Chapter 241: The Truth Hidden Within His Soul

"Bring me an Aesthor Stone."

Erza’s calm command echoed throughout the interrogation room.

Sunday immediately responded.

"Yes, Your Highness. Retrieving an Aesthor Stone now."

A metallic arm extended silently from the ceiling before disappearing into one of the secured storage compartments. A few moments later, it returned carrying a small crystal resting carefully upon its mechanical palm. The arm stopped before Erza and respectfully presented the stone.

Erza reached forward and picked it up.

The crystal measured barely three inches across, small enough to fit comfortably inside her palm, yet the moment she held it, she immediately sensed the incredible concentration of aura compressed within it. Even without activating her senses, she could feel thousands of strands of corrupted energy sealed inside the crystal.

"So..."

Erza quietly whispered while studying it from every angle.

"This is his aura..."

For several seconds she simply observed the stone in silence. The aura stored inside was undeniably Yuuta’s, yet despite holding it directly in her hand...

She felt...

Nothing.

No discomfort.

No corruption.

No instinctive rejection.

Only silence.

The Dragon Queen slowly shifted her gaze toward the terrified Salesman Demon before looking at Sara without turning her body.

"Sara."

"Do you sense anything from this stone?"

Sara respectfully stepped closer before focusing her senses upon the crystal resting inside Erza’s hand.

The moment she did...

Her expression immediately changed.

She frowned.

"There is..."

She hesitated for a brief moment before answering honestly.

"Yes, Your Highness."

"I can feel something."

"It isn’t merely aura."

"There is an uncomfortable presence sealed inside it."

"It feels..."

Sara searched for the proper words.

"...unclean."

"...Almost unkown."

The answer caused Erza’s eyes to narrow. Because she didn’t feel anything, Erza thought Maybe i am so stronger that I can’t feel it,?.

She slowly turned toward Sara, her expression becoming unusually serious.

"I want you to remember that feeling."

"Observe everything carefully."

"After what happens next..."

"...I want a complete report of every difference you sense."

Sara immediately lowered her head.

"As Your Majesty wishes."

Erza nodded once.

Without another word...

She tightened her grip around the Aesthor Stone.

Then.....

Crack!

She slammed it onto the stone floor beneath her feet.

The moment the Aesthor Stone shattered against the floor, the entire interrogation room was swallowed by an eruption of aura.

A reddish-black mist burst from the broken crystal, spreading through the chamber like thick smoke escaping from a prison that had remained sealed for centuries. It didn’t disperse naturally. Instead, it drifted through the air in unnatural currents, twisting and writhing as though it possessed a will of its own.

Sara’s crimson eyes widened.

Aura...

Shouldn’t have color.

At least, not under normal circumstances.

Only when aura became unimaginably dense could ordinary eyes perceive it. Such a phenomenon existed only in ancient records and forgotten theories. Even Sara had never witnessed it personally despite living for centuries.

Yet...

The aura before her wasn’t simply visible.

It felt fundamentally wrong.

A chill crawled across her spine as she instinctively took a small step backward. Every instinct she possessed warned her that the energy filling the room didn’t belong to anything she had ever encountered before.

Then...Aura disapper.

A horrifying scream shattered the silence.

"NO!!"

Sara immediately turned toward the Salesman Demon.

His entire body convulsed violently.

The holy chains rattled as he desperately struggled against them, his eyes rolling wildly while blood streamed from his nose. He wasn’t looking at Erza anymore.

He wasn’t looking at anyone inside the room.

His gaze remained fixed upon something...

Something invisible.

"I didn’t kill anyone!"

His voice cracked in terror.

"I swear!"

"I didn’t!"

"Please!"

"Don’t make me watch it again!"

His hands clawed desperately at the empty air as though countless unseen figures had surrounded him. Tears mixed with blood ran across his face while his breathing became completely erratic.

"No..."

"No..."

"That’s too much sin..."

