The hellish pain sank into Dreleon's bones, leaving behind a weight that made his very existence feel like a burden.
The hell he experienced still lingering in his consciousness.
When he finally opened his eyes, the world was a blurred smear of poisonous greens and bruised purples.
His eyelids felt heavy—not like lead shutters this time, but heavy with a deep, existential weariness.
He stared at the dark canopy above and seriously considered a dark thought:
Should I just destroy these eyes? If I can't see this nightmare, perhaps it will cease to exist.
He remembered the Snake's voice, that cold, spectral hiss that had accompanied his descent into this purgatory.
He had expected some form of care, or perhaps a lecture on the high-level secrets of the Beast Kingdom.
Instead, the devious creature had dumped him into a poisonous hell while his nerves were still screaming from the Red Mist.
[Lion pup, this is but one of my simplest formations,] the Snake's mental voice had echoed in his agony. [If you can overcome it or destroy it, I will grant you my Five Pillars of Knowledge. If you die... I shall still teach you One Pillar. The choice is yours.]
"Hah..." Dreleon whispered to the empty air, his voice lifeless and cracked. "One pillar... even if I die? Is that even animallistically possible? Would you lecture my corpse, you demon?"
The absurdity of the threat only made him more sure that the snake's intentions were not right.
His stomach started growling as after experiencing that hell of pain he has yet to eat anything.
He needed food.
But in the poisonous mush, food was a relative term.
Every leaf was a blade of toxin; every drop of water was a vial of acid.
The very air he breathed was a slow-acting venom designed to erode the spirit.
After two months:
For these two months, Dreleon had lived as a scavenger for survival.
He had forced his Royal Lion body to adapt, his savage genes working overtime to build a rudimentary resistance to the swamp's flora.
His build started thinning, and his skeleton was coming off the surface with each passing day.
The only thing keeping him alive was his dream and memories.
But on the third day of the second month, his luck—and his mind—finally ran out.
The swamp had gone strangely barren.
The small, poisonous lizards he usually hunted had vanished into the deep mush, leaving him with a gnawing, acidic hunger that threatened to turn his stomach inside out.
Clueless and desperate, he turned to the only thing left: the plants.
"Thank the gods for those training days," he muttered, pulling a set of jagged, multi-colored leaves from a rotted stump.
He remembered his instructors talking about the 'Eight Edible Veins'; plants that, if prepared correctly, could sustain a beast in the harshest environments.
"So, a human like me could survive for years with it," he thought.
He found this miraculous plant in the second week of his coming and decided to save it for an emergency like today.
He was proud of himself.
He felt like a scholar of survival, having all virtues.
But pride is a dangerous thing for a lion who hasn't eaten in days.
He found a discarded skull—large enough to serve as a bowl—and began the delicate process of mixing the eight plants.
He found a thick, sturdy tree branch to use as a pestle, grinding the leaves into a thick, neon-green paste.
He was careful.
He was precise.
He checked the navigation of the veins and the texture of the pulp.
Not allowing any toxin to mix.
But, he didn't notice the tiny, translucent legs crawling out from the hollow of the branch he was using.
Hidden within the wood was a Memory Retriever.
It was a parasitic insect no larger than a thumbnail, a creature that fed not on blood, but on the bio-electric signals of a brain.
As Dreleon stirred his meal, the insect was crushed into the mixture, its caustic internal fluids infecting the edible plants.
The moment Dreleon swallowed the first mouthful, the world—began to delete itself.
And as he ate more unknowingly, he forgot more.
First went the names.
He looked at the trees and forgot what they were called.
Then went the faces.
The princess, the King, the Turtle, the Snake—they became blurred shapes of light and shadow.
Finally, his own name, Dreleon, was pulled from his mind like a thread from a sweater.
The stinging pain returned, sharper than any poison, as the Retriever's essence ate through his memories.
His royal heritage, his high-grade pacter status, and his dreams of the Golden Path were all scrubbed away, leaving behind only the raw, bleeding core of his identity: The Beast.
The animal instincts he had honed in the grotto flared up to fill the void.
His Royal Lion bloodline, sensing the attack on the mind, went into a defensive frenzy, pumping power into his muscles until his skeletal frame vibrated with a terrifying, mindless energy.
He looked at the river, seeing the moonlight that night, but he didn't know why it was beautiful.
He only knew it was a light in the dark.
And so, the prince was buried under the weight of a tiny insect's spite.
The Royal Heir was gone. On that hill, overlooking the poisonous river, a new creature stood up.
The Mad Lion King had arrived.
And unknown to him, something in his heart started to eat those small invaders.