She didn't hurt!
She had thought being eaten by a demon would hurt, but it didn't hurt at all.
All she felt was release.
Like a string stretched taut for over forty years, suddenly snipped by someone. It no longer twanged, no longer trembled. It was quiet.
Her body was shriveling up—not slowly, but bit by bit, like a punctured balloon.
The wrinkles on her skin deepened, her bones protruded further, and her eye sockets sank deeper.
The pus accumulated in her bedsores was evaporating. It wasn't being baked dry; it dried on its own after its life force had been drained away.
Maggots crawled out of the sores. They sensed their host's death—no, not death, but the disappearance of her "life force." They stopped wriggling, curled into balls, and then dried up as well.
Her consciousness was gradually dispersing.
It became blurry, faded, like ink poured into clear water and diluted until it grew lighter and lighter, harder and harder to see.
Those memories—the joy of catching fish by the river as a child, the sweetness of marrying her beloved in her youth, the hardship of raising children in middle age, the agony of her body rotting away in old age—all faded, as though viewed through frosted glass. She could no longer see them clearly.
She felt no regret, because there had been no happiness in those memories, only pain.
She had hurt for over forty years, until she could no longer remember what it felt like not to hurt. Now even the pain was fading—not because it no longer hurt, but because the sensation of pain was being pulled away.
Her lips moved again.
This time, her voice was a little louder than before, because Malaka's black mist had slipped into her throat and helped dissolve the phlegm