9. Black and Gold (2)
9. Black and Gold (2)
Two weeks earlier.
The troupe members who had noticed the issue with Ella's memory waited for her to fall back asleep, then huddled for a meeting.
Maya took the lead in explaining her condition.
"The mystery of the human psyche is divided into five stages."
The Image of the surface, the active Thought, the Essence of projection, the structured Will, the foundational Spirit.
The first stage, Image, was the province of illusion mages. It was mainly used to render mental images into visual information.
"The Reaper's Scythe targets the third stage—Essence."
Her time with the circus had taught Maya how to simplify her explanations.
But for members who had never received a proper education, her words were still a struggle to follow.
Most sat there blank-faced. Only Umon, kept sharp by curiosity and his own peculiar brand of reasoning, managed a question.
"Wait! Maya, didn't you say earlier that memory was the fourth stage?"
"I did. In truth, the Reaper's Scythe doesn't touch memory. It touches emotion. Remember what it felt like when you took an indirect hit?"
The troupe shuddered as if the memory itself were repulsive.
"I got weirdly depressed."
"All these old, awful things kept surfacing..."
"Ha-ha. No matter how hard I tried to think of a funny joke, I just couldn't."
Maya nodded.
"Strictly speaking, the Reaper's Scythe didn't dredge up your memories. It provoked your emotions until those memories surfaced on their own."
Wonderstein mentally sorted her breakdown of the mysteries of the mental realm and nodded to himself.
Stage one, Image: imagination.
Stage two, Thought: cognition.
Stage three, Essence: emotion.
Stage four, Will: memory.
Stage five, Spirit: soul.
He recalled her saying the mysteries of the mental realm operated in sequence.
Imagination arose from thought. Thought arose from emotion. Emotion from memory. Memory from the soul.
Whatever the rest meant, he could be certain that the fourth stage rested upon the fifth.
After all, he was living through that very mechanism.
"The psyche normally functions in that forward direction. But occasionally, it runs in reverse. Someone struck directly by the Reaper's Scythe develops a filter at the third stage—Essence. An emotional barrier forms that prevents happy memories from reaching the lower stages. The memories themselves remain intact in the brain."
"Ah."
A handful of the quicker members caught on.
"She's saying memory can be distorted by emotion. No matter how accurately the fourth-stage Will records a memory, if the third stage distorts it, we can't form proper thoughts at the second stage. Right now, it looks like the Deputy Leader has been affected by a combination of the Reaper's Scythe and the Authority of Reversal—memories that stir up unhappy emotions are being filtered out. And that is altering her thoughts."
Everyone had just witnessed what that alteration of thought led to.
Maya recalled the scene and let out a sigh before she could stop herself.
The Deputy Leader flinging herself into the Troupe Leader's arms.
And the Troupe Leader receiving her with a smile.
Something... something about it made her feel strange.
"If the memories themselves had been erased, recovery would be difficult. You'd have to pull them from the fifth stage—the soul. But if the issue is simply that emotion is blocking the memories from surfacing, the problem becomes simpler."
"How do we fix it?"
"The most basic method is to apply a strong emotional stimulus. A jolt of emotion shakes the filter. That's how psychological counselors provoke dormant memories to the surface. But in the Deputy Leader's case, that approach is too dangerous. She was struck by the Reaper's Scythe. There are other methods, but the surest treatment is magic—as I mentioned to the Troupe Leader earlier."
Wonderstein nodded.
He hardly followed the theory either.
But he had caught the core point.
They needed a mage skilled in mental magic.
He swept his gaze across the troupe and delivered his conclusion.
"Once we reach the next city, I will ask Viscountess Bergson to locate a mental mage for us. Until Ella recovers her memories, let's avoid mentioning any past she no longer seems to recall. As Maya pointed out, an emotional jolt could be dangerous."
Every member agreed.
Wonderstein silently reproached himself.
What he had just told them was a lie.
He hadn't made a decision yet.
Maya's proposed treatment came with a critical problem.
Ella's suppressed memories would be laid bare to whichever mage performed the healing.
Which meant Wonderstein's own atrocities would be exposed as well.
He couldn't attempt the treatment until he found a workaround.
With the first item settled, the meeting moved to the second.
"Can you... fix our bodies?"
Everyone had been hesitating. Umon cut straight to it.
All eyes swung toward him.
Wonderstein had been wrestling with this question internally ever since it first hovered in the air.
What was the right answer to give them?
If he was being honest, he couldn't heal them.
Their congenital afflictions were Innate Traits—untouchable even by the System's power.
But laying that truth out plainly was hard.
The faces turned toward him brimmed with a hope they could barely contain.
He understood that hope better than anyone.
If he told them the truth, they would be crushed.
No—they wouldn't even believe him easily in the first place.
They might beg. They might try to bargain.
The disappointment would come after.
It had been the same with the kids from the orphanage.
Those cynical children, who cursed the orphanage, cursed the director, cursed the foundation, and drowned in distrust of the world—even they couldn't accept one thing.
