The small wooden door of the room was pushed open very slowly, making absolutely no sound. Javien stepped into the silent space, his eyes instantly fixing on the bed in the corner of the room.

There, Olivia was fast asleep. The maid’s face looked utterly exhausted, her breath rising and falling steadily in the stillness of the afternoon.

Javien walked over to the bed and knelt beside Olivia’s sleeping form without making a single sound.

He stared at her peaceful face the face of the girl who had sacrificed so much to heal the traumatic scars in his life.

Javien’s grip on the hilt of his sword tightened, and his chest felt tight with an incredibly heavy weight of guilt. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

"Sleep, Olivia..."

Javien whispered sorrowfully in his heart. He raised his hand slightly, longing to gently touch her hair, but he stopped himself, fearing he might disturb his beloved girl’s rest.

"I swear... this time, if you do the same thing again, I am willing to fall right alongside you."

Javien slowly stood back up, intending to leave the room to give Olivia space to rest.

However, just as he turned around, his eyes accidentally caught Olivia’s small vanity table in the corner of the room.

The vanity drawer was slightly open.

Javien flinched slightly. His alert nature as a Knight made him feel suspicious in tandem. He took a step closer to the vanity.

His original intention was merely to close the drawer properly, as he felt guilty about touching Olivia’s personal belongings without permission.

But as his hand reached out to push the drawer shut, his eyes caught a glimpse of an old notebook tucked inside. The book was open to a worn-out page.

Zap...

Javien’s heart seemed to stop for a beat.

His dark eyes froze on a line of words written on that page.

It was a line that described just how painful Olivia’s life had been during the phase when Javien was no longer by her side in this world. Every single word written on that sheet was drenched in a profound sense of loneliness, devastation, and loss.

Javien grit his teeth, the guilt stinging his chest even sharper. However, things took an strange turn when he flipped to the next page.

Those pages contained no regular words at all. Instead, there was nothing left but a chaotic mess of scribbled black lines and mysterious symbols, roughly sketched out. It looked like a sigil of some sort.

Curiosity overrode his guilt. With hands that trembled slightly, Javien began to silently flip through the pages of the book, one by one.

The more he flipped, the wider his eyes stretched in shock. He was completely frozen in the dead silence of the room, his tongue tied, unable to utter a single word.

He wasn’t seeing things. These scribbled symbols in Olivia’s book... Javien had definitely seen them before.

However, the memory was far too blurry, leaving him unsure and conflicted about the true meaning behind them. The only thing he knew for certain was that he had encountered that ghastly pattern before in a faint, blood-drenched memory.

A dark foreboding settled in his gut, and his breathing grew slightly uneven.

In that past life, he was absolutely certain that Olivia knew nothing about the existence of this foreign entity. Olivia was just an ordinary maid who should never have been involved in that dark world of conspiracies.

Yet, looking at the sketches right before his eyes now, Javien’s mind grew increasingly restless and anxious for her safety.

What made his blood run even colder was that the arrangement and pattern of the symbols Olivia had scribbled in this book looked different... something didn’t match the fragmented memories he held.

How could Olivia possibly know about this symbol? And what exactly was going on behind the scenes?

Javien slowly closed the book again, placing it back into the drawer with extreme care so its position wouldn’t look altered.

He turned to look at Olivia, who was still sound asleep, his gaze heavy with questions and mystery.

"You shouldn’t be involved in any of this, Olivia..."

he thought to himself, before turning to slip away.

After ensuring the notebook was safely hidden again, Javien walked out of Olivia’s chamber with a heart weighed down by a thousand riddles.

He returned to his dim guardroom and threw his exhausted body onto the bed, hoping that sleep would soothe the pounding in his head.

However, the moment his eyes closed, the serenity of sleep was violently torn away.

Javien found himself trapped in a deeply dark nightmare.

Within his slumbering subconscious, shattered fragments of memories came rushing back with a vengeance, triggered by the mysterious symbol he had just seen in the notebook.

In the dream, everything was swallowed by a thick, suffocating darkness.

In the next instant, he was forced to witness the form of a woman lying completely rigid, no longer moving. Javien couldn’t see her face clearly; everything was blurry and veiled in shadows.

Yet, what hurt his chest the most was when he faintly caught the trace of that woman’s final smile before everything was swept into silence. A smile so familiar, yet so painfully sorrowful, right before his entire world plunged into pitch black.

He knew her so well... but in the nightmares he had endured ever since turning 15, his memories had only grown stronger. He tried his best not to remember, but... that single event had altered his life forever.

"Argh...!"

Javien jolted awake, his eyes wide in the darkness of his room. He sat up gasping for air, cold sweat drenching his forehead and back.

Without him even realizing it, tears of anguish and grief began to roll down his cheeks, wetting his face in the dead of night.

He raised his palm in the dim, faint light. Something bizarre was happening.

The severe traumatic scars on his body... within just these past two days, they seemed to be healing at a rate that was unnaturally fast compared to usual.

