The garden was quiet. The quiet of death that follows screaming.

  Alene stood, her slender body a fragile shield in front of her son, Rio. She didn't feel the cold stone beneath her bare feet, nor the sharp, metallic smell of fresh blood that hung in the thick air like a heavy shroud.

  All her senses were focused on the entity standing before her, the silent mountain that had extinguished all the demons in her small world. His overwhelming shadow covered them completely, blocking the faint light from the palace as if claiming them as his property.

  Inside her, in that secret place no one dared to see, a sick, guilty happiness danced. They're dead, a part of her soul whispered with pure relief. They're all dead. The fat man whose foul breath had haunted her nightmares and whose filthy touches had carved invisible marks on her skin; his arrogant wife whose gazes were silent whips of daily contempt; and their son who found sadistic pleasure in hitting Rio .

  Demons. They were her demons, and this stone monster had annihilated them. The door to her hell had always been open, and now, he had closed it. With ease. With a cold, calculated squeeze.

  But her happiness shattered against the rock of reality when she felt Rio's small hand clutch her dress tightly, and heard his muffled sobs. "Papa... Papa..." he was whispering, the words like needles in her heart. Why are you crying for him? For that monster who was the cause of all your suffering, every bruise on your small body? She didn't understand. She couldn't comprehend this warped love that bound a son to his tormentor.

  She looked at the monster again. "Dream." He stood motionless, analyzing the scene with his empty gray eyes, eyes like the mouths of two graves. But she saw beyond that. Behind those imposing eyes, she saw a ghost. The ghost of another boy, with hazel eyes filled with a different kind of pain, a familiar, aching kind. She knew that look

  . A look of endless adoration and longing. It was the same look Hong-min used to give her, the look of a stray dog that had finally found a kind hand in a cruel world. How could this cold killer, this moving mountain of silent rage, carry the same spirit as the boy who was weaker than her, more cowardly than her, the boy she had once loved?

  Dream broke the silence. His voice wasn't Hong-min's; it was a deep, logical rumble, a vibration that came from a stone chest, yet carried within it an ancient sorrow. "He opposes the mission. He is an obstacle."

  The words were cold, analytical, and directed at her son. They weren't a threat, but a diagnosis, which made them all the more terrifying.

  "What mission?" Alene asked, her voice coming out sharp and strong, surprising even herself.

  "Traveling with me," Dream answered. In that moment, something in his stance shifted. An old pain flashed in his eyes, the pure pain of Hong-min. "Wasn't that our dream?"

  The words felt like a stab. Her dream. A silly dream of a naive child, dead and buried five years ago under the weight of harsh reality. A dream that had turned to ash the night she saw Hong-min frozen behind the door. "That dream is dead," she said, each word a struggle, as if tearing a piece of her soul.

  "I have a new dream now. A dream a thousand times more important than traveling to become the greatest sorceress." She tightened her embrace on Rio, burying her face in his hair for a moment, drawing strength from his small body. "My dream is my son. He is everything."

  She hated herself as she said it. She knew these words, to the ghost inhabiting this monster, were an absolute betrayal. She could see the disappointment in his gray eyes. She was hurting him, and she found a sick pleasure in it, the pleasure of revenge against the boy who wasn't there to save her.

  Then the impossible happened. She saw a tear. A single, heavy, gray tear formed in the corner of his stone eye and began to trickle slowly down his cheek, leaving behind a dark, wet trail like a slug on a rock. She froze. The monster who had killed three people without blinking... was crying. This couldn't be real.

  Was this part of his act? Another trick? But the pain she saw in that gaze was unbearably real. It was Hong-min's pain, the pain of rejection, the pain of betrayal.

  For a moment, she felt a pang of pity. But she crushed it with cold anger. There was no room for pity in this garden of blood.

  Suddenly, Dream straightened up. The tear vanished, the pain evaporated from his eyes, and the logical coldness took complete control again, as if an automated system had rebooted after a fatal error. "Mission terminated," he said in a decisive voice.

  "The primary bond with unit 'Alene' has been severed. There is no longer a reason to remain." He turned and began to walk away, leaving her in the garden of dead demons with her crying son. He's leaving. This was what she wanted. She had wanted him to leave from the very beginning. Hadn't she?

  "Wait!"

  The word escaped her mouth before she could think. He stopped, his back to her, like a huge idol awaiting a command.

  What a fool, she thought to herself, hating her weakness and selfishness. What an idiot I am. But she couldn't take it back. The instinct for survival was stronger than her broken pride.

