Chapter 22
Looking into those blue eyes that said she was prepared for it, I felt as though I were sinking deeper and deeper into a mire.
I didn’t know why, but I didn’t want to meet the princess’s gaze.
“Aren’t you going to tell me?”
“...I only have the knowledge.”
So I didn’t answer her question, even though I knew the answer.
This was the first sign of her condition worsening.
If she couldn’t form a new lump of mana inside her body, then every so often she would keep coughing up a little blood, different from the usual symptoms, and little by little her body would begin to go numb, starting from the extremities.
And then, once there was no longer enough mana supplied through medication to keep her body going, she would end up dead from a heart attack or something similar while sitting in a wheelchair.
I didn’t answer.
I wrapped a towel warmed with hot water around her neck and brought over a blanket to keep her warm.
The princess stared at me blankly for a moment, then quietly smiled and stopped asking.
...She couldn’t possibly not know that I knew. She had to realize I’d simply chosen not to answer because I felt like it, and still, smiling all the same, she patted my head and said it might be better to ask someone who had a license issued by the imperial court.
That, too, made my chest feel heavy, and that was why I couldn’t breathe properly.
It felt like I was sinking.
Like my feet were stuck in a mudflat, and I was sinking without end.
I was scared.
I didn’t know where I was being cast down to, or why I had lied even though I knew the truth.
I shouldn’t be like this with the princess of all people—shouldn’t have done this—but why, why, why, why, why?
Sentences that didn’t connect properly—no, words—began to rule my head, and my fingertips started to tremble in tiny fits.
“Young lady.”
“Y-yes?”
“Come here.”
“Ah. S-soon the head of the house will arrive. You should be examined.”
“I can have the detailed exam tomorrow.”
“Your Highness.”
“It’s not a disease that progresses rapidly anyway. I heard that from the imperial physician. That bit of coughing up blood just now was probably from blood in your throat slipping into your saliva and airway, and you choked on it. A healing spell will clear it up right away. So come here and lie down quietly for a nap.”
Was she... wanting to hear my answer? Had I disappointed the princess?
“...”
“Come quickly. I’m getting sleepy.”
“F-first, I understand.”
Trembling with unease, I still went along with the princess’s urging and let myself be drawn into her arms, and she, holding me all the while, began to fall asleep.
She really did take a nap.
After turning my heart upside down, she acted as though she knew nothing at all.
The sight was so absurd that I forgot the gloom that had been filling my head a moment ago, and the princess’s maid, too, seemed taken aback. She blinked at the princess, then ordered another maid waiting behind her to explain the situation to the head of the house and brought over a blanket.
Truly, unlike the people of Blium, they were maids with a fierce sense of professional duty.
So fierce it was almost infuriating.
At times like this, shouldn’t they be doing something to pull me away and insist she get treatment?
But whether I thought that, glared, or showed my irritation, the maids kept looking at me with unchanged expressions, bowing politely and asking me to stay with the princess for a little while. Their courtesy was so excessive that I had no choice but to slip into the princess’s arms.
Then I began to hear a sound from where our bodies touched.
Not the ordinary sound, something roughly like the sound of a volcano heard with both ears covered by my palms, or the low, wavering sound of life—but a rough, sharp one layered beneath them.
A sound so faint and strange that an ordinary person would never hear it.
This sound—this was the sound of the princess’s life weathering away.
Right now, only someone with the knowledge and the focus to listen could hear it clearly, but a year from now it would sound unmistakably different even in daily life, and after two years it would become irregular, until even breathing was filled with pain.
“...”
Wouldn’t it be better to take my life early, then?
Pain was tied to quality of life.
Unlike a wound or an illness, pain once etched into the body didn’t simply vanish even after it was neatly treated; it lingered, leaving physical and mental symptoms behind.
If they killed me in two years and made medicine from me, wouldn’t she end up suffering every time she used mana later?
If what the princess had said last time was true, then the age of peace that had continued in five-hundred-year cycles would soon come to an end.
It wouldn’t be a world where people merely bickered over who was better or more accomplished. The king of monsters would appear, and a world would come where humans were wiped out blindly.
In that case, shouldn’t they kill me now, before I developed any trauma toward mana?
Wouldn’t it be better to kill me now, let my mana recover, and have me live properly?
No matter how I looked at it, there was nothing to be gained by keeping me alive for long.
Even if I wasn’t the one whose worth was being judged—Prince something or other—the princess still possessed far more value than those princes.
The princess was a jack-of-all-trades.
Not that she was a genius.
She couldn’t create or use anything beyond what she had learned.
