Only Wisdom Awakened - Chapter 263

Chapter 263: Drowning
‘What is this?…

I was doing something, wasn’t I?

It was important… it… it….

What… was I doing?

“Hans~ where are you? Breakfast’s ready”

A familiar voice called him…

‘Who is this?

Why does feel so strange hearing her voice?’

“Haaans!! I’m going to tell Mom that you sleepyhead was up until late last night!”

‘What is she saying?! Mom?’

As his confused thoughts moved around in his brain, he felt something touching his arm.

“Come on Hans!’

Someone was pushing his shoulder, and it felt annoying, to the point where he felt like screaming something like:

“Stop it, will you!!”

However, he held himself back and tried to open his eyes, succeeding just to see the face of the little pest who was bothering him.

It was his sister, Hans’s eyes widened, and a gulp of saliva was shoved down his throat as his heart began beating uncontrollably…

“Hans, what’s with you?”

The girl asked gazing down at Hans.

‘I don’t know…

What… What’s with me?’

Feeling heavy and fatigued, Hans got out of bed and followed his sister down the stairs.

His vision was vaguely offuscated, he only managed to see what was in front of him, as if his whole peripherical vision had been cut off.

But Hans didn’t even notice it, he followed his sister to a round table, where his parents were already eating breakfast.

His sister sat down, and so did he…

No one spoke a word, and Hans felt like a couple of hours had passed.

He ate, but he didn’t know what he was eating, whenever he finished a plate, one of the three people sitting with him handed him another one.

This continued until his mother got up from the table, she didn’t speak, but Hans somehow knew he had to follow her, and so he did…

He followed her to the kitchen, where speaking in a whispering voice, his mother told him:

“Hans… you know right? You know that whatever you do I support you, I will love you whatever path you choose, and I will support you with all my heart.

I have always loved you, and I will do so for eternity…”

As she said those words, her face began disfiguring, her eyes widened in horror, and a couple of drops of blood began dripping down her chin, creating a trail up to her mouth.

Her face became pale and her breathing more labored as her hands gripped onto Hans’s shoulders, an otherworldly and terrifying voice that didn’t belong to her continued her speech:

“So why?!”

“Why did you kill me?”

Before he could even notice a slight change, Hans found himself gripping a sword that pierced his mother’s throat, her blood flowed down her chin onto the sword and reached his hands, leaving behind a putrid smell that enveloped Hans’s mind.

He couldn’t think straight, he wanted to speak but his mouth barely moved, and the words he was trying to scream didn’t come out, leaving him in that terrifying place…

‘I didn’t… I didn’t do it!’

‘I would never!’

‘I didn’t know… what was happening?!’

He tried to scream but it didn’t work, it was just like a…

Just like a dream.

Hans finally noticed, and as soon as he recognized the whole situation as a nightmare, the things that surrounded him vanished one by one, leaving him alone in an endless plain of darkness.

He was still shocked by what he had just seen, how much of a fool was he not to recognize that he was just dreaming?

He felt so stupid… when he was in front of his parents, he felt just like a kid.

‘Those were nightmares, but they weren’t completely wrong… I am sure of what I have seen.

Why is it?… that the crimson lady, one of the most notorious criminals on the planet, and the killer of my grandmother… had my mother’s face?’

Hans, more than worrying about whatever was now in front of him, began trying to find an answer to this question.

A mental attack? That was the most plausible explanation, but there weren’t any traces of mental attack skills in the woman’s status window…

So how… how could she have the same face as his mother?

It wasn’t exactly the same as his mother’s, it was the face of a slightly older woman, unfortunately, he hadn’t even checked the woman’s age when he analyzed her, so he couldn’t confirm his hypothesis.

But even without knowing her age, he could clearly tell she wasn’t related to his mother, they had a difficult surname after all.

Maybe she was a distant relative, but even that would not have explained such a similarity.

Was it really… just a coincidence?

As he found himself unable to reply, Hans finally shifted his attention back to his surroundings…

There was one reason why he hadn’t panicked when seeing such a place.

It was simply because… he was already quite familiar with it.

He wanted to sigh, but strangely enough, he found himself unable to speak.

He didn’t have his body, it was almost as if he had no presence… it wasn’t the first time he had entered that place like that.

‘Did I die for real this time?’

Hans felt a bit of remorse, his eyes were saddened, and it felt difficult to even gulp down his saliva.

It wasn’t a good feeling, knowing you worked your hardest and tried your best… just to end up like that because of a single mistake.

If he could, he would have wanted to close his eyes….

‘Maybe I’m just not cut for this’

He thought.

‘My abilities are incredible, and so is my talent, it is easy for me to understand complicated things that would take others days weeks, or even months, and yet I am still always a breath away from my death…

What was I doing this for in the first place? My family? Does that even matter anymore? I can barely remember their voices, the way they talked, moved, joked…

I’m sick and tired of this all.

If this is what living means… maybe we humans are simply stupid…

What do I live for? I left my friends when I first left Italy, and my family then left me that time in Manhattan….

And since then, for all this time, I have just been trying to get back what I lost, I do not feel strong emotions, I do not have someone I can trust…

The only person I thought would accompany me even after I accomplished my goals ended up stabbing me in the back and rotting a few meters underground…

Aiden also needs to be left alone, he needs someone who can teach him how to live, not someone like me who’s stuck in the past…

The best I can do is teach him some alchemy, no, I can’t even do that, my abilities can…

I am but a worthless human… no, there are some of us who are worth something… my sister was worth something… and so were my parents.

At least they were to me….

Maybe all that time spent alone, all those nights resting in that cold apartment in Chicago, all those days spent slaving away for just a couple of bucks… maybe I’ve become dull…

If anyone other than me received my powers and my talent… I am sure they would achieve more than me.

Because I am selfish… because the only things on my list are important only to me…’

After a few seconds of pause in his negative thoughts proceeded a swear:

‘Fuck’

He thought.

It wasn’t an angry or irrational: ‘fuck!’

It was the expression used by an exhausted boy, who had barely lived twenty years….

Twenty years or… hundreds…. Hundreds of years of memory were in his brain, life is special when it’s lived only once.

Any more than that, and it begins to lose value.

This wasn’t him… his real self was now drowning inside a sea of memories, memories that didn’t belong to him, feelings other people discovered, and emotions other people suffered.

Hans noticed this… and as time passed, he realized that there was a limit to what he was doing… in the future, inevitably… there would be a day when he would completely lose himself.

His powers… didn’t come without cost.

But while his thoughts began drifting away, and his essence began disappearing from that place, something he had been waiting for happened.

Below him, in the dark, something appeared.

It was dark inside the dark, but such dark was so pure, that it stood out even inside that plain…

Two pitch-black eyes stared at him, they were wide open, and a hint of both observation and aggression emanated from them.

Just being in the same space as that entity made Hans’s existence tremble.

He felt a freezing cold envelop his body as his sight slowly disappeared…

From the black he was seeing, a little fissure of white opened, blinding him.

This fissure became wider and wider until he could finally see what was beyond it…

It was a… a white ceiling.