The pit of corpses where Izan had been trapped for a week was at least three meters deep, but when he had been lying on the ground, it had seemed even higher.

Now that he was standing, the edge looked almost within reach; although he would have to climb the dirt wall, he knew it would not be too difficult to get out.

Judging by the sunlight, it was already past noon, so he had to hurry if he did not want to spend another night in the damn pit.

«Cler, I'm going to be busy. If anything happens, I'll talk to you again. Don't worry about me,» the boy told his friend.

Clara, who knew what was coming, decided to remain silent, nervous, inside the Dark Palace. Even if she had wanted to answer him, she would not have been able to.

With the little experience Izan had with his ability, he had understood that its use depended largely on his emotions and intentions.

The boy thought he had probably been able to speak with Clara at first because he wanted to communicate with her, so he decided to test what would happen if he wanted the opposite.

"Can you hear me?" he asked Clara, wishing that she could not hear him.

He waited for a moment but received no response.

"Good. Looks like this works the way I thought," he sighed, fixing his gaze on the rest of the corpses surrounding him. "I have to get started, or I'll never finish."

With his sense of smell completely accustomed to the stench of decay and with a gaze detached from the horror of death, Izan began arranging the corpses of his companions so he could remove their hearts.

He bent over the nearest body to start moving it but hesitated for a moment when he saw the face of the boy who had once been his companion. A second later, he grabbed the corpse by the shoulders and began dragging it.

Silence engulfed everything, as if the world had decided to fall quiet. The only sound was that of bodies being dragged.

With some effort, he propped all the bodies against the walls of the pit, forming a circle of death around him. It looked like the scene of a macabre ritual, where all the corpses faced the center of the circle as if they were truly watching.

In the center, only his friend's body remained, with him standing beside her.

During those days, he had barely paid attention to the other bodies. The only one he had recognized for certain was Bruno's corpse. As the days passed, one side of his jaw had come loose. It swung back and forth, hanging from the single strip of flesh that still held it in place.

He counted a total of twenty corpses. Twelve were his university classmates; counting Izan, thirteen of them had been traveling in the caravan when they were attacked. The rest of the bodies belonged to people he had barely known. Two were the carriage drivers, one was the emperor's emissary, and the remaining five were the guards escorting them, who had been no match for the men who ambushed them.

Seeing them all there, he said to himself:

"I don't know if I can eat that much."

His stomach still felt full, which surprised him. In his mind, the most sensible thing that should have happened in that situation would have been to vomit everything back up.

"I need to think this through," he said, walking in circles as he looked over all of them. "First of all, is it worth eating all their souls?"

He approached one of his dead female classmates and studied her carefully.

The girl's name was Ailen. He did not remember ever having a conversation with her, since she was not very talkative.

The little he knew about her was that, at most, she would utter a few words if someone asked her something directly.

Since Ailen always looked unfriendly, no one knew whether she was shy or hated them all.

"I think I'd feel bad if I didn't take my classmates' souls with me, even if I didn't know them very well," he sighed, then looked at Sofía, who was beside Ailen's body, "or even if I didn't like them."

Seeing Sofía, who had been killed by having her throat slit and still wore an expression of horror on her face, reminded him of Alex.

Not everyone in the group had appeared in the same city. In fact, ending up in the same group as Clara had been pure chance.

He did not know where the others were, but they had been told that they were probably in a city whose name he could not remember.

"I'll ask Clara later," he said to himself, thinking she would most likely remember. "And come to think of it, I think she'd be angry with me if I left any of our classmates behind—no question about it. I'll take them all with me. Besides, their powers will be practical."

He continued walking and saw the guards, who had taken the worst of it. Their bodies were more damaged and even more dismembered than those of the Heroes.

"And what am I going to do with you? Do you have abilities?" he wondered, crouching down as he thought. "If I can see their memories, that will be a huge help. I imagine this ability would also be very useful for gathering information."

He stood up again and let out a long sigh.

"All right, I've decided. I'm taking all of them. Now, second question: how am I supposed to eat this much? I won't be able to."

As he thoughtfully looked around, he found a cloak belonging to one of the guards. He examined it, tied its ends together, and made an improvised cloth bag. Then an idea came to him.

"If I take the hearts away from their bodies, will my power still work?"

Suddenly, another intrusive thought crossed his mind:

"What if I cook them so I don't have to eat everything raw?"

Then he shook his head.

"Izan, listen to the stupid things you're thinking," he scolded himself. "You're talking about eating people... Though... I don't have another choice, do I? I have to learn the limits of my ability..."

That was when he realized something he had failed to notice amid all the horror.

"To become stronger, I need souls... souls come from the dead... if I want to save Clara, my classmates, and even myself... I'm going to have to kill."

His words sounded cold, as if he had reached a logical conclusion about a theory rather than a problem he would actually have to face.

He shook his head to push away his thoughts, trying to keep himself from worrying, and returned his focus to the task at hand.

"All right. I have no choice but to start experimenting, and I don't want to leave this place at night."

