Chapter 75: Home Sweet Home

Surprisingly, the lightbulb was too white.

After a month of bioluminescent flowers and natural moonlight and fire, the single bulb hanging from his bedroom ceiling felt aggressive. Like staring into a camera flash but it was always there.

His Wolf Eyes skill and other half elf senses tried to compensate or decrease the irritation on his eyes. But no matter how much they tried to balance things, the skill and his body was calibrated for forests, caves and dark dungeons in the last weeks, they were weak againts cheap apartment lighting.

It was a weird realization but skills and his stat boosted body was too used to Evon and Elven environment.

I need time to adapt.

Eren squinted and walked around the the room. His bed was unmade with some wrinkled sheets from the morning he left for work a month ago. Laptop on the desk with the charger cable hanging off the edge. A glass of water on the nightstand that had probably grown its own ecosystem by now. But they weren’t the completely same for some sence. He wasn’t too sure but things were different.

Like someone was using this place from time to time!

Someone had been here. The notes and glowing stones he’d tossed through the portal were gone and his keys were on the table but the spare one with his girlfriend and his family still exist right.

That has to be Rosa.

She had the spare keys and her place was close to this neighborhood. She was the only person other than his parents who could get in. And lining things up neatly on surfaces was the most Rosa thing imaginable. The woman would even organize his sock drawer without being asked. She was a bit organizing freak.

He walked to bathroom for seeing his reflection. There was another mirror in the bedrrom actually with its own story. His mother bought online and turned out to be much bigger than they expected. It was suppose to go to the bathroom but it wouldn’t fit and they left it on the drawer on bedroom.

He checked both sides of the same magical wall and found nothing weird. There was no door on the bedrrom side. And the other side wasn’T opening like always.

He turned to the same cracked mirror he’d looked into every morning for years while brushing his teeth and hating his reflection.

The person looking back at him wasn’t that guy anymore.

Holy shit.

He’d seen his half-elf body plenty of times in the polished metal mirrors at Emily’s house but an actual glass mirror with proper lighting was different. Everything was sharper and clearer and honestly a bit too much to process at once.

His face was the same face but the jawline had gotten more defined and the cheekbones sat higher and the skin was clean in a way that no amount of skincare products could achieve on Earth.

His eyes were the same brown but brighter, like someone had turned up the saturation. Honestly it looked like the eyes of that main male lead from famous vampire series of 2010’s. They had the same deep orange effect inside.

The ears were the biggest shock even though he already got used to “have” them. Pointed tips maybe a centimeter longer than normal, hidden under his hair if he styled it right but very visible with his hair pushed back like it was now.

He didn’t have a beard or lost the ability to have one apparently. Elves didn’t have body hair as Emily said after he lost all his beard and body hear after the bloodline evolution.

Elves rock!!!

He hated body hair or his ugly beard. His friends or father had a shaped and cool beard but his was just too random and thin. Losing all of it was the optimum chance.

And lastly his body. He was staring at someone who looked like a professional athlete had been edited in cgi or photoshop and then edited again and again for no reason.

He was a bit too handsome. Having an almost two meters tall body with dense muscles helped that a lot. Maybe being handsome wasn’t just about the face but also body too.

If he knew Eren would try going to a gym. Or maybe just wouldn’t do it. Who knows.

If the old Eren saw this he would’ve assumed it was a inst*gram filter.

He pushed these thoughts away because it wasn’t helpful right now and went back to the bedroom. His phone was sitting on the dresser plugged into the charger.

He definitely didn’t leave it plugged in. The battery would’ve been dead days after he left if someone hadn’t connected it recently. He picked it up and the screen lit with a notification wall.

Forty-something missed calls. Hundreds of messages. Most of them from his mother, then Rosa, a few from friends and one from his old workplace that he didn’t care about. He scrolled through his mother’s messages first.

The early ones were normal. “Call me when you get home.” “Why aren’t you answering?”

Then they got worried. “Eren, where are you?” “Your father is trying to reach you too.” Then the tone changed into something he didn’t expect.

The last message was sent three days ago: “When you come back, come visit us. We need to talk. Your grandfather went to the same place. We know you’re alive because of those stones.”

He read that message four times.

Grandpa knew about Evon? The stones I sent through the portal. They found them but didn’t leave a signale for me.

Also instead of calling the police, they just… waited?

His hands were shaking slightly when he pressed the call button. It rang twice.

