Chapter Ninety-Three

Amuro walked through the narrow corridor on the second floor.

The huge floor-to-ceiling windows in the hallway were illuminated by the illusionary exterior at this moment, and he turned his head to see the endless black forest.

A small ventilation window was open at the top, and he could smell the cold air pouring in from there, mixed with fine snow particles.

Outside, there was a snow-covered garden, and a boy in a kimono sat on a swing in the courtyard, and the sound of an old hoop rubbing was infinitely amplified, coming from below.

Amuro heard the old chain rubbing against it, making a 'click, click, click' sound, and the boy sat on the swing and shook it slowly, looking up into the distance.

Then, the scenery outside the window suddenly changed with his running footsteps.

Light blue, green, golden, snow-white.

Spring, summer, autumn and winter.

The colors change with the seasons.

In an instant, the green shoots grew into lush foliage, and soon became golden and black, and the branches that were originally full of leaves fell with snow, and then the snow on them gradually melted, repeating the process of germination, blooming, and withering.

The only constant is the person sitting on the swing.

The boy looked down at the book in his hand, and he didn't know how long the seasons had turned, and at first the boy who didn't look like an adult man's thigh-height on the swing drew a strip and became a teenager.

The boy closed the book in his hand, and suddenly turned his head to look at the window on the second floor.

Caught off guard, Amuro Toru and his gaze were up.

Quiet, gloomy eyes of different colors, in the ever-changing time, calm thick, lonely snow.

In the next second, everything outside the window turned into fog and disappeared.

The feeling of loneliness was so intense and heavy that Amuro was stunned for a moment before he realized that he shouldn't be spending time here.

He set off again and ran towards his destination, the huge floor-to-ceiling windows being left behind, the lights dimmed, and all the whispers came flooding back.

Okiya stepped down the hallway, passing one room after another with wide open doors.

He saw that the little young master puffed out the radish vegetables on the plate with a puffed face, and had to pick them up again under the butler's gaze and put them in his mouth.

He saw the other party curled up in a chair and sleeping, and the books on the bookshelf next to him had changed batch after batch, all of which were difficult names and catalogs, and there was no bright color that belonged to a child.

The weapon was thrown on the ground, making a clanging sound, and the boy played the young master's temperament, and after just a few shots, he couldn't hold the heavy machinery, and simply didn't learn anything.

He saw the high-end gifts scattered around, the books thrown aside, and the boy willfully expressing his requests to the butler and the gentleman who rarely came.

Okiya walked through the last row of rooms, all the gifts were thrown on the floor, and the view was still quiet and silent outside the window, and then when he walked past the last oil painting, everything suddenly fell silent.

He then stopped, and heard a soft breath in the room, trembling, like the breath of a rabbit pressed against a cutting board and facing a sharp knife.

The scene in the room changed again, and the gentleman in the study sat in a large chair with a relaxed expression.

The butler stepped forward and placed the hot tea in the other person's hand.

"The organization's recent experiments have been successful, and the results of the final phase are coming down...... You can get your hands dirty with him. ”

“…… Sir, but. The butler almost knocked over the tea in his hand, but he barely managed to hold on and whispered, "I don't know what will happen to him later." ”

He racked his brains to find some reason to dispel the idea of the boss ordering him to kill the child he had raised since childhood, but was quickly blocked by the following words.

"Role? I don't see much value in him, let alone his parents......" His tone was full of detached disgust.

The conversation between the two muffled the sound of another very faint breathing in the room.

Okiya saw the boy who secretly drilled into the small space under the bookcase with a flashlight in order to read the book that the housekeeper wouldn't let him read.

In a trance, the pink-haired man saw through those eyes a world that was collapsing violently.

It was also at this time that he finally figured out that when he once mentioned the topic of childhood to Columbai, the unnaturalness in the other party's tone was nothing more than disgust at his own powerlessness.

If I could have worked a little harder at that time, wouldn't I have been labeled as worthless and then removed at will?

Perhaps it was on that day that the ten-year-old boy really figured out the difference between the little master who was kept at home and the rat in a cage, and finally lifted the gauze of camouflage and found that he was the latter who could be slaughtered at will.

Fear, disgust, depression, pain, reluctance......

Maybe there's something else.

Okiya tried to reach out and grab him, but the outstretched hand only passed through the phantom.

He was silent for a moment, then moved to the next room, and the hallway after that was still silent.

The boy curled up under the covers, quietly watching the butler close the storybook in his hand and say goodnight to himself.

He closed his eyes obediently as usual, but took out the dinner knife hidden under the mattress after the other party left.

The boy carefully locked the bedroom door, guarded the door, and waited for the person who did not know when to do it to come to the bedroom in the middle of the night, for fear that he would die in his sleep, and in the morning the butler came to call the door to open the door earlier, and returned to the bed as if nothing had happened, pretending to have just woken up.

He watched as the boy picked out the vegetables and carrots from his meal day after day, and was even more silent when he received the butler's tacit approval that he did not need to eat the vegetables.

