At the End of Ruin, There You Are (56 Chapters Left to Complete) - Chapter 114

It is night. When he closes his eyes, Pheon is overwhelmed by the hunger Caella felt, her yearning for food, and the pain radiating from her organs as they began to break down once her nourishment was abruptly cut off.

Yet, he would never dare claim to fully understand the humiliation, degradation, and misery Caella must have endured. He had never once slept properly; even in dreams, he found himself gazing down at Caella’s lifeless body.

She had wasted away until only skin and bones remained in pitiful condition. Her once-beautiful face was utterly ruined, her lustrous platinum hair completely fallen out. Her frostbitten hands and feet were too dreadful to even look at.

The burial clothes draped over Caella—the woman who should always have been treated with utmost dignity—were nothing more than her everyday garments reduced to rags, along with his blood-soaked cloak. Every night, her husband helplessly stared down at her corpse, unable even to properly bury her in the frozen ground.

‘After seeing this so many times, shouldn’t I be used to it by now?’

He had witnessed countless deaths and mutilated corpses through every conceivable method.

He had endured brutal battles numerous times, and in the end, had himself been savagely slaughtered. Death was familiar to him; humans, as creatures of adaptation, should grow numb to scenes they witnessed repeatedly.

Yet Caella’s death—and the wretched state of her remains—refused to become familiar. Far from growing accustomed to it, each time he faced her corpse, he was struck anew by overwhelming shock, grief, and guilt that swept through his entire body.

He pleaded desperately to stop seeing it, struggling instead to wake up. He couldn’t bear the feeling that her lifeless blue eyes kept fixedly staring at him.

No—if she would only look at him like that, he would welcome it. But whenever he reached out, she was already collapsed on the floor, gazing only at the door.

Day after day, he saw his dead wife, unburied and unmourned; day after day, he saw his living wife, who stared only at death.

“Do you desire me?”

Amidst death that never grew familiar, one thing remained absolutely certain: she was beautiful.

“Why?”

The sane Caella would never understand him in her entire life.

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