Novel Full Chapter 361: Decision
Chapter 361: Decision
Merisa lowered her head again, shoulders trembling. “I just… I.. i..” Her voice failed her entirely this time. She said nothing more. She just spreaded her arms.. As no word.. seems to leave her lips.
Razeal stood there, looking at her, unsure what to do with the weight now pressing down on him. His thoughts felt sluggish, as though wading through deep water. Anger had burned itself out, leaving behind something dull and exhausting.. He honestly doesn’t even know what to feel or do now..
Silence stretched between them.
Then finally Razeal took a step forward.
Merisa didn’t react at first. She only realized he was close when his presence filled her senses.. too close. She lifted her head slowly, startled, her eyes widening slightly.
He stood inches away from her now.
His face was blank, controlled just no sadness ot anything on there.. Too carefully composed.
“You’ve just transformed into a vampire,” he said evenly. “If you don’t drink blood, your condition will deteriorate.”
Merisa blinked, confused by the sudden shift in topic?
“I’m thirsty too,” he continued, as if reciting a fact rather than admitting a need. “And we need to establish the blood link.”
Her brows knit together, Confusion flickering across her face.
“So,” Razeal said, raising his hand slightly, indicating his neck, “bite here. You’ll know what to do after that. Just… get it over with. Quickly.”
She stared at him.. Not saying anything. Honestly felt extremely sad as how.. Cruel he was.. not even sparing second for her second? And selfish towards himself?
But before she could speak.. before she could even process what he had said.. Razeal stepped forward again.
And wrapped his arms around her.
The contact was sudden.
Merisa froze completely, her mind going blank as his body pressed against hers. His embrace was firm, unyielding, yet strangely restrained.. as if he were holding himself back even now.
Her breath caught in her throat.
“Bite my neck.” Razeal’s voice was barely more than a whisper, his words brushing past her ear, carried through the darkness like a breath of cold air. His arms tightened around her at the same time.. not abruptly or possessively, but firmly, as if he were anchoring both of them in place.
Merisa felt it instantly.
She could tell he was just.. making excuses. Creating distance through necessity. Turning something unbearably emotional into something procedural, mechanical.. something he could justify to himself without admitting what it actually was.. Like not wanting to show that he actually cares.
Still, she said nothing.
She wrapped her arms around him in return too.
The moment she did, the dam broke.
Tears spilled from her eyes without warning, hot and relentless, her body shaking as years.. no, decades of buried pain finally forced their way out. This was the first time she had ever spoken those words aloud. The first time she had allowed herself to be seen in that broken state. The first time she had stopped pretending she was untouchable.
Her grip tightened around his back, fingers clutching his clothes as if letting go might cause him to vanish.
She cried openly now.. no restraint, no pride, no control.
And Razeal… let her
He didn’t speak.
He didn’t show anything.
He didn’t tell her to stop.
For once, he did nothing but stand there and hold her, silent and rigid, his jaw clenched, eyes staring into nothing as her sobs shook against his chest. He didn’t know if this made him weak? He didn’t know if this made him cruel?
He only knew that pushing her away right now felt wrong.
Maybe he was a monster?Maybe he had already crossed lines he could never come back from?
But even monsters could understand pain.
After all, he wasn’t that insensitive or that heartless, even if he didn’t know it himself. Maybe he was a monster, but still… he could at least offer a shoulder for someone to cry on. If something like this had happened to anyone? Even if they hated him the most, he would have done the same? Afterall maybe people are disgusting.. He’s just different.
He also felt sad about it.
So he allowed it.
The darkness inside the shadow cocoon swallowed the sound of her crying, the water around them barely stirring as time passed.
Minutes blurred into longer stretches. Her sobs slowly weakened, turning hoarse, then uneven, until they faded into quiet, exhausted breaths. Even then, she didn’t loosen her hold. If anything, her arms tightened more, as if fear had crept back in.. the fear that the moment she let go, he would disappear again.
Razeal remained still the entire time.
An hour passed.
Maybe more.
Finally, her breathing evened out.
When her crying finally quieted into shallow, exhausted breaths, when the trembling in her body eased into something fragile but steady, he leaned closer and spoke again.. soft, low, and steady.
