Chapter 994 — A Dual Stage
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 5
An Luo had returned to her bed, and her father was sitting beside it.
Everything felt like a dream — even the pain from the wound she had just pulled could not convince An Luo that any of it was real. She felt her head spinning again, that weak, off-balance dizziness coming in wave after wave. Was this a sign that she was about to wake from the dream?
She raised her head and looked at her father's face, confirming every detail again and again, as though she meant to carve each wrinkle, each hair, each tiny shift of expression deep into her mind, and then hold it up against the image in her memory from more than a decade ago. She did not know what good this did — but she had to find something to occupy herself, if only to calm her heart little by little.
Her father was utterly different from her memory. Apart from those eyes, An Luo could find almost no detail in his face that matched what she remembered... Was that only because more than ten years had blurred the details of her childhood? Or could the experiences of these years truly change a person so profoundly?
"You're nothing like what I remember," she could not help saying. "I remember you had a very high forehead... and a broader bridge of the nose than you have now..."
Bade reached up and touched his own face.
Yes, this face must indeed have changed a great deal — a change that the mere passage of time could hardly explain. Embracing darkness and corruption comes at a price. He had long since lost count of how many forbidden and dangerous powers he had touched, how much he had given up for them... flesh remolding, godspawn factor trials, mutation, poison. This face had shifted back and forth between human and inhuman, reshaped again and again. Though he had always tried to preserve his original human features, in the end the face had become unrecognizable.
There were probably few people left in this world who could still recognize him.
"That is the price of living to this day," Bade said, tugging at the corner of his mouth with a touch of self-mockery. "Fortunately, it is all behind me now. I live well here."
An Luo was silent for a moment, then finally asked the question she had been wanting to ask from the start: "So you have been in Cecil... Ansul all along? You never died — you were simply captured by Ansul, and then you became one of them?"
Her words carried an accusing tone, yet there was a certain lack of confidence in them too — because she herself was now nothing but a prisoner of war who had chosen to surrender, and hardly seemed in any position to interrogate her own father.
But she was clearly still angry, almost furious — an emotion born of the shock to the worldview she had held to for so long. She stared at her father as if not merely seeking an answer, but hoping he could offer a complete account that would convince her, so that this "betrayal" would not seem so shameful.
Bade had long anticipated this question, and had prepared for it a long time. But when the moment finally came, he still fell silent for a long while before gathering the courage to speak: "An Luo, I... have been through a great many things. Over the years, I have done some... things more terrible than you can imagine."
...
Margarita had come to a tower on the western wall of Fort Sorin. Though the world "outside" was already in the cold of winter, the wind blowing over this tower was still as warm and mild as spring. She brushed a stray wisp of hair from her forehead where the wind had stirred it, lifted her head to gaze toward the trunk of the great tree, and let out a soft breath.