Summer Inside the Walls was languid and damp.
Aeternus drove the cattle up the grassy slope. The cows lowered their heads to graze, their tails swishing slowly. Wiping away his sweat, he swept his gaze across the pasture.
Then he saw Historia.
She stood beneath the old oak tree, speaking with someone. A woman he did not recognize—her back turned toward him, her posture straight, dressed in a light-colored gown, black hair falling to her waist. Even from so far away, he could sense the tranquil air about her, utterly out of place in the pasture.
Historia had tipped her face upward, wearing an expression Aeternus had never seen on her before. Excitement, shyness, and a trace of admiration.
Aeternus stopped on the slope. They were a hundred meters apart, with the herd and a thicket between them. He could neither hear their conversation nor see the woman’s face. He did not approach.
His first feeling was happiness. In this place where no one paid attention to Historia, it could only be a good thing for someone like that to speak with her.
The black-haired woman bent down and handed Historia a thick book. Its cover was dark. Historia accepted it carefully and hugged it tightly to her chest.
The woman kept watching her.
Aeternus did not go over to disturb them. It was a rare, warm moment for Historia.
Over the following days, that book became Historia’s most precious companion.
Whenever she had a spare moment, she held the book in her hands, pointing at the illustrations and words with shining eyes. "Aeternus, how do you read this character?" "What does this passage mean?"
No one had taught her to read when she was young. Written words were like mysterious symbols to her. Aeternus had never received a formal education either, but with the research experience of his previous life, combined with the fact that the Eldian script had changed little over two hundred years, he could understand seventy or eighty percent of it.
He sat down and taught her one character at a time.
"This means ‘brave’... and this one means ‘courage.’ Put together, they mean ‘courageous.’" He traced the characters in the dirt with a twig. Historia studied earnestly, her blue eyes fixed upon them as her little lips softly repeated the sounds after him.
Sometimes she mistook one character for another. Aeternus never laughed at her, only corrected her gently. Gradually, she became able to read simple sentences. Her finger moved across the lines of text; she read slowly, but with complete focus.
"Krista... helped... people who needed help," she read aloud word by word. Then she looked up and smiled at him. "She’s so kind."
Aeternus watched her become absorbed in the story, and his heart softened. He understood that kind of yearning.
The book told the story of a girl named Krista. She was not an omnipotent goddess, merely a kind girl who always thought of others. In the story, Krista listened to people’s troubles and reached out to help them, earning their trust and affection in return. She and everyone else supported one another, searching together for a way to survive through hardship.
"Krista... doesn’t save everyone all by herself," Historia said softly as she closed the book. "She survives... together with everyone else."
Aeternus nodded. "Yes. She is important, but she needs other people too."
Historia’s eyes gleamed with yearning. "I... want to become someone like that too."
Looking at her, Aeternus suddenly recalled that day and asked as casually as he could, "Historia, that older girl who gave you this book that day... who was she? She didn’t seem to be from the pasture."
Historia looked up, pure bewilderment spreading across her face. She blinked.
"Older girl?" She tilted her head and repeated the words, her voice full of incomprehension. "What older girl? What are you talking about, Aeternus?"
The air froze.
The cicadas, the cattle, the wind rustling through the grass—all of it seemed to be cut off by an invisible hand. Blood rushed to Aeternus’s head, then drained away in an icy retreat.
He stared hard at her face. There was no joke, no attempt at concealment. Those blue eyes held nothing but unfeigned confusion.
Impossible!
He had seen it with his own eyes! The black-haired woman, her elegant figure, the book Historia had held as though it were a treasure... every detail was clearly etched into his mind. It had only been a few days.
A chill crawled up his spine. He suddenly realized that his failure to approach that day might not have been simply out of courtesy. That mysterious black-haired woman seemed to possess some power capable of silently erasing a person’s memories.
"It’s... it’s nothing." Aeternus heard the dryness in his own voice. He forced out a stiff smile. "Maybe... maybe I dreamed it and got confused."
Historia seemed to believe him. Lowering her head, she resumed pointing at the page and quietly reading the words she had just learned.
Aeternus could no longer remain calm.
He sat there in the sunlight, yet felt no warmth. He looked at Historia’s focused profile, then at the heavy storybook.
Who was that black-haired woman?
She had given Historia a book.
Then she had made Historia completely forget her existence?
Why?!
This was anything but ordinary. A powerful unease, like icy vines, coiled tightly around Aeternus’s heart.
Spring turned to autumn, and time flowed on Inside the Walls. In the blink of an eye, it was already the year 844.
As for that mysterious black-haired woman, Aeternus had long since vaguely guessed her identity from the temperament she occasionally revealed and the terrifying power she possessed to alter memories. The royal family Inside the Walls... the Founding Titan. Only later did he learn her name: Frieda Reiss.
She would still occasionally appear at the pasture. Every time she came, Aeternus could sense that unusual tranquility in the air in advance, and would consciously drive the cattle away, keeping far from her.
He remembered too clearly the strange incident of that erased memory and understood the woman’s danger. Like a watchful marmot, he was always prepared to retreat into the safety of his burrow.
Yet even the most careful plans had their oversights.
One afternoon, the sunlight was perfect and the brook murmured gently. Gathering a rare burst of courage, Historia slipped beyond the pasture fence with Aeternus to their secret stream.
