Episode 4
With a wet, sucking sound, I could feel the blood draining out of me.
My blood—the blood I had received from the first head of the Blium family—ran from my body.
“Agh, uh? Ahh…….”
And once enough blood had spilled out to kill a person without even trying, darkness began to settle over my vision so thickly I could no longer see what was in front of me.
Slowly, starting at the edges.
The world darkened as if black ink had been poured into clear water, and at the same time, my head began to spin.
As though I’d ridden a spiral slide straight into the ground, I felt myself sliding down, my body collapsing between my legs, and even the sound of my blood draining away grew muffled and distant.
But one thing—the voice ringing inside my head—came through far too clearly.
“I am not human. If I were, I could never hate a younger sibling who shared blood and dreams with me so sincerely. I could never hate the sibling who worked so hard to help others, the sibling who had once tried to embrace even a foolish older brother who had gone so far as to attempt the suicide forbidden by God, with love.”
“Hhk, hrrk, ngh.”
“I should not have hated them. I shouldn’t have. And yet I did hate the sibling who had everything I did not. I envied them with all my heart. I envied them so much that my own corpse became a lump of flesh, one that spewed flame and lightning from that envy.”
“Kkhh, hk.”
With every ragged breath, my body made a grinding sound.
When I looked down through a vision narrowed to the width of a needle, I saw my legs being crushed.
The joints that should have been there were bending as if struck with a club, and the muscles had slipped out of place, twisting themselves into a frenzy.
A lump of flesh.
This was the process of becoming one.
Only then did I understand what the duchess had meant by that forbidden area filled with blood and flesh.
As I changed like this, blood would be flung everywhere, and I would die here as a lump of flesh.
“……Huh?”
Die.
I could die.
I, who couldn’t even bring myself to commit suicide, could die again simply because someone else needed me to.
There was no reason to struggle.
No— even if I fought with everything I had, there was no way I could stop my body from being warped by that incomprehensible force called mana.
I would do my part and die.
Thinking that, I stopped struggling, and even the last of the blood that had been keeping my reason afloat drained from my body. I pitched forward, and with my final wish, I prayed.
Let this time bring peace.
Let this coward, who lacked even the courage to kill herself and instead leaned on the needs of others, no longer be able to think at all.
As I wished for that, I lost consciousness before long.
“I, who was becoming a lump of flesh, wanted two things.”
And yet…….
“One was revenge. I wanted to pour out all these feelings on the children of the sibling who had called me nothing but a slaughtering weapon, and on the servants too—on those who had said that I, the one who wiped out the Ordo Family and dealt with the war that had fallen upon the Blium family, was nothing more than a killing machine.”
Why was that voice still there?
Even when I clamped my hands over my ears, it still echoed inside my skull.
Gasping at that voice, I forced myself upright, and the speaker began talking about the sibling’s descendants instead of the sibling.
“What I felt toward my sibling was really about myself. It was regret toward myself, envy, frustration. Emotions born from my own inadequacy.”
“Hh?”
“But their blood relatives, while living comfortably by saving people atop the corpses I had made with my own hands, still slandered me. That, I could not bear. Because unlike my sibling, I was petty and mean-spirited, because I was impulsive like a murderer, I cursed them.”
The speaker’s voice was certainly different when he spoke of the sibling.
When he spoke of the sibling, there was shame under it.
The sibling had been accomplished because they had worked hard and polished their heart; the reason he had become a ghost of the Ordo Family was, in the end, his own choice.
So the end of it always turned back toward himself.
It was like a monk punishing himself for killing bandits and spilling blood.
But his feelings toward the Blium family were different.
Every last emotion was plainly directed at others.
And that emotion had the shape of a blade.
Wielding it against himself would make him think of the pain and the consequences, and he could not bring it down cleanly. But when it was turned on someone else, all he had to do was erase a little hesitation, and he could strike as freely as he wanted.
That was why the one who had always smiled at his sibling while wearing away his own soul cursed the sibling’s descendants without mercy.
A curse that would strip them of their humanity.
A curse that would turn them into a lump of flesh.
To that point, I could understand.
I understood that if you became a lump of flesh, your bones and organs would vanish and you would die quickly.
But what was I now?
