episode_0020

“Mino.”

“Did you call?”

“Yeah, I need your help this time too, just like the last time I was in the Empire. Can I ask you for help?”

“If I can be of any help to your noble being, it would be a great honor in itself, so please let me know at any time.”

“Then I’ll do whatever you want?”

Leah thought as she watched Mino sucking the blood pack.

The Vampire Lord seems to be unlucky, at least considering what he’s about to do.

“There’s something I want to investigate while I have some time to spare. Last time, Galvein told Abel that he had a ‘childhood friend’. I want to find out more about that.”

“Are you jealous…”

“You want me to say more? Even though my body is like this, I’m still a man, you know?”

“…”

Mino thought to himself that the sun would rise in the west tomorrow, and that Pon Jeong-in really existed. He then thought to himself that it was hard to believe. Of course, Leah would have tackled him outwardly.

“So, I thought if Galvein knew, wouldn’t you know too?”

“What kind of logic does that have…”

“Did you know?”

“I know it’s presumptuous, but…”

After hearing that, Leah took out a notebook and a quill pen to take notes.

“Then, can you tell me about that childhood friend?”

“There may be a better way… Would you like to hear it?”

A better way? Leah nodded, perhaps curious, and made a gesture as if asking for me to tell her.

Then Mino continued speaking while spreading blood magic in his hand.

“Among the blood magic that can be used as a vampire lord, there is one that allows you to glimpse a part of the past. How about using that?”

“Uh, um.”

I was just going to do some investigative work, but Mino was more actively involved in crime than I thought.

“Then do that. I want to see it for myself.”

“Yes, I understand. However, I need the blood of the person who wants to peek into the past…”

“Phys?”

Abel’s blood…

Leah thought for a moment, then clapped her hands and hurried off somewhere.

And when Leah returned, she was holding a glass vial full of Abel’s blood.

“I asked Abel and he gave it to me.”

“…It wouldn’t have been that much, just one drop would have been enough, but the more the better, so it’s better.”

In order to obtain that one drop of blood, a war broke out between territories in the Demon Realm, but Mino didn’t say anything. He must have felt a certain amount of debt anyway, so there was no need to increase it any further.

“Then, let’s get started right away.”

-Slurp.

Blood from the glass bottle flowed out through the entrance and settled in the center of the magic circle made of Mino’s blood as a core. Although Leah had no professional training, she could tell that this was magic of an incredibly advanced level.

“Wow… Ah, Mino. Is your magic okay? If I had known it was such a high-level magic, I would have stopped you.”

“It’s okay. Originally, vampires could pay some of their magic power in exchange for blood, so it’s not a big burden, so don’t worry…”

“Tsk… I should have changed my species to a vampire too. I can’t even count the number of times I suffered from lack of magic power during my days as a warrior, even if I added all my fingers and toes together.”

“…”

Mino felt a chill for a moment as he thought, “Is Leah really saying that?” If Leah really changed species to a vampire, Abel might kill himself by driving a stake into his heart this time.

Normally, when a human becomes a vampire, they have to sacrifice a small amount of their life force in exchange, but Leah had a 99% chance of dying in the process.

“Oh, just kidding.”

“…I have a feeling that my grandfather, who just passed away, was beckoning me across the River Styx and stopped….”

“I must be mistaken. Rather, does that mean the magic is almost complete?”

“That’s right. Now 3…”

“3 minutes?

“2… 1…”

“?”

-Flash!

In an instant, the world around me was engulfed in a crimson light, and then I began to fall endlessly, endlessly down a black passage as if the floor had disappeared.

“Gyaaah!!! This is, please, say something-”

-Thud.

Leah’s voice cut off as if it had never happened, and only a black hole remained in its place.

“Come to think of it, I don’t remember telling you how to return to your noble person.”

Mino tilted his head for a moment, then realized in shock that he hadn’t said anything.

“…”

At that moment, Mino sensed his future.

The vampire lord is unlucky. That seemed like a self-evident fact.

*****

“Wowaaaah- Aah!”

Thud! It definitely looked like it had hit the ground hard, but there was no impact of that kind whatsoever.

“Ahhh… If it was going to fall like this, you should’ve told me a long time ago… Oh, Mino is a vampire, so he has wings. Is that why he didn’t pay attention…?”

Leah patted her waist, feeling something like phantom pain, although she was clearly not hurt.

It seemed like the first thing to do was figure out where this place was.

Two-by-two, two-by-two. When Leah took a quick look around, it seemed like a countryside similar to her hometown.

But if you look closely, there’s something a little different. The colors of this town… no, I should say the colors of this world. They were just dull. To the point where it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say they were black and white.