That the pastor who had promised to heal their bodies was a fraud.
When the disabled threw themselves into the street to block the police from dragging the pastor away, the media called it brainwashing by a cult. The truth was a little different.
Laying-on of hands that made the lame rise and the disfigured whole.
That had been the most popular show at the orphanage.
It was a kind of hope-porn.
Deep down, everyone probably sensed it was fake.
They still loved getting drunk on the illusion.
Wasn't YouTube the same thing?
The World Can't Stop Bowing to the Korean Government!
White Women? Korean Men Make Them Swoon!
Foreign Actors Fall in Love with Kimchi!
Those so-called "patriot-bait YouTubers," puffing up nonsense statistics to pump nationalism into their viewers. People knew it was fake, and they still devoured it.
They wanted to get drunk and forget.
Their own miserable reality.
The same held true here.
They wanted the narcotic of hope, even for a moment.
When the evidence that the pastor was a fraud surfaced piece by piece, a wave of suicides had followed.
The tens of millions of won they had given the church?
That wasn't the point.
The point was that the hope they'd clung to for years had been trampled.
Wonderstein looked at the troupe.
He could see the hope they carried wasn't something they had picked up overnight.
His read was right.
The troupe had nurtured this fragile hope for a long time—ever since they had first glimpsed what Wonderstein's power could do.
Of course, they had been too terrified of him to approach for a while after that.
Once the fear faded, they still couldn't bring themselves to ask, afraid the answer would be no.
They had simply done their best not to get on his bad side.
Waiting for the day that might come.
And today, it had.
Wonderstein met their eyes. He parted his lips with deliberation.
"...Yes. It's possible."
The answer startled even himself.
He scrambled to tack on justifications.
This would make it easier to raise their Affection levels.
This would make it easier to ignite their motivation.
This would make it easier to control them.
He repeated the reasons to himself, but the strongest motive had come from the chest, not the head.
He didn't want to crush their hope.
He raised a hand to stop the celebration before it could start.
"But not right away. A cure without side effects is still difficult. So... two years. Help me reach the Circus Grand Prix Finals. In the meantime, I'll keep working on a way to make your bodies whole."
The troupe members turned to each other, beaming.
"Of course!"
"I knew something was up! I've been suspicious for ages—why else would you have gathered us all?"
"You're the one who said the Troupe Leader was going to use us as dark-magic sacrifices last time!"
"Gah, when did I say that?"
"Ha-ha, boss must have his hands full! All we have to do is keep doing what we've been doing, right?"
"Even if two years isn't enough, don't feel awkward about telling us!"
"That's right! I'd gladly wait on the Troupe Leader hand and foot for ten years!"
"Ten years is way too long!"
The meeting broke up in a cheerful din.
In the end, Wonderstein couldn't bring himself to tell them about the Smiling Man.
There hadn't been a chance—and he hadn't wanted one.
When he'd steeled himself to finally open up, part of him had genuinely wanted to stop walling himself off from the troupe.
But he had already deceived them twice.
He'd lied about Ella's recovery.
He'd lied about the troupe's cure.
He could not possibly add some "I need to be honest with you" speech on top of that.
Wearing the Smiling Man's face did not, it turned out, actually make a person shameless.
Two weeks slipped by.
Laughter never left the Monster Circus Troupe in that time.
Ella laughed. The members laughed.
And watching them, Wonderstein...
...laughed too.
"Troupe Leader...?"
"Ah, Yurakne."
A woman with violet hair pinned up approached. Wonderstein greeted her with genuine warmth.
Lately, she was the easiest person to face.
Conversation with her came easily. The tea she brewed soothed him.
Her presence put his mind at ease.
Many things contributed, but the biggest was her gaze.
Unlike the other members, who watched him with something approaching worship every time he walked by, she looked at him with the same eyes she always had.
She was the only one who stayed level-headed while the others buzzed with excitement over his promise.
Perhaps it was because she'd been born with the least visible impairment. Alone among them, she didn't get swept up in his pledge.
"What is it?"
"The, uh... the alchemist says he has something to discuss with you regarding Ella's condition...."
The alchemist.
He had become Wonderstein's other rapidly growing headache of late.
After arriving in Yeterinpurk, Wonderstein had asked Anais about memory treatments—specifically, methods that didn't require hiring a mental mage.
Anais had suggested the Alchemy Guild's approach.
The guild possessed secret techniques for burning herbs and infusing the fumes into medicinal incense that acted upon the mysteries of the mental realm.
He'd fed Maya a story about being unable to find a mental mage and summoned an advisor from the Alchemy Guild. The man was supposedly one of the guild's few Master-class alchemists, so Wonderstein had expected him to take his time arriving. Instead, he had reached Yeterinpurk within days of being contacted.
Like someone who had been hovering at Anais's side, waiting to be introduced.
"Old-timer."
Wonderstein stepped into a room in the villa's annex.
Inside waited the Alchemy Guild's Master of Herbology—and the former head gardener of the Tomato Greenhouse, Gaston Haliwooden.