What he was about to do was not a simple ritual.
It was a structural failure designed to precipitate mory into the blood, an intentional fall, an engineered agony, and—
"……."
…as the sacrifice prepared for that failure, I collapse.
***
Before things reached this point.
When Lee Yeon-woo was still living alone in the hotel.
One day, he read. And he rembered.
"Annotations of the Crimson Core…."
A grandiose na.
"…Annotations on the crimson core?"
Translated intuitively, sothing like 'Comntary on the Red Heart.' The naming sense was crude beyond asure, and the implications within were equally unhinged.
'Though I shouldn't have expected sanity from the author to begin with.'
The scripture of a blood-worshipping cult. A collection of fragntary comntaries derived from multiple texts, stitched together with considerable crudeness for reasons unknown.
"Testimonies of failed experinters and sacrifices, annotations and anatomical diagrams, layered with bizarre prophecies and screams. Laid out like this, it almost sounds like a literary composition."
"Yes."
"Nine of the thirteen chapters have been ruled non-executable."
A cautionary tale, then?
"Hard to say…."
The hotel's archive was lined with dangerous books.
Not rely subversive in content, but the kind whose very existence posed a physical threat. In practice, Lee Yeon-woo had suffered a vicious headache the entire ti he turned the thick hardcover's pages.
Ah, and now a nosebleed.
"……."
"…Thank you."
Lee Yeon-woo looked at the tissue Coco had pushed toward him. A box of tissues nudged over with its head. Lee Yeon-woo accepted the consideration without demurring.
The nosebleed, thankfully, stopped quickly.
"A remarkable text in many senses."
"Yes."
"…But it's not as though there's no way to adapt it."
Chapter 6: 'The Protest of Blood That Refused the Heart.'
"Blood cannot replicate the body."
Lee Yeon-woo read on.
"However, it can rember you longer than you rember yourself."
It was not in the format of the academic papers Lee Yeon-woo had spent his life reading. If one had to classify it, perhaps a grimoire. It was closer to soone's deranged notes… stained with dried bloodstains.
Thin, dense, and viscously clinging passages. It felt as though mories had been extracted directly from the veins, the way a syringe draws marrow. The brain-gnawing contamination he suppressed with reason, as he always had.
"Lay the heart down, and the blood will answer."
The sentence structure fractured, teetering on the brink of collapse.
"Restoration responds not to form but to purpose, and emotion must be bound so it does not cross the boundary. The soul will drift away unless sutured. Who is it that designs the structure of blood?"
The mont he read it, not his eyes or brain but the blood itself reacted first.
"That is not your mory. You rely borrowed it for a ti, so do not presu to play the owner…."
His pulse hamred fiercely, and the veins on the back of his hand stirred.
Not pain.
Alienness.
"……."
…He had never once felt it, yet he could understand.
'This is a sensation directed at sothing that rembers.'
Lee Yeon-woo looked down at the book. His brow furrowed deeply.
"…As I thought, this isn't sane."
He'd tried to approach it with the humility of learning from the basics, but honestly, it was profoundly disagreeable. Every line reeked of blood-soaked history.
For Lee Yeon-woo, who had oriented his career within the rails of common sense, this book provoked a physiological revulsion. It was closer to a sin than to knowledge. Wasn't it?
'Beyond simply dangerous—its very existence is unethical.'
Abbreviated as the Crimson Core Comntary, this book was, how to put it, the dregs of a forbidden ritual. The remnants of a failed mythology, left behind in an ugly form.
"The objective is personality replication through blood and… the establishnt of immortality, is it."
Predictable.
"All the more unpleasant for being so."
"Yes."
Beyond displeasure, there was a faint sense of the vast.
"A cost-efficient discipline built on blood, of all things."
What a venerable history this discipline possessed.
"According to the text's own account, it began the mont humanity first perceived the existence of blood."
"Yes!"
"The grace of our ancestors is truly without limit."
The extre selfishness provoked revulsion, yet he couldn't deny the scholarly interest. Humanity's boundless spirit of inquiry and potential did, on occasion, deliver a strange satisfaction.
'There must have been no shortage of those dreaming of eternal life, then or now, so the accumulation of research data is hardly surprising.'
What confidence they must have had.
'To perpetrate such acts for that goal, and even leave records. What audacious hearts. Unimaginable for a commoner like .'
Or perhaps they simply didn't think at all.