“Bite my neck.”
Merisa lifted her head slowly, eyes swollen and red, lashes heavy with tears. For a moment she looked confused, as if she had forgotten where she was or what he meant. Then her gaze drifted to his neck.
She still didn’t fully understand what he was trying to do.
But zhe felt it before she understood it: a dryness in her throat, a subtle pull deep in her chest, an instinct she had never known before stirring awake. The scent of him.. faint, metallic, alive cut through the lingering haze of grief and reached something ancient and newly formed inside her.
She swallowed.
Her throat tightened.
A scent reached her senses, sharper than anything she had known before. Her body reacted before her mind could catch up. She felt confused by it.. but she didn’t pull away.
Instead, she leaned forward.
Part of her feared that if she hesitated, he would release her. Another part simply couldn’t resist the pull anymore. Even her Sadness grief and pain all seems to just disappearing all this moment.
Her fangs emerged without conscious thought.
The moment they pierced his skin, everything else vanished.
The world narrowed to sensation.. overwhelming, consuming, far beyond anything she had ever experienced. Her body went weak instantly, knees threatening to give way as something vast and intoxicating surged through her. Her thoughts scattered, her awareness dissolving into the rush that flooded her senses.
Warmth flooded her mouth…Blood his blood spilled across her tongue.
That was all she remembered before the euphoria struck.
A vampiric ecstasy unlike anything she had ever known crashed over her in a single, merciless wave. Her eyes rolled back as though she had just tasted the most exquisite delicacy in existence.. something beyond pleasure, beyond sensation itself.
For a vampire, drinking human blood was already a bliss beyond words. Not to say it was her first time.
And if that wasn’t enough..
She was drinking from a progenitor.
From the very origin.
The pleasure multiplied..millions, no, billions of times over stacking endlessly upon itself until she could no longer think, no longer resist. Her body surrendered completely to the sensation.
Razeal felt her sag against him and reacted without thinking, tightening his hold and supporting her weight. He stayed upright, steady, anchoring her as her body lost the strength to do so on its own. The sensation of his blood being drawn was… strange. Not painful. Not pleasant in the way he had expected.
Just intimate.
Too intimate.
He exhaled slowly, jaw tightening, and then.. almost as an afterthought his attention drifted to her neck. The wound he had left there earlier had already healed, skin smooth and unbroken. He hesitated only a fraction of a second before leaning down and biting her again.
Her blood tasted different now.
Not better. Not worse.
Just… complicated.
He felt the pull of it, the echo of the same euphoric rush he had experienced before, but it didn’t consume him this time. Something inside him held back. Maybe it was exhaustion? Maybe it was the heaviness still lodged in his chest? dulled by the weight of everything he had learned.? Whatever it was, it dulled the edge of the pleasure and left behind a quiet ache instead.
He kept his eyes open, staring into the darkness of the shadow cocoon as the blood exchange continued, his expression unreadable, his eyes unfocused, mind drifting far away.
Then, suddenly as if thinking of something..he spoke.
“Hey… Zara. Can I ask you for advice?”
The words formed quietly in Razeal’s mind, almost hesitant.. an unfamiliar thing for him. As soon as the thought finished, a translucent livestream interface panel bloomed in front of his eyes, hovering in the darkness like a ghostly window.
He hadn’t looked at it in a since then. Or rather, he had stopped acknowledging it. Messages were scrolling rapidly.. lines of color and motion bleeding past one another in a constant flood. Speculation. Confusion. Arguments. Curiosity or just talking here and there by these old Villains.
Thoigh he ignored all of it.
He looked at chat interface as to see.. zara message.. But suddenly a voice answered him.. in his head directly rather then message.
“Sure. What is it?”
Zara’s voice rang inside his head, unfiltered and immediate. For a brief second, Razeal paused.. his grip around Merisa instinctively tightening as surprise flickered across his face. He hadn’t expected the response to be like this..
He exhaled slowly and dismissed the instinctive reaction, attributing it to some function of the system or the stream.. something he hadn’t learned yet, something he didn’t care enough to question right now atleast.
“I don’t know,” he said after a moment, his thoughts forming more slowly than usual. “I’m… conflicted.”
