Chapter3

No carriage was willing to go to the slums at night, so I could only run along the dirt road outside the estate, stumbling with every heavy step.

The wind wrapped its chill around me, drilling into my collar, while the chocolates in my inner pocket grew hot in my tight grasp.

Abyssal curse. Soul displacement.

These two utterly absurd phrases echoed in my mind over and over again. But back at the manor, Vivian's impatient sneer, the unconcealable mania in Grayson's eyes, and what Weiss had said about the hidden cabin, exile, and waiting for death... their expressions indicated they were not joking at all.

At the end of the alley, a building with a crooked spire appeared. I pushed open the wooden door of the clinic.

The overwhelming smell of moldy herbs mixed with the foul stench of rotting flesh immediately hit my face.

"Who is it?" a hoarse voice asked from the darkness.

"Noah, it's me."

I walked over, and the half-stub of a cheap candle at the head of the bed flickered.

Noah lay on the blackened wooden cot. He turned his head to look at me, a faint glimmer of light gathering in his eyes.

"Jessica? Why did you... come back so late?" He struggled, trying to prop himself up.

"Don't move." I strode over and pressed his bony shoulders down.

It had been three years. When he was fifteen, the wheels of that carriage had crushed his liver and ribs. Even though I later risked my life taking jobs in the underground black market every single day, the medicine I bought could only barely keep him breathing. All the physicians in the city had declared with certainty that he absolutely would not survive this year's early winter.

He had always wanted to be a knight since he was a child, but now, he couldn't even sit up on his own.

"What's wrong?" Noah grabbed my wrist with a backhand grip. "Why are your hands shaking so much? Did someone bully you at the Marquis's estate?"

I looked at him, a stinging soreness welling up in my eyes.

I deadbolted the wooden door, took out the three dark brown chocolates, and placed them beside his pillow.

Then, I knelt on one knee by the bed and confessed everything that had happened at the manor tonight—from Weiss's warning and Vivian's venomous plot to Grayson's deadly soul-swapping trap.

After hearing it all, Noah fell into a long, deathly silence.

"You mean..." he finally spoke, his voice accompanied by the faint bubbling of blood in his throat, "as long as I eat this thing, our souls can be swapped?"

I nodded. "That's what the guardian spirit in my bloodline said."

Noah slowly raised his head, staring dead at me. "Then if I eat it right now... after the swap, that woman, Carmen... she will go into my body?"

"Yes."

"She will be trapped in this man's body, only able to lie on this rotting wooden bed and wait to die?"

"Yes."

"And I..." Noah lowered his head, looking at his own shriveled, sunken chest. "I'll be able to leave this bed, use her healthy body to stand up, and pick up a knight's sword again?"

I didn't speak.

Noah suddenly laughed.

"Jessica," he stared into my eyes, his tone allowing for no refusal, "feed it to me."

I immediately covered them with my handkerchief. "Noah, you're crazy! No one knows what kind of backlash Abyssal magic will bring. If you don't survive it, your soul will be instantly obliterated! I brought them here, but I never intended for you to—"

"Intended for me to what? To continue waiting to die in this broken shack?!"

Noah suddenly raised his voice and began to cough violently, spitting a mouthful of black blood directly onto the back of my hand.

I froze.

He gripped my wrist tightly. "I should have died at fifteen. For these three years, I've lain here like a piece of trash, helplessly watching you risk your life in the sewers every day just for my medical bills. My greatest wild hope has been to walk off this bed myself and slaughter all those bastards who bullied you, one by one."

Panting, he pinched a piece of chocolate from under my handkerchief. "If this thing can really execute a swap, then I've hit the jackpot. If it can't..."

He stared at the chocolate in his hand. "...then it's just death. I didn't have many days left anyway."

He tossed the first piece of chocolate into his mouth and bit down hard.

Then the second.

The third.

He chewed with intense effort, then forcefully swallowed it all down.

I clenched his other hand tightly.

Swallowing the last bite, Noah leaned weakly against the pillow. He looked at me, a trace of confusion emerging in his eyes: "How much longer do I have to wait? Why is there no reac—"

Before he could finish his sentence.

Noah's pupils suddenly dilated to their absolute limit.

His body jerked violently upward.

"Noah!"

I threw myself over like a madwoman, trying to pin him down. But a layer of bizarre, deathly-gray patterns rapidly surfaced on his skin.

His lips trembled uncontrollably, and a choking, rattling sound came from his throat.

Immediately after.

He snapped his eyes shut, and his head slumped heavily to the side, crashing onto the pillow.

His already faint breathing stopped completely.

Trembling, I felt under his nose with my fingers. He was dead.

Just at the exact moment my legs gave out and my tears were about to break the dam, Weiss whispered in my mind:

[Step back.]