"I didn’t kill them..."

His voice gradually broke into meaningless sobs.

The hallucination completely consumed him.

Whatever he was seeing...

Only he could see it.

Sara remained frozen.

She barely felt anything from the aura itself. It certainly made her uncomfortable, but not enough to explain the absolute madness overtaking the demon. The aura simply felt...

Wrong.

Like something incomplete.

Like something that should never have existed within this world.

Then...

The screaming suddenly stopped.

The demon’s body stiffened.

His pupils lost all life.

A final shiver passed through his body before he collapsed motionless against the floor.

He was dead.

Madness had devoured him completely.

Nearly a minute passed before the strange reddish-black aura gradually faded away. The room slowly returned to normal, leaving behind only silence and the lifeless corpse lying across the cracked stone floor.

Erza remained standing exactly where she had been from the beginning.

Her expression hadn’t changed.

She quietly observed the corpse for several seconds before speaking without looking away.

"Sara."

"What did you feel?"

Sara lowered her head, trying to organize sensations she couldn’t properly explain.

"My Queen..."

She hesitated.

For a brief moment, Sara wondered whether she should even mention it. The strange aura she had sensed had lasted for barely a second before disappearing completely. She feared giving a false report before the most terrifying being she had ever met. After several moments of silence, she decided to speak only about what she was absolutely certain of.

"I... don’t understand what I just experienced."

She lowered her head slightly before continuing.

"It didn’t feel like ordinary aura, Your Highness. It was... unknown to me. I cannot compare it to any race or creature I have ever encountered."

Sara slowly shook her head, trying to organize the chaotic thoughts inside her mind.

"I also cannot say much because I believe the amount of aura sealed inside that Aesthor Stone was very small. Whatever I sensed was only a fragment of its true nature, so perhaps I experienced only a tiny portion of it."

She paused, searching for words capable of describing something she couldn’t even comprehend.

"But even that tiny fragment..."

"...felt wrong."

Her crimson eyes drifted toward the shattered crystal scattered across the floor.

"My Queen... the best way I can describe it is that this aura..."

"...should not exist."

The words caused Erza’s expression to change ever so slightly.

She slowly turned her head toward Sara the moment those words left her mouth, her violet eyes narrowing with unmistakable seriousness.

Sara immediately understood that those words had caught Erza’s attention.

"It feels... unnatural," she continued quietly. "Not simply evil... not simply corrupted. It feels as though the world itself rejects its existence. As though it was never meant to be born."

Erza remained silent for several seconds before calmly asking,

"In simpler words..."

"What are you trying to say?"

Sara lowered her gaze once more.

She remained silent for several long moments, carefully choosing every word before finally answering.

"I believe..."

"...this aura belongs to an unknown existence."

"It doesn’t resemble a dragon... a vampire... a demon... a human... or any race recorded in Nova."

Her fists unconsciously tightened as she recalled the indescribable sensation.

"If I had to give it a name..."

Sara slowly turned toward the Salesman Demon’s lifeless corpse, remembering how madness had devoured him the instant he came into contact with that aura.

"...I would safely call it..."

"...the aura of an unknown monster."

She remained silent afterward, trying to make sense of everything she had just experienced.

The strange aura had certainly made her uneasy, but beyond that...

Nothing.

She hadn’t suffered hallucinations.

She hadn’t heard voices.

She hadn’t lost control of her mind.

The only thing she had truly felt was an indescribable discomfort, as though something completely alien had briefly brushed against her existence before disappearing.

Yet...

The Salesman Demon had gone completely insane.

The difference made no sense.

Sara frowned deeply.

Perhaps...

The amount of aura stored inside the Aesthor Stone had simply been too little to affect someone like her. That explanation sounded reasonable at first, yet it immediately created another question.

If the aura had been so weak...

Then why had the demon died?

The contradiction refused to leave her mind.

Meanwhile...

Erza quietly sighed.