  "You son of a bitch!" she screamed, her voice trembling with a mixture of anger and despair. "You killed everyone here and now you're leaving me? Do you think the 'Gu' clan will believe a Panyer just showed up, killed the master of this house, and then vanished? They'll think I did it! Me and my son! They'll hunt us down and execute us in the main square!"

  It was a harsh, logical truth. An argument not aimed at Hong-min's heart, but at Dream's mind. An argument about consequences, about survival.

  "You started this mess," she continued, taking a step toward him, forcing herself to approach the monster she had been fleeing moments before. "So you have to take responsibility and get us out of here."

  He didn't turn around. He remained standing for what felt like an eternity, processing her new proposition. Then, without turning, he said a single word, quiet, logical, and decisive. "Yes."

  Alene sighed with a relief she didn't know she'd been holding. She had succeeded.

  "I will take you with me." Dream turned slowly to face her. His face was as cold as ever, devoid of any expression. But she saw something different in his gray eyes. It wasn't longing, it wasn't pain. It was a faint glimmer, something strange and incomprehensible... was that... happiness? It wasn't a smile, just a slight tightening at the corners of his stone mouth, a strange imitation of a feeling he had never known.

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  She looked at this being who was both a killer and a savior, a monster and a ghost, and felt that she had just made a deal with the devil himself, and she wasn't sure who had won.

  The garden was a theater of silence that followed the massacre. The air itself was heavy, saturated with the sharp, metallic scent of fresh blood that began to mix with the smell of damp earth and withered roses, creating a nauseating perfume of death.

  Dream stood like a statue of obsidian, analyzing the situation before him: Alene, trembling, her slender body forming a fragile shield in front of her son, and the child who, moments ago, had sworn to kill him. Inside him, in that space that was never quiet anymore, a storm of voices raged, a conflict between logic and memory.

  said the cold voice of 404 from the depths of his consciousness, pure and sharp as a shard of glass.

  screamed the sarcastic voice of Hong-min, a distorted echo from a distant memory, filled with bitterness and a sick warmth.

  The command came from a third voice, calm and deep, like the sound of rocks grinding at the bottom of a forgotten ocean.

  The voice of the nascent "Dream," the new consciousness that was trying to impose control over this chaos, to be the captain of a ship steered by a ghost and a machine. He looked at Alene, who was still trembling, and felt the echo of Hong-min's sorrow as he saw his sun trembling with fear. "And that child... are we taking him with us?"

  Alene looked at him, pure fear filling her wide blue eyes. She nodded her head quickly. "Yes."

  "I don't want to go with this monster!" Rio screamed, trying to break free from his mother's grip, his small face twisted with hatred and tears. "I'll kill him!"

  "He opposes the mission," Dream said calmly, his voice a low rumble devoid of any emotion. "He wants to kill me. He opposes my mission to live, and he opposes my mission to find feelings."

  "He's a child!" Alene retorted desperately, her voice on the verge of breaking. "He doesn't have the ability to kill you!"

  "No," Dream said, and began to list a possible course of events with terrifying coldness, as if reading a report from the future. "He will join the Gu clan. He will train for years. He will become an assassin. He will use his knowledge of my weaknesses, which he will observe now. The probability of his success in a future assassination attempt is 17.3%. An unacceptable percentage."

  Alene was shocked by this icy analysis, and her face paled. "Impossible!"

  "Fine," Dream said, as if yielding to her wish, or like a scientist agreeing to change a variable in his experiment. "He does not oppose the mission."

  screamed the voice of 404 inside him, like a red alarm flashing in the dark.

  Dream retorted with a silent anger that shook his inner being.

  Suddenly, the air changed. The smell of blood was no longer dominant, but the smell of pure danger, the scent of ozone that precedes a lightning strike, and the scent of absolute power. Out of nowhere, Ling Gu appeared at the entrance to the garden, accompanied by two guards wearing black armor as shiny as beetle wings. He wasn't walking; he was gliding, his movement calm and confident like a tiger in its kingdom, every step calculated and filled with arrogance.

  "Oh, Panyer," Ling Gu said, a condescending smile on his face. "It seems you're living a love story." He looked around at the bodies with indifference, as if they were just scattered furniture. "But as I told you before, playtime is over."

  He spoke in a calm, theatrical voice, and seemed to possess no power. But the next moment, Dream felt it. An immense, invisible pressure, as if the entire sky of the cave had descended upon his shoulders. He fell to one knee, the stone ground cracking beneath him like a spiderweb.

