Dream
Chapter - 36
Pain always came first, before memory.
Dark, horrifying, and silent.
“Hah? What does this mean, Officer? I was only defending myself!” The voice sounded unfamiliar, yet his chest trembled as he spoke. “Why am I being named a suspect?”
“Silence.” The tone was cold, devoid of emotion. “You will be questioned. Do not talk too much.”
He lowered his head. His gaze fell on the blood seeping from the stab wound in his own abdomen, making his entire body shake.
“What does this mean…?” His voice weakened. “Shouldn’t I be treated first?”
That answer never came.
Two pairs of rough hands snapped cuffs around his wrists and dragged him across the street. Red lights glowed. Horns blared. People stopped, stared, whispered.
Beneath a road sign, two bodies lay still.
A thin-mustached man with a thick beard, unmoving. Beside him, a young girl in a white uniform, her clothes soaked red.
Her chest rose and fell weakly, showing that she was dying.
An ambulance siren tore through the crowd.
The girl was lifted first. Her face was pale, her eyes shut tight. Another ambulance arrived. A body bag was slowly zipped over the man’s corpse.
He did not look back when the police car door closed.
The interrogation room was cold. A blinding lamp hung at the center. Four people inside. One long table. Far too cramped for a room like this.
“What was your motive for committing that murder?” the officer in front of him asked.
He remained silent. Self-defense spun in his mind, but never left his lips.
“Chief,” another officer muttered with disgust, “he’s clearly a murderer.”
Silence filled the room.
“Take him to a cell,” the cold voice ordered.
The cuffs pulled at his arms again. A narrow corridor. Dim lights. Damp air mixed with the smell of iron. Suffocating.
“New guy?”
“Still young.”
“What case?”
The iron door slammed shut. The sound of the lock echoed longer than it should have.
Ten pairs of eyes stared at him.
“Why are you here?” asked a white-haired man.
He slowly sat down. His shoulders trembled.
“Self-defense.”
“What kind of self-defense?”
“…Because it wasn’t fair.”
No one spoke right away. A large man with a dragon tattoo on his arm stepped closer, staring at him longer than necessary.
“Maybe you were set up.”
He gave a small nod.
“I… think so too.”
Days passed without justice. Weeks turned into months. Months into years.
Family visits became rarer. The outside world felt like a children’s fairy tale, filled with hope and freedom.
Until one day, the guards stopped passing by. The cell fell silent.
Then
An explosion. The walls shook. The cell turned into an oven for the people inside.
Zavi jolted awake, his breath ragged. His chest felt heavy, as if crushed beneath collapsing rubble.
A bomb.
That was the last sound echoing in his head.
He looked around. A residential area. Lively. Peaceful. No justice. The memory surfaced, a memory that should have remained a nightmare from Earth.
Zavi clenched his fist. The memory did not fade.
It was only waiting for the right moment to return.
“Why am I only remembering this now?” he murmured in confusion.
Then a startled, worried voice came from beside him.
“Sir…? Why did you shout? People passing by are staring at us with strange looks!”
“A nightmare,” Zavi replied, trying to steady his breathing.
The two looked at each other, unsure what kind of dream could make him shout so incoherently.
“Did I say something strange while I was asleep?” Zavi asked, trying to confirm whether he had spoken about Earth in his sleep.
That worry faded after hearing the answer.
“Maybe… justice and freedom…”
Zavi’s blue eyes shimmered when he heard those words again. Tears welled up. On Earth, while still inside a detention cell, he had often spoken those two words, day after day, month after month, year after year, for ten long years.
His cellmates were confused at first, but eventually grew used to hearing them.
He did not know what true justice was. Without explanation, without evidence, without witnesses, they acted at will and treated him like a doll.
“So that’s how it is,” he murmured hoarsely.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t make it to the meeting point last night because those three silent-type Chalog were troublesome.”
“Ah… I’m sorry too. I couldn’t help you in time!”
Moreira panicked, the words slipping out unconsciously.
That night, after surviving the pursuit of the cursed-type Chalog and seeing them killed by the female evil spirit, they decided to seek out a crowd in the district. The location was not far from where Zavi had been, still on the same road, about a hundred meters away.
“Thank you, Miss. You saved my life again.”
The atmosphere suddenly turned awkward. The woman’s mind was filled with unanswered questions she had pondered throughout the journey, even back in the cafe.
