“Where are you going?”
Guru sniffled hard and looked up at the man.
Through tear-blurred vision, she saw a familiar face.
“Kh-hng!”
It was the face of the daddy she’d been longing to see all this time.
Her eyes reddened in an instant, the tip of her nose stung, and then—like the pouring rain—tears fell in heavy drops, soaking her cheeks.
“Gwuu wuz... hff... goin’ to find Mefi... but den... it stawted wainin’... hff!”
She gulped for breath and wiped at her face.
Sheir bent down to meet her eyes, his expression unreadable.
“If you mean Mephisto, I can make you another one.”
“Snff! But if you make a new one, it’s not Mefi... Mefi is onwy one.”
“The appearance and the behavior will be the same.”
“Stiww...”
“Why?”
It was a hard question.
Why was it that someone who looked and acted exactly like Daddy wasn’t actually Daddy?
Fidgeting, she muttered without confidence,
“Just... ‘cause... a heawt is onwy one...”
She clutched at the hem of her clothes and ducked her head.
The tears were falling so fast she couldn’t lift her face.
The words she didn’t dare say swirled in her mouth—
'So pwease give Gwuu back her one and onwy Daddy...'
Looking down at the sniffling, snotty child, Sheir replied with what seemed like genuine curiosity.
“You say things similar to Mephisto.”
“Kh-hng... Mefi?”
Guru’s tear-drenched eyes widened.
“Yes. Long ago.”
His gaze turned distant, as if recalling the past, and then he held out his hand.
“If you say so, let’s go find Mephisto.”
Blinking blankly, she asked,
“Weawwy?”
“Yes.”
Guru hesitated on whether to take his hand, then blurted out,
“If Gwuu finds Mefi, she’s gonna dwive you outta Daddy.”
She’d meant to follow it with, so you and me are enemies, but Sheir only looked genuinely intrigued.
“You? Do you think you can?”
“Y-yeah! If Gwuu uses Cwaftin’ and squish-squish fwom yo-wang, den...!”
“Oh, like this?”
Sheir picked Veilach up by the scruff of his neck.
The ugly hamster’s face flushed bright red with shame.
Glancing at him, Guru said meekly,
“Uh... a wittwe mo’ pwetty than dat...”
Back in the basket, Veilach’s mouth hung open like he’d been hit.
'That brat... she actually has enough aesthetic sense to think I’m ugly?'
While he reeled from the revelation, the child obediently took Sheir’s hand and, with the other, pushed her tricycle.
Sheir, however, lifted the trike in his other hand.
The basket tipped, and Veilach and Lukshifer scrambled up onto Guru’s shoulders.
Sheir looked down at her small hand.
“Is this what you call satisfaction?”
“Mmhm. It’s wike inside youw heawt gets aww warm an’ soft, an’ wike a wowm tickwes inside youw chest.”
Sheir placed a hand over his own chest, the corners of his mouth faintly lifting.
“I see.”
“Den it means you agwee. Snff!”
“Yes... this is also good.”
He spoke like a slightly amused scholar, almost like a boy on his first outing.
Then, just as Jurim had done before, he lifted Guru up and wiped her damp eyes.
Strangely, the rain seemed to curve away from them, and people on the street drifted around as if they didn’t notice them at all.
Looking around in wonder, Guru sniffled and said in a nasally voice,
“Mistew, you shouwd go to pweschool. You don’t know a wot of tings.”
“You mean the institution you attend?”
“Yeeeng. If you don’t know tings, you gotta weawn. Teachuh says not knowin’ isn’t somethin’ to be ashamed of.”
Sheir nodded gravely.
“If one must go, then it’s best to go.”
Guru’s face showed genuine shock.
He was the first adult who’d ever agreed so readily to go to kindergarten.
'...A good pewson?'
But he’d taken Daddy away...
As she wrestled with the thought, Sheir spoke.
“The last child I made was much like you.”
“Last?”
“I mean Mephisto.”
The supreme god and emperor who had awakened in the snowy plains created countless loyal children.
They built mountains, split the earth, filled the skies, and poured water and fire into the world.
In the meantime, life was born and died over and over—but none of it ever stirred him.
To him, everything outside the snowy plains was nothing more than dust destined to vanish.
While he turned away in that belief, the negative emotions of the living took form as something called “corruption.”
Corruption defiled the land.
And at last, it even threatened his snowy plains.
It was intolerable for mere dust to threaten his domain.
The reason he created his last child was to return the snowy plains to their original, primordial state.
He made an heir, pouring in his own power.
He gave it no name—after all, every being who could call it would soon vanish.
But the child gazed longingly at another world and named itself.
“Please call me Mephisto, Father.”
Perhaps that moment, when the child shyly called him Father for the first time, was the beginning.
That child, more vulnerable to emotional corruption than any other, one day drove a sword into his chest.
“A god who cannot measure all things and look after them is nothing but a calamity.”
The child had been crying.
The emperor did not die, but he was reduced to a silent watcher, returning to the primordial snowy plains.
Even so, the world he had made kept turning—until his second child built the Tower.
Before he could purify his world, the Tower ended it, tainted by corruption.
He had looked on with indifference.
Until now, nothing had ever held meaning for him.
Sheir glanced at his left hand.
Synchronizing with the consciousness of a dust speck had broken down the walls around him.
The affection Jurim had begun to feel seeped into him, like a drizzle soaking cloth, slowly corrupting him.
Perhaps that was why—
“I only wished for you not to be in danger.”
“...Daddy’s not in dangew.”
“But you were emotional. In my world, emotions cloud reason, lead to wrong choices, and threaten my place. They were dangerous.”
He said it like a reflection.
Looking back, maybe all he’d wanted was to keep his supreme seat.
He’d only wanted to blow away the dust specks—without ever considering the thoughts and feelings each one held.
At that moment, Mephisto was hiding in a corner of a white snowfield.
After being captured by Dominic, he had hastily created a dungeon and slipped inside.
In a vast plain blanketed with snow, finding a white baby bird buried in the drifts would be no easy task.
'So it’s fine.'
Or so he told himself—yet he kept thinking he could hear Karmirach’s growls somewhere.
Mephisto was still far too young and weak to face an SSS-Class bloodline.
The baby bird sniffled hard.
'How long can I keep hiding?'
His small shoulders drooped.
It wasn’t only Karmirach he feared.
Dark thoughts kept coming.
Over and over, an image flashed in his mind—just like this snowy plain, but with a sword in his human-shaped hands.
The baby bird squeezed his eyes shut to block it out, but the vision of that small hand gripping a sword was already there.
A transparent blade, like it was forged from shards of ice, dripped blood onto the snow.
Without thinking, he knew whose blood it was.
'Father.'
It was the memory of pointing a sword at his father.
At the same moment he realized it, the sword fell with a soft thunk onto the snow.
His snow-white hair scattered like feathers in a wind laced with cold.
His eyes burned with a heat he couldn’t stand, and he cried miserably.
The memory of stabbing his father flickered in and out, leaking from him like light through cracks.
The baby bird wrapped his wings around his chest, trying to contain the pain.
'Unfilial child.'
That’s what Veilach had called him.
And now, at last, he thought he understood what that meant.

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