Everything Sara had described perfectly matched what Erza had been suspecting ever since she witnessed Yuuta’s aura for the first time.

"...An unknown aura..."

Erza whispered to herself.

A trace of sadness appeared inside her violet eyes.

She already knew Yuuta had never been born naturally. From the memories she had witness, she understood that his existence had been artificially created through experiments involving countless unknown elements. Unfortunately, his childhood memories started before revealing exactly what those experiments had been.

Now...

Sara’s description completed another missing piece.

His aura wasn’t unique.

It was...

Broken.

It belonged to an existence that the world itself couldn’t properly recognize.

No race could identify it.

Perhaps...

Not even the gods.

Erza slowly lowered her gaze.

For the first time since meeting Yuuta...

She genuinely felt relieved that she had never attempted to teach him aura.

If his aura itself was already this unstable...

Then what kind of Soul Realm trial existed inside him?

She couldn’t answer that question.

Even someone like Erza wasn’t willing to gamble with something so unknown.

After a brief moment, the sadness disappeared from her expression.

There was still another mystery demanding an answer.

She slowly looked toward the Salesman Demon’s corpse.

"...What exactly..."

"...did you see?"

Erza quietly murmured.

Memory Reading had shown nothing.

Not a single hallucination.

Not a single illusion.

Which meant whatever had driven the demon insane had never existed inside his memories.

Only his soul...

Had witnessed it.

And somehow...

That encounter had been enough to kill him.

Erza crouched beside the corpse before carefully examining every inch of his body. Several minutes passed in complete silence as her fingers traced faint streams of residual mana still lingering beneath his skin.

Then...

She smiled.

"I see..."

The answer finally revealed itself.

The demon hadn’t simply died from madness.

His demonic mana...

Had completely disappeared.

Not dispersed.

Not exhausted.

Gone.

Even his life force had vanished alongside it, leaving behind nothing more than an empty shell. Whatever the demon had encountered hadn’t merely broken his mind.

It had consumed his very existence.

Erza stood slowly, the pieces finally clicking into place within her mind.

The fragments of understanding that had been scattered across her memory now formed a coherent picture terrible, undeniable, and heartbreaking.

She remembered the zoo.

The way she had tried to heal Yuuta, the way he had consumed everything inside her, her mana, her aura, her very essence.

She remembered the memory sealing, when she had repaired the Seven crown seal placed by the Goddess of the World Tree, and how Yuuta had absorbed Zani from her, plunging into a nightmare that had nearly consumed him.

She began to understand.

The realization struck Erza harder than any blade ever could.

The Goddess of the World Tree hadn’t sent Yuuta to Earth by coincidence.

She had deliberately chosen a world almost completely devoid of mana, a world where his soul wouldn’t be constantly surrounded by the endless energy flowing through Nova.

Only now did Erza understand that the Goddess must have foreseen something terrifying about Yuuta’s existence. To everyone, he looked completely human despite his unknown origin.

The Goddess had most likely believed that if he lived on Earth, away from mana and away from the endless conflicts of Nova, he could one day die peacefully as nothing more than an ordinary human.

Then another detail surfaced inside Erza’s mind.

The Memory Chamber From Elf kingdom.

It had taken them three entire days to finish reading Yuuta’s memories. At first she had assumed it was because his memories had been protected, but now that explanation no longer satisfied her. Yuuta had entered the laboratory when he was barely four years old. A four-year-old child should never possess enough memories to occupy someone for three entire days. That could only mean one thing.

There were memories she had never been allowed to see.

Horrifying memories.

Memories hidden behind the Divine Seal that only the Goddess and the rulers of the Elf Kingdom knew about. Whatever truth existed before Yuuta’s recorded childhood had been buried so deeply that even Memory Reading couldn’t reach it. It explained why the Goddess had sealed him, erased those memories, and sent him away from Nova before anyone else could discover the truth.

Erza’s brows slowly knitted together.

Yet one question refused to leave her mind.

