10. Demon in a Bottle (18)
10. Demon in a Bottle (18)
Phairen closed her eyes, then opened them again.
A lifetime of emotions flickered across her face in that brief instant.
She had never left her teacher's side since that day.
She had even attended his funeral cradling him in her arms.
Watching Elpara—the sole woman among them—shed tears, Phairen had to physically choke back the laughter threatening to burst from her.
That woman who always made a point of unbuttoning her blouse at the chest and thighs whenever she came to see him.
Shameless, at forty years old.
As if she didn't know I was right beside him—twenty years younger.
"Should we not inform the other professors?"
The memorial service took place a month after the accident.
She had fully accepted the Demon in the Bottle as her teacher, and the demon, for his part, had grown comfortable in the mask he wore.
He no longer needed to search for information to speak with her naturally.
"No. You have heard the same whispers I have. This Black Magician—the mastermind behind the attack. If my survival were known to him, everyone would be in danger."
He delivered the line and then added one more word.
The kind of word he knew she would love.
"You are the only one I can trust."
She smiled at that.
Since her teacher had become like this, she had felt so keenly how much he depended on her.
She did not understand why he was so determined to hide his survival from his colleagues.
Nor did she know why this Black Magician supposedly had him marked.
The doubts didn't linger long.
It was her revered teacher's word, so she would follow it.
That was the path to being the beloved disciple.
After the memorial, she set out on a journey with him.
He said he wanted to see the world.
Phairen dragged one trunk and cradled one bottle across every corner of the globe.
The life she had always dreamed of—just the two of them.
Her teacher behaved like someone who had stepped into the world for the first time.
He reacted to every little thing.
Often, he was ignorant of what should have been common knowledge.
Yet Phairen never once suspected his identity.
She simply reasoned that such a horrific transformation must have naturally damaged his memory.
She even took joy in it—that while he had forgotten important things, he still remembered their trivial conversations. Proof, she told herself, of how much she had meant to him.
Sometimes he wanted to come out of the flask.
But that was, unfortunately, impossible.
Phairen had already classified him as a "person," not a monster.
Her Inspira could not be used on a person.
And if he ever left the bottle, there might be no getting him back in.
The Demon in the Bottle agreed with her judgment.
So whenever he needed something, he gave her an order.
She did whatever he asked.
Some of it baffled her. Some of it bordered on the repulsive.
Still, she carried out her master's commands in silence.
"Piri, I am always grateful that you are my disciple."
His acknowledgment and praise were enough.
He even concerned himself with her future.
He urged her to pursue a professorship at Rekachev.
She knew exactly how formidable that challenge was.
The man teaching beast-taming in her teacher's stead was Joerin, a trainer who ranked among the top two in the field.
She could not imagine standing in the place her teacher had once occupied.
"You are my disciple, Piri. Trust only in me."
The Demon in the Bottle knew what trials the school would set.
A brief stroll through the Garden of Whispers was all it took.
He trained her to counter every test, calibrated to the exact answers required.
Phairen passed every task the school set with perfect scores.
As it happened, the current beast-taming professor had been angling to return to active performance.
When a talent like Phairen appeared, he gladly surrendered the post.
"Ursus's personal disciple, you say? Hoho, I should have known! Who else could have produced someone like you? So all that time traveling the world was to broaden your horizons and hone your craft? Welcome, Professor Phairen!"
Just like that, she became a professor at Rekachev at the age of thirty.
To inherit her teacher's seat—her heart swelled nearly to bursting.
This was official recognition. She was her teacher's successor.
"It is all thanks to you, Master."
"It is thanks to your own efforts."
Even after she joined the school, his bizarre requests never ceased.
Money was never an issue; he fed her information that could earn her any amount she required.
She procured the rare books he wished to read, the rare materials he desired.
Sometimes she performed dubious magical experiments on his behalf.
But the strangest of his demands was something else entirely.
Collecting living things infected with the Curse Plague.
Creatures warped by the Curse Plague often appeared at auction.
A whole subculture of "monster collectors" traded in them actively.
But what her teacher wanted were specimens in whom the Devolut infection was still active.
Those were banned from trade outside sanctioned research institutions.
Rekachev was a prestigious academy, but it was a circus school.
Even a professor could not lawfully acquire such dangerous organisms.
So she traveled directly into plague-stricken zones.
There she would find infected creatures, trap them in bottles, and return.
Entering those zones required regular injections of Milky Way.
The Alchemist Guild had developed it as a treatment for the Curse Plague, but it carried a vicious toxicity. A child given the dose would lose every hair on their head.
The repeated infusions ravaged her body from the inside out.
Yet she carried out her teacher's orders without a word.
Because he had told her it was the only way to recover his body.
Then came word that the Curse Plague was spreading through the Isumi Hills, and she rushed to the site.
It was not far from Yeterinpurk.
She was swamped with entrance exam preparations for the Circus Grand Prix, but she could spare this much time.
What she found upon reaching the village was a desolate ruin.
Most of the inhabitants were dead.
"Rumor says they went mad and devoured each other."
"What!"
The Demon in the Bottle cried out in horror.
Phairen understood what troubled her teacher.
She had been turning it over in her mind the whole journey back from Dvalchev.
She recalled the scene she had witnessed on the Wonder Stage seventeen years ago.
Most people knew only that the stage had crashed into the sea that day during the attack—they had no idea what had truly happened inside.
Bodies twisting and warping into grotesque new shapes.
Unmistakably the work of Devolut.
But the madness—people tearing at each other—she had never seen that anywhere but there, seventeen years ago.
