Pain always came first before the memories. Dark, terrifying, and silent.
"Hah?! What do you mean by this, Officer? I don't know anything." The voice sounded unfamiliar, yet his chest trembled when he said it. "Why am I being made a suspect?"
"Silence!" The tone was cold, without emotion. "There is an eyewitness. You will give a statement. Do not talk too much."
He lowered his head. His gaze fell on the blood seeping from the slash wound on his own stomach. His knees wavered, his hands trembled, not because of the pain, but because justice no longer had any meaning.
"What do you mean…?" his voice weakened. "Shouldn't I be treated first?"
'Damn it. Uniformed bastards.'
The answer never came, as if it were a coin sinking into the vast ocean stretching as far as the eye could see.
Two pairs of rough hands cuffed his wrists and dragged him across the road like an animal. The traffic light glowed red. Car horns blared. People stopped, stared, whispered.
Beneath a road sign pole, two bodies lay on the ground.
A man with a thin mustache and thick beard, silent, unmoving. Beside him, a young girl wearing a gray jacket beneath her white uniform had turned red with blood.
Her chest rose and fell weakly, showing that the young girl was dying.
The ambulance siren split through the crowd. The girl was lifted first. Her face was pale, her eyes closed, her breathing rising and falling. Another ambulance arrived. The body bag was slowly closed over the man's body.
He did not look back again when the police car door opened wide and pulled him inside.
Inside the cold interrogation room. A blinding lamp hung in the middle. Four people inside, one sitting at the long table. Too narrow for a room.
"What was your motive for committing that murder?" asked the officer in front of him.
He remained silent. "Self-defense." The words spun in his head, but for some reason they never came out of his mouth.
"Chief," another officer muttered with disgust, "He is clearly a murderer."
The room fell silent. The air around them seemed held down by the anger of the three officers.
"Take him to the cell," the cold voice of the chief broke the silence.
The handcuffs pulled his arms again. A narrow corridor. Dim light from lanterns. The damp smell mixed with iron hung in the air, followed by murmurs from the prisoners.
"New guy?"
"Still young. This is crazy."
"What's the case?"
The iron door closed. 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 with wrinkles across his face.
He sat down slowly. His shoulders slumped, his lips trembled as he answered in a voice barely audible, "Self-defense."
"Self-defense? Because of what?"
"…Because it wasn't fair."
No one spoke immediately. A large man with a dragon tattoo coiling around his arm stepped closer, staring at him longer than necessary.
"Maybe you were framed. That happens often."
He gave a small nod.
"I… think so too."
Days passed without certain justice. Weeks became months. Months became years.
Family visits came less and less. The outside world began to feel like a children's fairy tale, hope, and freedom.
Until one day, the guards stopped passing by. The cell became silent.
Then—
An explosion. The walls shook. The cell turned into an oven for the people inside it...
Zavi woke up with broken breaths. His chest felt heavy, as if something were playing with it from the inside.
Boom!
That was the last sound left in his head.
He looked around. Residential houses. Crowded streets. Calm. And that memory surfaced again, a memory that should have been a nightmare experienced on Earth.
'Sylvia, are you doing alright over there?'
Zavi clenched his fists. That memory had not disappeared.
It was only waiting for the right moment to return.
"Why did I only remember it now?" he muttered in confusion.
Then... a voice of surprise and concern came from beside him.
"Sir, Lamena? Why were you shouting? People passing by are even looking at us with cynical stares!"
"Huh? You mean I was talking in my sleep. Damn it, did I say something related to Earth?" He took a deep breath, then slowly exhaled.
"A nightmare," Zavi answered, his mind far calmer.
The two looked at each other. Zavi himself did not know what kind of dream he had experienced that made him shout so incoherently.
To make sure further, he asked hesitantly, "Did I say anything strange while I was still asleep?" Zavi tried to confirm whether he had said things related to Earth.
But that concern faded after hearing the answer.
"Maybe... you mentioned a woman's name... and justice for freedom..."
Zavi's blue eyes briefly shone after hearing that sentence again. Tears welled up in his eyes. Back on Earth, while still inside the prison cell, he often said those two words, day after day, month after month, and year after year, for more than ten years he kept saying them.
The person who shared the same cell with him was confused at first, but over time they became used to hearing it, until one of them was eventually released.
He did not know what true justice really was. Without explanation, without evidence, without witnesses, they acted arbitrarily and treated him like a puppet that would be thrown away once it was no longer useful.
"So that's how it is," he muttered, his voice hoarse. "Sorry, last night I couldn't meet at the location point because those three silent-type Chalog were a bit troublesome."
His eyes swept around, then he stood and quickly added, "You two were chased by them as well?"
"Yes," Moreira replied, then continued, "I'm also sorry that I couldn't give you help in time."
Moreira panicked, not knowing what else to say.
...
That night. After escaping the pursuit of the silent-type Chalog, which were killed by the girl with the identity of an evil spirit, they decided to search for a crowd along the district streets at night. The location was not far from where Zavi had been, still on the same road.
"Thank you, Miss. You saved my life again."
The atmosphere suddenly became awkward. The young girl's mind was filled with unanswered questions after thinking about them throughout this journey, even while they were at the café.
