It had been raining since midnight. No thunder. No lightning. Just heavy, consistent rain, and it felt… wrong.
Early in the morning, a little boy found something on the edge of the village river.
Not a corpse. The remains of a corpse.
Just a head, lying in the mud, with a stiff expression as if screaming. His eyes were pitch black, his pupils gone. But what made all the villagers speechless: there was no blood at all.
Not because it was cleaned. But because the victim's body contents were completely dry, as if sucked from the inside.
And on his neck, not a wound. But a symbol. Burned from within the flesh—three interlocking circles.
Veyrn came to the scene, but he didn't touch anything. Just looked, then muttered:
"Not the work of a witch. This is the work of… something hungry."
Meanwhile, Rivan returned to the notes he had found earlier. He began to recopy the old pages, trying to put together the sequence of past events.
Suddenly, one of the pages changed color—the ink that had initially faded, now appeared clearer, as if exposed to heat.
"Darzel is not a name. It is a nickname. It comes every hundred years, seeking the 'breaking of boundaries'—when the laws of the world weaken due to human chaos. And when that happens, it begins to feed on the most 'potential.'"
Rivan gritted his teeth.
Zeo.
Zeo himself stood at the scene, not far from the river. But he did not look at the head.
He stared at his own reflection in the water.
"I caused the chaos," he muttered softly. "But the one who came… was not invited by me."
Then, dimly on the surface of the water, he saw another face.
A face without eyes.
A face with three small mouths on the right cheek.
And when he looked back—no one was there.
For the first time, Zeo asked himself:
"Am I still a player… or have I become bait?"
Three days after the discovery of the head on the riverbank, a girl was found on the edge of the forest.
Her name was Lira, 17 years old, the daughter of a hunter. She had disappeared a week earlier. Everyone thought she was dead. But now she was back.
Alive. But not whole.
The villagers found her sitting in the mud, naked, her eyes looking up as if she were looking at the sky—even though the sky was covered in clouds. Her hands moved slightly, as if she were weaving something invisible.
When she was brought to the village hall, she did not speak. Did not cry. Did not react.
Until night fell.
She began to laugh. Softly, softly, like a child playing hide and seek.
Then, she said:
"Her bones are long… she has three tongues… she does not walk. She slides. She… calls me."
The villagers were terrified. Some wanted to kill her. But Veyrn stopped them.
"She is not cursed," he said. "She is… a recording. A fragment of a message from something that does not want to be remembered."
Rivan visited Lira that night, secretly. He sat outside the room where the girl was locked up. He heard her muttering from behind the wooden door.
Lira called out unfamiliar names. But one sentence made Rivan freeze:
"Zeo called her. But she wasn't the one who was eaten."
Rivan stood up, slowly. His brain was spinning. Was it true that Zeo lured Darzel into this world? Or… was Zeo just a bridge?
And if Lira was still alive… that meant Darzel didn't always kill directly.
Sometimes he left witnesses—because he wanted to be feared.
Zeo himself stood on a hill. In front of him, three crows died. Their bodies rotted too quickly—and their blood flowed up, not down. A sign he knew only appeared when the world began to tear apart.
Zeo closed his eyes.
"Darzel… you came sooner than I expected."
But he wasn't afraid.
He was… curious.
And that was the most dangerous thing.