I don't know how long it took, but perhaps it was the gentleman's near-success experiment that failed again, and his value was regained because of this failure.

As he pulled the carrot off again, the depressed-looking boy whispered words of protest without the same indulgence as the butler's compensation.

"No, young master. Okay, I don't have to eat it tonight, but I'll make a drink for breakfast tomorrow morning with vegetables and fruit. It's been a long time since you've eaten vegetables, and it's not a good habit. ”

The boy looked stunned, just nodded his head haphazardly and lowered his head to eat, and then hurried back to the bedroom.

The moment he closed the door with his backhand, he fell to his knees and began to cry silently.

Because of the happiness of the rest of his life after the catastrophe, Okiya couldn't see it, and maybe the boy himself didn't understand it at that time.

He just knelt on the carpet of the room, covered his mouth and buried his head, his whole body trembling violently, tears falling on the carpet in large drops, but there was nothing but heavy breathing.

I don't know how long he cried, but the boy still sat on the carpet, his tears had dried up, and he looked at the window, which was extraordinarily narrow in the huge bedroom, and the sunlight poured in through the half-closed blinds, like the black and white shadows of a cage.

He stood up, slow and slow from kneeling on the ground for too long, and walked smoothly to the only window in his bedroom.

The narrow wooden window edge could only frame a square view, and when night fell, the homing bird landed on the window edge with a stone in its mouth, and the boy subconsciously reached out to touch it, and his fingertips could only touch the window.

The bird turned its head to look at him, and suddenly spread its wings and walked away.

Okiya stood there for a long time, waiting for the door to the next place to appear in front of him before waking up from a dream.

He walked briskly forward.

The countless rooms in the hallway were dimly lit, and the old clocks at the end were 'ticking, ticking'.

Amuro frowned and walked towards the end of the clock, where the hallway kept repeating, and he still hadn't found the entrance to the basement.

The doors of the rooms on both sides were wide open, and inside were one completely different memory space after another.

He walked through the corridor, and in the room next to him, a young man in a kimono sat at a desk, holding a foreign language financial bibliography in his hand, and he felt a headache just looking at it.

The lamp next to the desk was on, and I don't know what time it was at night, so the boy yawned and poured down the refreshing tea in his hand.

The sound of the pages turning was replaced by the sound of grappling, and in the training room, a bruised teenager got up from the ground, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and motioned for the other party to come again. Then he rushed up again with what he had at hand.

Amuro quickened his pace, but the hallway suddenly flickered twice, and the thick carpet under his feet turned into a road.

He suddenly went from the inside of a building that had always been ghostly to the wide, the sky of the vast exhibition stretching out in front of him, with closed shops on either side, and the siren of a police car sounding from a distance.

He watched as the young man in the suit shorts that made it easy to move was so cold that the tip of his nose was red, and after he knocked the man in the alley who was nervous and slashed at him with a knife when he saw someone appear, he suddenly heard a figure in the distance.

"Hello. Are you a student in your neighborhood? ”

In the alley shot, the man with half-long hair stood next to Matsuda Jinpei and waved at the boy with a smile.

The scene changes abruptly, and Amuro Toru walks down the street next to the alley to another bustling shopping street.

He saw the boy with his back to the fast-food restaurant with its huge burger decoration, walking towards the black car on the side of the road, step by step, his shoes falling to the ground with a crisp, short tapping sound.

The surrounding scenery has changed again.

The street turned into a promenade, the asphalt road turned into a carpeted wooden floor, and the phantom of Ikekawa Na turned his back to him and continued towards the corridor that stretched infinitely ahead.

As he walked, the suit he wore to make it easy to move when he fled turned into a wide kimono, and his shoes and socks disappeared.

It looked like the 17 or 8-year-old boy continued to walk forward, but a completely different shadow flashed on his body.

Like a computer that keeps flashing after a freeze, his figure suddenly turned bloody when it flickered a few times.

Dark red, viscous blood slid slowly down between the knees and down the calf curve to the feet, leaving broken footprints on the carpet.

The sound of chains swaying echoed in the air, and black shackles suddenly appeared on the bare part of his blood-stained feet, and the chains on them were firmly nailed to the walls on the left and right.

The boy continued to walk unconsciously, until the hallway no longer stretched.

Amuro frowned as he saw a door appear in front of the phantom, like an entrance to the basement.

The boy stood in the doorway, his voice shackled on his ankles, and it seemed that he had finally moved from a 17-year-old boy to a 19 or 20-year-old, and after stopping, the man who could already be called a man suddenly looked back.

There was a flicker, and the bloody clothes on his body were replaced by the familiar cyan kimono.

The blonde man paused, only to notice that the phantom that now belonged to Ikekawa Na was no different from the first time he met the other party as a new member of the organization.

'Ikekawa Na' just glanced back at him, then he turned his head and walked towards a black door.

The silver anklets that were attached to the ankles, the bells swayed with the steps, making a crisp sound, like the sound of iron chains.

(End of chapter)