The Return of the Demon Emperor 2

"Hmm..?"

He whispered in a tired voice, as if speaking to the void itself, while the echo of his words faded into the surrounding nothingness. He looked at "Karsu," who emerged from the nothingness like a ghost that had been chasing him for eternity, his resurrected and intact body glowing with fragile golden threads, like a memory on the verge of vanishing. "Damn... Is it possible that death has not yet satisfied your hunger? Even the fire wasn't enough to quench your thirst for destruction?"

"Well..."

His voice bent as though pleading to a ghost in a broken mirror, "Because I am kind..." – the word stuck in his throat like a bloody thorn, reminding him every time of that boy he buried one night beneath the screams of volcanoes – "...and because you are me from a world groaning under the rubble of my mistakes, I will make a deal with you... Do not tempt me to regret it."

Karsu, who seemed like a shadow teetering on the brink of eternal collapse, slowly lifted his head. His eyes resembled two dusty windows looking into an abandoned room inside him: "I... am not you," he said as if denying his very existence, "You are just a nightmare that leaked through the cracks of my conscience... A curse I carried before I realized that the curse is to be kind in a universe that devours the kind like a fleeting memory."

The manifested figure suddenly drew closer, his cracked hand gleaming like a rusted knife in the dark. "Do you know why the void always laughs when we think we know ourselves?" His laugh was like the scream of a child trapped in a dream torn apart by wolves. "Because if you saw what I see... if you knew that the 'Karsu' you carry is just a mask for an orphan who hid here after his first world burned... you would tear out your eyes to avoid seeing the truth you now deny."

Karsu turned his face, his sigh vibrating like the tremor of a storm in a glass of water. "There is a difference..." he whispered while a blue wound, like a small handprint, glimmered on his chest, "You live at the bottom of my consciousness like black mud... but I, I live in a tangible reality, my existence is my true being."

A heavy silence broke by a mysterious crack, as though the void itself was groaning under the weight of this conversation.

A venomous sneer nearly erupted from between the manifested's lips, but Karsu's tone – that voice weighed down by fragments of certainty – made his laughter break in his throat, like glass piercing the body of a dreamer. Karsu's gaze was like dark arrows piercing the veil of the void: his seriousness was not just a threat... but a confirmation that every word spoken here would carve the fate of worlds not yet born.

"Have I made a mistake...?"

The manifested whispered to himself, his voice trembling like a spider's thread in the path of a cyclone. He suddenly noticed that his hand was shaking... why?

"No..."

He answered himself, trying to convince the void more than his own self, "There is something wrong..."

But his words suddenly stopped. In front of him, Karsu stood like a fog statue, but his eyes... his eyes shone with black light, reminding him of something: an old night when he stood on the edge of a cliff, watching the stars of his world flicker out one by one, while hearing a voice whisper to him: "This is the fate of all who dare to think."

"Or is this thing..."

The manifested continued, his voice now like a lost echo in a metallic maze, "...just an illusion you created, you ghost from a parallel world?"

Karsu did not answer. Instead, he slowly raised his hand towards his chest, as if tearing through the skin of reality to reveal something. Suddenly, a faint light emitted from his fingers, like a screen of scattered dust showing him fragmented scenes: a child running down an abandoned street, a woman crying over a faceless corpse, a city sinking into the sand as time spits it out, and finally, a man who was righteous and became demonic.

The manifested recoiled, his eyes wide as if seeing his ghost for the first time.

"Are you... me?"

He whispered, as though the question burned his tongue, "In a smaller body... not from a parallel world?"

Karsu took a step closer, the black light in his eyes swallowing the space between them:

"Which one of us is a test for the other? Have you really thought about it?...."

His question was like a knife cutting through the silence. Even lies here suffocate.

Suddenly, the manifested's expression shattered. He saw in Karsu's eyes something he had not been forced to see since the dawn of his existence:

Himself.

The same eyes weighed down with unbearable questions, the same lips refusing to utter anything that would condemn them. But Karsu... Karsu carried all of this, and yet stood like a mountain that would not collapse.