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Chapter 2: A Work of Art
Upon closing his eyes and losing his consciousness, Blake could feel a fleeting feeling of his body being thrown away. But with his current half-dead condition, it was already a miracle that he could feel his senses somewhat working, there’s no way he would be able to figure out what actually happened to his body.
Hence when he suddenly regained his consciousness and felt his body falling down and hitting the ground face-first, he couldn’t help but jerked his eyes wide open while simultaneously turning his body up so that he wouldn’t be sitting with his face as his butt.
Blake didn’t know why he would suddenly fall to the ground, but the fact that there was a stinging pain on his forehead told him that his face had just really been planted to the ground a few seconds ago.
Blake was about to rub his hurting forehead when he suddenly felt something odd in front of his forehead.
Using his hand to rub the unknown thing, Blake was able to feel the rough, hard, and bony texture in front of his forehead. And when he used all of his ten fingers to grab whatever it was that was stuck to his forehead, Blake could finally feel that there were two hand-sized, long stumps that were stuck to his forehead.
He tried to pull out the stump, but it didn’t even budge when Blake tried to pull it out using all his might, rather, he abruptly stopped and released his hands from the stumps as he felt his skull was being pulled away from his head when he put all of his strength in trying to pull out those stumps.
.....
He wanted to see what was stuck on his forehead and tried looking around to see whether there were any nearby mirrors in his surroundings. However, when he finally took the time to look at the environment around him, Blake’s body suddenly stiffened as his mind went on high alert.
All around him were only trees, grasses, bushes, and a few huge rocks here and there, but those weren’t the things that made his mind freeze for a split second. It was the fact that the sun that was shining above his head was completely red.
Not only its body was red, but the light that it emitted also had a red hue carried with it, giving the trees, grasses, and even the rocks a shade of red on their bodies.
It was certainly a new and peculiar scenery that he had never seen anywhere in his whole life before.
Despite the many trees around him, Blake was currently sitting in a small clearing between the trees and the red light was shining quite brightly onto his eyes, so he raised his hand to block out the red sun from assaulting his eyes, only to find something even more shocking that the red sun that hung way high in the sky.
The nails on the tips of his fingers were now gone as he had sharp-looking claws, and his healthy white skin had now turned pitch black, the exact same color as his hair.
‘What was happening to me...’ He thought as he was frozen still, staring at the hand that didn’t look like it belonged to him.
‘Is this a dream...?’
He tried knocking his forehead with his sharp claws, but a dull sound was soon heard as the claws clashed against the stump on his forehead. And although it didn’t hurt him a single bit, Blake could feel the impact from both his forehead and his claws very clearly.
‘This isn’t a dream...’
Blake took a few deep breaths as he calmed himself down and tried to figure out the situation that he was currently in.
He didn’t know about the red sun and where in the world did the red sun exist. He also went through his memory and tried to remember if there were any places with the red sun mentioned in the textbook that contained information about the other world inside the gate, but even with his photographic memory, Blake didn’t remember anything about the red sun ever being mentioned anywhere.
However, that doesn’t mean that he was lost. He still had other clues, and that was his own body.
Blake then stood up as he observed his body very closely from the tip of his head to the bottom of his toes.
It had changed very significantly. Although he could feel and see that his build was still the same, the sudden existence of two stumps on his forehead, claws on the tip of his limbs, and the skin on his whole body was now pitch black were a lot of pointers that his mind could work on.
And with that many clues to work with, it didn’t take long for Blake to figure out whose characteristic did the changes in his body belong to.
“No way...” He muttered under his breath.
He had never seen them with his own eyes before since only the people that had been to the other world behind the gate had seen them with their own eyes, but according to the photos in the textbook that he had read before, those characteristics most likely pointed to one creature.
There were many types of them since it had been known that they all came in all different colors, shapes, and sizes. And it was the demon’s.
Horns on his forehead and claws on his limbs. There were other known creatures with such characteristics on the other world, and those were the beastmen’s. But with his body that still resembled humans very much and with the absence of any fur on his body, he concluded that there’s no way that he was now a beast or a beastmen.
And call it stereotypes for the demons, but his pitch-black skin looked so ominous that he might even consider himself to be a demon even without the horns and the claws.
But the question that he got was,
‘How? How did I turn into a demon? Did I die and be reborn as a demon?’
He still remembered very clearly what had happened before he lost his consciousness, even more so with his memory. The face of the one who had possibly killed him, the feeling of pure hatred that overflowed in his heart even when he was on the brink of losing his consciousness, he still remembered it vividly.
‘Did I become a demon because of that?’ He thought as he remembered the hate that he had against the world that he was born into.
Blake was about to contemplate more about his current condition, he suddenly heard a loud explosion resounding not too far away from his current location.
He didn’t know what happened, but since there was no single clue about the world that he was currently in, Blake decided to investigate it while throwing away his existential crisis at the back of his head.
Of course, he moved very carefully so that he wouldn’t be getting anyone’s attention, and assessed the situation first before he decided to do anything.
But little did he expect when he arrived near the source of the explosion, what he saw were six wolves, with each one of them was as huge as a cow. However, the six wolves were being held by tendrils of darkness that held onto their bodies and stopped them from moving an inch.
He looked at the scene with great interest as he saw a creature in the middle of those wolves drawing symbols in the air before more tendrils of darkness appeared and this time, they stabbed onto the wolves’ bodies instead of holding them down.
The way that the creature created the tendrils of darkness from thin air was as beautiful as an orchestra conductor as the creature didn’t even move an inch from its place, just waving its hands left and right as the six strong-looking wolves couldn’t even do anything to the creature standing in the middle of them as they were rendered immobile and stabbed to death without the creature even dirtying its hand.
The awe that he felt when seeing such a scene brought Blake unconsciously moved closer towards them as he now could finally see who was the creature that was responsible for doing all of that.
And when his eyes were peeled open earlier when he saw how the creature effortlessly and elegantly played with the huge wolves, his eyes were now jerked wide open, his mouth slightly agape, and his whole body petrified when he saw the figure standing straight in the middle of the wolves.
With long red hair that complemented the shining red sun flowing beautifully onto her back, wearing a two-piece dress that showed both of her slender midriff and two bat-like wings decorating her unblemished glowing white skin on her back, a face so perfect that sculptors would gladly pay with their lives just to sculpt her beauty onto their work, and two small horns on her forehead that added to her exquisiteness, it was a scene where Blake couldn’t ever forget even if his photographic memory suddenly stopped functioning.
“That shit is a work of art...” He said while feeling his nose burning with fire.