Javien pressed his hand over his eyes, trying to banish the lingering nightmare that gripped his soul. His heart was still beating at an abnormally frantic pace.

In his state of utter chaos and ragged breathing, he reached for his clothes, driven by an urgent, overwhelming primal instinct.

He needed to see her. Right now.

"It is enough for me just to see that she is still breathing..."

his heart whispered sorrowfully.

With steps shrouded in anxiety, he walked briskly and silently back through the corridor toward Olivia’s chamber.

Arriving at her door, Javien stood frozen for a moment, drawing a deep breath to steady the storm in his chest.

The same feelings of guilt and longing washed over him, only in a different place and a different timeline.

A bitter, faint smile carved its way onto his face in the dark. Javien tried to turn the doorknob, only to realize something amiss the door was locked tightly from the inside.

Refusing to give up and unwilling to knock for fear of disrupting her sleep, Javien turned his gaze toward the outer corridor.

His deep yearning and desperate protectiveness as a guard overrode his common sense.

He stepped outside, scaled the balcony, and decided to slip inside by gripping the frame of Olivia’s window, which was left slightly ajar.

The moment his feet touched the floor inside, he let out a sigh of relief seeing Olivia still sleeping peacefully in her bed, completely undisturbed.

But that peace lasted only for a split second.

Before Javien could make another move, a sudden, searing heat erupted through his entire body! A fiercely aggressive, foreign torrent of energy began to course wildly through his veins.

Javien’s heart hammered frantically. Instantly, he knew... the demon blood inside him was reacting violently!

The trigger from the symbol in Olivia’s book had silently shattered the seals within him.

Thinking only of Olivia’s safety, Javien wasted no time.

He leaped back out of the window, sprinting through the dark night straight back toward his own quarters.

The moment he crossed the threshold, he slammed the door shut and locked it securely from within.

Click!

Inside the pitch-black room, a dense, freezing, and lethal black aura exploded outward, completely enveloping Javien’s body.

The veins on his forehead and arms began to bulge, darkening beneath his skin. He knew... the beast inside him was waking up to take control.

In the depths of his pitch-black room, Javien collapsed onto the floor, forcing every ounce of his strength to keep from making a single sound that could shatter the quiet night.

Yet, the burning assault inside his body only grew more intense. Every drop of the mysterious liquid medicine that the cruel Duke had secretly forced him to drink was now interacting and reacting aggressively within his bloodstream.

Javien let out a choked groan. He sacrificed his remaining strength to crawl, gripping the foot of the wooden bed so tightly that the veins on his hands bulged wildly.

In that exact moment, his eyes flared with a brilliant purple light in the dim darkness, casting a dangerous, magical glow.

In all his life, the demon blood inside him had rarely awakened to rage like this.

He knew it was all because of the mysterious liquid Duke Herold frequently gave him to keep the power locked away temporarily.

But... Javien himself had no idea why, on this quiet night, after merely seeing the symbol in Olivia’s notebook, his soul and body were reacting so horrifyingly.

He felt as though his body was being ripped clean in half. The pain pierced straight to the marrow of his bones! The dark power within him could no longer be contained.

Even though Javien forced his rational mind to stay anchored, the demonic entity inside his flesh was growing increasingly aggressive, desperate to tear its way out of his vessel.

As his mind began to spin, the thought flashed through Javien’s head to drag his body to Duke Herold just to beg for the suppressing antidote. But his sanity quickly put a stop to it.

In his current state acting no different than a wild, untamed beast he was utterly terrified that the people around this manor, especially Olivia, would fall victim to his carnage!

He had seen this horrific sight once before. A past memory flashed by; he had witnessed his own father go berserk in the exact same manner. But back then, his father possessed a secret method and formula to subdue the demon within the flesh.

But Javien? He had never been told a single secret behind this cursed power.

When he was a child, his mother had passed away early on, while his father suddenly vanished without a trace in a battle, rumored to have been defeated.

Javien was left to survive in the dark, never knowing the truth of who he really was.

Dragged back to the suspenseful reality, Javien continued to fight for his life against his own body. Using the absolute last remnants of his sanity, he tried to drag himself slowly toward the door.

He had to lock that door tightly, so that if he truly lost control in the next few minutes, his demonic form would not be able to escape this room to claim the lives of others.

But just as his hand was about to reach the doorknob, Javien’s heart felt as though it was about to detonate!

BAM! BAM! BAM!

His heartbeat thundered frantically.

Javien gasped, the air catching inside his throat in a highly critical state.

The atmosphere inside the chamber suddenly turned into a biting, bone-chilling cold as a dense black mist erupted outward, filling every corner of the room.

The impact of that darkness was devastating; all the green plants sitting in the corner of his private room suddenly withered and dried up within seconds, as if the entire life force of the vegetation had been violently drained by his black aura.

Javien panicked completely. He knew his time was up...