Chapter 16. Fairies and Humans (12)

After realizing that I was completely lost and that I couldn’t even go back to the stairs, I broke through the ceiling and went straight upstairs. However, the upstairs had the same atmosphere as the downstairs. With hope, I went upstairs again, and it was still the same.

“Uh-huh.”

Even though I had drilled through the ceiling three times, I could only see a similar scenery. I searched for a long time, but I couldn’t find the child, and it was wide.

When I saw humans passing by from time to time, I could barely resist the urge to pull my hair and scream at the whales for where the child was.

“Whew.”

Still, having been to every corner, I thought I knew what this place was now.

“This is a ‘prison’…”

Naughty people in numbered clothes, the thick iron bars they are locked in, the different types of rooms that appear to be used for corporal punishment, the torture chambers that make them cry out to confess their sins, and the guards who manage the prisoners.

This place had all the characteristics of a ‘prison’.

“Is that child imprisoned here for a crime?”

If you’re a prisoner, why do you have to be locked up in the deepest floor of the prison because of such a heinous crime? Seeing that he can’t speak properly, he seems to have been imprisoned since he was very young. Can a child commit such a mistake?

“He wasn’t that ambitious enough.”

I remembered the ‘darkness’ I had witnessed when I first met him.

Darkness literally means the absence of light.

We classify other concepts that have it as an attribute into its sub-concepts.

In other words, the concepts related to darkness and ‘the absence of light’ belonged to darkness as ‘dark series’. These broad concepts, such as ‘existing but invisible’ and ‘hidden from being seen’, are also a kind of darkness.

In the spiritual realm, the things that living things have built into the deepest base of their minds and the psychological barriers that hide or protect them are also called darkness.

By the way, the deepest things in the heart meant the thoughts or emotions that were hidden because they did not want to reveal them, or that they were dominant enough to take root until the very back of the heart.

And I read his darkness through his eyes.

“It was empty.”

Darkness was very powerful, but it was an attribute related to the primordial darkness, Doom. If it was handled in vain, he could have been engulfed in Doom without realizing it.

Mental darkness was especially dangerous.

The mental darkness took on the characteristics of negativity, death, and emptiness as it got closer to Doom.

The darkness of those who are immersed in negative emotions close to death, such as anxiety, anger, and despair, resembled Doom.

The same was true of the darkness of those who have the will to kill to harm their lives.

The darkness of an empty person who is empty inside, as if only a shell remained, and neglects themself without anything they cherish, also resembled Doom.

The darkness resembling Doom, which I felt intensely when I first met the child, was this empty darkness.

The child was pure emptiness itself. It was like a truly soulless, inanimate object. Empty and without negative or positive emotions.

Only after I was with him in the form of grass did positive emotions slowly settle in his heart.

Until then, the child was just empty.

“Empty people are not motivated, so they often just lie down without doing anything, far from harming anyone.”

As far as I know, it was that.

I looked around the inside of the prison.

Fairies can glimpse emotions in the bodily fluids of creatures, but cannot dig into the darkness of their hearts. However, perhaps because I had dark qualities, when I focused my attention on someone, I was able to get a glimpse of the darkness underlying their heart.

So, the darkness of the prisoners I observed today was mostly empty. However, the nature of negativity and death was also evident. It was definitely different from that of the child.

“Why didn’t he have a number tag on his clothes, unlike the other prisoners?”

Why was the door marked with only the room number and not the prisoner number?

Was he that special? Or…

…Could it be that he was here for some other reason, not because he had sinned?

In fact, it didn’t matter if the kid had sinned. No matter who he is, I will like him as my first person.

I just wanted to know him.