Choosing a Gift Is Too Difficult
Choosing a gift was far too difficult.
Even Hell, for all its advanced industries, had never changed at its core. Hell existed to punish sinners and scrub clean the sins of their former lives. The demons had never forgotten that essence either.
Which was why…
“Welcome. Tell me what knowledge you require, and I shall provide the Chief Justice with the most suitable sinner.”
Imprisoning sinners in capsules and using them as knowledge vending machines could, in its own way, be considered a form of judgment.
Dantalion swept a dubious gaze over the dozens of capsules lining the building. Sitri, looking around with him, spoke in a slightly excited voice.
“Pride Hell really is something else, isn’t it?”
“I think ‘something else’ might be underselling it.”
The very bottom of Hell—Pride Hell. Those who had committed sins through knowledge and wisdom usually fell here.
Dantalion stared into one of the capsules. The sinner inside had every limb restrained, eyes covered by bandages etched with curses. Those bandages held the power to deny everything the sinner was.
Knowledge, wisdom, conviction… It’s a fitting punishment for people who spent their whole lives believing they were right.
To die over and over inside a world they could never escape by their own power. The souls cast into Pride Hell endured this torment for eons before they could earn a chance at reincarnation. Usually, though… most of them chose annihilation long before that.
Dantalion looked away from the capsule and asked the neatly suited demon,
“Who’s the smoothest talker in this place?”
“If it’s the smoothest talker you want, I have just the ones. This way, please.”
Dantalion followed the guide deeper into the building. At the center waited an elevator of pure gold, enormous enough to boast. A colossal lift carved with the forms of mythical demons and monsters.
The guide, smiling with his eyes, pointed at it proudly.
“We use elevators of the highest standard, designed with every demon’s size in mind.”
“I can see the consideration… but did it really need to be pure gold?”
“Of course. It’s magnificent, isn’t it?”
Sitri nodded. Honestly, when a Great Demon ruled the place, a little showing off looked good, didn’t it? She tapped Dantalion’s shoulder and whispered,
“We can’t fall behind either. Leave it to me and I’ll make the Supreme Court absolutely gorgeou—”
“Is that necessary? Personally I find restraint more charming than extravagance.”
Dantalion casually brushed off the demon’s whisper and boarded the elevator after the guide. Sitri clicked her tongue and followed. The guide pressed the button for the lowest basement level—floor 666.
The elevator dropped at high speed and chimed softly on arrival. The underground 666th floor that greeted them was… utterly bleak.
Dantalion surveyed the space beyond the doors and asked the guide,
“Modeled after a morgue from the living world? Less ornate than I expected.”
Rows of freezer-like storage units made it look exactly like a mortuary. Stepping onto the 666th floor, Dantalion headed toward the wall. Nameplates listing sinners’ names and crimes covered every inch of it.
The guide who had followed him added,
“It is modeled after a morgue, yes, but more precisely this place is closer to Lord Lucifer’s private exhibition hall.”
“Exhibition hall?”
“Indeed. One might call it the final resting place Lord Lucifer prepared for the trash who can never wash away their sins.”
With a crooked smile the guide pulled open one of the storage unit handles. A soul-freezing cold spilled out, revealing a sinner locked inside black ice, face twisted and hideous.
“We preserve the souls in the black ice of Helheim. Thanks to the nature of this ice, the sinners taste eternal pain and helplessness from which they can never escape.”
“I see.”
Dantalion nodded as if that made sense. If someone had sinned enough to turn a white canvas black, the price had to follow.
He closed the unit, returning the soul to darkness, and asked the guide,
“So where’s the sinner I want?”
“This way.”
After checking the numbers, the guide led Dantalion to one particular unit.
Paul Joseph Goebbels & Adolf Schicklgruber
After reading the nameplate, Dantalion asked the guide with a puzzled look,
“No crimes listed. And the names are a little different from the ones I know.”
“The list of crimes was far too long, so we omitted it. Also, Lord Lucifer noticed that Adolf seemed to dislike his own surname, so he used Schicklgruber instead of Hitler.”
“Hmm…”
Dantalion gave a rough nod. There was nothing to gain by poking at someone else’s workplace culture.
Still…
Is it really all right to hand these two’s knowledge and wisdom over to Yoanna?
Knowledge and wisdom themselves could not distinguish good from evil. Dynamite had originally been invented to develop mines, after all. Every piece of knowledge and wisdom took on different meaning depending on the individual.
But the unease was hard to shake. This wasn’t just any human knowledge—it belonged to the most evil leader the Earth had ever known. The memory of having started off on the wrong foot made Dantalion’s thoughts grow heavier…
“We’ll take this one. Form it into a scroll, and don’t leave so much as a fingernail’s worth of the soul’s residue.”