Her teacher said it was the doing of the Black Magician.
That name had surfaced repeatedly amid the efforts to revive the Circus Grand Prix.
Voices of alarm asked whether he might appear again.
The organizers had even assembled a dedicated pursuit team.
There could be no doubt—he had surfaced near Yeterinpurk.
The Demon in the Bottle trembled.
He had suspected the man would resurface the moment he heard the Grand Prix was being revived.
But to come so close.
Maybe... maybe...
...following his trail?
Urgh.
"We must accelerate the plan."
At her teacher's pronouncement, Phairen nodded with a resigned air.
Her teacher's plan was to construct a vessel for his soul and transfer himself into it.
But that was originally supposed to take several more years.
Her gaze drifted across the shelves in the secret chamber.
Every jar held a creature afflicted by the Curse Plague.
All of them collected toward his goal of reclaiming a body.
The degenerative transformations had halted the moment they entered the glass.
The "fixation" property of her Inspira applied even to Devolut.
The jars still contained active Devolut cultures.
The original plan was to gather them for several more years and fashion his body from the accumulated mass.
But with the Black Magician's next move unknowable, they could not afford to wait years.
Phairen composed her expression and stepped into the corner of the office.
Today she would have to do the most distasteful thing she had ever done.
"Professor, I'm ready."
In the center of the office stood a neatly dressed girl of eighteen.
Clara.
After receiving Phairen's favor during the entrance exam, she had been helping the professor with her work.
The task, as Phairen explained it, was to test a script an acquaintance of hers was preparing for an experimental stage production.
Clara had accepted without hesitation.
It was a small thing, compared to the kindness the professor had shown her.
Every evening, Clara came to the professor's office to dance, deliver lines, and sing as instructed.
It was certainly experimental.
The movements and pronunciations were deeply esoteric.
But Clara, true to her standing as Rekachev's top student, executed every demand with flawless precision.
She had no way of knowing.
That the dance was a sacrificial rite offering oneself to the Demon God.
That the lines were a spell to wrench one's own soul from the body.
That the song was an incantation to summon another soul into the vacated flesh.
That the drink the professor always kindly provided contained the drugs the ritual required.
That the office floor was etched with the necessary sorcerous patterns.
That behind the screen past the professor's desk, the one who had supplied all of it was watching.
Tonight was the culmination of weeks of preparation.
At Phairen's cue, Clara flowed through everything she had learned, as smoothly as water.
Not a single mistake.
A performance befitting the top student of her year.
Something felt strange from the moment the ritual began.
Her body was unaccountably languid, and whenever she spoke her lines, her mind clouded over.
By the final song, she felt her consciousness detaching, floating upward.
But she kept going.
The show must go on—that was the creed burned into the marrow of every acrobat.
For someone who had survived the elite track, it was even more absolute.
You did not halt a performance because you felt a little dizzy.
Besides, the professor's acquaintance—the one who had devised this piece—was behind the screen.
He had agreed to reveal himself only after the performance, in case Clara, faced with a stranger, might grow nervous.
An industry connection.
She had to make a good impression.
The minutes-long ritual concluded.
The final movement stilled, the final line left Clara's lips.
In that moment.
The magic activated.
Still facing the screen, waiting for the producer of this piece to emerge, Clara felt something writhe inside her body.
"Ghk!"
She clutched her throat and collapsed to the floor.
Her breath choked off.
Something was crawling up her windpipe toward her mouth.
"Ghhk, hrrk! P-Professor! My body—!"
She looked frantically for Phairen.
She believed the professor would do something—anything—to help.
But when she raised her head toward the professor, she froze.
The professor was not even looking at her.
Her face was radiant with exultation.
Turned toward the screen—toward her acquaintance.
"Master!"
Master?
Clara's mind seized on the figure Phairen invoked in every class: her master.
Ursus of the Five-Person Gang.
The man who had died years ago. Why—?
But she could think no further.
A numbing, prickling sensation swept through her entire body.
"Ghuuegh!"
Something heaved out of her mouth.
A pale, viscous slime.
It gushed from every orifice in her body.
"Hhhhhaah!"
She crumpled to the floor with a deflating sound, like a puppet with its strings cut.
Clara tried to scream.
No voice came.
Her entire body felt impossibly heavy, as if every muscle had dissolved.
She tried to look down at herself.
Her vision was wrecked.
Her sight spun in dizzying circles, as though looking through dozens of lenses stacked at random.
She was flailing in a vortex of churning waves.
Then she heard the professor's voice.
"Clara, come this way. It's safe here."
Professor? Is that you? What's happening?
"Here, come inside. You trust me, don't you? Once you're in here, everything will be all right."
Through the chaos, Clara fixed on the professor's face in her mind.
Professor Phairen.
Always so kind to her students—the one who understood her heart, the good one.
The one who had saved her.
Ah, Professor. I'm coming.
And so she hurled herself into a world of shimmering light.
The viscous, formless fluid Clara had expelled siphoned into the glass bottle.
She had no idea where she was.
All she felt was a deep, enveloping comfort.
Her sight, her hearing, her sense of touch—all returned to normal.
She beheld the view through the glass of the bottle.
There stood her favorite professor.
And beside her, another figure.
Clara could not contain her shock at the sight.
The figure wore a face she knew intimately.
Too intimately...
Blue hair, the demure look of an eighteen-year-old girl.
The face she saw in the mirror every morning.
The figure was her.
"A success."
The girl once called Clara—the demon now outside the bottle—smiled.