Around 22:30. Their place of refuge was beside a small branching road. A market located in the north of Luand was still crowded, and they leaned against a wall near a stall that sold something like medicines and herbal potions, watched by a man standing beside it.
The seller was very kind to them. He welcomed their arrival warmly, knowing they came from outside the city just from the confused expressions on their faces, and he quickly offered two glasses of herbal tea as a greeting.
Besides, the man traded together with his wife, so he was not afraid his goods would be taken while he prepared the herbal tea behind the stall. Meanwhile, the woman standing beside them, his wife, asked about their purpose for coming to this city. Of course, she told them to sit down so the conversation could become comfortable and calm.
Because it was awkward as they had only just met, Moreira initially refused to speak and chose to stand while making small talk about his arrival here, saying that he came to pick up his relative.
But eventually.
"You sell herbal potions, right?" Moreira asked casually.
The female seller glanced behind her for a moment, watching her husband who was still calmly brewing the herbal tea, then she looked at the two of them with the eyes of a businessperson.
"Yes," she answered. "Are you interested in buying them? Greysia is already famous in other cities, including cities outside the kingdom. Your arrival here is very timely, tonight I will give a special discount only for customers like you."
After speaking at length about how widely the potions had spread, she waited for an answer from the beautiful girl standing in front of her and the young man sitting on the wooden chair with a padded backrest.
Her gaze became sharper than before. Moreira knew the woman was only joking about giving a special discount to customers like him.
"Celvira, what do you think?" he asked to confirm.
The reason he called the young third-level evil spirit girl Celvira was simply to make it easier to address her, because it would be impolite to use words like "you" toward a young unfamiliar girl, and he intended to use that name here temporarily even though he did not know her real purpose.
However, unexpectedly, the name "Celvira" that had accidentally come from his mind at that moment made the girl smile happily because she previously had no name, and she accepted that name gladly.
After explaining the events he had experienced, Moreira looked at Zavi with a confused expression. Zavi's expression, which previously had been calculating, turned into something as deep as an abyss, full of fear, like prey facing a predator.
Celvira and Moreira looked at each other, waiting for his direction for the next step. From another perspective, both of them thought that the word "return" would be the right choice for a situation like this.
Zavi stared blankly ahead. He had just realized that he was merely a child playing with death, even though his real age had been twenty-eight while he was on Earth. But that thought was completely wrong.
That day, his mind seemed to have been controlled by something to immediately perform the ritual in order to obtain supernatural abilities, and he had spoken words that he himself thought were inappropriate to Avatar Karl to ask for the ritual steps.
"Damn... why am I thinking about regretting it? Isn't it now that I can obtain what I want, and because of them, it seems I'm actually wasting it?"
After muttering in annoyance at himself and deciding what he wanted to do next since he had already come this far, not wanting to lose those closest to him, Zavi slowly stood up. The pain in his little finger, which had been aching before, was slowly but surely no longer painful.
Strange.
"Yes, we will go to that place! Right?" he said to confirm. "Besides, I have never broken that promise." He sounded far more enthusiastic than before.
Moreira smiled faintly and replied with an excited tone. "Alright, sir. Let's finish this cooperation as soon as possible..."
After observing more carefully, Zavi finally realized something.
"Ahh, I see. That strange woman is still following you."
Zavi approached, lowered his head slightly, and said in a low tone, "Thank you, miss. Back then you saved me from that sudden attack."
Celvira lifted her shoulders slightly, her face confused, not knowing what to answer. But after seeing Moreira give her a thumbs-up, she nodded and raised her thumb toward Zavi as a sign of satisfaction.
'That fifth level is making my feelings strange,' Celvira thought nervously.
Then they stepped forward, walking to the stall to ask about various herbal potions as a requirement, though not an important one, to control the Prisoner ability.
The district streets were filled with people passing by and horse carriages moving along the road while carrying out their activities. Meanwhile, they walked through the crowd, and after several minutes they arrived at the stall right at the intersection leading into the market.
"I didn't expect you would actually come back here again," said the stall owner, a man who could not hide his happiness.
"What is he saying? I don't understand!" Celvira whispered to Moreira standing beside her.
"You don't even understand something that simple?" Moreira muttered in surprise.
But in the end he tried to explain so she could understand what the man had said.
Meanwhile, Zavi and the stall owner chatted about life like men usually do, and after a few minutes the topic shifted. Feeling bored, Zavi eventually revealed the real purpose of his arrival and hoped the man knew something about herbal potions used to control the Prisoner ability.
Speaking in whispers, he told the other two to move away.
Then Zavi did not expect that obtaining information about the potion would be so easy.
That was only his strange assumption.
Because finding those ingredients was extremely difficult and possibly dangerous for ordinary people. It required courage and the readiness to risk one's life if someone tried to obtain the materials directly from their sources.
Some of the ingredients existed in forests, valleys, caves, even places that might never have been exposed to the human world. However, a few of them were sold on the black market.
"H-huh? Turns out it's quite heavy."
'I'm told to search for some ingredients in that strange forest again... damn it.' he thought while swallowing nervously.