Questions and Answers

But at that moment, those mottled, tangled fragments of memory froze on a single scene.

It was a pitch-black cave. His gaunt body lay on the ground, his vacant eyes closed, his life fixed in place. His corpse slowly swelled, decayed, rotted away, and finally became a skeleton.

A ghastly, deathly pale skeleton.

"I am Tulas, but it seems I have already... died?" When Tulas grasped this information, he abruptly opened his eyes.

After he opened his eyes, even more information came flooding in all at once.

The unwillingness, resentment, and obsession with leaving after death had driven him mad. Then he drifted around that dead-silent island, year after year. During that time, many people entered the island, and many were killed by him.

Whenever he killed a living person, he returned to the place where his bones were buried and slept, waiting for the next living person to enter. He had become something like the island's scavenger, clearing away every existence that offended his eyes.

Until, who knew how many years later, he saw another living person. That person was unbelievably powerful, and in the end, it seemed he had been destroyed by that living person.

"Eh, that's not right. If I was destroyed, why do I still exist now?" Tulas pondered this question, not even noticing the changes in his surroundings.

"But I was clearly killed by that strange gun?" Even now, Tulas could not distinguish whether he was an undead creature or a soul.

As he doubted himself, a voice suddenly reached Tulas's ears.

"Awake?"

It was a light, calm voice, its trailing notes carrying a lingering, elegant charm. It sounded exceedingly pleasant.

Eh, pleasant?

Tulas suddenly froze. What a wonderful word that was—why had he suddenly used such a word to describe this voice?

Ever since