After leaving that strange human girl with Leeora, Draven returned to his study. Inside, he found his servant Erlos, seemingly waiting for his arrival with a silly grin on his face. However, the moment he saw his master’s expression, that grin disappeared.

Without a word, Draven sat on the chair behind his desk as he had to finish reading a couple more reports before he left to attend the council meeting.

However, the silence was very, very uncomfortable.

The elf fidgeted on the spot. “Sire, do you have any instructions for me…?”

The red-eyed man purposely ignored him, continuing to read through the scrolls on his desk. Only after he finished did Draven look at his servant with a displeased gaze, causing the elf to gulp.

“Didn’t I say to throw that creature among her kind?”

It was a simple question, but Draven’s slow, dignified voice caused the usually carefree servant to be nervous.

“Y-Yes, Sire,” Erlos replied.

He thought the King would scold him, but Draven only glared at him, not saying another word.

To Erlos, it was fine if his master scolded him but if he received only a wordless glare, it was a warning sign for him that he had truly angered his king.

Erlos put on an awkward smile to hide his anxiety, but the twitching of his long ears was a dead giveaway of his true emotions.

“Sire, before you punish me for disobedience, may I be allowed to explain my actions?”

He blinked his eyes towards the King, trying to act cute to appeal to his master, but the red-eyed man had no change in his dark expression.

The servant took his silence as permission to speak. “Sire, trust me, I also want to throw that human girl out as much as you want. After All, the palace is not a place for those weak and deceiving creatures but…” He paused mid-sentence, trying to bait a response from Draven but his master simply kept his cold glare pinned at his body.

He continued, “B-But Sire, we cannot forget that she is a female, nothing but a frail and injured human girl. Throwing such a helpless little one to a bunch of strangers is not a good idea. You also know we can’t trust those humans. Though we have allowed those human refugees to take shelter in our kingdom and they live in those villages at the edge of Agartha, we generally have nothing to do with them. Since it was your order, I still did think of bringing that human girl to one of those villages, but seeing her thin body covered in bandages, I thought perhaps we should wait and at least let her regain her consciousness first. We can’t say what would have happened to her if we…”

After this long speech, Erlos waited to get a reaction from his king, but all throughout, it appeared that not a single word managed to affect him.

The elf servant sighed helplessly, “The human will be thrown out this very instant. I will excuse myself, Sire—”

“No need,” the cold voice of that red-eyed king interrupted him.

‘Huh? Did I hear anything wrong?’ His long ears started twitching again, but this time from excitement, not nervousness. “I knew it, Sire! You may have a heart of stone, but you still have a teeny-tiny bit of conscience in you for that frail—mmf! Hmf? Hmmphf!”

It was as if his mouth was sealed on its own and he could not create anything else but strange, muffled noises. Of course, it was the doing of his master and it was not the first time he used his power to shut his servant’s talkative mouth.

Draven stood up from his chair and walked out of his study. Just as he stepped out of the door, his dignified voice reached his servant’s ears.

“We are going somewhere.”

Erlos, who could not say a word, followed behind him while silently crying in his heart. ‘I must have been the worst villain in my last life to be reborn in this life as his servant and be forced to follow him everywhere.’

‘Stone heart? To me, it looks like he seems to not have any!’

The king without a heart and his poor servant stepped out of a long corridor and came out into the open lawn on one side of the palace. Erlos was still breathlessly catching up with his fast-walking king. When he was only a couple of steps away, Erlos found that he could finally use his voice. His eyes glistened with happiness.

“Sire—”

But his words were cut off as the two suddenly disappeared from the lawn. The elf servants who were working around witnessed the astonishing performance of magic but didn’t feel surprised as it was not the first time their king had disappeared in front of them.

Draven Aramis was the owner of various kinds of abilities and powers. The fact that everyone was scared of him, was not for nothing.

It only took a few moments for Draven and Erlos to travel almost half across the continent, and they reached a particular burned forest.

It was exactly the haunted mountain where Draven was summoned the night before, the very place where he found the unconscious body of the human creature he saved.

While Draven’s eyes were busy looking around, assuring himself that it was the same place, his companion found himself falling on the ground, feeling dizzy as an aftereffect of the teleportation magic. The young elf didn’t even get a chance to breathe before he appeared in an unknown place.

“Oh my, my body–eugh! S-Sire… I know I have said this many times before, but it would help me if you can inform me before teleporting. I almost felt like dying,” he whined as he caught his breath.

As a creature of nature, the body of elves were many times stronger than a human’s, but still, they would need to at least cover themselves with their powers to protect their body from the laws of space when teleporting. Otherwise, though they would not sustain injuries, it would feel like every muscle of their body was being drained of energy.

However, true to his namesake, the king without a heart looked like he cared not a bit about his servant and walked ahead to inspect the area.

“What is this place, Sire?” Erlos asked as soon as he regained the ability to stand, looking around the remnant stumps of trees and the rocky ground covered with ash. “How cruel. Who would dare destroy trees this way? It looks like it was burned recently. But how wicked can one be to burn an entire mountain? What kind of lunacy or grudge is this—”

Though it was daytime, the mountain looked bleak as grey smoke continued to rise from the ground, with the wind blowing up the ash that had yet to fully settle on the ground. As an elf, Erlos shivered in heartache, unable to imagine the kind of fire that burned this mountain.

Draven still didn’t comment and stopped at the place he remembered to have found that human girl. Though he had been here merely for a brief moment that night, his sharp memory and eyes that could see in the dark made it easy for him to find this place.

He remembered how that creature looked at that time—she looked like a giant block of charcoal, and he didn’t realize she was a living human being at first glance. Though he had seen worse sights, he could not stop feeling something about it. It was strange, but perhaps his kingdom had gone through boring peace for some time, that such a minor thing was now stirring strange feelings inside him.

He had no idea that his frozen heart of his seemed to have a tiny crack on it.

Draven shook his head to forget it and then looked around, peering into the distance like a hawk to see the nearest village or town to know what happened in this place. The reason he came here was to investigate what happened that night. The creature he saved was insignificant. He didn’t care about that girl, but it did pique his curiosity that why he was summoned to this mountain.

What was his relation to this place?

Was it the place or the creature he saved?