By Zephyria 
“Let’s not go up yet and stay here. It’s small, but there’s a summoning circle, so the Mana flowing around it is stable.”
—So that’s why I suddenly went into a catatonic state… Aska is crying again. Crybaby Aska. Always crying.
“I made another mistake.”
—Crybaby! Crybaby! He’s a crybaby!
“Shut up.”
Noise seeped through the cracks of my faint consciousness. It was Pipi, being frivolous in a solemn tone, and Aska, mumbling with a nasal voice.
I wanted to say something too, but my lips wouldn’t move. Barely holding onto the thread of my consciousness, I inwardly sighed in relief.
Thankfully, I didn’t die. In this unfamiliar and remote place, Aska collapsed, and I was in so much pain that I thought we were going to die like this.
I couldn’t move my body, but there was almost no pain, so this was much better.
—Kyle understood what I said. And he even peeked into your memories like you do. Isn’t that something only you can do?
“Maybe they’re becoming alike because they love each other.”
—Crazy Aska. He’s gone insane.
“Be quiet now. If Kyle wakes up because of you, I’ll pluck all your feathers out.”
I felt a pleasant pressure, as if I was being hugged tightly. Perhaps it was because of the familiar scent and sense of security, but I suddenly felt very sleepy. I wanted to let them know that I was awake, even if only for a moment, so they wouldn’t worry, but there was no way. I didn’t even have the strength to blink, let alone move my fingers.
I was embraced by Aska and slowly drifted back to sleep.
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I am floating in the air in a semi-transparent state like a ghost, dreaming an unknown dream again.
A forest, a volcanic zone, the sea, a building in a style I’ve never seen before, a crowded marketplace…
The scenes changed rapidly without any rules or warning.
“Using tools as we have been will inevitably make us vulnerable to security breaches. How about using biometric authentication to distinguish individuals instead?”
“Biometric authentication?”
“Each person’s body has unique information. Things like fingerprints or the shape of the eyes. There’s also the method of checking teeth.”
“With so many people in the world, isn’t it possible that such… biometric information? could overlap? Especially if they’re blood relatives.”
“Just as 100 people all look different when gathered together, biometric information cannot be identical, Your Highness. That applies even to blood relatives. If you’re still uneasy, you can register multiple pieces of information at once and compare them all. If it’s the same person, everything from one to ten will match.”
Two people are talking in what looks like Ruins. Whether it’s my eyes or my memory that’s strange, their figures repeatedly scattered and reassembled like sand in the desert.
When I saw Aska’s past before, I could feel his emotions as if I had become one with him, but now I can only watch from the perspective of an outsider.
The scene, so inaccurate that I couldn’t even recognize their faces properly, disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, just like before. The voices gradually became filled with static until they couldn’t be heard at all.
Then I felt the temperature around me rising. The air became heavy so quickly that it was hard to breathe. The surroundings were filled with steam, and the sound of metal being struck rang out from all directions.
“I made it somehow because they told me to, but…”
I turned my head towards the sound and saw a small child who didn’t even look 1m tall… No, looking at his face, he was a middle-aged man. His face, covered with a thick beard, was flushed red from the heat of melting metal.
The man, small in stature but with a sturdy-looking body, sighed and muttered as he held a heavy hammer.
“What method do you plan to use to cool something forged with the flames of Gehenna?”
With those words, the scene blurred again. I faintly heard a woman’s voice in my ear.
“Why don’t we sprinkle seawater on it? It will cool down before all the seas in the world dry up.”
“It will take thousands of years, maybe even longer.”
“But what else can we do? There’s no other way…”
Before the conversation could end, my body floated upwards. My vision shook dizzily, and my ears went numb.
I opened my eyes with a start and saw an unfamiliar place. Stone pillars and stairs, a floor with unknown patterns drawn on it…
Ah.
I rolled my eyes around to survey my surroundings and realized. This was the place where Aska had collapsed.
Had the boundary between reality and dreams become blurred because I had so many dreams? I blinked my eyes at the strange feeling that I was all alone and raised my head.
—Bbing…
Pipi, sensing my movement, raised his head. He had grown so large that he was enveloping Aska and me with his giant wings. The feathers were so soft that I wasn’t cold at all.
