The days that followed were the strangest and longest of David's life. He became a physician in the abyss, one with no talking patients and no medical instruments. Every day, he repeated the same task: approaching the beast, which had now let down all its defenses against him, and applying the incredibly precious blue paste to the wound on its shoulder.
The effect was noticeable, but it was no transformative miracle. It was a slow, painful process, like the melting of a glacier. The beast's external form remained unchanged, still the same blasphemous, terrifying visage. But its interior was undergoing a seismic shift.
The red glow in its eyes dimmed day by day. Gradually, from the depths of that blood-red, he could begin to see the calm, dark brown undertone of a human iris. It no longer emitted meaningless roars. Instead, there were long, unsettling silences, punctuated by occasional, disjointed syllables squeezed from its throat.
David began to attempt a deeper level of communication. He spoke to it constantly, as if to a relative with amnesia, telling it everything about himself: his name, the world he came from—a world so distant it seemed mythological, with a sun, cities, laws, a world where one didn't have to live in fear. He also spoke of the Sanctuary, of Landon, and of the tragic, naive rebellion.
He didn't know how much it understood. He was simply using human language to continuously knock on the door of a human soul that had been sealed for far too long.
The turning point came, without warning, the day after David had used the last of the moss.
That day, as David sat a short distance from his "patient" as usual, gnawing on a tasteless fungus and contemplating his next move, the beast was suddenly seized by a violent convulsion, as if an invisible electric current was ravaging its body. It repeatedly slammed its head against the ground, its mouth forming garbled, slurred syllables, as if it were in a life-or-death struggle with its own vocal cords and mouth.
"Da... Da... vid..."
A word, extremely muffled and distorted in pronunciation, yet clearly recognizable, was forced out, syllable by difficult syllable, from its fanged mouth.
David shot to his feet, the fungus falling from his hand. He stared at it in shock, his heart nearly stopping.
"You... you can speak?"
The beast's massive head slowly lifted. From its eyes, now mostly faded of their red hue, a warm liquid flowed for the first time. Not blood, but the murky, earth-scented tears of a human being.
"Ma... Mara..."
A second word, a woman's name, was roared out with all its might. The love and pain contained in that sound were so profound that they made David's own heart tremble. He instantly recalled the old woman, Mara, who had spent her days weeping after Landon had declared her husband "exiled."
"Your name..." David's voice trembled with excitement. "Do you remember your own name?"
The beast's body curled into a ball from the agony of recollection. Memory was now a cruel invader, wielding a sharp blade, rampaging across the desolate plains of its shattered consciousness. The sealed-away images were like countless sharp mirror shards being forcibly pieced back together, each one reflecting a soul-shattering scene from its time as a "man."
After a long while, a heavy, hoarse word, truly belonging to a human, was uttered from the mouth that did not belong to a human, carrying the weight of a tombstone:
"Gre... gor..."
Gregor.
The name, like a rusty key, finally clicked, throwing open the floodgates of memory.
"I... am Gregor..." he, or it, said, looking down at its own monstrous, carapaced claws with boundless fear and self-loathing. "He... Landon... that demon... what did he do to me?!"
In the broken, pain- and tear-filled narrative that followed, David finally pieced together the darkest, most terrifying, and most anti-human truth behind Landon's divine authority, from the mouth of its very first victim.
Gregor had been a skilled stonemason, one of the earliest residents of the Sanctuary, arriving even before Landon claimed to have "discovered" the Great Tree of Light. Initially, it was a small group of them who had found this miracle in the darkness and survived by its grace. But Landon, the man brimming with charismatic charm and boundless ambition, soon claimed the tree for himself with his seductive rhetoric. He proclaimed he had heard "divine oracles," fashioning himself as the tree's sole agent in the mortal world.
Gregor was the first to openly question him. He questioned Landon's monopoly on resources and, more importantly, the draconian edicts designed to imprison their minds. He firmly believed the Great Tree of Light was a gift to all survivors, to be managed collectively, not to be a tool for one man's dictatorship.
His resistance was met with Landon's cruelest, most unimaginable retaliation.
"He didn't exile me..." Gregor's voice was violently distorted with rage and sorrow, each word squeezed from between his teeth. "He dragged me... to the base of that tree... to that... that pulsing, glowing 'heart' in the center of its trunk. He said he would let me experience 'divine power,' that he would grant me 'eternity.' And then... then he pried open my mouth and poured the glowing, resin-like, searing hot liquid flowing from that 'heart'... down my throat..."
Gregor's account was cut short by violent tremors. That memory was, for him, a living hell, a thousand times more terrifying than death.
"My bones... my bones felt like they were being filled with molten iron... melting, then solidifying again... my skin was tearing, stretching, reforming... I could clearly feel myself becoming... becoming this monster... I begged him to kill me, but he just smiled, watching his 'masterpiece' with the eyes of someone… admiring a work of art. He said I was the first, but I wouldn't be the last. All mortals who dared to question his divinity would become the tree's most loyal 'guardians,' the most obedient... beasts beneath his throne."
Once Gregor's sanity was completely consumed by the boundless pain and bestiality, Landon threw him into this abyss. It became Landon's dumping ground for all "dissenters," and a living, breathing horror story to intimidate everyone else.
David listened in silence, his fists clenched so tight his knuckles were white. The anger in his heart was no longer a burning flame, but a sharp, hard piece of ice forged in extreme cold. Landon's crimes were a hundred times more heinous than he had imagined. He wasn't just a dictator, a tyrant; he was a complete madman conducting anti-human experiments, playing with the very form of life. And the Great Tree of Light, worshipped by all, was no divine tree at all. It was the root of all evil and distortion, a malevolent, living altar that demanded "sacrifices."
"Over the years... he's thrown down... a few more..." Gregor panted, his consciousness still as unstable as a candle in the wind. "They... they didn't make it. The darkness and loneliness here... they accelerate the process. They've long since... become just like me... beasts that only know hunger and how to roar..."
He looked up, gazing at David with eyes that had regained a sliver of humanity.
"You... how did you do it? That blue stuff... it reminded me... reminded me of Mara, of the smell of the sun..."
"It's a type of moss. Its components might be able to suppress... or rather, counteract the power of that tree," David explained, his voice holding a strange calmness. "My knowledge, my science, is not worthless here. Landon uses his 'divine power' to create monsters. And I, perhaps, can use science to turn you... back."
Gregor's massive body slowly, arduously, prostrated itself before David. His hideous head, for the first time, bowed low, completing the human gesture of submission and supplication.
"Save them... and save me..." his voice was filled with endless pleading. "Looking like this... I can't face Mara. But, I can fight. This body, these claws... they are the shame Landon bestowed upon me. So let them fight for vengeance against him!"
David looked at the ally imprisoned within the monster's shell, and the plan in his mind became chillingly clear and cold.
He was no longer the idealist trying to awaken a flock of sheep. The flock's cowardice and fear would only make them rush to push him onto the altar at the critical moment.
Now, what he had to do was awaken a pack of real "beasts" in this deepest darkness. A pack of beasts stripped of everything, their very bones soaked in pain and hatred. He would use his wisdom and knowledge as a weapon, equipping them with rational minds, and forging their hatred into the sharpest of blades.
He would lead this legion of vengeance from hell, climb out of the abyss, and wage a final, unrelenting war against the shining throne built on lies and bones.
He reached out and gently placed his hand on Gregor's rough, hot, rock-like head.
"We will, Gregor," David's voice was calm and firm, laced with an unnerving iciness forged in the abyss. "We will find them all. And then, together, we will return to the surface. And we will let Landon, and his 'divine tree,' have a taste of the echoes from the abyss."