The suffocating darkness of the salt cellar slowly dissolved, chased away by the unyielding warmth of Elicia's embrace. My ragged, hyperventilating breaths finally began to slow, turning into heavy, exhausted sighs. The sheer mental toll of the panic attack, combined with the weeks of running, completely drained the last of my consciousness.
"Sleep, little Ren, No one will hurt you. I promise I'll protect you." Elicia whispered into my hair, her arms never loosening their protective hold as she gently rocked me.
With those words acting as a shield against the monsters in my head, my eyelids grew impossibly heavy. I closed my eyes, letting the real world fade away as I slipped into a deep, dreamless void.
But the void didn't stay empty for long.
The cold floorboards of The Iron Ledger vanished. The smell of lavender and old dust evaporated, replaced instantly by the sterile, sharp scent of antiseptic, isopropyl alcohol, and clean linen. A rhythmic, metallic beeping echoed softly in the background.
I blinked, and suddenly, I wasn't Eirene anymore. I wasn't the S-rank Bounty Hunter. I wasn't the blood-sucking winged demon.
I was looking down at my old hands… no claws, no prosthetics, no scars. I was back in my past life on Earth.
The sunlight streaming through the large glass window wasn't burning my flesh; it was casting a warm, familiar glow over the private room inside the University of Santo Tomas Hospital in Manila. I looked across the room and my chest tightened with a completely different kind of ache. There they were. My mother, Celine Albatross, was sitting in a plastic chair by the bedside, her eyes tired but filled with love, while my father, Albert Albatross, stood beside her with a reassuring hand on her shoulder. And there I was, Roxanne Albatross, sitting on the edge of the examination bed.
This was a few months before the horrific accident that would end my life and drag me into this new world. It was a time when my biggest worries were just exams and kendo practice.
The heavy wooden door of the hospital room clicked open, drawing all of our attention. A doctor in a pristine white coat walked in, holding a medical chart pressed against his chest. He adjusted his glasses, looking at my parents first with a serious but calm expression, before turning his gaze directly toward me.
The rhythmic beep-beep-beep of the heart monitor felt deafeningly loud in the sudden, suffocating silence of the room.
The doctor opened his mouth to speak, but before a single syllable could escape his lips, my mother leaned forward from her plastic chair. Her fingers were tightly white-knuckled around her handbag, her voice trembling with an anxiety she had been trying so desperately to suppress for weeks.
"Doctor, please, why is my daughter bruising all of a sudden? She came home from school lately completely exhausted, and then she felt so dizzy she could barely finish her periodical exams. And during her kendo training... she vomited right in the middle of a practice match. Last Sunday, while she was serving as an altar server at the chapel, she had a massive nosebleed out of nowhere. What is happening to her?" Celine Albatross cut in, her eyes wide, pleading for a simple answer.
My father, Albert, stepped closer to the bed, his grip tightening on my mother's shoulder. His face was a mask of stoic worry, trying to be the anchor for the family, but I could see the slight tremor in his jaw.
I sat on the edge of the crisp white hospital sheets, looking down at my own forearms. Now that she mentioned it, the faint, purplish-yellow bruises mapped across my skin looked ugly and unnatural under the harsh fluorescent lights of the UST hospital room. I remembered that exhaustion. I remembered the metallic taste of blood in the back of my throat during kendo practice, forcing myself to push through the fatigue, thinking I was just overworking myself.
The doctor let out a long, heavy sigh, the charts in his hands suddenly looking impossibly heavy. He looked at my parents, his eyes filled with professional, deeply sorrowful empathy, before turning his gaze directly to me.
"Mrs. and Mr. Albatross... I am so incredibly sorry, the blood panels and bone marrow aspirate we ran this morning have come back. Your daughter has been diagnosed with acute leukemia." the doctor said, his voice dropping into a quiet, devastatingly flat register.
The words seemed to echo off the sterile walls, bouncing around my head like a physical blow.
Leukemia. Cancer of the blood.
My mother let out a strangled, breathless gasp, her hand instantly flying to her mouth as her entire world shattered right there in the clinic. My father went completely rigid, his face draining of all color as he stared at the doctor in absolute, frozen disbelief.
In my dream, I wanted to reach out to them. I wanted to tell them it was okay, that I was right there. But as the memory played out, the stark, bitter irony of my two existences began to bleed together in my subconscious. In my past life, my own blood was a malfunctioning, cancerous enemy, actively destroying my body from the inside out before the accident even had a chance to claim me. And in my new life, that very same blood was a cursed, lethal weapon… the source of an S-rank magic that allowed me to slaughter armies, yet left me terrified and broken in the dark.