But for some reason, oddly enough, only one thing was colored: the eyes of the people.

“But… no matter how I look at it, this place seems like the human world?”

That’s right. Leah was shocked by the fact that the newspaper with the contents of the empire’s politics on the front page and the appearance of this place was exactly the same as the human world. Wasn’t Abel the Demon King? If so, shouldn’t he live with the Demons?

Still, Leah decided to talk to the people around her. There might be an empire in the Demon World, and there might be demons who hide their tails, horns, and wings.

As she happened to see a bald old man passing by, Leah ran over to him and tried to talk to him.

“Hey, mister!”

“…”

“Sir? Can’t you hear me?”

Complete ignorance. Leah didn’t want to admit it, but it was hard to ignore her completely when she thought about her own beauty tricks. But when the ignorance returned despite the odds, Leah was flustered.

“Excuse me? Can I ask you something?-”

“…”

-Swoosh.

“Huh?!”

However, when she tried to speak to him again and reached out her hand, Leah was startled to see her hand pass through the man’s body, so she pulled her hand away and shook it off.

The man headed to his general store with a box full of apples as if nothing had happened, and Leah was able to make a few inferences based on his reaction.

“Am I being treated like a ghost? Well, I’m not going back to the past, I’m just seeing memories.”

I can’t interfere with this side, and this side can’t interfere with me. It seemed like that was the rule.

I didn’t know this would cause such trouble, but has the plan to ask people to find out Abel’s location been forcibly scrapped?

While Leah was wrapping her head in thought for a while, someone passed by in front of Leah’s eyes.

“Huh?”

And the blue-eyed girl with the sky-blue flower on her head looked exactly like a younger Leah, so Leah was a little taken aback.

“Let’s follow along…”

There was no evidence, but somehow she felt that if she met that girl, she would be able to meet Abel. Thinking so, Leah followed the girl. In fact, it would be a bit misleading to say that she followed her, because even if Leah ran behind the girl, she wouldn’t have noticed her.

The girl walked towards a flower garden with light steps, as if she had no worries or concerns.

The girl was gesturing across the flower field with a hand that seemed to be handling something more beautiful than anything else, but I couldn’t tell. The scenery was colorless, so they just looked like gray flowers.

Thud thud thud, the girl ran off somewhere again.

And in that direction was a young boy with long flowing hair, wearing shackles on his hands and feet, like a prisoner, and wearing rags that were hardly even clothes… with wings and blue eyes.

“Abel?”

Let’s take a closer look at his face. He has many scars and is young, but he is definitely Abel. Have I come back to Abel’s childhood?

Abel in his childhood was crouching in a flower garden. For some reason, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Abel was running away from something, given the traces of violence that were all over his body.

The girl gradually approached Abel. Then she looked around as if she was seeing something new, and then she realized that he was the same age and her expression brightened.

“Hello?”

“…”

Abel raised his head and stared intently at the girl’s face. Full of wariness, he just looked at her without saying a single word in response.

“What are you doing here?”

“…”

As expected, there was no answer.

“I just moved to this town!”

“…”

“That’s what I’m saying, ah. No. You have to state your name first!”

“Ah!” said the girl, clapping her hands. She quickly added.

“My name is ‘Noah’.”

“…”

Abel’s cloudy eyes, a bit closer to a deep purple-blue, looked into the clear blue eyes of the girl called Noah, a bit closer to sky-blue. This time, their eyes were able to meet each other.

“Hey, since you moved, you probably don’t have any friends… So, can you tell me your name?”

At that moment, Leah thought she heard the sound of water falling.

In an instant, color spread throughout the colorless world.

As if the spirit of the wind was blessing this meeting, a pleasant breeze blew and the flowers in the flower garden swayed together.

Ah, yellow daffodils. Only then did I realize how beautiful they were.

In the spectacle of colors spreading across the gray world, Abel slowly opened his mouth.

“My name is…’Lucifer’.”

No, the young boy Lucifer opened his mouth.

That was the boy and the girl’s first meeting.

-Rustle.

In that scene, the yellow daffodil that touched my feet withered. As if something had been added to my memory, the withered daffodil disappeared, becoming a fragment of a dream.

Since looking into a person’s past is ultimately looking into the unconscious mind of that person, it is said that when looking at memories, some of the details are different from reality and are influenced by the emotions or fleeting thoughts of the current owner of the memory.

It’s not like the facts are distorted, but it’s just a case of memory correction, where you remember food that actually has no special merits as being delicious.

Maybe what they stepped on together that day wasn’t a yellow daffodil. I don’t know.