Chapter 107: Color is Black.

I have never lamented the helplessness of being a child this bitterly.

No matter how much knowledge one accumulates, simply because one lacks sufficient years, no one will believe you.

How many times had he grown weary of the sheer number of people who equated life experience directly with the passage of years?

Because you’re young. Because you’re still a child. You’ve never known real hardship.

They were free to dream of innocent, pure children all they liked—but age is merely the number of years lived, not a tally of experience.

The system had not changed one iota since ancient times.

They revered children as divine gifts from the gods, yet dismissed a child’s words as utterly trivial.

And when that child was only a few years shy of adulthood, it became all the more infuriating.

They refused to acknowledge that a mind capable of true thought already existed.

“Another failure, huh.”

He tore the returned petition into shreds until nothing but confetti remained, then stared at the wastebasket overflowing with the piled-up remnants.

How many times had this happened now?

If he counted the ones that were merely accepted on paper and then left to gather dust, the fingers of both hands and feet had long since run out.

Each rejection prompted him to search for a new approach, yet in the end, all a child like him could manage was this much.

He should have had some connections, some personal contacts.

Yet in this particular matter, not a single person had stood on Yuran’s side.

（I have to prepare the next one.）

Ignoring the scattered scraps of paper, he began readying a fresh petition.

In one corner of his heart, he already knew it would accomplish nothing.

Even so—if he stopped moving now, he would be crushed by reality in an instant.

He would become just another abandoned child cast into the shadow of the nation—voice unheard, forsaken.

And the same would hold true for her, trapped in that prison.

If Yuran’s voice fell silent, the country would rush to finalize Violet’s sentence without delay.

They paid no heed to Marlin, who screamed the same way every single day.

They treated the words of a former maid as though they were the wriggling of an ant on the ground—beneath contempt.

In the room strewn with countless sheets of paper and dust, lit only by the faint light from the window, Yuran’s back as he hunched over the desk resembled that of a possessed zealot.

The servants who once came to clean his room, even his parents, no longer approached this place.

No matter what they said—sometimes shouting in an attempt to reason with him—Yuran never listened.

To everyone who saw him, eyes bloodshot and fixed on the paper, only an eerie, creeping dread remained.

Alone in the dim, filthy room, he simply thought of Violet and let his pen race across the page.

When he imagined her now confined in a place far darker, far more defiled than this one, it felt as though his brain were being boiled in rage.

What suited her was sweet black tea and confections sipped in pristine air, simple dresses of soft, pleasant fabric, time spent smiling gently beneath tender light as the breeze caressed her skin.

Locked behind iron bars that the sun could never reach, fed only the bare minimum nutrition required to survive, deprived of freedom, bound and restrained—

“……!”

Claw-like fingers gouged the ink-soaked paper.

It didn’t tear, but the crumpled sheet was surely beyond salvage now.

The sheer revulsion of the imagined scene was unbearable.

Covering his mouth—on the verge of vomiting—with a hand already blackened by ink transferred from the still-wet characters, he fought the nausea.

（Disgusting, disgusting—disgusting.）

The ones who had shoved her into such a place.

The world itself.

Disgusting.

The woman who justified it all with words like “atoning for her sins.”

The people around her who called that “kindness.”

All of them were far, far more repulsive than maggots swarming over a corpse.

Above all else—the fact that he himself could not free her from that place made him feel unbearably sick.

The blood that trickled from his clenched lips was thick and black, stagnant like old ink.