The spear formed from lightning still pinned Rui firmly through the chest.
The savage power of lightning rampaged through his body like countless greedy venomous snakes.
Destroying.
Burning.
Paralyzing.
The steel-hard body he took such pride in was as fragile as rotten wood before this power.
His powerful regeneration, enough to reconstruct his limbs in an instant, now seemed to have its throat seized, unable to repair even an inch of skin.
The wound kept charring and widening.
His life was rapidly slipping away.
Pinned to the tree, Rui could not move.
He raised his head and looked at the boy slowly approaching him.
His fear had vanished.
Because once fear reached its limit, all that remained was pure numbness toward death.
He gazed into those scarlet eyes that seemed capable of piercing the soul.
In the final moments of his life, the false memories of "family bonds" he had forcibly distorted and fabricated shattered like reflections of flowers in a mirror and the moon on water.
He remembered.
He remembered when he was still human.
He remembered his frail, sickly body, for which even running in the sunlight had been an extravagant wish.
He remembered his parents.
He remembered that rainy night, when that lord appeared before him and granted him tremendous power.
He also remembered how, after he killed someone, his father raised a blade, intending to kill him and then take his own life. His mother wept beside them, but did not stop him.
He had not understood then.
He had thought his parents no longer loved him.
So he had killed them with his own hands.
Not until now.
Only now, as death descended, did he finally understand.
What his father had wanted to sever was not him, but this sin.
His mother had wept because