Chapter 36: Inside the Cave
Chapter 36: Inside the Cave
Ethan saw that eye again.
No sky. No ground. No sound.
Only a darkness so deep that the very concept of "distance" lost its meaning. And at the farthest end of that darkness, an enormous vortex of light turned slowly.
At first Ethan thought it was a storm.
Bands of azure and silver-white light coiled into one another, vast enough to swallow an entire safe zone, an entire continent, perhaps an entire world. They spun around a pitch-black center, slow, solemn, like a ritual that had repeated for billions of years.
Then that pitch-black center stirred faintly.
And Ethan understood.
It was not a storm.
It was an eye.
That entire vortex of light was only its iris. Those churning bands of nebula were only the veins within that iris. And the darkness at the center, deeper than any abyss Ethan had ever known, was the pupil.
That pupil was turning toward him.
Ethan had faced death before. He had had one arm burned off by Void Fire. He had stood before the Bone-Wing Dragon without retreating half a step.
But beneath this gaze, every notion of "courage" became laughable.
Because that eye carried no killing intent.
No anger. No hunger. Not even curiosity.
It only looked.
With the kind of gaze one gives a speck of dust that happens to drift across one’s field of vision. Whether Ethan existed or vanished, suffered or screamed, made no difference to it whatsoever. He was not its enemy. He was not its prey.
He did not even qualify as a thing within its awareness.
And that was precisely what made it terrifying.
Killing intent could still be resisted. Hatred could still be answered. But the absolute indifference of an existence at this level was like gravity, like time. No one resists gravity. One can only fall.
Ethan lowered his head.
Beneath him there was no ground. Only a web.
Countless threads of white light woven into one another, stretching endlessly in every direction, radiating out from beneath the eye like frozen rays of light. Seen from afar, the web was beautiful in a cold way, like moonlight fallen across a night sea.
But Ethan was caught in it.
The threads of light wound around his neck, his shoulders, his chest, his arms and legs. Thin as silk, cold as ice, and impossible to break. They tightened, little by little, unhurried, with the patience of something that had never known the concept of failure.
Ethan wanted to thrash.
He couldn’t.
Wanted to scream.
He couldn’t.
In the instant his consciousness began to be crushed apart, a thought flashed through his mind, sharp and cold as a shard of glass:
This web had not been spread to catch him.
It had been here all along. For a very long time. Stretched beneath everything.
He was merely one of countless living things caught upon it without ever knowing.
Then eighty years ago, when the first Void rifts tore open the sky, the thing humanity called a "catastrophe"...
Had it only been the moment this eye opened?
Before that thought could take full shape, the threads of light clamped down hard.
Ethan’s breath broke off. His vision washed white. His soul let out a cracking sound, like a thin pane of glass pressed beneath a boulder.
The eye still watched.
Calm.
As if waiting for a speck of dust to go out.
At that very moment, a black shadow tore across.
No shape. No face. Only like a streak of ink hurled straight into this gray-white world, so fast that Ethan could not make it out.
Crack!
The entire space shattered like a mirror.
The eye vanished. The web snapped into segments of light, then dissolved. Darkness crashed down and swallowed everything.
Ethan fell.
Fell for a long time.
Until pain dragged him back.
He wanted to open his eyes. He couldn’t.
His body felt as though it had been smashed to pieces and crudely put back together. His right shoulder throbbed. His right hand was almost numb, but each time a warm current of energy flowed through it, his fingers sent back the sensation of shattered bone being pressed back into place.
His left arm was even worse.
Hot. Cold. Painful. Numb.
The Void Fire was like a beast locked beneath charred skin, clawing at its cage now and then. Each time it stirred, Ethan’s soul shuddered.
But there was another current of energy wrapped around him.
Warm. Soft. Far weaker than the pain, yet persistent to the point of near stubbornness. It seeped into his body, stanching the bleeding bit by bit, dragging his wounds back from the edge of collapse bit by bit.
Then Ethan heard Laira’s voice. Very close.
"You should rest."
Another woman’s voice spoke. Weaker. More unsteady. But still forcing itself to stay calm.
"I can keep going."
"Your energy is almost spent."
"Then I’ll use it until it runs out."
