Chapter 244
"Am I speaking to the real Erusha Birtash right now?"
Witnessing the dramatic change in Theo's eyes, where both pupils radiated vividly different and unnatural colors, the static calm that had long settled on Aldraya's face finally cracked.
For the first time since their reunion in the cave, a clear reaction surfaced.
Her delicate brows slowly knit together, forming a furrowed brow that suggested deep confusion, heightened concentration, or perhaps an acknowledgment beginning to take root.
That flat, frozen-lake expression was now disturbed by ripples of intense wonder and curiosity.
Along with the crease in her brow, a question slipped from Aldraya's still-pale lips.
Her voice sounded softer than before, yet carried a direct, certainty-seeking intonation.
She did not ask about the strange phenomenon itself, but leapt straight to its most important implication.
Aldraya questioned the essence of the entity she was speaking to at this very moment.
She wanted to know, with exact specificity, whether she was facing and conversing with the true soul of Erusha Birtash, the original entity that first inhabited that body, or with the other "soul" rumored to reside within it.
"Trapped in a horrific dilemma—inescapable, undeniable, and far too significant to abandon.
Just hearing it alone would make anyone smile bitterly."
The man seated before her, the figure whose two-colored eyes cast their own light in the darkness of the cave, appeared to process Aldraya's question.
A subtle shift occurred immediately after the question was spoken.
The visual dominance of the two eye colors was no longer balanced.
The glowing pink of his right pupil seemed to strengthen, radiating brighter and more striking intensity, while the blazing blue in his left eye dimmed slightly, as though pushed into the background.
This shift acted like a visual marker of which soul now held full control over voice and consciousness.
The soul represented by the blue eye—none other than Theo Vkytor—had stepped into the rear line.
Then the man answered.
He nodded, a simple yet meaningful gesture, confirming the truth of Aldraya's question.
Yes, at this moment Aldraya was indeed speaking with the true soul of Erusha Birtash, or at least with the consciousness that identified itself as the original "self" of that body.
However, the confirmation was not followed by relief or a triumphant claim.
Instead, the answer was colored by a bitter, irritated frustration.
In a voice that sounded like a mixture of exhaustion and disgust, the man admitted that he—the real Erusha—was trapped in what he bluntly called a "damned" situation.
The crude word conveyed not only difficulty, but filth, entrapment, and something deeply unwanted.
He stated that this situation was unavoidable, an existential snare that forced him to share space with a foreign entity within his own body, a reality he endured with reluctant resignation and constant irritation.
"I remember the moment far too clearly.
The world suddenly felt like it was leaking—as if reality had been folded, squeezed, and left behind as crumbs."
Fuuuuh!
"When ninety-nine percent of that world was devoured, I had no understanding of what 'the real world' even meant.
But I knew that something alien had been forced into my body."
Hiiiih!
"That something was him. Theo Vkytor."
One day, chaos overtook the logic of reality.
The boundary between the written world and the living world, between ink and breath, suddenly shattered without warning.
The real world of Theo Vkytor, a narrative architect who had given birth to darkness through his novels, began to collapse as it was devoured by his own creation.
Flo Viva Mythology, a game realm born from the inspiration of his bestselling horror novel Last Prayer, turned into a colossal monster that bit the hand of its creator.
The destruction unfolded swiftly and without restraint, consuming ninety-nine percent of everything known as reality.
Cities, memories, physical laws—everything dissolved into shimmering data and code.
Only one percent remained, a final shard of original existence, flung away like debris from a shattered spacecraft.
And within that shard was Theo Vkytor's consciousness, the writer himself, hurled into the heart of a fictional world that had become far too real.
His arrival was not a noble rebirth, but a chaotic and brutal collision.
The vast, rule-bound game world captured that fragment of foreign consciousness and, with cold programming logic, searched for the most "empty" or compatible vessel to contain it.
The choice fell upon a rogue samurai, a man whose life revolved around wine, women, and gold coins, someone who avoided the grand affairs of the world.
Erusha Birtash.
In an instant, without permission or protocol, Theo's consciousness was forcibly crammed into the space of Erusha's soul.
The occupation was brutal.
Theo was not a guest knocking on the door.
He was a flash flood crashing into Erusha's palace of consciousness, flooding every corner, seizing every corridor of thought, and briefly drowning the rightful owner beneath the surge of invading identity.
The rage that erupted afterward was no ordinary fire, but the eruption of a long-dormant volcano of the soul.
Erusha, the legitimate owner of the body, awakened imprisoned within himself.
He felt every muscle movement not born of his will, heard every thought that did not originate from his mind, and watched the world through his own eyes like a spectator bound to a chair.
The first resounding scream was a pure protest from a soul whose boundaries had been violated.
He screamed within unheard inner silence, cursing, howling, demanding the foreign intruder leave, return to the world that had already been destroyed.
His anger was the anger of sacred territory defiled.
His vision of life as a solitary samurai who cared only for simple worldly pleasures was now disrupted by the presence of another consciousness bearing heavy thoughts, complex plans, and the melancholy of a displaced creator.
He resented every second in which Theo moved their shared body to act in accordance with grand purposes he deemed pointless and disruptive to his peace.
"At first, I never stopped cursing him.
Every second. Every breath."
Fhuuuuh!
"I wanted him gone—vanished.
Better for him to suffer without a body than to contaminate mine."
Hiiiih!
"I screamed inside my own head, hoping my consciousness would be loud enough to drive him out.
No compromise. No peace.
This body is mine, and his presence is an insult.
But time did something I never anticipated."
At first, those curses and inner screams became the unbroken rhythm of daily life.
Every breath, every blink controlled by foreign hands, was shadowed by the silent maledictions of the imprisoned soul.
Erusha Birtash, the rightful owner of the body, marshaled all his remaining will toward a single goal.
To expel the dark passenger, Theo Vkytor, from his skull.
In his unchanneled fury, he even wished that the writer's consciousness would be cast into eternal emptiness, drifting forever without a vessel, as retribution for the existential theft he had suffered.
Every graceful movement Theo made, every measured sentence he spoke, felt like salt rubbed into the open wound of Erusha's identity.
Yet as time passed and seasons turned, the screams began to lose their intensity, fading into confused murmurs and, eventually, into a silence filled with observation.
To be continued…