Chapter 162 - When logic escapes [3]

Silence fell over the place the moment Eve made it terrifyingly clear why we should never even touch the lake. It was as if the entire environment had held its breath. Arthur's expression bordered on the absurd — his eyes wide open and mouth slightly ajar, like someone who'd just seen a UFO land in front of them but still refused to believe it.

I, on the other hand, stayed alert, sweeping the area with my eyes. Every rustling leaf, every shimmer on the water's surface felt loaded with meaning. Something out there was alive — aware of our presence. Blood was everywhere — splattered on leaves, dark puddles in the dirt, even smeared on the tree trunks. Organs hung from low branches like grotesque fruit, and some lay just a few feet from us, still wet and glistening under the light filtering through the canopy.

The scene was grotesque from any angle, a horror show so intense it could make anyone throw up just from looking at it. And yet, Adam — standing beside me, clutching the hem of my shirt with trembling fingers — showed no clear reaction. His face was calm — or maybe empty — as if none of it fazed him at all.

In the heavy silence that followed, it was Arthur who broke it first. His voice came out low, almost a whisper laced with disbelief — more a muttered thought than a question for the rest of us: "What the hell just happened...? She... just imploded?"

Personally, I shared the same question. From my perspective, it had simply imploded — so fast I couldn't even register it with my enhanced vision. Even after activating my eyes, I scanned for anything out of the ordinary but found nothing besides the lake's constant, eerie glow. Strangely enough, I feel that even if I had witnessed the exact moment of the implosion, I still wouldn't have seen anything.

That thought made me glance at my Alter Ego. His gaze was fixed on the floating orb in front of him, as if searching for invisible answers in that ethereal glow.

But when our eyes finally met, his intense red gaze slowly shifted toward me. The contrast between my golden eyes, shining with their own light, and his burning red ones carried a weight all its own.

For a brief moment, our souls locked, and I tried to understand what lay behind that enigmatic stare. To be honest, from the moment he first appeared before me, I've never truly understood what he's thinking.

The only thing I've ever grasped about my Alter Ego is his intentions — and generally, they've always been aligned to help me. It's always been like that since the beginning, and I believed it would stay that way forever.

So when I saw Eve implode right in front of me, something in my mind clicked. It was like a puzzle piece finally fit, revealing a possible reason behind my Alter Ego's recent, strange hostility.

As I watched him standing still next to the sphere, a strange feeling — a mix of curiosity and unease — stirred inside me. I decided it was time to test my theory. Without moving my feet, I slowly raised my arm, feeling my loose, elastic skin stretch beneath my own touch. My gaze locked on my Alter Ego, who stared back at me with a passive expression, making no move except to observe.

There was no tension in the air, no sign of an impending attack — no tingle, no shiver crawling up my spine. That primal sense of danger I could always rely on was silent. Taking that as confirmation, I took a deep breath and confidently extended my hand forward, letting the air between us hum with the tension of what might come next.

The moment my hand touched the waters of the black lake, a strange sensation washed over me, as if an invisible force — or maybe a void — quietly unraveled the very structure of who I was. It wasn't physical pain or an impact. It was something far deeper, like the underlying order of my being was dissolving in a silent whisper, suspending me in an unexplainable void.

What took over me was complete strangeness, as though the very concept of form was being renegotiated, rewritten from within. My arm — once familiar, an inseparable part of me — began to deny its own existence.

It was as if every fiber, every nerve, rejected cohesion, crumbling from within. Each part seemed to gain a will of its own, heading down separate paths — yet all those paths led nowhere, dissolving into a void of absolute, silent disorientation.

First came the cold. Not the kind you feel on your skin from the wind or a lack of warmth, but a deep chill from within — the kind that unravels and erases tangible memories, as though each recollection dissolved into mist.

Then came the reversed weight, like gravity had forgotten where to pull, and my body, stunned and directionless, could only watch, unable to react. Everything around me vibrated in silence — an inaudible hum, but so intense it resonated through the very core of who I believed I was, making my chest rise and fall with an unsettling internal echo.

My arm sank into itself. It didn't vanish — it unbecame, like a thought that slips away the very moment you try to name it. I stood there, frozen, observing — not with my eyes, but with some part of me I never knew could feel such a deep, silent collapse, like I was crumbling from the inside out in an eternal split-second.

It was a void that didn't hurt, but slowly consumed me, like I had touched something too ancient to comprehend — a memory forgotten in the shadows of time, capable of disarming any resistance. And because of that, something deep inside me surrendered — quietly and inevitably.

Still, at the center of that colorless vastness, there was a silence so profound it felt almost physical. As if the whole world, in a restrained gesture, held its breath in the face of something that should never be witnessed — as if even the air refused to disturb that forbidden instant.

Suddenly, my arm simply vanished, disappearing before my very eyes. For a moment, all I could do was stare at the emptiness where it had been, with a look of shock that consumed me internally — even if my face remained still, carrying the usual mask of indifference I showed the world.