The space fell quiet for a few seconds. Then Mira went on, her voice very soft: "Ethan saved my life. No. Two lives. I will save him for certain."
Ethan couldn’t open his eyes.
But he heard Mira’s breathing. Very heavy. Very tired.
He wanted to tell her to stop. His lips wouldn’t move.
Laira said nothing more either. Only after a long while did she speak, coolly.
"You really are different from those two."
Mira was silent.
"Why did you go with them?"
The healing light over Ethan’s body wavered slightly.
Mira laughed very softly. A dry laugh, without a trace of joy.
"Because I am Nolan’s fiancée."
Laira did not answer at once.
Mira lowered her head and went on channeling energy into Ethan’s right hand. She had set the broken fingers with white bandages and healing light, but the spot where bone had pierced through skin still kept her from looking too long.
"House Vale and House Greaves decided on a marriage alliance. If nothing changes, next year I will marry Nolan."
Laira frowned. "You don’t like him."
"I don’t."
"Then run."
Mira shook her head.
Run.
Those words, from Laira’s mouth, came as light as a breath. Of course. To a dragon, every sky is a road home. If you don’t like it, fly away; whoever dares to stop you, burn them.
But Mira had no wings.
"It isn’t that simple. Nolan’s father owns an Epic-rank Heaven’s Gate, and he has already reached Elite tier 5. He has sat on the Earth Shield Council for years, and his ties with the defense corps, the academy, and the great houses all run deep."
"So what?"
Mira smiled bitterly. "So the moment I resist, what waits for me won’t be freedom. It’ll be another cage, one that’s worse."
She paused for a moment.
Her eyes reddened.
"I tried once."
Laira looked at her.
"When I found out I had to marry Nolan, I refused. I told my father I didn’t want to marry a man like him. I said I wanted to keep being a healer, wanted to join the battlefield support line, wanted to decide my own future."
She bowed her head lower. Her voice grew so small it nearly dissolved into the sound of the wind outside the cave.
"Then my father locked me in a dark room for three days."
Laira was silent.
"No light. No food. Only water. On the third day, he opened the door and asked whether I’d calmed down."
Mira’s healing hand trembled faintly.
Those three days, she remembered more clearly than any memory in her life.
Not because of the darkness. Darkness was not so frightening.
But because in those three days, no one came. Not her mother. Not her cousins. Not the old housekeeper who had once carried her as a child. The whole house knew she was locked behind that door, and the whole house kept silent together, as if that silence were a ritual everyone had long since memorized.
On the third day, when the door opened, she had meant to scream.
But looking into her father’s eyes, she swallowed it all back down.
Because in those eyes there was no anger. Anger would have meant he still saw her as a wayward daughter. What lay in his eyes was only the impatience of a man waiting for a piece of merchandise to finish the last step of packaging.
"That was when I understood," Mira said, tears falling without her bothering to wipe them. "In a great house, I’m no one’s daughter. I’m a piece of merchandise. A puppet. A thing used to trade for connections, profit, and support."
Laira crossed her arms. Her gaze turned very deep.
She did not console her. She did not say meaningless things like "everything will be fine."
Because Laira could see that Mira did not need a cheap word of comfort.
Mira wiped her tears with the back of her hand, the healing light still not stopping.
"I’m not strong enough to resist. Not brave enough to die either. So all I can do is keep living like this. Going along with Nolan. Listening to him brag. Watching him treat other people as tools. Telling myself that as long as I stay quiet, things won’t get too bad."
She looked at Ethan lying on the ground.
His face was deathly pale. His breathing was very faint. If not for the fact that his chest still rose and fell, he looked almost like a corpse draped in dark red fire.
"But today, I saw him want to kill me."
Laira said coolly: "Does that surprise you?"
Mira was silent for a few seconds.
Then she shook her head.
"No."
The answer made Laira narrow her eyes slightly.
Mira smiled bitterly. "I just didn’t expect him to do it so fast. No hesitation. No guilt. Only because I could speak the truth, he wanted me dead."
Once she had said it, she realized that the thing chilling her spine was not the bullet.
It was that she had not been surprised at all.
