Episode 5
I screamed until my throat felt ready to split.
I clawed at every part of my body, screamed with all the strength I had left, and smashed my head against the floor and walls over and over.
And yet nothing about my situation changed.
I had to live.
I had been made to die, and then, all at once, my purpose had changed; I had become something that had to live on and on and on.
No, there was something even more terrifying than that.
The head of the house, who had once treated me with a halfhearted kindness twisted by guilt, and the young master, who had stared at me with eyes full of disgust, would now be the ones fighting to keep me alive.
Because they didn’t want the curse to pass to them.
And after them, to their children. Then after that, to their grandchildren.
So long as I remained alive, they would do everything they could to keep me from dying; and when they finally reached the limit of their own lives, they would lock me away somewhere no one could see and tell me to die there instead.
They would feed me enough affection to make me believe it, and then kill me once I had outlived my usefulness.
I didn’t want to live like that.
I understood that I had been created out of necessity, and I could accept that.
But I didn’t want a life in which I was given affection when I was needed, then butchered when my value declined, all while still looking up at my master with my last breath.
That was the life of livestock, not a human being.
That alone I could not bear.
I didn’t want to live the way I had in my previous life—panting with my tongue out for affection that would never come, eating the scraps left behind, wagging my tail until I wore myself out and died without even realizing it.
I wanted to choose.
I was a coward and a wretch who couldn’t kill herself, someone who needed another person’s help even to die, but at the very least, I wanted to die as a human being.
I had died for my younger sister, who couldn’t feel affection, no—who couldn’t even feel hatred.
That was what I had done. And yet, and yet, why?
“Aaaargh!”
At this rate, I’d be livestock.
I’d end up scavenging scraps again.
Because they would shove a funnel down my throat like they were making foie gras, and then force every kind of emotion into me so I could never bring myself to die.
I’d endure the first few months, probably.
Even as a bastard who couldn’t quite qualify as human, I could probably keep my feelings intact for a few months.
But what if it became a year? What if it became two?
Would I still be able to hold out then?
Could I truly wish for death from the depths of my heart?
I wasn’t some hero or great figure who could hold fast to her convictions despite endless temptation.
If I had been that kind of person, I wouldn’t have been clinging to someone else’s affection in the first place; I would have stood entirely on my own.
But I couldn’t do that.
Far from standing on my own, I would become some pig of a thing gorging itself on scraps.
Whether I wanted it or not.
At that thought, tears welled up in my eyes.
“Hnng, nghhh...”
I had waited ten long years, begging to be allowed to die as a human being, and this was the day I’d been waiting for—only for the curse not to kill me, but to make me live as a beast.
How, how could something like this happen?
I collapsed onto the floor, and the world before me blurred white.
Maybe because I had spent every last ounce of strength in that outburst, my body flopped helplessly against the ground, unable to rage anymore, and when even the tears finally stopped, the strength drained out of me as if my blood were being drawn away.
“Ha... hah...”
And then, once the anger and the crying had gone out of me, laughter began to fill the empty space they left behind.
It spilled out of me again and again.
Sometimes it sounded like the laughter of a madwoman; sometimes it sounded like laughter from someone who couldn’t cry and so had to laugh instead.
There was the laughter I had as a man in my previous life, the girlish laughter of this body, the laughter of an old man like the speaker who had laid this curse on me...
I kept making different kinds of sounds until my breathing finally settled back into place, and then I started smashing the wall again. When I calmed down once more, I found myself alternating between crying and laughing.
What finally stopped me was the door opening and the head of the house and the knights coming inside.
I had laughed and cried for quite a while, but as if someone had flipped a switch, it all stopped at once.
My eyes went strange.
I didn’t turn my head, but my eyes did, and I looked at them that way. When they saw my arms and legs, soaked and oozing, they gagged and looked at me as though I were a monster.
So I grinned.
Silently, I split the corners of my mouth as wide as they would go.
Maybe I could do it now.
With that thought, I forced myself to my feet, and the knights flinched and stepped back. Seeing that, I gathered every scrap of strength I had left and lurched toward them.
Separate from the sturdiness of my body itself, I seemed to have weakened quite a bit; every time I planted my foot, blood seeped out of it.
The muscles in my calves rose and twisted, and ooze splattered out. The fluid that clung to the soles of my feet made wet, squelching sounds with every step, each one going smack, smack.
“Ugh.”