He stared into the shifting darkness ahead of him, where shadows folded and unfolded without pattern.. As made that pannel disappear front of his eyes.
“You saw everything, right?” he continued. “What she said. What she went through. I…” His jaw tightened. “I feel taken aback. Like.. like I can see her side now. I can understand why she made the choices she did.”
“I still hate her,” he added immediately, as if to correct himself. “But at the same time, it feels childish to hold onto that hatred when I can understand the reasoning behind it. Like I’m throwing a tantrum even though I know why it happened.”
He paused, blood still warm at his lips, his fangs resting against Merisa’s skin as the sucking continued almost automatically.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel anymore?”
There was silence for a moment.
“She’s a pitiful woman,” Zara said. Not cruelly. Not with disdain. Simply as a statement of fact. “And you’re both caught in something deeply complicated.”
Razeal didn’t respond.
“In my long life,” she continued, “I’ve learned one important thing. Sometimes it isn’t that people are inherently wrong. Sometimes, it’s the situation that is wrong.”
“If you can see yourself making the same mistake she did,” Zara went on, “then maybe it wasn’t a failure of character. Maybe it was a failure of circumstance.”
“So you’re conflicted because you’re wondering whether to forgive her,” Zara said, not asking but concluding. “Because you’ve realized it was a mistake. That she didn’t intend for things to end the way they did.”
He remained silent for a long moment.
“But I still went through it,” Razeal said finally.
His voice.. his thoughts were steady now, stripped of uncertainty.
“The pain? The humiliation? Everything I lost?” His eyes hardened. “She played a major role in that. Even if it was a mistake.. even if she had reasons.. it cost me everything.”
“I don’t want to forgive her,” he admitted. “And I don’t want to give her another chance. Not even one. The mistake was too big. Understanding it doesn’t erase what it did to me.”
A pause.
“But at the same time,” he added more quietly, “I feel like I’m being childish by not wanting to move on. Like I’m clinging to this anger just because it’s familiar.”
He shook his head faintly.
“She didn’t trust me. That alone…” His fingers twitched. “I don’t want to forgive that. I don’t want to overlook it. I just..” His thoughts tangled briefly. “I don’t know.”
Zara didn’t interrupt him.
When she spoke again, her voice was firm.. unambiguous.
“But that isn’t childish at all,” she said.
Razeal stilled.
“It’s reasonable,” Zara continued. “And it’s your right.”
“She made a mistake, and you paid the price for it. Deeply. That gives you every right not to forgive her. Understanding her reasons doesn’t absolve her of responsibility.”
“If you believe that you might have made the same mistake in her position, then you would have been wrong too. Ignorance, fear, and weakness don’t make someone innocent. They explain actions.. but they don’t erase guilt.”
“Everyone carries burdens,” Zara said. “Some heavier than others. But that doesn’t mean it gives you thr right to make mistakes because of them.. the damage caused by those burdens doesn’t disappear just because the reasons behind them are understandable.”
“Guilt is guilt. No amount of justification changes that. So no.. you are not childish. You are not throwing a tantrum. You are responding to harm that was done to you.”
Her voice softened slightly at the end.
“You have the right not to forgive her. And you don’t need to belittle yourself for that.” Zara said in Razeal’s voice.. calm, obvious, and very straightforward.
“Life is always a very complicated thing.”
Zara’s voice flowed through Razeal’s mind without urgency, without judgment, carrying the weight of someone who had lived long enough to stop expecting the world to make sense.
“There is no person,” she said calmly, “who will never make a mistake. Or no one who will never disappoint you. It doesn’t matter how good they are, how kind, how strong, or how much they love you. They will still fail you at things, at least once and many times.”
“No one is perfect,” Zara continued. “Not parents. Not children. Not lovers. Not heroes. And that is simply how existence works.”
A pause, then softer: “If you want a relationship.. if you care enough you sometimes choose to ignore the parts that hurt you. You decide what matters more.”
“The mistake you cannot undo,” Zara said, “or the loss of losing that person entirely. That is always the choice.” Her tone deepened, carrying something almost wistful. “At the end of the day, there is nothing greater than family. Believe me. I have lived long enough to test that truth in every possible way.”
“Life without your family,” Zara went on, “becomes tasteless. Colorless. Even when it is peaceful.”