  He tried to stand, using all his muscular strength, moving every stone fiber, but he was like an insect pinned under the boot of a god. It was a different kind of power, the power of absolute will that crushes reality.

  "Weak," Ling Gu said with boredom, looking at his polished nails. "So weak."

  "Rio! Rio!" Alene screamed, seeing that the pressure had affected her son, who had fainted in her arms. She looked at Dream with pleading eyes. "Protect Rio! I'm begging you, Dream!"

  screamed 404 inside him, logic demanding survival at any cost.

  screamed Hong-min, his dead heart still beating with his desperate love.

  Dream trembled under the pressure, not just from Ling Gu's power, but from the civil war raging in his consciousness, tearing him between survival protocols and the echo of emotions. He was helpless.

  Ling Gu looked at Alene and Rio with indifference. "Leave them. I don't care about these slaves." Then he pointed at Dream. "Just bring the Panyer."

  The two guards advanced and placed heavy, ornate metal cuffs with strange engravings around Dream's wrists. They were cold to the touch, and Dream felt his strength fading, as if it were being sucked from his body through invisible channels. The Shackles of Restraint.

  Dream looked at Alene. He saw her run to her unconscious son, hug him tightly, her back to him. There was no look of anger or sorrow. It was... relief. Ling Gu had freed her. She didn't care what happened to him.

  screamed 404 inside him, his voice dripping with pain and anger.

  Dream's consciousness sank into darkness.

  She felt relieved. A guilty, disgusting relief, but it was relief. When Ling Gu said, "Leave the woman and child," she felt as if a mountain had been lifted from her chest. They would survive. Rio would live. That's all that mattered.

  She ran to her son, hugged him, and turned her back on the monster being chained, focusing her entire being on the small warmth in her arms. But she couldn't resist a fleeting glance over her shoulder, a final look driven by a sick curiosity.

  If only she hadn't.

  She saw his gray eyes staring at her. There was no anger or hatred in them. There was something worse. Betrayal. The shock of an abandoned child. The same look that was in Hong-min's eyes on that fateful night behind the door, a look she now understood was not weakness, but pure pain.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered into the air, but the words didn't reach him, perhaps they weren't even meant for him in the first place. "I have to be selfish. For him."

  She hugged Rio tighter, closed her eyes, trying to shut the image of that look out of her consciousness, but she knew it would be etched there forever.

  Dream woke up.

  He was in a dark, damp cell underground. The smell of mold and cold stone filled his sensors. The cuffs were still on his wrists, connected by thick chains to the wall. In front of him, on a simple wooden chair, sat Ling Gu, smiling like a cat that had found a mouse to play with.

  Dream tried to break the cuffs. He pulled with all his might, the stone muscles under his skin spasming, but the chains didn't even creak.

  "It seems you are an ignorant barbarian," Ling Gu said with amusement. "Don't you know? No matter what you do, those cuffs won't move. They are the Shackles of Restraint, made from a metal that absorbs energy and paralyzes the will, specifically for restraining your kind."

  Dream stopped. He knew what the Shackles of Restraint were from Hong-min's memories. He began to analyze his surroundings calmly. A prison. A chair. Him alone.

  "So," Ling Gu said, leaning forward, his hands clasped under his chin. "Will you accept my offer, or do you want me to hang you on the palace gates, just as the 'Chosen One' hung the heads of your race? Choose. There is no third option."

  "I want to find feelings," Dream said, his voice calm and controlled now, as if he wasn't the one who had just been captured. "Does serving you conflict with this mission?"

  Ling Gu burst out laughing, a clear, ringing laugh that filled the cell. "Find feelings? How will you find them? Are they something that can be found? What an interesting creature you are!" His laughter subsided, and the coldness returned to his eyes. "But no, it doesn't conflict. In fact, it might make things more amusing. So, what is your decision?"

  "Yes," Dream answered directly. "I accept your offer." He paused for a moment, then added, his voice carrying a strange tone, a tone that was not entirely logical and not entirely emotional, as if his nascent consciousness had found a loophole in logic. "But," Dream said, "what did Ling Gu say now? Dream said I want us to be... friends."

  Ling Gu smile froze for a moment. He stared at Dream with genuine surprise, then his smile widened again, but this time, it held a new glint of intense interest and sadistic glee.

  "Of course," he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm and pleasure. "This is even better for me. We are now... friends."

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