Through all these years, some part of her had always known. Known that in Nolan’s eyes, she and the coordinate-tracking compass in her pocket held the same value. Broken, replace it. In the way, throw it out. She knew, but she chose not to look, because looking straight at that truth would turn her years of obedience into a joke.
Today, Nolan’s bullet had looked straight at it for her.
"When the bullet came flying, I suddenly found it very funny," Mira said, her tears falling onto the back of Ethan’s hand. "I was about to be killed by my own fiancé. And the person who threw himself out to block the bullet for me was the very one I’d hesitated over and left behind from the start."
Laira looked at her for a long time.
Then she said: "Ethan is that kind of person."
Mira raised her head.
Laira looked at Ethan, her voice dropping much lower.
"He doesn’t like trusting people. But once he’s decided to save someone, he’ll save them to the end."
Mira looked at Ethan’s ashen face and did not answer.
Because she did not know whether she had the right to answer.
At that very moment, Laira suddenly frowned.
Her ears twitched faintly.
The air outside the cave changed. Very slightly. But to her, clear enough.
Laira stood up.
Mira tensed at once. "What is it?"
"Quiet."
Mira closed her mouth.
Laira went to the mouth of the cave and looked out through the narrow crack in the stone. Outside lay the gray gloom of the Anomalous Coordinates. Vines blanketed the cliff face. In the distance, a few fragments of ruins slid slowly past one another, like two layers of the world set out of alignment.
A very faint sound rang out.
Click.
Like a claw touching stone.
Laira’s red-orange eyes went cold. She turned to look at Ethan, then at Mira.
"Stay here. If something’s wrong with him, call me."
"You’re going alone?"
"I won’t go far."
Without waiting for Mira to say anything more, a pair of dragon wings spread open in the cramped space. Laira tilted her body and slipped out through the crack in the cave like a streak of dark red fire.
Only Mira and Ethan were left in the cave.
The sound of the wind was blocked off by the stone walls. The cave was quiet to the point of suffocation.
Mira looked at the mouth of the cave for a while, then bowed her head and went on healing.
Her energy was nearly gone. Each time the white light rose in her palm, her fingertips trembled. Sweat soaked through her clothes. Now and then black dots leapt across her vision from exhaustion.
But she did not stop.
Stanch the bleeding. Push the displaced bone back into place. Lock the muscles and tendons in with healing energy.
Every step hurt so much that Ethan, unconscious, faintly knit his brows.
"Sorry. Just bear it a little longer."
No one answered her.
Mira looked at him. Looked at the dried streak of blood on his cheekbone. Looked at his hastily bandaged right shoulder. Looked at the charred left arm sealed shut by Laira’s fire.
A person wounded this badly, and yet when the bullet came flying, he still threw himself out.
Mira suddenly laughed very softly. A weak, foolish laugh, mixed with tears not yet dry.
"Ethan, when you saved me, you were really cool."
No one answered.
But she still laughed. Laughed like a fool.
And in the middle of that laughter, Mira suddenly realized something so strange it was almost absurd.
She was inside the Anomalous Coordinates. Outside was crawling with monsters. She had just been abandoned by her fiancé, had her road home cut off by his own hand, been thrown into a place where she could die at any moment.
She should have been afraid.
But her chest, for the first time in years, felt so light.
No Nolan standing beside her, giving orders. No weight of her father’s gaze pressing on her shoulders. No engagement cinched around her throat like a noose.
Only a dark cave.
A gravely wounded man who needed her.
And these trembling hands, at last allowed to do the very thing they themselves wanted to do.
So that was how it was. All her life she had lived inside the safe zone, behind the highest walls, the thickest wards, yet not for a single day had she been safe. And here, in the most dangerous place in the world, she had found the first breath that belonged to herself.
The cage had never been at the Anomalous Coordinates.
The cage was at home.
Mira lowered her head and went on pouring healing light into Ethan’s body.
Her voice was very small. But clear.
"This time, I’ll choose for myself."
Outside the cave, a low, deep blast rang out. Dark red firelight flashed through the crack in the stone.
Mira lifted her head, but did not take her hands off Ethan.
She drew a deep breath, then bent back down.
"Don’t die."
She didn’t know whether she was saying it to Ethan.
Or to herself.