Barefoot, Historia splashed through the cool water, her laughter ringing through the woods like silver bells. Aeternus sat on the bank, weaving a tiny cage from blades of grass, a smile at the corner of his lips.
Then, without warning, an icy and suffocating pressure descended upon them.
Aeternus’s hairs stood on end as he abruptly looked up.
In the woods across the stream stood Frieda Reiss. She still wore her simple, elegant long dress, but her face was now filled with shock, anger, and an icy resentment at having been offended.
Her gaze was like tangible spikes of ice. It first stabbed fiercely toward Historia, who had frozen in the stream, before snapping toward Aeternus on the bank.
"Historia!" Frieda’s voice was not loud, but it carried an unquestionable authority that instantly froze all the joy by the stream. "Who gave you permission to come out here?! Return inside the fence immediately!"
Historia’s little face turned deathly pale. Her whole body trembled, her eyes immediately reddening as she scrambled in panic toward the bank.
Frieda’s eyes locked onto Aeternus as if she were examining some filthy object that had defiled her territory. "And you... you should not be here. You should never have brought her outside!"
Fear engulfed Aeternus like a freezing river. The worst-case scenario had happened. He wanted to explain, wanted to run, but beneath that invisible pressure, his body felt nailed in place.
He had to find a way!
In a flash, Aeternus almost instinctively attempted to enter the [Accelerated World]—even one instant of extra time to think would be enough!
The moment he focused his mind, everything around him abruptly slowed. Sound stretched and distorted. Yet in that crack between moments of consciousness, he saw something far more terrifying than reality—
Behind Frieda, a blurred male figure was distinctly superimposed over her! It seemed condensed from shadows and will, bearing an ancient, weary majesty. More horrifying still, at the very instant Aeternus’s gaze fell upon it, that blurred man’s head seemed to move, as if... it were about to rise and look at him, this observer who should not exist!
An indescribable, icy terror born from the depths of his soul seized him in an instant! Driven by the instinct to survive, he forcibly severed the connection, and his consciousness snapped back into reality. The entire process had lasted less than half a second, yet cold sweat had already soaked his back.
What was that?! What kind of joke was this?! Why was there someone... on Frieda?!
There was no time to think further. In reality, Frieda’s pupils had changed to an eerie purple at some point! An invisible and immense force spread outward from her, and even the air seemed to tremble. Aeternus and Historia felt as if lightning had passed through their bodies.
"Forget all of this..." Frieda’s voice carried an ancient echo as it drilled directly into their minds. "Forget that you came here. Forget that you played together... Forget that you saw me..."
Aeternus felt a powerful will violently invade his consciousness, attempting to brutally erase and overwrite the memories they had just made. It felt as though an icy hand were stirring his brain, bringing waves of dizziness and nausea.
Yet the blurring and loss of memory he had expected did not occur.
When that force touched the depths of his consciousness, it seemed to strike an invisible wall. Diablo’s soul core—that of a researcher from the future, tempered by Paths—along with the qualities within him that differed from those of all Eldians, formed a natural barrier at that moment. His memories of the stream, the laughter, and Frieda’s furious face remained sharply branded in his mind, completely untouched!
He was shocked, but even more overwhelmed by the terror of standing at the edge of disaster. Frieda’s power did not work on him! If she discovered that...
The instinct to survive overrode everything. Aeternus reacted almost immediately—he could not let Frieda discover anything unusual! He copied Historia’s appearance. The fear and panic in her eyes were rapidly fading, replaced by bewilderment and emptiness. Her body trembled faintly, like someone just awakened from a deep dream.
Aeternus forced his own gaze to go blank and arranged a similarly confused expression on his face. He even deliberately swayed, as if he could not keep his footing. He ceased all resistance, allowing that force to brush across the surface of his consciousness while feigning the successful alteration of his memories.
The light in Frieda’s eyes, along with that eerie purple, gradually receded. She looked at the two children standing there with vacant gazes. Her eyes paused on Aeternus for a moment, as though confirming that the memory alteration had succeeded. A complex emotion flashed across her face—something like relief, but also something like an even deeper exhaustion.
"Go back, Historia." Her voice returned to its usual tone, though a nearly imperceptible hoarseness remained. "From now on... you are not allowed outside the fence."
Like a puppet on strings, Historia obediently staggered toward the pasture fence, never once looking back at Aeternus.
Aeternus maintained his dazed appearance as well, slowly turning toward his home. Only after he had gone far enough that he could no longer feel that icy gaze did he dare stop. Leaning against a rough tree trunk, he gasped for breath, cold sweat having long soaked through the clothes on his back.
His heart pounded wildly in his chest. Relief at surviving the ordeal tangled with immense fear.
He had succeeded. He had deceived that godlike woman capable of altering memories, and had narrowly escaped the gaze of the even more terrifying existence upon her.
Yet that narrow escape brought no joy—only a deeper chill. He had witnessed the horror of that power with his own eyes and confirmed the abnormality within himself. The Founding Titan’s power was no different from that of a god. And he himself—an anomaly who should not exist, immune to memory alteration—had already stepped into the center of an even more dangerous and unknown vortex.
Comments (0)
Please log in to leave a comment. Login or Register