“No need to worry. Never once receiving a complaint is our pride.”
“?”
Sitri had placed the order in Dantalion’s stead. After signing the documents with a neat flourish, she turned to him.
“If we’re giving her something, we should give her the best. Don’t you know ‘full-spend full-invest’?”
“What does that even mean? Doesn’t sound like a proper idiom.”
Sitri sighed and shook her head as if there was no helping him. Pouring resources into a beloved character was the natural order of things—how could he not grasp something so simple…
“Once you’ve decided to help, go all in without hesitation! Something like that.”
“Somehow that rubs me the wrong way… but you’re not wrong.”
Dantalion nodded. If Yoanna seemed to go strange from this knowledge, he could always intervene later. He had made a mistake at the beginning, but he was confident he understood her properly now.
A short while later, having received the carefully wrapped scroll, Dantalion returned to the surface with Sitri.
And yet…
“Doesn’t it seem brighter than when we arrived?”
“You’re right. Did they turn up the lights?”
The entire building was bright enough to hurt the eyes. Strange. Demons born in the gloomy depths of Hell were not usually fond of bright light. More than that, the loud murmuring suggested something unusual was happening…
“I say, aren’t you Dantalion?”
“Hm?”
Someone called out to him from behind. A young woman’s voice using an oddly mismatched manner of speech. Dantalion turned naturally and found a woman half-hidden beside the elevator.
“…Jijang Bosal?”
“Indeed! My, how delightful to see you again after so long!”
A woman scattering a radiant glow utterly out of place in Hell. Jijang Bosal greeted him with a refreshing smile.
Jijang Bosal—the bodhisattva who saved the sentient beings of Hell’s six realms—was something of a celebrity down here. Little wonder: she was so earnest about salvation that she was called the Dark Lord of the Underworld, the teacher of the gloomy world.
Figuring this was fate, Dantalion brought her back to his office. Seated on the sofa, he asked,
“Anything you’d like to drink?”
“I’ve recently become rather fond of something called black grapefruit tea. Might I trouble you for that?”
“For anyone else I might refuse, but not for you.”
Dantalion gestured to Sitri. She respectfully set a canned coffee and a black grapefruit tea on the table. Jijang Bosal’s eyes sparkled as she photographed the luminous tea with her phone.
Watching her, Dantalion sipped his canned coffee and said,
“Still living young, I see.”
“Hahaha! After repeating my past lives so many times, is that not only natural?”
Laughing heartily as she took more photos, Jijang Bosal slurped the tea through a straw. Dantalion snorted a quiet laugh. This man—no, this woman—was one of the few friends he had.
Setting down the can, he asked,
“So, have you come again to save more sinners?”
“Asking me that is no different from asking whether I am still breathing.”
“Fair enough.”
Dantalion nodded. Across dozens, perhaps hundreds of lifetimes, Jijang Bosal had saved countless sinners. Honestly, it was beyond comprehension. Sinners poured in from dozens of worlds—how could anyone save them all? Her path was like running a road with no end.
Yet it was also undeniable that thanks to her, the judges could finally breathe a little. Simply for lightening his subordinates’ load, she deserved respect.
Having emptied the cup in an instant, Jijang Bosal smiled brightly and spoke.
“But what business brought you to Pride Hell? It is rare for a demon of your caliber to need knowledge and wisdom.”
“Well…”
After a brief hesitation, Dantalion decided to tell her about Yoanna. Unlike the others, Jijang Bosal would never harm the girl. He gave a concise explanation…
“What a splendid thing! You have given yourself the chance to save a young sentient being and accumulate virtue!”
“One could interpret it that way.”
“Hahaha! I always thought you regarded my work with indifference, yet here you have such a side to you!”
Jijang Bosal laughed, radiating a halo. Facing that pure smile, Dantalion could only feel awkward. He had merely intervened to reduce his own workload, yet she treated it like something noble—it was embarrassing.
“Then do you mean to give that scroll to the child as well?”
“Yes. She seems to struggle with getting close to people, so I thought I’d give her a little help.”
“Hohoho, is that so?”
“?”
Smiling as if thoroughly entertained, Jijang Bosal rummaged through her handbag. Cosmetics, candy, four-cut photo strips… Wait—hadn’t her previous life been that of an old man? She was living far too much like a young girl now.
While Dantalion felt oddly unsettled at having glimpsed a friend’s private hobbies—
“Here. How about exchanging for this?”
“What’s that?”
Jijang Bosal pulled out a book covered in stickers.
Making Friends Edition!
“What do you say? I made this book for the friends I have befriended in this life!”
“……”
Something that felt both impressive and completely unimpressive had appeared. Dantalion stared at the book and at Jijang Bosal with an indescribable expression.