Chapter 137
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She escaped.
Cynthia was gone.
Segleninde stared blankly at the spot where she had vanished. More precisely, he was gazing at the body of ‘Cynthia Obel’, now nothing more than an empty shell. The blood that had once streamed from the wound in her throat, pierced by the Instant Death Dagger, had already stopped. Her body, now pale and lifeless, had lost all focus in its eyes.
“Sia, you’re joking, right? Please…”
With a trembling voice, Segleninde gently stroked her face, then flinched.
Cold. Pale.
It was always the same whenever she left him. The soul that had transmigrated into this unfamiliar world was gone, leaving behind only the fake body he had created. Not even the gaze of the empty doll reflected him anymore.
Segleninde let out a hollow laugh.
Where did it all go wrong?
This time, just this once, he had truly thought he would succeed.
Meaningless theories spun endlessly in his mind. Segleninde went over everything from the very beginning, searching for the cause.
The reason for this ceaseless, unending cycle.
* * *
The first Cynthia who transmigrated into this world was a soft yet tenacious human.
At least, that was how Segleninde remembered her. The tiny thing kept wandering around, always catching his eye and irritating him. And yet, watching her was unexpectedly entertaining prey. That was all she was.
Every few years, at the Wincastle Manor, there would be a banquet, and occasionally such humans would appear. Some with especially remarkable physical abilities or intelligence would attempt to escape, evading the traps and creatures he had prepared.
But Segleninde had never once lost his prey.
So he thought this one would be no different. Maybe she caught his eye for a moment, but she was fated to die anyway. There was no reason to pay her much attention.
But Cynthia became the first prey to ever escape from him alive.
“See you never, you crazy bastard! I’m out of here! Let’s never meet again!”
Shouting boisterously, the second-in-line princess, Cynthia, ran far away, flipping him off as she escaped through the now-open mansion doors.
The very first Cynthia was a fiercely stubborn human. No matter how many times she died, and died again—reviving infinitely with the time-rewinding music box—she never once lost her mind.
And at last, she succeeded in escaping. Even managed to stick it to him as she left.
“Hah.”
Segleninde was dumbfounded. On some level, his pride was wounded. To think he’d been outmaneuvered by mere prey, beaten by a fragile being who could never resist, who was sliced apart every time he drew his sword.
But by then, he’d already regained much of his strength and control through repeated sacrifices disguised as banquets. Thanks to that, after some effort, he was able to summon that soul from another world back into this one.
His confusion only lasted a moment. To be honest, Segleninde had found it entertaining.
No matter how many times he killed her, she always came back to face him head-on. Someone who kept challenging him, fighting to survive, even as she died again and again. She was the first prey he had ever lost, and she was a living monument to that fact. He wanted to meet her again.
And once more, he wanted to see that woman smile brightly at him, pausing at the open mansion doors before heading out into the afternoon sunlight.
So, he repeated it endlessly.
The world Cynthia perceived as a ‘game’ had already long since been completed. Without any further progress, only frozen and stagnant. But just as stagnant water festers without flow, the world would die if the flow did not continue.
Thus, this world drew in humans from other worlds, using them to help keep the cycle going. Whenever possible, it prepared bodies suitable for those souls and wove new stories into the world so that their unfamiliar destinies could blend in naturally.
And once the world had drawn out enough flow, it would immediately bring about death. In some way or another, it would never let a soul from a foreign world live for long.
Cynthia was one of them.
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