Spirit Wanderer - 77

Opening my eyes to a blurry version of the setting that I had been in, on top of the clouds, looking up at the starry night sky, I blinked a few times, letting the tears accumulate and fall down my cheeks.

'Two tears.'

Even now, as I relived my most painful memories, the most I could feel for my old self was summed up into just two tears.

//Are you done?//

"..."

//I'll... give you a second.//

At the very least, that guy could read the atmosphere, and I was thankful for that, as I sorted out my turbulent emotions.

With my ability to think becoming clearer and clearer each and every second, I honestly started wondering why that guy had made the trial so easy.

Like, all I had to do was literally experience the worst moment of my life.

Not to say it wasn't empowering or special, I just really wondered if there was a catch involved.

//Of course not, you dumbass. The only reason I gave you the trial was to fit in with your cliche understanding of novel worlds. I could have just passed down my torch to you for free, you know?//

'Ah, so that was it.'

Either way, I was thankful to him, for both the power and the reminder that I had gotten.

That I had once loved somebody so much, to the point that my heart had hurt as if it was splitting in two when the left me.

'I once had such strong emotions...'

I wasn't going to lie, life had been a little bit dull, a little bit gray, after I had been subjected to my exile in the North, and maybe, just maybe, little bits of color had started seeping through my view of the world again.

'Rua...'

If only she was here again, in front of me, then I would've probably seen a whole new world.

But she wasn't, and so I could only take the next most logical step.

//Can I actually get this torch that you've been talking about all this time now?//

//Oh yeah! HeRe YoU Go, ByE bYe!//

And, with that, he was gone, and I found myself back in the ecosystem that had kept itself sustainable inside a tree.

But, there was something different with my body.

Having replaced a little swath of my hair was a fiery, orange feather that flowed soothingly down my scalp with the rest of my perfectly treated hair.

I mean, it kinda felt weird to have a feather be stuck in your head, but like, being a human, I would get used to it soon.

'So this is what a phoenix's feather looks like.'

And yeah, I was looking at my reflection in the pond where the two fish had been to see this, as I obviously couldn't see something that was literally on top of my head.

Staring at my reflection in the water there, I couldn't help but raise a few questions, all completely directed at myself.

'What was the point of everything I had done in this world?'

'Did I really have any purpose here?'

'Why was it me?'

And,

'Where do I go from here?'

With these questions burning themselves into my mind, I slowly got off one knee and slowly started leaving this area.

I was done here after all, but maybe, I would come back, just to pay my respects to the man who had shown me what it meant to feel such strong emotions again.

And, stepping out of the tree trunk, I realized something.

My hatred for life had disappeared.

...

"Swish!"

Flicking my sword a little bit to get the blood off of it, I quickly resheathed it.

That had been the fourth monster that I had encountered just trying to walk to where my sister was, as to meet up with her for a certain something that we had to do.

I mean, even though we had been in communication with each other as soon as I walked into range, that didn't count for the fact that there were just some things that we could only do once we actually physically met with each other.

Well, back to the main topic, what I had been trying to get at was that my luck was so damn low that I already had 10 monsters throwing themselves at me in a span of less than an hour!

Most of the other groups would have been actively trying to find monsters, but that definitely wasn't the case for me.

It probably had something to do with the fact that everything in this novel was working to kill me in the end or something.

And well, this wasn't much of a bad thing either, because I was just calmly racking up points now.

To show you what I mean, even though I entered the competition late, I was already in the top 10 rankings.

Yeah, that just goes to show you how little the amount of monsters in this forest was, and why the competition was so skewed towards my sister, who had a protagonist's luck.

Or in this case, it was skewed towards me too, with my antagonist's luck.

I was just grateful that the monsters I had faced had just been way below my rank, on the level of about 1 star humans, and so I had dispatched of them quite quickly.

It was just that, with all of these easy points, I knew that something bad was about to happen.

And, looking up at the moon, I was just waiting for my misfortune to strike.

'High so high, the crimson sky, it's way to sweet to turn down. I scream and shout, but no one's round, there's no where to escape~'

Reciting the lyrics that had been stuck in my head for the past few hours, I watched as the moon turned red, casting the entire sky in a rusty glow.

"AwooOOOOOOOOO!"

Hearing the cries of various monsters in the distance, I knew that it was about time to get serious.

With the blood moon having descended, the monsters would all get extreme boosts in power, and thus, everything would change.

'Ah... why does everything have to impede me from reuniting with my sister again...'