The sterile white walls of the UST hospital room began to flicker and blur, the bright sunlight of Earth warping into the deep, violet-tinted shadows of my memories, pulling me deeper into the labyrinth of my own mind.
The doctor cleared his throat, his face grim as he tapped the medical chart with his pen.
"Because it is acute, the progression is aggressive. It is best that Roxanne begins chemotherapy immediately to stop the cancer cells from spreading further through her bone marrow and bloodstream."
The word chemotherapy hung in the air like a death sentence. To a high school student, it meant losing my hair, losing my strength, and giving up the kendo matches and life I had worked so hard to build.
My mother completely broke down, burying her face into her hands as silent, violent sobs racked her body. But my father stood tall. He squeezed my mother's shoulder tightly, his knuckles turning stark white as he looked the doctor straight in the eye. There was no hesitation in his voice… only the fierce, desperate resolve of a parent willing to wage war against illness itself.
"Do it, Do whatever it takes for our daughter. Save her." my father said, his voice cracking slightly but carrying an undeniable weight.
I sat on the edge of that sterile hospital bed, watching them. A profound, aching sadness washed over my dreaming mind. Even back then, long before I ever became Eirene, long before I was hunted as a blood-sucking demon or locked in a salt cellar, my family had been my shield. They were willing to fight the invisible monsters inside my own veins.
The rhythmic, electronic beep-beep-beep of the UST hospital monitor began to distort, stretching out into a low, echoing hum. The bright, sterile white walls of the clinic started to dissolve like wet paper, bleeding back into the heavy, dark velvet curtains and the quiet, lavender-scented shadows of Room 204.
The transition was agonizingly slow. The memory of my father's desperate plea to save me lingered in the air, wrapping around my consciousness until it merged with the soft, steady warmth of the divine mana still circulating through my body.
My eyes twitched beneath my eyelids as the dream of Earth finally faded away, leaving me drifting in a deep, healing sleep on the mattress of The Iron Ledger, safely tucked away in the heart of Tata.
The sterile white ceiling of the University of Santo Tomas Hospital slowly began to fracture, the faint, comforting echo of my father's voice dissolving into the quiet hum of the room. The clinical scent of antiseptic warped, bleeding back into the heavy, grounding smell of old oak and lavender.
I woke up with a sharp, gasping intake of air, my upper body instantly bolting upright on the mattress.
My right hand flew to my chest, my fingers instinctively clawing at the fabric over my sternum, checking for a terminal sickness that no longer existed in this flesh. My heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs, but it wasn't the weak, failing pulse of Roxanne Albatross. It was the dense, powerful, terrifyingly vital core of a Phase 5 demon. There was no leukemia here. There were no cancerous cells destroying my marrow. My blood was perfectly pure… lethal, cursed, and entirely mine.
"Ren?"
The soft, anxious voice cut through the residual fog of my nightmare. I blinked rapidly, the dual-colored jade and crimson of my eyes finally focusing on the dim interior of Room 204.
Elicia was sitting on the edge of the adjacent twin bed, her knees pulled slightly toward her chest, watching me with a look of profound, lingering worry. The heavy velvet curtains were still drawn completely shut, keeping the room wrapped in a safe, protective twilight.
"You were thrashing in your sleep, You were whispering names... names I didn't recognize. And you kept pulling at your arms." Elicia murmured softly, her analytical eyes tracing the lingering tension in my shoulders.
I looked down at my hands. The prosthetic left arm gleamed faintly in the dim light, and my right hand was completely free of the purplish bruises from my dream. I let out a long, slow breath, forcing the phantom memories of Manila, the UST clinic, and the terrifying diagnosis back into the deepest, darkest corners of my subconscious.
"Just a dream, A very old dream. From before all of this." I said, my voice dropping into its usual smooth, flat register as I swung my legs over the edge of the bed.
Elicia didn't push. She knew better than anyone that my past was a minefield of trauma, both from this world and whatever fractured memories I carried from before. Instead, she stood up, her perfectly restored mana pool radiating a gentle, ambient warmth that naturally combated the chill of my anxiety.
"The sun is starting to dip below the western spires, you've been asleep for nearly eight hours. Your body needed it."
I flexed my fingers, feeling the absolute, flawless state of my physical form. Elicia's continuous-healing passive trick was still quietly humming in the background of my biology, entirely shielding me from the lingering effects of the daylight outside. I stood up, grabbing the heavy vanguard cloak from the chair and throwing it back over my shoulders, pulling the deep hood up until my features were once again swallowed by shadow. I muttered, my bounty-hunter instincts locking back into place as the vulnerability of the panic attack completely hardened into iron resolve.
"Good, the darkness is coming. It's time to map out our next move in Tata."