Naless slowly turned his gaze back toward his younger self.
"What is he doing?" Frey asked, puzzled, as he watched the child hold one of the lifeless creatures, playing with its corpse.
The boy extended his hand toward the dead body, then pulled it back, then reached again—as if trying to touch sothing invisible, sothing that wasn't there.
"Watch closely," Naless said quietly. "Focus on what happens next."
They both fell silent.
They watched.
A strange child waving his hand through empty air, holding a dead creature in the other.
Seconds passed.
Then ...
Sothing changed.
The hand moving through the air suddenly began to glow.
Without warning, sothing erged… a strange power.
It resembled aura… yet it was different.
A spark of gray energy, surrounded by crimson vibrations, pulsed with a force that felt unnatural ... impossible to comprehend.
The young Naless slowly extended his hand toward the corpse, cautious… almost afraid.
The mont that strange energy touched the lifeless body ...
It seeped inside.
Right before Frey's eyes.
Right before Naless's.
The gray-red energy spread through the small corpse, and its body began to glow.
Its veins lit up.
Every cell ignited.
A strange warmth spread through that cold, lifeless body.
And from nothing ... Sothing extraordinary was born.
Frey's eyes widened, his breath catching as he stared.
The corpse trembled.
And from within it… a heartbeat echoed.
In the hands of the young Naless, the squirrel-like creature opened its eyes… and rose again.
Alive.
As if death had never touched it.
It didn't even realize what had happened. The mont it saw the child before it, it fled—running away with full vitality, untouched, unbroken.
Frey stood frozen in shock.
But the one who was even more shocked—
Was the young Naless himself.
His hand trembled violently ... the sa hand that had released that strange power.
He stepped back, fear overtaking him, as if sothing he had dreaded… had just beco reality.
Frey was about to speak, to question what he had just witnessed.
But the question ca from soone else.
A new presence had entered.
A cold, heavy hand seized the young Naless by the arm.
And a chilling voice cut through the silence.
"What did you just do?"
The voice ca from behind him.
Slowly… Naless turned.
Only to find a man he had never seen before standing there.
He was tall, surrounded by an obscure aura that made Naless feel as though the being before him was sothing entirely different. And yet… the man shared the sa physical traits ... gray hair, cold, dark eyes, and a pale, lifeless complexion.
He wore simple clothing, nothing remarkable, nothing that would distinguish him from an ordinary man. But that only made his presence more unsettling. There was sothing fundantally wrong about him.
Naless didn't know what to say. The man had seen everything—he had witnessed the miracle that had just occurred.
Under normal circumstances, such an event would have been reported imdiately… but this man was anything but normal.
"I see… you don't understand," the man said calmly, before grabbing Naless and taking him away. There was no resistance, no struggle ... Naless had nothing he could use against him.
He was taken to a place he had never seen before. And what was even stranger… he couldn't comprehend how he had arrived there in the first place. His sense of space and ti twisted the mont he followed that man.
From that encounter onward… nothing felt natural anymore.
Naless was confined within a bleak building ... empty, lifeless, as though no one had ever lived there. The entire situation was bizarre. Even after his sudden disappearance, no one ca looking for him… as if his very existence had never mattered.
Later, he realized… the man had done sothing.
"I spent several years imprisoned by that man," Naless said from the present, recounting what had happened.
The man rarely appeared, leaving him alone for long stretches of ti. But whenever he did co… he brought sothing with him.
Corpses.
"Corpses of different creatures… from various kinds."
Sotis they were bodies of his own kind. Other tis, they were creatures from entirely different races.
It was the first ti Naless had seen beings that were not born on Krat… beings from a world completely foreign to him.
"He wanted to do the sa thing I did with that creature… but this ti, with them."
The man forced Naless to attempt using that strange power again. He wanted him to bring those corpses back to life. Naless had little choice… so he obeyed, trying again and again to recreate what had once happened.
But every single ti… he failed.
The man never said a word about those failures. He would simply leave, abandoning Naless alone with the corpses. Days passed in isolation, surrounded by bodies that decayed rapidly.
Over ti, Naless learned how to preserve them, preventing their decay. Gradually… they beca the only thing he had.
The man continued bringing more. Each ti… a new type, a new species, sothing entirely different. And so, studying those creatures beca Naless's sole occupation.
He couldn't bring them back to life—he failed every ti. But he did manage to manifest that strange power… a gray-red energy unlike anything in that world.
After countless failures, the man finally spoke—one of the few tis Naless ever heard him say anything.
"Your existence is distorted. Your self is fractured… the power my master desires exists within you, but you are unable to manifest it."
His voice was cold, devoid of emotion. Then he turned away, opening the door he had always kept shut before Naless.
"You are free to leave. You are of no use to anymore."
He left him behind .. alone, surrounded by an ocean of corpses. Countless bodies, each belonging to a different race. That was the last ti Naless ever saw that man.
A man who, in all likelihood, had shown him nearly every living being that existed in the material world. He had even brought him the corpses of demons, Light bearers, Pantheon beings… and humans.
"It was strange… his appearance before was not random," Naless said from the present, his tone calm.
"I didn't know who he was back then, nor what he represented. He felt… overwhelming. As if he was always watching , observing everything I did. Defying him was impossible."
"Later… I finally understood the truth behind him. I understood why I felt so powerless before him, despite how similar he seed to ."
"That was the Great one of my kind… the Great one of Krat."
"A being sent to … for reasons I did not understand. But he likely desired the power I had shown."
Naless spoke, revealing what that encounter had left behind—how it shaped him, how it built the person he would eventually beco.
Those words… only deepened the existential crisis he had been living through.
A distorted existence… a fractured self.
They drove him to question his origin more than ever before, pushing him to uncover the truth behind those strange powers he was born with.
He wanted answers.
And to find them, Naless realized that he needed to fully understand the laws of life and death… and master them. The corpses surrounding him had already given him the first hint.
That unique power within him beca the source of his manipulation over life and death… the seed from which everything began.
A seed planted within him… after his fateful encounter with the Great one of Krat.
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