We kept on walking into the depths of the labyrinth. My companion gave me salty hard biscuits and jerky. A group of other explorers had given them to him, he said. He ate no food and didn’t take off his hood or boots in front of me.

“I’m fine,” he just said when I asked.

The next night, we slept in a strange room by the tunnel. While he was asleep, I saw glimmering luminescence on the ground, blinking around him as if attracted to him.

As the tunnels became deeper and more intricate, my companion’s words became more enigmatic.

“I’m collecting parts,” he said when I asked why he had walked into the ruins.

“What are the parts for?”

“To become another.”

“Why do you need to become another?” I said.

“I can’t meet him with how I currently look.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Who is ‘him’?” I asked, but my companion didn’t answer me. He was staring at his own hands while holding the gun.

Instead of asking again, I glanced at the side of his face. He was pretty, with fine features. Maybe my nanny would be pleased with him.

“Because I did some very terrible things to him,” he explained.

We went even deeper the next few days, and the tunnel was becoming more expansive. The atmosphere’s temperature had been growing warmer, like a gigantic dragon’s internal organs. Even with my optimism, I was getting scared. Where were we going?

I had only a few biscuits left. “It’s my last meal, isn’t it?” I asked him jokingly as I nibbled on the last bit.

“Maybe, yes. Humans will die without water and food. So many people starved and died after the Great Fall.” His words lacked empathy.

I stared at his fair-skinned face. His eyes always looked like gleaming jewels, but I hadn’t seen any emotions appear in them.

“The ruins here barely survived after the event so that the capital citizens could be supplied with clean water and energy. However, some rural regions could not…”

I remembered a classmate from a remote town. He looked thin and small for his age, writing a play script about “the tragedy of the Great Fall.” I thought it was a tearjerker drama with too many typos, not cultured writing.

My classmates and I laughed at his work, and it was full of my red pencil lines after I proofread it. I had said, “You wouldn’t know, but the Great Fall played a crucial role in human development.”

“Exactly. It was good for you.”