“I know this well.”
“If you can preserve a relationship,” Zara said, “by losing some pride, some wealth, some grudges, by forgetting certain things and forgiving certain mistakes.. then you should ask yourself whether that price is really too high.” Her voice softened further. “Because a life without those bonds leaves behind an emptiness that never truly fades.”
“I knew my own daughter wanted to kill me,” Zara admitted calmly. “And I let it be. Because even then… her presence mattered more to me than her hatred. I chose to enjoy the moments she existed in my life rather than drown in disappointment Or overthinking that am being stupid?”
“Be selfish as i had said.”
There was no bitterness in her words. Only acceptance.
She continued, steady and unashamed. “Being selfish sometimes means choosing what makes you happy. What allows you to keep living without regret. Whether it is morally right or wrong matters far less than whether you can live with the outcome.”
Her words sharpened, not in cruelty but clarity.
“There is no absolute intelligence or stupidity in this world. No single correct answer. Everyone stands at a different angle, sees a different right answer to same question, and makes a different choice.”
A pause. “So choose the one you can bear. You don’t need to torture yourself over what is right or reasonable. Ask yourself only this.. what does your heart want? And are you willing to accept the consequences?”
The silence that followed was long.
Razeal closed his eyes.
For a few seconds, the world seemed to recede.. his anger, his resentment, his confusion all blurring together into something dull and aching. Zara’s words didn’t erase what he had gone through. They didn’t justify Merisa’s actions. they didn’t pressed against the walls he had built, testing their strength. But ut did make him clear on his answer somehow.
Then he finally spoke, his voice was low and steady.
“I don’t think,” he said, “that what I went through deserves forgiveness.”
He opened his eyes slowly.
“No matter the reason. No matter the trauma behind it.” His gaze hardened, though there was no fury in it now.. only certainty. “What happened to me destroyed everything I had. My childhood. My place. My trust. No one deserves that.”
He paused, exhaling quietly.
“I feel bad for what happened to her..”
“I understand her fear now,” he admitted. “I understand her trauma. And that understanding…” His lips pressed together. “But understanding doesn’t erase what she did. It doesn’t undo the way she handled everything.. how immaturely of her.”
“It wasn’t just what she did,” Razeal continued. “It was how she did it. How recklessly. How careless can she be?” His eyes flickered with something sharp. “She didn’t even try. She didn’t trust me enough to try.”
A question surfaced unbidden, painful and raw.
“Was her fear more important than me?” he murmured. “Was her trauma heavier than her love for her own child?”
He shook his head faintly.
“I don’t know,” he said. “And maybe I never will.”
Zara listened without interrupting.
“You have the right to feel that way,” she said at last. “And you have the right to choose distance.”
“Do what makes you happy,” she said gently. “Even if it looks sad from the outside.”
“But from what I can see, she does seem to care for you. Whatever she was before… she seems genuine now.”
Razeal didn’t respond anything for a very long time.
“Taking revenge is not always right, you know,” Zara added at last. Her voice was softer now, no judgment in it.. only the weariness of someone who had lived long enough to lose more than she could ever regain. As a mother, as someone who had watched bonds rot and still ache afterward, she understood the weight of relationships better than most. Somewhere in her words was a quiet hope.. that at least one ending in this world might be less broken than the rest.
Razeal heard her.. And yet he said nothing.
Silence stretched inside him, thick and unmoving. His grip around Merisa loosened just a fraction, not out of mercy, but because his heart felt too heavy to hold anything at all.. His feeling and emotions everywhere.. Just tangled.. Thoughts rose and sank again, memories scraping against one another, each one leaving a deeper mark.
“But forgiving someone isn’t always right either,” he finally replied, his voice low, steady, stripped of emotion. “Sometimes forgiveness is wrong too.”
He exhaled slowly, as if letting go of something he had carried for far too long.
“No,” he continued, quieter now, but firmer than before. “I won’t forgive anything. Not this. Not them. Not her. Not when it cost me everything.”
His eyes hardened.. not with hatred, but resolve.
“No one deserves it,” he said. “I deserve myself more.”
There was a pause.
“Well,” Zara replied at last, gently, “then do what you must.”
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