Why did Yuuta’s very existence consume everything around him?

Mana.

Aura.

Even Zani.

Everything eventually disappeared back into Yuuta, as though his soul itself had become an endless abyss.

Erza remained silent.

She could no longer understand the purpose behind Subject Zero Karma.

If the experiment’s objective had truly been to create the perfect Dragon Slayer, then his existence should have been stable... controllable.

Instead, Yuuta’s soul was fractured. His aura leaked uncontrollably. It carried emotions so violent that even an Aesthor Stone struggled to contain them.

This wasn’t perfection.

It was failure.

Yet...

One truth had become painfully clear.

Yuuta wasn’t suffering because of fate alone.

He was suffering because of her too.

Her presence.

Her Aura.

Even the Mana naturally surrounding Nova itself.

Every moment he spent near her unknowingly weakened the Seven Crown Seal protecting him and also Demonic aura. Perhaps the Goddess had never anticipated that demons already existed on Earth. Their corrupted mana had slowly eroded the seal for years, accelerating the very disaster she had tried to prevent.

Erza’s heart tightened.

For the first time in centuries...

Genuine despair filled her violet eyes.

Despite knowing she had already caused Yuuta nothing but pain... despite knowing she had selfishly dragged him into a world he had never wanted...

A small part of her heart had continued to dream.

She had believed...

That if she sealed away her dragon aura... if she abandoned her authority, her title, and even her mana...

Then perhaps...

She could simply remain beside him.

Not as the Dragon Queen.

Not as Nova’s strongest existence.

But as Erza.

His wife.

Living the quiet life Yuuta had always dreamed of—a small home, peaceful mornings, shared meals, and Elena’s laughter filling every corner. A life where there were no wars to fight, no kingdoms to protect, and no blood left to shed.

It had been a foolish dream.

A selfish one.

Yet...

It was the only dream she had ever allowed herself to have.

Now...

After witnessing the truth hidden within Yuuta’s soul...

That fragile dream quietly crumbled before her eyes.

If she truly loved him...

She could never stay beside him.

A single tear escaped the corner of her eye before she gently wiped it away with the back of her hand. There was no anger left inside her, only a quiet sorrow she had never experienced before.

The suffering Yuuta had carried was far greater than she had ever imagined. From the moment of his creation, every step of his life had been nothing more than a desperate attempt to delay an inevitable disaster. Even the Goddess herself, a divine existence worshipped across Nova, had failed to save him completely.

Erza slowly closed her eyes.

"I understand now..."

Her voice was barely louder than a whisper.

"I will erase the Demonic Era... fulfill every wish you still have... and only then..."

A faint, bittersweet smile appeared across her lips, though tears still lingered within her violet eyes.

"...will I leave you in peace."

"My Idoit Mortal."

Suddenly.....

A violent chill crawled across her soul.

Erza’s entire body froze.

It wasn’t Aura.

It wasn’t Mana.

It was...

Fear.

An unfamiliar panic spread through her heart as though something invisible had reached directly into her soul.

Then she heard it.

"...Save me..."

The weak, broken voice echoed clearly inside her mind.

Another whisper followed.

"...Save me..."

Erza’s violet eyes widened.

"...Yuuta."

For the first time since arriving on Earth, genuine panic appeared across the Dragon Queen’s face.

She turned toward Sara so abruptly that everyone inside the interrogation room stiffened.

"I have to go back."

Those were the only words she spoke.

The next instant, Erza vanished.

A deafening sonic boom exploded throughout the interrogation room as she disappeared, leaving behind only a violent gust of wind that shook the entire Agency. Sara, Fiona, Lily, and every elite agent stared toward the empty space where the Dragon Queen had been standing only a heartbeat earlier, their expressions filled with confusion as none of them had ever seen Erza abandon a conversation so suddenly.

Something had happened.

And whatever it was...

It was important enough to make even the Queen of Atlantis panic.

To be continued.