BFT | Chapter 35

2.

It was said that the earthquake had shaken even a small city more than an hour away from Abaddon Prison. The city hall officials were too busy handling complaints to care whether the felons lived or died. They had dumped the prison repairs on the warden, too. Everything had gone exactly as Ryall had expected.

"Was there a riot? My God, how many bodies is this?"

A merchant who came to deliver bread in the afternoon blanched when he saw the mountain of corpses piled in the corner in front of the main building.

"Over a hundred, probably. They were going to die anyway."

"They just died a few days earlier than scheduled."

The guards said this as they hauled corpses out of Abaddon Prison. The prisoners were still locked in tents, without even a sip of water. They had told the warden, "We have to open the prison gate while the bodies are being buried, so we can't let the prisoners wander around outside." That was the excuse they gave him, but Ryall had another purpose.

He meant to kill as many prisoners as possible this time. Yesterday, too, he had mainly picked out the young prisoners who had dirtied the beast and hacked them down with an axe. They had been lucky enough to live longer than scheduled because they had been used as stallions to impregnate the beast. If Ryall regretted anything, it was only that he had not been able to kill them even more brutally. He did not feel the slightest trace of guilt.

The warden seemed to have guessed at the whole picture, but as a veteran he treated Ryall no differently than usual. The guards, on the other hand, had changed their attitude noticeably. They would not meet his eyes. They carried out every order without a single complaint.

Ryall had no interest in what the guards thought of him, then or now, but he did know one thing. Up until now, the guards had looked down on him. They had sneered behind his back that he was nothing more than a brute with fists but a dull, blocked-up head.

I really was stupid back then.

When he had been in the army, Ryall had been a teenage upstart. He knew very well that just by existing, he stirred hostility in men, but he had not yet learned how to hide himself. But now things were different. The boy had grown into someone not to be taken lightly, and he had saved up a huge sum of money. Two weeks later, Ryall planned to turn Abaddon Prison into an execution ground and leave the country with the beast.

While serving as an executioner, Ryall had the chance to observe court society from afar. During that time, he had encountered quite a few fake nobles who had laundered their identities. It was the moment when he overturned the rigid belief that rank was decided at birth and that status could never be changed.

Ryall planned to wash his identity clean abroad and pass as a minor noble, then live quietly somewhere with the beast. The common-born were discriminated against and disadvantaged in every way. In the army, common-born soldiers started as enlisted men, while noble sons started as officers. Capital guards would barge into commoners' homes for no particular reason. Ryall would have to protect the beast in the future, and to keep others from barging into their home at will, a noble status was absolutely necessary.

Ryall did not allow the prisoners to eat until after seven in the evening. After being locked in the tents for twenty-four hours, all of them were utterly exhausted. There had been more than a dozen deaths as well.

Around nine at night, Ryall went into his private tent. By the brazier, the beast was sound asleep.

This morning, when Ryall had first seen the beast's face in the bright sunlight, he had been startled. It was far more beautiful than when he had been seeing that face in the dim firelight of the underground solitary cell. And its complexion had been so pale.

When Ryall asked whether he was hurt or sick, the beast had smiled.

- I wouldn't call it illness, but my complexion is probably bad enough.

Those words made Ryall's hatred for the men who had dirtied the beast flare up again.

- The magical power that moves our bodies increases when we sleep.

- If I sleep well, I'll feel better.

- I'll be sleeping all day, so don't wake me.

Ryall promised he would never wake him. He knew very well how important sleep was to the body of a demon.

"Mm...."

With a faint sigh, the beast slowly opened his eyes. As the eyelids that carried long lashes lifted like theater curtains, blue irises were revealed. Ryall was utterly dazzled. Could the Mediterranean the way people talked about it be that blue? He suddenly wondered what it would feel like if those eyes regained their ruby color.

"You're awake? How do you feel?"

When Ryall asked, the beast lowered his gaze. Even though he had slept soundly all day, his expression looked darker than usual. Ryall found himself having a pathetic thought for a moment. Could that "mate" have appeared in the beast's dreams?

