, Rio had never complained about work, even though he sometimes clumsily knocked things over due to unfamiliar movements. He was a child who, despite Jiman’s step-by-step teaching, often tried to do everything at once out of his own eagerness. A child that everyone couldn’t help but adore, who would surely become a good doctor.
I couldn’t take that dream away from Rio.
“You’ll definitely become that.”
Probably after my death, Jiman would leave for distant places for research. If that happens, there would be no adult to protect Rio, and above all, he would miss the opportunity to safely become a doctor in the palace. Rio was still too young, and taking him would be purely my selfishness. If we couldn’t leave the palace together, the time left for Rio and me was merely three days.
“That’s right. You’ll become an excellent doctor.”
“Really?”
“Of course.”
I showed a thumbs up following Rio. I calmly soothed my aching heart while watching the child who was genuinely excited and smiling brightly. Rio burrowed into my arms and wrapped his short arms around me. As he nuzzled his face against my shoulder, I had to try hard not to show how terrified I was.
