Episode 3
“Ha.”
A laugh escaped me.
Jealousy?
Why?
If he’d killed someone out of personal greed or desire, at least I could have understood that. It was only natural for the ugly to envy the beautiful.
But had the elder brother of the founding duke killed someone for that reason?
No, he hadn’t.
The founding duke of Blium and his siblings had gone where only the enemies of the Ordo Family waited, asking no reward, and they had saved lives there despite every kind of humiliation and neglect. And that man—no, that brother—had driven a blade so deep into him that the tip burst through the woman’s back.
He was a man who deserved to die.
He was the sort of filth that, even in peaceful Korea, would have earned a discussion of the death penalty.
And most of the people the narrator of this story killed were exactly that kind of trash.
Bandits who looted medical supplies to sell them, lords who sacrificed their own subjects to preserve their wealth, soldiers who raped the people they were meant to protect and killed anyone who tried to stop them so they could indulge their own desires.
Was killing people like that truly lower than saving lives?
No. It wasn’t.
If people like that were left alive, they would only kill dozens more. If anything, it was heroic to step forward and do what others hated to do—and there was no reason at all to feel jealous of it.
And there was another reason I could laugh at this feeling.
Jealousy is a feeling I can’t understand.
For a being made because it was needed, jealousy was a feeling you could sense but should never understand—no, a feeling you weren’t supposed to be capable of understanding.
I had felt regret so many times that I’d come to empathize with it, but this time would be different.
As I’d suspected, unlike when I heard the word regret, I didn’t feel any torment no matter how many times I heard that I was jealous. There was no neuralgia, no hallucination.
Even now, the emotion in the voice was heavy, carrying that ugly residue that clung to the bottom of human nature, but… that was all it was.
I could tell it was heavy, that it was sincere jealousy, but I couldn’t truly share it the way I had with regret.
This curse couldn’t kill me.
Once that thought crossed my mind, the corner of my mouth twisted on its own, and I was startled by the fact that I’d been laughing at it. I shook my head hard.
To have come here to die, and yet feel relieved that I couldn’t die.
…How shameful.
It was embarrassing to cling to things like living and dying. When had I ever clung to such things?
I hadn’t done that in my previous life either. I’d only done it because an opportunity had come along. I’d thought this life would be the same.
Right. Don’t cling to it in some pathetic, humiliating way. All I had to do was achieve my purpose, so for now I should focus only on being cursed.
With that in mind, I was on my way to the passage leading to the next chamber when I heard water beginning to boil.
“Ah?”
Something was boiling in my arm, and I could feel it through my skin.
“I envy you. My younger sibling, with hands that can save lives. My younger sister, who even in the face of death preached the preciousness of life and worried about me.”
My skin swelled in a strange, unnatural way.
The raised flesh had a faint translucence to it, as though it were filled with water, and I made a few vacant sounds at the sight of it.
And when I finally managed to recognize what I was seeing, I became aware of the stinging pain peculiar to a burn.
“Aa, aaaaaagh!”
My arm began to burn.
Blisters burst.
Sticky fluid ran down, fouling my skin, and the pain was so bad it felt like I was scraping my entire arm raw against asphalt. My mind went white. I dropped to my knees, and just as I was about to faint, a voice rang inside my head, as if to keep me from losing consciousness.
“My hands were stained with blood. My younger siblings’ hands were stained with blood too. But that blood was different. The blood on my siblings’ hands was filled with the warmth of life. It held the desperate struggle of life trying to survive. But what stained my hands was the death throe. It was nothing but a scream with only the future of growing cold left to it.”
“Agh! AAAAAAAGH!”
Hot, hot, hot, hot, hot!
If only I could pass out—if I could just pass out, then I might be able to die!
Ah, ah… at this point, was I really begging someone else to take my life from me?
“I wanted to stain my hands with hot, hot blood. I wanted to be thanked not like the monster of Ordo, who killed people and was praised for it, but by saving them.”
“Kkhkghgh! Kkhgk!”
“But my mana had changed. My younger siblings could not overcome the chain of anger they had once conquered, and so they surrendered to it. I envy them, my strong younger siblings.”
Shut up, it hurts, shut up, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts!