The instant the beast said that he could not summon his mate into the human world, Ryall immediately realized the bond between them was rather deep. That was how lonely the beast's eyes had looked. Demon ecology supposedly solved reproduction with fistfights, but the beast and his mate seemed more like they had come together through a romance.

He could never say this to anyone, but through the whole day Ryall had mulled over jealous thoughts toward the mate in question. What did that bastard look like? How had he met the beast? How good was he in bed? Was the bastard the beast's first partner? How many children had they had together? How well had the bastard done as a father?

He was curious about every single thing, and jealous of every single thing. He was angry with himself for feeling so intensely envious of a man he would never meet the beast with again, like some fool.

Forcing those stupid thoughts away, Ryall said, "You look gloomy. Did you have a nightmare?"

"Something like that."

The beast sat up and wrote in the air.

"I had a terrible dream."

"A dream where I turned into a human nobleman."

"Unluckily, he had a venereal disease."

Ryall was speechless.

"Because of the disease, he had a hard time with bowel movements every time."

"He had to eat too, because he was human."

"He tried not to drink wine if he could help it because of the bowel problem, but people kept urging him to drink, which was awful."

"At a party welcoming foreign ambassadors, he danced with an ambassador's wife, and though his lower half hurt terribly, he still finished to the very end with dignity."

Ryall could not find anything to say in response. If one of the guards under him had said something like that, he would have at least laughed politely, but the beast's expression was too serious for that. Still, anyone who suddenly dreamed of turning into a pig and rolling around in a filthy pen would probably find it horrifying.

Ryall rubbed his chin with one hand, sorting through his thoughts.

"I've been curious for a while. You seem to know a lot about humans. You can read too.... How did you learn all that? Can you speak a lot of languages besides this one? Can you even read the pictographs of the native people in the New World?"

"Pictographs just look like strange drawings even to demon eyes."

The beast answered with a placid expression.

"Our demon language system, things like the alphabet, grammar, and vocabulary, is similar to the Germanic languages of the human world."

"Because of language issues, the places demons operate in are mostly in Europe."

Listening to the explanation, Ryall found it fascinating.

"My Baphomet clan is raised by the mother and father for the first three years after birth."

"During that time, we learn magic as well as all kinds of knowledge, and knowledge about humans is taught with a lot of emphasis."

"You can absorb that much knowledge just three years after being born?"

"A demon's growth process is different from a human's."

"There are differences in growth speed from race to race, but at the very least, there isn't some hopeless race like yours that only barely learns to speak after four or five years."

"In growth rate, physical ability, and mental strength, we're superior to humans in every respect."

The beast was mocking humans to no end, but Ryall could not find a single argument to refute him.

"And we don't teach knowledge through words or books like humans do."

"We carry knowledge on magic and transmit it that way."

"So you absorb knowledge the way you would drink water.... But is there some important reason you study human knowledge so seriously?"

"If you want to seduce humans, you have to understand humans well."

"Only then can you steal a human soul."

"The myths and stories humans know about demons are mostly nonsense, but soul theft is real."

"I see. That's surprising."

Ryall gave the appropriate responses and concluded that the myths and stories about demons were, for the most part, not wrong. He was frankly dumbfounded by the beast's insistence that the image humans knew of demons was mostly distorted. Everything the beast had told him so far about demons was no different from the demons in human stories. Of course, he did not say this out loud, because he thought the beast might get upset.

"Why do demons steal human souls? Do you use human souls as currency in your world or something?"

"It's just instinct."

"Like a female mantis instinctively eating the male after mating is over."

The beast said this with a smile.

"The Great Demon King made us this way."

"He engraved it into us so that every demon would take soul binding as its destiny."

"I was born that way too, and it's not my fault."

In other words, the Great Demon King was the brain, and demons were just his hands and feet.

"Do you know why the Great Demon King made you that way?"

"What a foolish question."

"That's like asking whether you know the will of God."

"You can vaguely guess, but only the Great Demon King himself would know the exact meaning."