Towering trees, their gnarled roots snaking across the forest floor like ancient serpents, formed a dense canopy overhead, filtering the sunlight into scattered rays that danced amidst the shadows. Overgrown stones littered the ground, peeking out here and there from the otherwise dense cover of moss that climbed even to a remarkable height on the tree trunks as if bearing silent witness to centuries of nature’s reign.

With tears welling up in my eyes, I took a deep breath, savoring every sip.

The air was thick with the scent of damp earth and decaying foliage, mingled with the sweet scent of flowers blooming all over the blanket of moss.

A sob escaped my lips.

How long has it been since I smelled something so wonderful?

Simply too long. So long, in fact, that I’d forgotten how uplifting the scent of flowers could be.

It caressed my soul.

Honestly, I lost track of how long I sat there, taking it all in, basking in this moment that, for all I knew, could fade away at any second. As if spellbound, I watched in wonder as vines cascaded down from lofty branches, their tendrils swaying in the light breeze and entwining into a tangled mess of webs that draped the forest in a verdant embrace no different from the moss on which I sat. Birds flitted somewhere among the branches, their songs echoing through the woodland depths, while creatures hidden from my sight rustled in the undergrowth, adding to the symphony of life that thrived within this dream-like wonder.

A place with this kind of serenity was rare to find, even back on Earth. Not to mention the undeniable lingering sense of magic. As much as I may not have liked it, my instincts were telling me that despite this place not being so old, every tree, every leaf, and every shadow seemed to emanate this strange sense of ages-old might. It was as if the very soul of these woods stirred with a primal energy, ancient and eternal, waiting to speak to those who dared to listen.

But as I strove to glimpse into the secrets this magical place held, one nagging question pressed upon my mind.

‘How the bloody heck did I get here?’

Undeniably, this was no dream. Rare as they were among my nightmares, they never lasted this long and never were this real, this vivid, this serene. No, this forest was not a figment of my fading mind - I was here, as in really here.

‘But how?’

The last thing I remembered was that shitty bug-like creature piercing a hole in my chest while clicking its mandibles in undisguised glee. There was, however, no sign of the wound now.

Was it some kind of illusion, then?

This entire forest, too?

If so, a bloody good one. The wound and this place seemed pretty damn real to me.

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‘Wait...’

There was more. After having my heart pierced, there came that blinding white light. Not really the proverbial white light at the end of the tunnel, but an all-consuming bright glow not so different from...from the light that took the shoelace bitch away.

“Shit. Did that weird-ass bug actually did what I think it did? Again!” I blurted out in realization, my horrified voice disturbing the serenity of this place, my eyes searching it for clues as to what hellhole I was actually in this time.

‘This couldn’t be Earth, could it?’

For a moment, I entertained the possibility that a bit of remorse had struck the bug, and after ripping me from my world several months prior, the creature had decided to send me back. While this place wasn’t exactly impossible by Earth standards, sadly, the Lattice’s existence kind of was.

At least, that’s what I believed.

After all, in all my life on Earth, I had never heard of anything like the World Rune Lattice binding the whole world to its rules - nor about mana actually existing, for that matter. The presence of the first was easy to double-check by delving into my mind and the Grid Forge; the latter, I faintly sensed still flowing within my body.

So . . . no, this wasn’t Earth.

In a way, the realization came as a relief. While I longed to return to my family, to see my brother, my father, and my grandfather again, to appear at their doorstep looking as I did, I would undoubtedly end up on yet another table under the knife of yet another butcher. No, if I wanted to go back to my old life, I couldn’t come back with wings fluttering on my lower back and a tail wagging behind me.

“Damn you, y-you bloody deranged asshole,” I growled through my teeth. Because of him and his shitty experiments, I was basically forced to stay here, wherever this place was.

“F-fuck me....”

What escaped my lips was a curse my mother would have scolded me for, a pathetic whimper into the carefree song of the birds high above my beast ears, now sorrowfully downcast, tips almost touching my shoulders. This time, the tears really burned my eyes.

Even if this was Eleaden, the planet where I had endured the last year and a half, a place where people possessed incredible abilities, there was no way to tell if there was a way for me to get rid of the side effects of the concoctions, let alone return to Earth without the help of that damn bug. And even if there was a way, which I hoped there was, it could take years.

“Tell me, Sage, where do I even begin?” I groaned into my tail’s hair as I pressed it to my chest and lamented: “All I know of this world is basically two shitty rooms.”

As if understanding my hurt, Sage wrapped herself gently around my neck to soothe me.

‘Huh, apples?’

Baffled, I sniffed my tail a bit more.

‘...no cinnamon?’

While wondering at the mystery of the scent emanating from my otherwise dirty tail, my skull tingled with a notification.

* You were poisoned

“What the...?” Back in the cellar, the poison didn’t... bite me.

Why? Why now? What changed? Wait...was it because I was no longer a beast?

The beast.

A shudder ran through my body at the thought of what I had done under that primal ferocity driving me. My eyes fell on my hands again, the dried blood on them just a gruesome reminder of what I had become - a murderer. No matter what I might do, no matter what excuses I might find, no matter how hard I might turn a blind eye to it, no one could wash the blood from my hands.

Pressing Sage closer to my chest, same with my knees, I buried my head deeper into her hair and hid in the embrace of my wings, breaking down in tears.

* You were poisoned

‘Good.’

To die by my own hands, who knows where, alone, seemed like a fitting end for someone like me.