“Are you okay?”
Aska asked in a hoarse voice. Looking at him closely, his eyes were red, and he looked very tired. I didn’t answer and lifted my arm in front of my eyes.
The wound I had sustained had already healed completely, leaving no trace. It was easy to breathe, I wasn’t coughing, and the chill that had seeped deep into my bones had disappeared.
“Does anything still hurt?”
Aska asked anxiously, perhaps because I didn’t answer. I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know where to start.
First, I reached out and groped Aska’s shoulders and chest. Just like me, Aska’s body had no wounds or scars. His smooth skin was so soft that my stomach churned.
This was definitely not the first time.
Was it the first time when I went to see the festival with Aska? At that time, the seal was forcibly broken, and I almost died. I thought that kissing Aska or drinking his saliva would heal my wounds, so I thought I could save my life, but it wasn’t like that.
In fact, Aska’s saliva has no healing effect. I know that Aska kisses me and gives me his saliva just because I give him blood, so he wants to give me something too.
What method has he been using to heal me all this time?
Using healing magic? No, then there’s no reason to open my chest, hold my heart, and artificially compress it.
Since when have my wounds been healing on their own? It’s definitely after we reunited.
When I think about it, it’s always been like that since I met Aska. Even when I’m in so much pain that I can’t stay conscious, I wake up the next day feeling strangely fine.
When I was with Sakira and Abyss, I couldn’t bear the pain without taking medicine every day. I couldn’t walk for long, and my muscles would quickly stiffen and spasm, especially when it got cold.
Then, when I first entered Aska’s dream using Popo’s ability…
I was definitely in a lot of pain then too. I was in so much pain that I couldn’t even stay conscious, but suddenly I felt better. I wasn’t out of breath anymore, I wasn’t coughing, and there was no blood in my sputum.
While I was asleep, Aska did something to my body again, just like he did in Talim. Judging by the timing, that was the most likely time.
“Kyle.”
Aska stroked my cheek with his cool hand. He gently applied pressure to make me turn my head and met my gaze. Looking into his eyes, full of worry and anxiety, made my stomach churn for some reason.
There were many complex emotions, but perhaps the biggest one was anger. I was still angry with Aska.
He seemed reluctant to talk about it, so I didn’t ask anything. I thought he would tell me someday. Even if he didn’t, it would be okay.
I would rather be a clueless, foolish idiot than have him upset by bringing up a story he had kept secret with great difficulty.
But all of this is only possible on the premise that Aska is completely by my side. If I had known that he was doing this at the cost of harming himself, I would never have stood by and watched.
I had been feeling something was wrong since we were in the basement of the Ruins, but why didn’t I think about it more deeply? I also knew that if I suffered a fatal injury, it would affect Aska. From the beginning, that wasn’t normal, so why did I naively think that it would be okay as long as I didn’t suffer a fatal injury?
Was it just because I was endlessly happy to be with him? Was my head frozen because I was having so much fun together? Maybe I was just grinning at Aska’s face in a complex and dangerous swamp.
Not knowing when I would lose my footing…
‘Don’t get mad at me even if I do something wrong…’
I wanted to get angry and ask Aska what he had done to himself, but I couldn’t.
‘Don’t get mad at me… Hngh…’
It was even worse because I remembered his face from when he was drunk and begging while crying when he was young.
‘You can’t get mad at me even if I do something wrong…’
His expression was similar to that time. His face, staring at me silently, was distorted with sorrow as if he was about to burst into tears at any moment.
As Aska wished, I didn’t get angry and calmly opened my mouth.
“I had a dream.”
“What kind of dream?”
“I don’t know. It’s not my memory. It must be someone else’s memory. Anyway, I had a dream, and it seems like people in the old days controlled access to areas through biometric authentication.”
Aska flinched, as if something I said pricked him. His tearful face also changed to one of embarrassment. I continued to speak.
“Like the Ruins we went to last time. Only you and I could enter there too. And suddenly, there was a strange voice saying that the Ruins were damaged. Remember? He moved us underground to have us re-examined.”
It felt like the puzzle pieces that had been scattered in a mess were starting to fit together one by one from the edges.