Around 9:30 p.m., their temporary refuge was beside a branching side street, a market still bustling with activity. They leaned against a wall near stalls selling meat, medicine, and herbal concoctions, watched over by a man standing beside them. The vendor was kind, welcoming them warmly, able to tell they were from out of town just from the confusion on their faces, and promptly offered them two cups of herbal tea as a greeting.
After all, he worked alongside his wife, so he was not worried about his goods being taken while he prepared the tea in the back. Meanwhile, the woman guarding the stall, his wife, asked about their purpose for coming to the city. She invited them to sit so the conversation could be comfortable and calm.
Feeling awkward, Moreira initially refused and chose to remain standing while explaining his reason for coming, though not in full.
“You sell herbal concoctions, right?” Moreira asked casually.
The female vendor briefly glanced behind her at her husband, who was still calmly brewing the tea, then looked back at them with the eyes of a merchant.
“Yes,” she replied. “Are you interested in buying? Greysia is already famous in other cities, even beyond the kingdom. Your arrival is well timed. Tonight, I’ll give a special discount just for customers like you.”
After a long explanation about how remarkable the distribution of those concoctions was, she waited for a response from the beautiful girl standing before her and the young man sitting on the cushioned wooden chair.
Her gaze sharpened more than before. Moreira knew the woman was only joking about giving a special discount to customers like them.
“Esvalen, what do you think about this?” he asked to confirm.
The reason he addressed the third-rank evil spirit as Esvalen was simply to make it easier to call her. It felt impolite to use casual pronouns toward a young woman, and he intended to use that name here for the time being, even though he did not know her true purpose.
Unexpectedly, the name Esvalen, which had slipped from his thoughts without intention, made the woman smile happily, and she accepted the name given to her.
After recounting what he had experienced, Moreira looked at Zavi with a confused expression. Zavi’s face, once filled with calculation, had turned into fear, like prey encountering a predator.
Esvalen and Moreira glanced at each other, waiting for his direction. From another perspective, both thought that the word go home would be the right choice in a situation like this.
Zavi’s gaze was empty, staring ahead as if his purpose in this world meant nothing. Only then did he realize that he was nothing more than a child playing with death, despite being twenty-eight years old back on Earth.
At that time, his mind had seemed controlled by something, urging him to perform the ritual to gain supernatural power, to utter words he believed were wrong toward that Avatar in order to receive the ritual’s steps.
“Damn it… What’s the point of regretting it now? Haven’t I finally obtained the freedom I searched for all this time? Then why am I wasting it?”
After muttering in frustration and deciding what to do next now that he had come this far, Zavi began to stand. The pain in his little finger, which had throbbed earlier, was slowly but surely fading.
Strange.
“Yes, we’re going to that place. That’s right, isn’t it? Besides, when have I ever broken a promise?” Zavi said, his face far more spirited than before.
Moreira smiled faintly and replied enthusiastically. “Alright, sir. Let’s finish this cooperation as quickly as possible.”
“Oh, I see. That woman is still following you.”
Zavi stepped closer, slightly lowered his head, and spoke in a low voice. “Thank you. Back then, Miss, you saved me from that sudden attack.”
Esvalen lifted her shoulders slightly, confused, unsure how to respond. But after seeing Moreira give her a thumbs-up, she nodded and returned the gesture, pointing her thumb toward her chest.
“Huh? Why is a rank five doing this?”
She could not hide her shock, speaking to a rank five for the first time.
They moved forward, walking toward the stall to ask about various herbal concoctions as a requirement to control supernatural abilities.
People in the district passed by, going about their activities. They walked through the crowd and, a few minutes later, arrived at the stall near the market’s branching entrance.
“I didn’t expect you to come back here,” the stall owner said, unable to hide his delight.
“What is he saying? I don’t understand,” Esvalen whispered to Moreira at her side.
After chatting about life, like men usually do, and after a few minutes the topic shifted, Zavi finally revealed his true purpose for coming and hoped the man knew about herbal concoctions used to control the Prisoner ability.
Speaking in hushed tones, he told the other two to step away. Then, to Zavi’s surprise, obtaining information about the concoction turned out to be easy.
That was merely his strange assumption. In truth, searching for the ingredients was extremely dangerous, requiring strong resolve and readiness to sacrifice one’s life if gathering them directly. Some of the materials were found in forests, valleys, caves, and places possibly never exposed to the human world.
“H huh? This is heavier than I thought."