The knights’ gazes sharpened even more.
Monster. Something inhuman. A human enemy of a different sort from demons.
That was the kind of look they gave me.
Just like the way they looked at me, the knights tensed all over and gripped their weapons tightly, and I, seeing that, quickened my pace.
“Hhng, hhng!”
With wet, slapping sounds.
No, that wasn’t enough.
This alone wouldn’t make them subdue me. They’d only try to pin me down.
So I had to terrify them thoroughly, make them sure they could kill me.
Make them kill me reflexively, before they had time for a single thought.
“Aaaaargh!”
I let out a beastlike shriek.
Like someone who had been cursed and turned into an animal.
Bending forward and running at them like an ape so they’d think exactly that, the knights all wore the same look of shock and swung their weapons at me.
But I still didn’t die.
Information transmitted through the bloodline.
Perhaps the head of the house had told them by then, because the knights beat me down with their scabbards instead of their blades, and once I had been subdued like that, they dragged me into a room on a leash.
The leash was fixed to a pillar in the center of the room so I couldn’t leave it.
Inside the collar, as if to prevent self-harm, the material was lined with soft fur, and the furniture was all rounded wooden pieces with no sharp edges.
No, if I looked closer, it wasn’t just the collar and the furniture that were like that.
As befitted the Blium family, praised for their medical skill, everything in the room had been arranged so that self-harm would be impossible.
Instead of curtains that could be used to hang myself, the windows were covered with paper blinds.
Instead of glass panes, there were translucent iron sheets, and the tableware was made of wood.
There was nothing that could catch fire, and nothing I could put in my mouth to block my airway.
If no one cared for me, I would die, yes—but they wouldn’t leave me unattended long enough for that to happen.
Disgusting.
...And yet I couldn’t work up any anger.
I was too tired to be angry.
The head of the house had always been that sort of man.
He had left me, a doll made to contain the curse, alone for seven or eight years without the slightest trace of guilt, then only came to me when he could see death approaching, pretending to care, eating with me, asking whether I needed anything.
Would a man like that really let me die if the curse would simply pass to one of his children again?
No. No, of course not.
Even if he killed me, he would absolutely try to keep me alive until he had made another obedient curse doll.
And every time I tried to die, he would look down at me with eyes full of contempt.
Those siblings, too. And the servants who attended them!
I want to die.
I don’t have the courage to violate the morality and ethics I learned by clinging to whatever affection my previous life’s parents tossed me like charity, and I don’t have the bravery to kill myself, but I want to die.
“Hhhng...”
When I came to my senses, I was scratching at my arms.
I dragged my blunt, nail-less fingers over arms that had turned to charcoal and clawed at them recklessly.
I forced my fingers into the cracks where skin had stuck together, where the flesh had gone thin, and pulled at the skin with all my might.
Like tearing off a scab from a wound, I yanked at the flesh.
Then, with a creaking sound, the skin tore open.
Even though my arm had burned black all the way through, blood still seemed to flow, because blood came spilling from the wound.
Pinkish skin was exposed, and at first tiny beads of blood formed here and there.
But after a few seconds, it was running in streams, and at the sight of it I moved my fingers again and began tearing at my arm, at my skin.
This was something I could do because I knew it wouldn’t kill me.
How pathetic that I couldn’t kill myself, and yet could mutilate myself like a madwoman...
“Pfft.”
It was ridiculous.
I wish I could kill myself with something less childish than this.
I wished I could do more than tug at my arm and rip away the charred skin. I wished I could tear at my own throat instead.
But that was as far as I could go.
I could ruin my arm, but I couldn’t do anything to the parts tied to my life, and so I turned the fury that had built up inside me onto the furniture instead.
I smashed the table and hurled the chair.
When I made so much noise, a servant opened the door and came in.
Not the common-born servant who had once kept my life hanging by a thread, but a properly trained noble servant.
“Ha.”
So I was supposed to live a long time.
So the curse wouldn’t pass to the young masters, and then to their children.
How ridiculous.
“Hah! Ahahahahaha!”
Was this affection, or was it necessity?
As I burst into laughter and wiped my face with the blood on my arm, the servant, thoroughly frightened, began carefully putting the things back in order.
“...”
Not for me, but as though serving someone else entirely.
Watching that motion in silence, I saw the servants’ expressions shift into a mixture of disgust and fear before they hurried out and brought back the duchess.