Although he would have liked to discuss all his thoughts with Clara, something inside him told him it was better to take the initiative himself. His friend was much smarter than he was, but Izan thought that if he wanted to save her, he had to bring her back to life and keep her as far away as possible from the horror he would have to commit.

The first thing he did was prepare three bags made from scraps of cloth, mainly from the guards' cloaks. Then he inspected the belongings left on the bodies.

He did not manage to recover much. Most of their belongings had been looted by the attackers, but among what he found were a pair of leather gloves belonging to one of his classmates, one of the guards' helmets, which he was not sure he would use, as well as two swords and three daggers that he thought might come in handy, even if only to sell secondhand in some nearby village.

The most interesting thing he found was a lighter tucked away in one of Bruno's pockets.

Izan knew his classmate was a smoker, but he was still surprised to find something from Earth, since they had left almost all of their belongings back at the palace.

From Clara, he took only a black-beaded bracelet, which he tied around his left wrist.

"All right, time to begin," he said, dagger in hand, standing before the first body.

The first one he opened was a dark-skinned boy named Noah. Although he knew him from university, the most interaction he had ever had with him had actually been in this world because of a particular situation that had occurred and that Izan had not given much importance to at the time.

Both Izan and Noah had appeared in the same sanctuary, something that had greatly surprised even the apostles of that temple.

The boy closed his eyes, emptying his mind of thoughts about the person whose heart he was about to tear out, and focused solely on the task.

Once he removed Noah's heart, he placed it in one of the bags he had set aside for his classmates.

He repeated the procedure one by one with chilling coldness.

He ignored their faces and the people who had once lived inside those bodies.

Furthermore, he was doing what he had to do. Besides, he kept telling himself that this would probably save them.

By the time he reached the tenth corpse, he had already become skilled at opening and cutting through the skin with precision.

The most difficult part came when it was time to remove the guards' hearts. He had trouble unfastening the warriors' armor and even more trouble removing the chainmail fitted tightly against their bodies.

When he saw the chainmail beneath the armor, he immediately thought it would be a good idea to wear one, but once he removed them, he realized they were heavier than he had imagined; each one must have weighed at least ten kilograms. He had no choice but to give up on taking that protection with him. His slender build was not suited to carrying that much weight.

At that moment, he regretted not going to the gym when he had the chance.

It took him a couple of hours to finish the gruesome task, but when he finally did, he had three bags, dirty with mud and blood, filled with human hearts.

"Now I have to get out," he said as he wiped the sweat from his forehead with his hand, only managing to smear even more blood across it. "If I recall correctly, there was a river near the road we came from. I need to wash myself immediately... It's a miracle I haven't gotten sick or caught an infection during all these days... Or maybe I'm somehow more resistant to those things?"

He looked at the edge of the pit and searched for somewhere he could grab onto to begin climbing. Once he found a suitable spot, he gathered all his belongings and began throwing them up one by one.

He tried, unsuccessfully, to throw a suit of chainmail up, but the effort nearly injured his arm.

Then he approached his friend's body, which still had its face covered by the leather breastplate. He gave her a sad look. He gently touched the hand of the arm he had not eaten and said:

"You're coming with me. I'm not saying goodbye. I don't want the Clara inside to hear this, but I want to thank you. As horrible as it sounds, I'm grateful that you were the reason I was able to keep living. I'm going to give you back the life you gave me so much of."

He turned his back on her and prepared to finish his preparations.

The last thing he did before climbing was tie the bags filled with hearts together with a rope. He secured the other end of the rope to his belt and began climbing.

His weak body resisted rising, but the mental image of a different landscape beyond the pit gave him the strength he lacked.

He dug his fingernails into the dirt, held onto protruding rocks and roots, and slowly climbed higher.

Chunks of dirt broke loose, falling onto some of the corpses, though not enough to bury them.

He could see the edge getting closer and closer, and when he finally reached it, he felt the dirt slipping between his fingers, threatening to send him falling.

Gathering the little strength he had left, he stretched out his hands and grabbed as much of the surface as he could, using it to pull himself out.

Some of the dirt fell, partially burying a few corpses.

Once he had caught his breath, he grabbed the rope around his waist and began pulling to haul up his macabre meal. It was heavier than he had expected, but after a minute, he managed to pull it up.

Exhausted and breathing heavily, Izan collapsed onto the ground. He felt the hard, dry, rocky earth beneath him, so different from the mud of the pit.

After resting enough, he stood up again and, this time, looked upon the landscape that had remained hidden from his eyes throughout all those long days.

A landscape that struck him as desolate.

There were no green forests or beautiful meadows, much less great snow-capped mountains towering in the distance. No. There was none of that.

Everywhere he looked, there was a savage wasteland, with solitary dead trees hundreds of meters apart. There were thorny bushes and rocky mounds.

There was nothing else. No road, no animals, not even birds in the clear sky.

The sun burned fiercely against his dirty skin.

The silence was absolute.

And his mind realized something; his memories were still hazy, and the nearby river he remembered was far too distant.

Desolation remained his most faithful companion.