The rain had long since stopped by the time night settled over the forest. The ground remained muddy, soft earth still drinking in the last of the storm.
Renher awoke from a deep, dreamless slumber.
Pain hit him immediately — sharp and insistent, radiating through his chest and legs like hot iron pressed against bone. He drew a slow breath, steadying himself, and opened his eyes.
He expected the forest.
He expected the familiar tangle of branches overhead, the blood-soaked earth beneath him, and perhaps the translucent shape of the floating ghost drifting somewhere nearby.
What greeted him instead made him forget the pain entirely.
Dread moved across his face like a shadow.
He lay inside an underground cave, vast and sunless, swallowed whole by darkness. The air was cold and damp, thick with the smell of something ancient. In places, the cave walls receded into deeper black — but what caught his eye were the cocoons.
Dozens of them.
They hung suspended from the ceiling and jutted from crevices in the rock, each one pulsing faintly with a deep, crimson hue, as though something alive slept within.
Renher's eyes swept the chamber in rapid, disciplined arcs — a soldier's reflex. No sword. No ghost. No exit he could immediately identify.
Where am I? What are these things? How did I get here? What happened to the forest?
The questions surged through him in a single chaotic wave, each one colliding with the next before an answer could form.
"You're awake."
The voice came from somewhere to his left, calm and unhurried.
"I thought you had died. That's a relief."
Renher turned sharply, jaw tightening.
The ghost floated a few feet away, translucent as ever, his expression carrying the particular patience of someone who had already done their panicking and moved past it.
"Where am I?" Renher demanded. "Who are you?"
The ghost tilted his head faintly, as though considering how best to answer.
"I am you," he said. "The one who died."
Renher stared at him.
"More precisely," the ghost continued, clasping his hands loosely, "I am the one who summoned you to this world. The body you now inhabit was, until recently, mine — or rather, mine to borrow."
Renher was still lying on the cave floor. He didn't move to rise — not yet. His instincts, honed through years of war and blood, were scanning the darkness around him with quiet urgency. Nothing had attacked. Nothing had stirred. The ghost's presence, strange as it was, carried none of the pressure of a threat.
Friendly, at least for now, he concluded. Probably.
"Before anything else," Renher said carefully, "tell me how I came to be here. Then we can proceed." A pause. "And your name."
"Kazuma," the ghost replied. "Though the name tied to this body — your body now — is Cornelius."
He drifted slightly, the faint crimson glow of a nearby cocoon passing through him without resistance.
"And before you ask — I did not specifically choose you. You were selected. Randomly, it seems, after your death."
Renher's expression didn't change, but something shifted behind his eyes.
Kazuma noticed. "You're safe for now. When you fell unconscious in the forest, something pulled us both here. I don't know why or how — one moment I was watching over you, and the next, I was enclosed in this place alongside you." He glanced briefly at the shadows surrounding them. "I've already scouted the chamber. It isn't large. No visible exits. And at the far end—" he gestured toward the distant dark — "there is a throne. A figure sits upon it. Crown. Sword. Lifeless, as far as I can tell."
"As far as you can tell," Renher repeated flatly.
"Yes. As far as I can tell."
A silence settled between them, brief and weighted. Then Renher pushed himself upright, gritting his teeth as his wounds protested the movement. He sat with his back against the cave wall, arms resting on his knees, and fixed the ghost with a level gaze.
"Alright," he said. "Talk. All of it. Why should I trust you?"
Kazuma was quiet for a moment.
"Honestly? You have no particular reason to," he admitted. "But the people tied to this body treated me with genuine kindness. I have a debt I haven't repaid. That's the closest thing to a reason I can offer." He paused. "I'll explain properly. Just listen."
Renher gave a single, measured nod.
Kazuma began.
The body, he explained, had originally belonged to Cornelius — a young man with an uncommon ability. He could summon a soul from another world, drawing it across the boundary between lives. The cost, however, was absolute. The summoner's own soul was displaced in the process, left without an anchor and a menas to merge itself.
Cornelius had invoked this power only when death was already upon him — a final, desperate gambit. The soul he had drawn was my own.
"I was a samurai in my previous life," Kazuma said, without particular ceremony. "When I woke in this body, Cornelius's soul was already fading. We managed to deal with what was threatening us at the time — a wild boar, nothing more — and bought ourselves some breathing room. But Cornelius had nothing left to hold onto and the process merge sould i was not familiar with it. He passed within hours."
Renher said nothing, listening.
"I spent four months after that adapting. Learning this world's rules, its people, its geography. Everything was fine." Kazuma's expression shifted slightly — something wry, and tired, underneath it. "Until today. The monkey. You know the rest."
"The sword," Renher said. "You mentioned merging yourself with the sword."
"Yes." Kazuma glanced downward, though the sword was nowhere visible in the cave. "When I arrived in this world, I was granted a power — what the people here call a ability. Mine is Merging. I can combine compatible things into something new. Before I died, I used Cornelius's summoning ability to call a new soul — yours — and used my own power to bind it to this body." A faint, somewhat self-satisfied expression crossed his translucent face. "And I merged what remained of my own soul into the sword, so I wouldn't simply vanish. A medium to persist. It worked, evidently."
"Evidently," Renher said dryly.
"These abilities — as they're called — are rare in this world. Granted by gods and goddesses to a select few. I don't fully understand the criteria. But i guess every sould can have only one ability" Kazuma folded his arms. "But that's what I am. That's how we arrived at this moment."
A quiet beat followed.
"Your turn," Kazuma said simply.
Renher was still for a moment. Then, unhurriedly, he began to speak.
He told Kazuma about his past — the kingdom he had ruled, the wars he had fought, the battlefield where gods had bled into the earth. He spoke of Kaileen without lingering on her, though her name clearly cost him something to say aloud. When he finished, the silence that followed was different from the ones before it — fuller, somehow.
Kazuma regarded him with something that might have been respect.
"Quite the history, King," he said.
A faint colour touched Renher's face — just briefly, and quickly buried. He straightened, his expression resettling into the composed neutrality of a man long accustomed to command.
"Now that we know each other," he said, "let's find a way out of—"
The sound that cut him off was not a voice.