But the author's psychological state was not Lee Yeon-woo's research subject. He organized the remainder to confirm his complete understanding of this untidy, unfriendly text.
"To summarize: the premise is that blood can create flesh, preserve mory, and replicate the self. They researched a consciousness that could exist even after discarding the body."
"Yes."
"Amputate a body part to collect blood, construct a self-storage vessel, then attempt bodily reconstruction…… bold. Most ended in failure, naturally. The synchronization between self and blood went awry, leading to collapse or runaway?"
"Failure."
"Yes, failure. Quite a few fascinating phrases. 'Let one without a heart lead the blood'—that one too. A sentence rich in interpretive possibility… hmm…."
"No."
"Yes, it's dangerous. But still fascinating."
And horrifying.
'How many were ground up for this?'
The 13-chapter text was trendously thick. Heavy and worn. Every sentence written in blood.
'This isn't simply a matter of being unethical.'
Was there any history or discipline in all the world this destructive of order? And yet what emanated from this record was not malice but zeal. Within the efforts to restore the self, that desire was laid bare.
Revolting, fascinating, and therefore precise. Like a living organism.
'And if one truly defined this as a living organism, would it deserve respect?'
A research subject convincing enough to tornt one between ethics and gain.
"……."
A sacrificial offering was essential to this ritual.
"…A dium capable of disrupting the blood's structure at an emotional level while maintaining a living state. Yes, in this frawork, the blood's five basic components would include emotion, will, and mory."
Even from reading several texts alone, the approximate chanism was within his grasp. The output was sufficiently predictable.
"Placed atop that formula, blood will react most intensely at the mont of witnessing soone's death. Consequently, the sacrifice must retain their sense of self up to the mont of being killed."
"Yes."
"Deviants, the lot of them. They knew full well it couldn't be easy and repeated the sa thing."
All failure, failure, failure. Records overflowing with nothing but side effects.
"…'The sacrifice's blood did not collapse; emotion and soul condensed viscously. Deep collapse occurred, and all involved were consud by the blood's autonomous self….' Dear ."
Lee Yeon-woo felt pity—or perhaps contempt. Anyone capable of writing a text of this caliber would have easily surpassed the average surgeon's skill. To record nothing but failures with that talent.
'But this is the text that most closely addresses the problem I've been wrestling with. A little more study and I think I could understand it, yet for soone who's barely started moving blood….'
Even so.
Still.
Fascinating.
"……."
Velmareth quora solven dei.
Rithmar, rithmar, delashta in keen.
Myorn be unspoken, skinrend to nafall.
Red upon red. hush the breath that never left.
Take not —take what knew ….
Velmareth….
Velmareth….
Velmareth.
Velmareth.
"……."
"No."
"Right."
His eyes were thick with blood.
The way it slid, sticky, down his chin—it looked just like tears.
'If you put it that way, I suppose I'm crying for the first ti in a while.'
He could feel the blood reacting to the written words. When the blood scraped at his insides, Lee Yeon-woo was unmistakably feeling sothing. Emotions tethered to mory had been dragged up along with it.
'Why? Because I thought of the sacrifices in the records? Because of knowledge spent without value? Because I thought of ti discarded with such regret?'
Either way, he hated it. Truly hateful.
'How shaful.'
And uncomfortable.
"……."
When he wiped, blood stained the cotton glove.
"…I'm well aware this isn't sothing I should attempt in my current state."
That day, Lee Yeon-woo suspended his research on the ritual. He'd sensed he couldn't handle it. In a state this emotional and raw, nothing would work.
'The side effects are severe, too.'
The original objective was 'transition to a sustainable hemobody by using blood as a vessel for self and existence, abandoning the flesh,' but the side effects were too extre.
'…Blood abnormally integrating self, mory, emotion, and soul before going berserk. Incomplete self-dissolution, emotional contamination, mory overload, failure of soul orientation… ultimately the boundary between self and blood collapses….'
Sensory distortion. mory over-ergence. Autonomous blood behavior. Duplication of self. Every recorded side effect pointed to the annihilation of identity.
It was regrettably laughable. The attempt to preserve existence had instead killed it and left it to fester.
"Failed experintal subjects repeatedly mutter specific phrases, unable to die or live, becoming blood and left abandoned forever. This is called the deep collapse of the blood."
A dangerous ritual.
"Deep collapse of the blood."
"Yes."
"Doesn't the na alone terrify you?"
"Yes."
"Yes."
Reviews
All reviews (0)