My arms below the elbows had turned to charcoal, and yet they still retained the shape of arms. My legs were stained red with blood, and yet they still retained the shape of legs.
As I stared blankly at the statue-like figure, the speaker answered me as if mocking me.
“You shall never reach what you desire. Just as I could not save people, I shall not give you what you want. If you struggle to live, I’ll turn you into a lump of flesh. You will spend your life restoring yourself, only to die the moment your mana runs out.”
“Wha, t—”
“If you desire death, then I’ll make you live instead. Even if you kill others, I’ll make you live. No— I’ll give you a power no one can ignore, so that you may live by killing others.”
“Agh, ngh! I—!”
Words full of malice.
He would not give death to the one who wanted to die.
Live miserably.
Live with your arms and legs twisted into monstrosities, kill others the way I did, and go on living that kind of life while watching the rest of your family save people.
At that, I tried to get up, tried to say something, but as if the curse had already been laid, the stone wall began to crumble, and I fell without end.
“Kuh! Ngh!”
I slammed into jutting rocks along the way.
I hit my head. I hit my fingers.
By all rights, something should have broken long ago.
No— even if my bones didn’t break, my skin should have torn, or I should have been bruised.
But perhaps because of the curse that would not let me die, my body, having gained terrible momentum, crashed into everything and yet remained utterly intact. From the top of my head all the way down as I was thrown against the floor and bounced around like a ball, neither bones nor ligaments nor muscles were damaged.
“Kk, hhh.”
That was not all.
My lungs were not crushed.
It should have been strange if my organs had not burst, and yet I rose as though I had suffered no impact at all.
This was not a human body.
I could not die.
“Ah, ahh.”
The moment I understood that, a thin sound escaped my mouth—
“Ah, ahh, ahhh, AAAAAAH!”
A scream burst out.
I hadn’t wanted much.
I had only wanted that curse that had killed dozens to kill me too, like everyone else.
I had no intention of overcoming the curse and living happily ever after.
Even if I survived, I had no ability to live happily, and I had no right to such a life when I had already tried to kill myself.
And yet now, because I wished for death, it would not let me die. It would force me to live.
That bastard had known exactly how much I suffered comparing myself to others, comparing myself to myself, and he had still chosen to make others feel that pain, knowing full well how unbearable it was.
“Aaaah!”
My mind went black.
My anger surged so high that all the blood in my body rushed away to carry oxygen and nutrients to my muscles.
And the muscles, fed by that surge, moved on their own.
My raised arm slammed into the floor.
The floor split.
I ran with all my strength and smashed my head into the wall.
The wall broke.
I stabbed at the wall with my fingertips.
My fingers tore through the rock as easily as if it were castella cake.
No, it didn’t end there.
Again, I heard that bubbling sound.
The fluid beneath my skin, and beneath that, heated up once more and burst into flame.
Just as the curse had ordered me to live by killing people, it burned with enough ferocity to incinerate a person as easily as breathing.
“Hhaaaaa!”
But this fire was unlike the one I felt when I was consumed by envy.
There was no pain at all.
As if the owner of the blade had changed hands, I felt no resistance in wielding it.
That was not all.
As though I had gone from the one stabbed by the blade to the one swinging it, the curse began shoving information into my head at random.
“Ah, hngh, hihih, uhhhahaha!”
And with that information, I could only stop convulsing and laugh like a madwoman.
Didn’t he say that he would not let those who wanted to die die?
“Aha ha ha! Ahaha ha!”
It was exactly that.
If they sent me out like this, I might forget my personal feelings and try to kill myself anyway.
After going to all this trouble to curse me, if I somehow managed to go outside and kill myself after all, then all he had really done was make things annoying for me; it would be hard to call that fulfilling his will exactly.
Was that why?
Did he curse the Blium family with a kind of curse of knowledge so that I could not commit suicide?
A curse that forced me to recognize even unwanted information.
The content of that curse was simple.
The next curse would fall after I died.
If I killed myself now, the current head’s child would be afflicted; after the head changed, it would be the next head’s child.
So I could not die.
I had to live as long as possible.
Yes— just like the older sister of the third head, who had supposedly overcome the curse at last and lived a happy life for the first time in her life—