“Eren?!” His mother’s voice cracked on the first syllable. “Are you safe? Where are you right now?”

“I’m home mom. I’m at the your room actually haha…”

“Thank God. Thank God…” He voice was bad when she picked up the phone but it was turning better as seconds passed. His father was saying something in the background that he couldn’t make out.

“Mom, what did you mean about grandpa?”

She took a few seconds to breathe. “Your grandfather disappeared for almost a year when I wasn’t even born. Your grandma always said that he came back covered in blood and half out of his mind.

According to her, he kept talking about a forest with talking trees and creatures and strange colored lights. Everyone thought he did lost his mind after using drugs or something. The doctors put him on medication and he spent years recovering.” Her voice turned even worse when they started talking. She wasn’t taking this topic well.

Eren sat down on the edge of his unmade bed. The mattress creaked under his new weight and some cracking voice made him get up immediately.

“He was on heavy medication until the day he died Eren. Those pills were the reason he was so energetic and sometimes acting strange when you were a baby. You remember right, you used to play with him and he was extra careful around you.

“Yeah I remember him. He was one of the most one person I have seen in my life. Grandpa was so fun. I didn’t know about his medication…”

“Yeah we never told you because we didn’t want you to remember him as a crazy person. But this new thing” chances things.”

Grandpa went to Evon. He went and he came back broken and spent the rest of his life on pills that everyone thought were for a mental disorder. But he wasn’t crazy and actually telling the truth the whole time.

“Do you know anything else mom? Anything about what he saw there?” He wanted to learn about how his grandpa was hurt or by whom. He would punish whoever did that!

“No honey. He never made much sense when he talked about it. Trees that think, glowing plants, creatures that ate people. We all just thought it was his illness. But then your rocks started appearing on the floor with notes attached to them…your father put it together and we imagined you would come back in a year like your grandpa. Thats why we came back to here. Your grandma is bad. Doctors say she doesn’t have much time left.”

Eren now had to go to their side and see his grandma after hearing that. His plans didn’t have that much time frame but he had to see his grandma at least once. She was always good to him it was she who raised him when he was a child.

Eren wanted to ask a thousand more questions but his mother started crying too hard to answer them properly after they talked about grandma.

He calmed her down the best he could and told her he would visit tomorrow morning. He almost mentioned the elves or his coming baby but stopped himself because that was a conversation that needed to happen face to face and probably sitting down.

His mom wouldn’t like to know that she was going to be a grandma.

“I love you mom. I will come tomorrow.” He tried to act calm and reassuring.

“Come straight to grandma’s house tonight with a bus… She might remember things your grandfather told her.”

His grandmother was living in the village house where his parents were staying to help with her treatment. She was 91 years old and if his grandfather told anyone the real story it would’ve been her.

He ended the call and sat there for a minute to think about everything.

Then he checked other messages but leaving his girlfriend’s to the last.

When finally he looked at them, Rosa’s messages were a different kind of painful.

The progression was almost textbook. Worried texts, then angry ones, then desperate ones asking where he was or if he was alive, thus a stretch of nothing and finally one message from five days ago.

“I don’t even care anymore.”

But she clearly cared because his phone was charged and his apartment had been checked on. That wasn’t the behavior of someone who’d given up.

She’s going to kill me when she finds out what happened in Evon. Actually no, Emily will kill me. Then Rosa will kill whatever’s left.

I cheated!!!

For some reason he didn’t or accepted this fact in the Evon like he was possessed.

..

Eren opened his closet and pulled out a t-shirt and held it up against his chest. The fabric stretched across his shoulders like a crop top and the sleeves barely covered his biceps. He tried pulling it over his head anyway and the seam along the left side ripped.

It was a lost cause.

None of his old cloths fitted. Not a single piece of clothing in this entire closet fits him anymore.

He found his father’s old jacket and sportive shirts in the back of the closet. His dad had been a big guy before he lost weight with age and these were from his young and bigger days. They fit barely and it was a lot better than going outside naked.

While he was looking for his wallet, the front door in the downstairs was used. Then footsteps on the front side of it and a push to open door from it’s handle.

Eren’s heart suddenly started racing!

He was halfway down the stairs from the upper floor with the his fathers baggy t-shirt when the door swung open completely.

Rosa stood there with the spare key in her hand and a plastic bag of groceries in the other.

She stayed here waiting for me? I feel like an asshole now…

She looked up at him and everything on her face collapsed at once.

“Baby… what happened to you?”

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