Chapter 340: Snow Lionheart (3)
When Snow Leonhart woke up, he found himself lying in bed.
He slowly touched his face, then glanced down at his clothes.
They were perfectly clean.
Everything seemed normal.
As if what he had witnessed had been nothing more than a dream—a terrible dream.
But that trembling, that pain in his chest...
That fear... it had been far too real.
"I saw my world collapse before my eyes."
Snow muttered as he hugged himself tightly.
The image of the blood-soaked Director still haunted his mind.
The man whom everyone called Father... had been a monster who devoured the flesh of the very children who called him that.
That truth alone made Snow consider running—escaping as far away as possible.
But... to where?
They were prisoners in the place they called home.
The dove on his pendant looked just like him.
He was like that dove .. a dove trapped inside an iron cage, with nothing to do but wait... wait for death.
With thoughts like those, the days went by.
Snow Lionheart lived each one in terror, haunted by what he had seen.
Children continued to disappear from time to time, as usual, replaced by newcomers.
But this time... he knew their fate.
Those children were either cut into pieces or eaten alive.
Each ending more horrific than the last.
Knowing that—without being able to do anything—was a crushing weight for a ten-year-old boy.
Someone could sleep in the bed beside him one day, only to vanish the next and end up on the Director’s death table.
Speaking of the Director... Snow’s face would go pale every time he saw the man.
And yet the Director never acknowledged him again.
Which made him wonder...
Had his time... simply not come yet?
The time of his death?
A never-ending war of thoughts raged inside the boy’s mind.
Perhaps his only solace was the time he spent with Deputy Director Annalise.
She was the only light in that dark place.
She always hugged him and told him everything would be alright.
But it was her next words that carved themselves deep into his soul:
"Be a good, obedient boy, and everything will be fine."
Those words always brought him back to that day... the day that felt more like a dream than reality.
As time passed, Snow managed to keep himself sane by forming new thoughts.
"I’m going to escape."
He would run away from the orphanage. From that hell.
"And I’ll take her with me."
The person he called Mother.
Deputy Director Annalise.
Snow wanted to save her.
He wanted to take her away from that cursed place.
And then, the two of them could live in peace, far away from all of this... as mother and son.
The boy blinded himself with those dreams—those sweet, impossible dreams—as he began to seriously plan his escape and what he would do afterward.
It was a selfish decision. He would leave all the other children behind. But he wasn’t a hero .. just a child.
A child crushed by guilt as he watched more and more of them disappear, completely unaware of the fate that awaited them.
He knew what was coming, and yet said nothing.
It was almost as if he were complicit in their deaths. That was why he wanted to run. To leave everything behind.
He knew that what was happening would leave a scar on him for life.
But he didn’t know what he was supposed to do.
Especially when some of the children tried to befriend him...
He didn’t know what to say to them anymore.
So instead, he focused. He trained in secret, honing his control over aura, and little by little, searched for a way out.
He planned to take Annalise with him once he found an escape route, so he never told her about his plan—not until the very end.
The days passed quickly. Then months.
Eventually, Snow Lionheart turned twelve.
For two years, he built his escape.
And for two years, an uncountable number of children died... children whose deaths Snow felt he had caused with his own hands.
They were all gone. And he had known. Yet he did nothing.
Snow wondered often... why hadn’t they taken him?
Why didn’t the Director just devour him and be done with it?
Why did he have to suffer in silence, carrying the burden of all those lives?
True, he hadn’t killed them. But he was a part of everything that had happened.
Silence in the face of a crime made him no different from the criminal.
Every time Snow looked at his hands... all he saw was blood.
The blood of all those children.
All the injections he had received throughout the years, changing the very makeup of his body...
The strange environment he had grown up in...
Snow could feel himself becoming something entirely different.
Something... not human.
And finally... the day he had long awaited arrived.
After two years of searching, planning, and training in secret—
Snow had finally found a way to escape.
He decided to go alone first .. to see if the path was truly safe. If it was, he would return immediately to take the Deputy Director with him.
So, late at night, Snow slipped out of bed and set off once more... hoping to find his salvation.
After two full years of preparation, he had memorized every detail by heart. And with almost flawless execution, he managed to escape the orphanage.
It was easy—far too easy.
As if they were letting him go.
What he didn’t realize at the time... was that those red eyes had been watching him all along.
Once he found himself beyond the walls of Yosefka Orphanage, deep in the forest that surrounded it—
He felt a rush of freedom.
Harnessing the aura he had trained so long to master, he bolstered his body and darted through the trees with speed.
He wanted to run far—far away from that place.
For a moment, he even forgot about the Deputy Director entirely...
Freedom was something his poor soul had longed for, for far too long.
So he ran. And ran.
Until his legs couldn’t carry him anymore.
He wanted to get as far away as he could.
But thin threads still tied him to the orphanage.
He felt like he had left so much of his shattered self behind.
So even after he had crossed a great distance... he stopped.
"Be a good, obedient boy, and everything will be fine."
Annalise...
The mother he never truly had... was still back there.
He was scared—terrified of what he had left behind.
His body and his soul, both had been stained by the filth of that place.
Did that boy really have the right to survive... alone?
No. He couldn’t.
At the very least...
"At the very least, I’ll take her with me."
And so, the boy turned back.
He returned to hell.
...
...
...
By the time Snow Lionheart made the decision to return, he realized just how far he’d gone—blinded by that intoxicating taste of freedom.
His aura had responded to his emotions, propelling him forward with incredible speed.
So much so that the return trip took him several days...
Only then did he realize how isolated the orphanage truly was from the world.
And for the second time, he came to understand just how little he knew about what lay beyond it.
About how vast the world really was.
Everything he had ever known ended at those orphanage walls.
He wanted to hurry back and rescue Deputy Director Annalise.
Saving even one soul would be enough to ease the weight crushing his young heart.
So after a long journey, he finally reached that place on a moonlit night... a night just like the one when he first discovered the truth.
It was almost ironic...
Snow Lionheart froze in place as his world was shattered all over again.
Before him, beneath the wing of night, the orphanage burned—consumed by raging flames.
A fire so fierce it lit up the darkness of the night.
Snow found himself running—toward the fire.
Searching for her... his only light.