old room

Alister's mind went blank.At a loss, bewildered, panic and countless emotions swirled in his fragile shell at the same time, turning into a whirlwind and beating his fragile soul.

The aftertaste of extreme fear and joy still lingered in the body of the red-haired mage, just like after the player's fingers left the harp, the taut strings would still vibrate gently.

Alister almost instinctively wanted to run away—away from here, away from Alvin Reeves who had grown beyond his imagination, but his legs were as limp as boiled Florentine pasta.

For a moment, Alister felt the impulse very clearly: Aiwen used to scream and growl non-stop when he was awakened, and now Alister wants to do that too.

His internal organs seemed to be twisted into a ball, and the instinct of survival and unnatural obsession tore at his heart at the same time.

"Ugh..."

Alister groaned with difficulty.

He moved a few steps towards the door of the stone room in embarrassment, and then fell limply to the ground again.

An ambiguous sense of exhaustion took over his body—but in fact, since he stayed away from the dirty and indecent aristocratic circle through his apprenticeship as a mage, Alister hadn't truly indulged himself for a long time.

The muscles in Alister's thighs were still twitching uncontrollably.

He was breathing quickly, and it took him a long time to gather up the courage to look up at Ivan. The fear still remained in his soul, but there was fear besides fear, because he knew that his heart was filled with Yes, and a hunger equal to fear.

But after all, Alister is a very good mage apprentice (if there is no such accident, he should become an outstanding supreme mage in the future), under the storm of the heart, he still managed to maintain a little sanity.

And anyone with a semblance of reason can perceive how weird and distorted the scene just happened.

"What exactly is going on……"

He asked, and he could hear the trembling lingering in his words.

Then he hesitated and looked at Ivan with difficulty, no longer evading.

The abnormality on Ivan's body has completely disappeared.

His hands and feet are still bound by iron chains, his mouth is still closed with a shackle, and there are no more floating scars and lines on his skin.

he looks...

He looks like a human being.

"Well……"

The mage apprentice looked at Alister with a pale face. He whimpered, as if he wanted to say something, but in the end, only the muffled moan came out.

There is still that unsettling coquettishness and seductiveness lingering in him, but the strong vitriol-like charm and ugliness have completely faded - so thoroughly that Alister almost doubted that maybe his gaffe was just an accident A nightmare in chaos.

Alister took a breath, the breath seemed to come from the depths of his soul, all the muscles in his body relaxed, and the cramp in his thigh was almost visible to the naked eye.

His muscles were twitching under the wet mage robes.

Only then did Alister realize that he had been tensing his body tightly just now. He was so tense that almost his whole body was aching after he relaxed.

But Alister didn't let his guard down.

He leaned against the wall and stared straight at Ivan for a long time. He tried to calm down his emotions, try to clear his mind and gather strength in his body.

After a while like this, he slowly moved towards Ivan.

He has tried his best to be calm on the surface, although from Ivan's point of view, he looks extremely tense now, as if what he is approaching is not Ivan, but a raging big devil.In just a short period of time, Alister looked as if he had aged a lot out of thin air.It was as if in this small world where magic had begun to ebb, he was so lucky that a succubus sucked away his youth, flesh and energy.

His cheeks were sunken badly, his eyes were bloodshot, and blood vessels on his temples protruded from beneath the skin like earthworms.And when he made the movements, his body swayed from side to side unconsciously, as if his muscles were too weak to pull the well-developed and hard skeleton.

If everything was normal, Ivan probably couldn't help but worry about such a haggard Alister, but now he has nothing to do with himself.

His head was in severe pain, and every blood vessel and nerve in his body seemed to be screaming in protest.Obviously this closed stone room is so dark, but the dim light from the only magic electrical lamp used for lighting is still extremely dazzling to Aiwen now.

This is because his pupils are dilating and then absorbing too much light. Of course, it is a pity that Ivan does not know this at this time.

He just felt bad—of course he felt the mutation that nearly drove Alister out of control.

But Ivan's feelings will only be worse than Alister.

Aiwen was forcibly awakened (although I don't know what method the people in the mage's tower used to do this), which means that Aiwen was dragged out of the starry sky unexpectedly.

This caused him to suffer some kind of invisible and tragic injury, the kind in the soul.

Because right then, he was "melting."

Until now, Aiwen didn't know how to describe or describe that state. In fact, he didn't know what it meant.All he knew was that he was melting, that his soul had lost its shape.When he was forcibly dragged out of the "room", Aiwen was like a ball of agar that fell into the gum, fused with "Him".A part of Aiwen stayed forever in the unspeakable evil and darkness, and similarly, the existence of "He" also slowly infiltrated into Aiwen's soul—although only a very, very small point.

Therefore, Ivan's world is completely different from Alister's world.

He saw the curly black tentacles on Alister's back, fluttering in the air in the wind, and the ends were tightly curled into a small circle like a devil's fern.

Alister said he hadn't eaten the fruit of the magical plants whose branches and leaves had started to mutate - but he might just be remembering wrongly.

Aiwen has a strong intuition (it is very likely that it is the message left by "His"), and those tentacles are the new shoots of those fruits.

And Alister obviously didn't know that he was exuding a faint metallic smell.

Alvin had a splitting headache.

He thought he saw something moving under Alister's skin.And behind the red-haired mage, something was moving in the shadows.

"Well--"

He wanted to remind Alister, but nothing came out.

God, Aiwen really hopes that he can go crazy, completely crazy, instead of being stuck on the border between madness and sobriety like he is now.

But what is surprising is that Alister actually understood Ivan's whispers in a sense.

"You...you are still Ivan...right?"

Ivan heard him trembling and asking.

He half-kneeled very close to Ivan, but he didn't really get close.

"Um..."

Alvin nodded.

Alister swallowed, his throat rolling.

The tentacles on the back of the red-haired mage became transparent after touching the light. At first glance, they seemed to have disappeared, but Ivan knew that they had always been there—in the same place, on Alister’s back, It's just that they hide themselves in the shadow world when they encounter light.

Oh, the Shadowlands.

In fact, Ivan had never heard of this word before, and had never been exposed to anything related to this word, but weird things still happened, when he thought of the Shadowlands (this word was in his mind appearing in a wondrous language and intonation), his vision suddenly changed.

The room he was in was shrouded in dirty and dark colors, the stone walls were covered with mottled traces left by time, large groups of molds of various colors covered the entire floor and ceiling, and the metal atmosphere here was so thick A dark gray sap could almost be squeezed out of the air, and Alister... Alister was just a hollow, empty shadow here.

Alvin let out a vague scream.

In this place, the presence of "He" is so strong that it almost makes Aiwen think that he has returned to the starry sky again.

【Da da da……】

He even heard the call from "Him".

Dark, evil, full of passion and longing.

Aiwen's heartstrings trembled with joy because of that voice.

He was almost about to respond to "Him", but perhaps in the dark, the dying goddess of magic still dripped the last drop of lucky mead on his forehead.

Alister met Ivan in reality.