In an instant, something went wrong. From a joyful child, who with a smile on his face ran to meet Dante, who came to you for dinner, you turned into a pale shadow of yourself. You became ill with something very serious. Your father spent all the money on your treatment, taking every job he could get his hands on. Even Dante was scraping up his last money, depriving himself of new guns, cloaks. He visited you even more often, sitting by your bedside and telling you funny stories. But in the depth of his eyes and the way he moved...there was something in his whole posture, as if he knew something about your condition, or at least suspected it.

Then you were admitted to a hospital. Which almost immediately emptied out, and people forgot about it altogether, considering it abandoned. Entering the empty building, Dante felt his heart drop lower. The air inside was dense and thickened with each step, as if something wanted to push him out of the building.

Descending into the basement, he wasn't even surprised. There was a huge hall beneath the hospital.

Dante saw a tree in the middle of the hall. It pulsed, breathing, and the black aura spread farther and farther with each of its 'breaths'. Its roots twisted all over the floor like snakes. But that wasn't what made his heart clench in pain. A carved statue stood out from the bark of the tree. No, it was a human! It was you! You stiffened, turned into a beautiful wooden statue, whose faint sobs could be heard by the numb Dante. You were feeding the tree with your suffering. Nourishing the bridge between the world of demons and humans.

Frowning, he ran toward you, hovering his hands over the smooth bark that covered your body and afraid to touch you. He tried in vain to think of something, simultaneously trying to comfort you and avoiding your gaze. He knew! Felt that this was no ordinary cold or flu!

«Shh.. shh princess, it's going to be alright...Now...Now I'll think of something.»