The voice battered at my head, and I flailed like a tipped-over toy, lurching forward and then backwards again and again until at last I slammed my head hard against the wall. The impact struck directly at my brain, and for a moment my mind cleared a little.
But only for a moment.
The fire flared up again, and pain came crashing back down. I immediately started ramming my head against the wall, trying to forget the pain.
Once, twice, three times…
But then the world in front of me turned red and dizziness surged through me. The voice that had been jealous of his younger sibling and the fire both stopped. I rolled around for a long while like a caterpillar, and only after the strength to even twitch had drained from me did I lift my head and stare at the passage ahead.
Would I have been able to get through if I’d run away the moment the fire started?
The thought came too late. The voice that had been shaking my head was already gone.
The flames that had burned my arm were gone too, leaving behind only heat and the searing sting of burns.
“Ngh…”
Let’s go. Move.
I’d decided to focus only on being cursed.
Thinking that, I got to my feet, and this time a corridor leading downward stretched out before me. I leaned against the wall and began to walk, my legs threatening to give way beneath me again and again.
A man in his fifties had been painted on the wall.
It seemed that, after breaking away from the Ordo Family, he had taken the surname Blium as an alias; the banner bore the word Blium and the emblem of the current house, and the writing explained how the founding duke and his younger sister had saved people and in what ways.
Honestly, I could only admire it.
He had gone onto a battlefield unarmed and saved hundreds of people. He had entered plague-stricken territory and ended the outbreak. He had written a manual on field surgery…
I couldn’t sympathize with it, but I could understand why the narrator of the story would envy the founding duke of the Blium family.
A perfect human being.
The founding duke and his younger sister were the sort of people you’d expect to see on television being called great men and women, while the narrator of this story compared his siblings’ accomplishments and perfection to himself and slowly collapsed under the weight of it.
But the narrator of the story was no ordinary person either.
He killed monsters while gathering medicinal herbs.
He researched how to harvest those herbs in better quality, how to cultivate them artificially.
Even after he was no longer able to save people with his own hands, he never gave up on the work of saving them.
Depending on how you looked at it, he might even have been greater than the founding duke.
And then the narrator became old, and I arrived at the third chamber.
“I despaired.”
In the center of the chamber, a man was carved holding the corpse of his younger sister and weeping over her.
He had defeated the king of monsters who led waves strong enough to erase one or two nations from the map, only to be drenched in its blood and fall ill alongside his sister.
The narrator and the duke did everything they could to save her, but neither of them was able to cure her.
She had been old.
Even with mana to help her, she couldn’t cross beyond her limits, and her aged body had no choice but to struggle against a disease it should otherwise have been able to overcome.
There had been physical injuries too.
She had stood on the front lines as a healing mage in the battle against the king of monsters.
Even a hero trained in martial arts would have been injured. How strong could a woman be who had been forcibly stuffed with techniques by the Ordo Family—and who, moreover, had barely used them at all?
There was bound to be injury.
There had been no medicine.
The king of monsters’ poison was distinct from any existing toxin, so it had to be studied from the beginning.
And research like that took time.
So the narrator had fallen into despair.
He had given up on every feeling, every effort, and tried to kill himself.
But the founding duke of Blium had not left him alone.
He had saved his brother.
He had saved the man who had been trying to kill himself.
That in itself had been the right thing to do, but not everyone in the world could endure that rightness.
And so the narrator had collapsed.
He had been defeated by the right thing; he had lain in bed, surrounded by the founding duke’s family, and had died with prayers for the dead on his lips, unable to save even one younger sister with his own hands. He had been a pitiful man, someone who only ever killed people in peace, someone who had lived his whole life in regret and jealousy, someone who had wanted to become a good person and so spent his entire life looking away from his own feelings. I, me, me, me, me, me.
“Ah, ah…”
He died peacefully, without even managing to kill himself, without paying the price for his sins.
I curse it.
I hate that bloodline that stopped my deeds.
I curse that bloodline that alone escaped Ordo’s shadow, that bloodline that left me behind and went on without me.
This is a curse.
A curse you carry out even while knowing it should never be done.
A malice thick with stubbornness, the sort that belongs to some senile old fool who can no longer recognize what he has accomplished.
“Ah.”
So I was already cursed.
Only belatedly realizing it, unlike the other times, I collapsed to the floor with a thud and made a pool of blood beneath me.