But she was the sort of person who could use everything she had learned to its fullest.
That wasn’t limited to swordsmanship or magic.
Whether she was handling work with me at her side or managing the art museum, she truly understood everything at one hundred percent and made equally complete use of everything she had.
In every sense, she was a universal talent.
Compared to the first prince, who took after the head of the house and muddled along, never becoming anything in particular, or the second prince, a beast driven by the blood of adolescence, if they weren’t Blium by name, one princess alone was worth a whole truckload of them.
As for someone like me, a disabled person and a rotten human being besides, there was nothing to say.
...Shouldn’t I really die now?
As I thought that, I turned my body and guided the princess’s hand up to my neck. A faint, tingling sensation began to spread from the spot where she touched me.
My heart, which had been sinking into the mud, suddenly began to pound like mad, and the corners of my mouth twitched.
I didn’t know why, but it felt as though a feverish bloom were rising wherever her slender fingers touched.
Slowly, the heat gathered, and once it surpassed its limit, it began to sting as though a flower bud had burst open. The pricking sensation started at my neck and flowed along it, reaching my spine.
“Hhhn.”
Heat spread as though branches were sprouting.
Beginning at my spine, it spread through me as if it were punching through flesh to grow.
Heat that was clearly not my own.
The princess’s body heat.
Closer to pain than warmth, and yet something I wanted to let into me all the same—
“...”
...No, dying right now would still be impossible.
The princess would keep every promise she made.
If she broke that promise and killed a ten-year-old child, she would be ruined in a way far worse than any trauma caused by pain.
That wouldn’t do.
That, above all, absolutely couldn’t happen.
“Hoo.”
For now, I should sleep.
When I pulled my neck away from her fingers and turned over, the princess’s warmth remained on my body like a blanket being laid over me, and sleep dragged at my eyelids.
Then, sensing movement, I opened my eyes and saw the princess stirring awake, blinking through her drowsiness as she sat up. Reflexively, I placed a cigarette soaked in medicine into her mouth.
“Pffh...”
The princess laughed loosely, eyes half-lidded, and I frowned at her beauty even in that disheveled state before lighting the cigarette.
“Sss... Hoo. Smoking the moment you wake up. That’s a mess. I feel like a hooligan.”
She chuckled, exhaling blue smoke at me.
As she swept back her rose-gold hair and laughed with clear amusement, I accepted an ashtray from one of the maids and held it under her ash.
“If Your Highness stays still for a while and then suddenly moves, your mana will become unstable, so you’ll need to smoke medicine every time you cough. We’ll have to consult the head of the house for the details, of course.”
“Hnn.”
“For the next year, if we assume you’re only going about daily life, that alone should be enough.”
“So it means it won’t get worse if we do that, right?”
“Yes. Your Highness’s illness has been recorded as something that progresses slowly, over the course of centuries, so it should advance slowly.”
The theoretical cure for the disease had actually been known for quite some time, despite the illness’s notorious reputation.
All they needed to do was create a new source of mana inside the body that wasn’t born with it.
The disease destroyed only the mana one already possessed.
Then why couldn’t it be cured?
The reason was simple.
Up until now, whenever a separate mana source was made inside the body, humans met one of two ends.
If a new source was made from a human’s own material, the donor would die from an immune reaction even if they were identical twins. If it was made from a monster, the immune reaction wouldn’t occur, but they’d become a monster like a chimera.
So the cure had failed.
But the lump of flesh of restoration that merely spewed out healing magic was a different matter.
If it were swallowed directly, it would devour a person and turn them into a lump of flesh twice over, but if it were turned into a regenerative medicine that stripped away regeneration, then a human could live on in quiet coexistence with their incurable illness—so long as even contact with the skin was enough to make the drug dangerous.
I had told the head of the house as much, so by now she was probably tearing her hair out trying to create an artificial mana source.
“Puhh. Well, that’s that, then. The details would only get in the way if someone like me, who knows nothing about medicine, tried to hear them. We should go pick out a dress.”
“Pardon?”
“You’re not planning to go to the ball wearing the clothes I gave you, are you? They’re comfortable, yes, but they don’t fit your body at all. So let’s go order something tailor-made.”
“That is...”
“You’re not seriously planning to show up looking shabby to a ball being held in my name, are you?”
“I...”
“Don’t tell me!”
“...I’ll go get fitted, yes, but isn’t this your doing, Your Highness?”
Why was this suddenly being treated as though I were the one causing trouble?
As I looked at the princess with my eyes half-lidded, she pressed out the cigarette she had burned down to the filter and snickered.