The sight of my missing arm lasted only a few seconds — just enough for a strange chill to crawl down my spine. Then, as if nothing had happened, my arm began to grow back, rebuilding itself in mere seconds until it was whole again, untouched, as if it had never been gone at all.

But that explained a lot of my questions—especially why my Alter Ego seemed so hesitant to let me get close to the lake. Honestly, my regeneration ability is strong—extremely strong—but even I couldn't predict what would happen if my entire body imploded in there.

I've survived brutal falls before, like when I jumped off a building and smashed into the ground, and still managed to regenerate completely. But this felt different. There was something about that lake that unsettled me, a strange sensation my conscious mind couldn't explain—but my Alter Ego seemed to recognize it as a real threat.

And then there were the stares. Everyone was looking at me with this complex mix of apprehension and curiosity that I couldn't quite read. The world around us was drowned in an almost absolute silence, so thick it seemed to swallow even the tiniest sounds. But that calm didn't last.

Out of nowhere, a woman's voice sliced through the silence, echoing firm and clear behind us: "Well, I think you've figured out by now why going into that lake is a terrible idea, right?"

Instantly, we all turned toward the voice, as if nothing had happened. Eve was standing there, unmoving, just a few feet away. I noticed Arthur's eyes go wide, like he was trying to make sense of the absurd scene in front of him. Oliver's group, on the other hand, looked far less surprised than I'd expected—as if they already knew some hidden truth.

But even if they did, there was still something deeply disturbing about what we were seeing: the ground was soaked in blood, and scattered body parts formed a grotesque tableau. And there stood Eve, smiling with a calm so unnerving it was as if nothing had exploded—as if that trail of destruction was just a meaningless detail.

"How... how are you still alive?" Arthur muttered, almost to himself, his voice filled with disbelief.

"This goes way beyond just regeneration... is it immortality?" His gaze wavered, lost in a question that defied every natural law. But his whisper didn't go unnoticed. Eve locked eyes with him, staring silently and intensely.

She gave a faint smile, barely moving her lips, her blue eyes fixed on Arthur with a subtle trace of despair—a dying spark behind her gaze that stood in stark contrast to the lifeless aura she gave off. Arthur felt the weight of that stare and trembled, unable to look away.

I caught his reaction from the corner of my eye, his shoulders tense and tight, before shifting my focus back to Eve. Her lips trembled slightly, forming a smile that felt almost melancholic. Then, her voice echoed in the stillness—calm, distant, and soft, like a whisper carried by the wind.

"So tell me—what does immortality mean to you?" Eve began, her tone gentle but almost defiant, her eyes locked onto Arthur.

"Just... not dying? That's such a naïve idea" she continued, a faint, ironic smile curving her lips: "As if simply not dying meant you were truly living" Silence followed, heavy and thick, as everyone waited for her to finish. Then her voice returned, steady and serene, cutting through the quiet.

"You think it's a gift—a body that defies time, a mind that never fades. But time... it doesn't need to kill to destroy. It just waits—silent, relentless. And one by one, it steals everything you are, everything you love. Immortality isn't about staying alive. It's about being condemned to watch. To watch as everything that matters fades away until there's nothing left but silence and a warped, distorted memory of what once had color"

In that moment, her words felt less like an answer and more like a confession. And in a way, I understood what she was trying to convey. I'd lived alongside the literal embodiment of Death—I knew what she meant.

Nekra had a role even deeper and more solemn: guiding every soul, every pale, silent light. They were cold—I knew because Nekra told me. In those fragments of existence, every repressed emotion, every buried pain, came rushing back all at once—overwhelming, unstoppable, like an invisible storm inside them.

The silence lingered, heavy in the air, like time itself had paused. Eve kept speaking, while Oliver listened in complete silence, a mysterious smile slowly forming on his lips. His eyes, locked on the horizon, seemed filled with memories no one else could reach.

"You celebrate the sunrise because you know it doesn't last" Eve said, her voice low, almost a whisper merging with the cold air.

"I've seen it so many times I'm not even sure it ever changes. Maybe it never did. Maybe I just stopped noticing" She let the words settle in our minds, each one like a tiny key to some ancient mystery: "Death is an answer. An ending. A closed cycle" she added, just as the first golden ray of sunlight touched her face—a silent reminder of time's inevitable passing.

At that moment, Eve lowered her gaze, slowly raising her hands in front of her. I couldn't see her eyes, but I could feel the waves of emotion radiating from her—something impossible to fully describe: pain intertwined with joy, a contradiction that should never exist in the same expression.

And yet, that's exactly what shaped her face: "Immortality... is the absence of questions. It's the empty space stretching silently between what no longer hurts and what no longer matters. It's moving forward after the end, even when the end was the only thing that gave meaning to the path. So no. Immortality isn't just "not dying" It's forgetting why you ever wanted to live in the first place"