The Zoo
I hadn’t expected much from a facility inside the Academy, but what they called a zoo more than lived up to the name.
“That’s… an elephant!”
I had assumed it would be the bare minimum—rabbits, cats, a few pretty birds, and maybe a token predator or two just for show.
It was the real deal.
“Oh, you knew what it was?”
“…I saw it in a book. This is my first time seeing one in the flesh.”
Which was how I ended up pretending to know things I really didn’t need to, and digging myself into a mild hole. But how was anyone supposed to hold back an exclamation at the sight of an elephant?
I was a girl now, sure, but something large and magnificent still made the dormant male heart inside me stir.
Even in a fantasy world, no dinosaurs? The disappointment was genuine, but at least creatures this massive existed at all.
I had originally planned to just wander around chatting with Dogeon at a leisurely pace.
Once I knew things like this were here, that plan went straight out the window.
“Right, then—next! Let’s go see the next one!”
“…You seem a little excited.”
I had no intention of denying it. I was excited.
I hadn’t expected anything this good to look at. The guy actually knew what he was doing!
“Well then, after the regular animal pavilion comes the divine beasts and… demonic beasts pavilion. Will you be all right?”
Demonic beasts.
Hm… I didn’t really know. I had never seen anything in my life that could properly be called a demonic beast.
I had encountered plenty of fantastical creatures, but they had all behaved like oversized dogs, so I had never felt any real sense of danger.
The closest thing had been the first time I met the god who took the form of a great dragon—there had been that brief, overwhelming pressure.
No joke: the deity was so enormous I had genuinely worried that a single careless movement might crush the entire palace.
“What of it?”
Anything short of that level wouldn’t be a problem.
“Ah, well… divine beasts are gentle, but most demonic beasts are quite ferocious.”
“And so?”
Ferocious or not, they were locked in cages. What was there to be afraid of? The “divine” part of the name still rubbed me the wrong way—everything with “god” in it since arriving on this continent had been strange and unpleasant—but I still wanted to see them.
“If you’re fine with it, then.”
Dogeon didn’t press any further and simply took the lead.
The first impression the moment we stepped inside was that the very air felt different.
Not fresher, exactly—the state of the mana was almost identical. Yet somehow it felt familiar.
Similar to when I spoke with the gods, maybe? Of course it was so faint I could only just barely sense it.
Being the demonic beast pavilion, the animals were definitely more distinctive in appearance. The cages were far larger and thicker, and some specimens were completely isolated behind glass walls.
The divine beast side, by contrast, had only wooden fences—or in some cases, none at all, the creatures simply free to roam.
It felt like discriminatory treatment, but the demonic beasts looked so threatening that I had to concede the point in my heart.
The divine beasts were all white, with wings or pretty patterns, and looked safe.
The demonic beasts, even at a glance, were mostly things with insect torsos and twisted human faces embedded in them, or bodies covered in hook-like spines—dangerous-looking in the extreme.
…No matter how faintly I could sense the gods’ presence, getting any closer was out of the question.
The demonic beasts were casting friendly glances my way, which made me feel a little guilty, but today I would stick to the divine beasts.
They showed zero interest in Dogeon; a few even looked at him the way a predator eyes prey.
“Then… how about we only look at the divine beasts today…?”
There was no one around, so I dropped the formal speech.
The way of speaking Father had taught me wasn’t uncomfortable… but it felt like talking down to a subordinate, which was a little off between friends.
“The demonic beasts are a bit much after all, huh?”
I don’t mind them, but you don’t look like you’d be fine.
“…Yeah.”
I didn’t particularly want to say that out loud. I could always come back and look at the demonic beasts alone later. I had no desire to put Dogeon in danger.
“Then… shall we start with this one?”
She only went looking for the unexpected animals—elephants, giraffes, lions, that sort of thing.
I had expected at least a flicker of interest in the cute ones like cats and rabbits, but she ignored them completely.
Even someone like her would still find the demonic beasts a bit much, I supposed.
I didn’t know what the monsters of the Eastern Continent looked like, but the original work had described every demonic beast and monster on this continent as uniformly grotesque.
There was only one difference between monsters and demonic beasts.
Whether they attacked humans on sight or not. If they did, they were monsters; if not, demonic beasts.
The setting was that plants and animals eroded by demonic energy turned into those things. Divine beasts, conversely, were the result of exposure to holy power.
They were better than monsters, but demonic beasts were still dangerous.
She seemed to know that too, and suggested we look at the divine beasts.
“Then… shall we start with this one?”
I chose the unicorn. It was famous even in the original work as a virgin detector, so I already felt some goodwill toward it—and since it turned meek only for virgins, it would behave gently with Hoyeon as well.
The moment it had spotted Anastasiya it had rubbed its head against her and demanded a lap pillow, so I figured it would do the same for Hoyeon.
According to the setting the author later revealed, the only cases where a unicorn followed someone that closely were those that satisfied the mind-body-spirit virgin theory.
I didn’t really know what that was… but apparently some people pushed a heroine solely on that basis.
Yet the unicorn’s reaction was strangely off.
It would take one step forward, then one step back, over and over.
If she weren’t a virgin it would get angry and refuse to let her near; if she were, it would go crazy with delight and approach. What was this performance supposed to mean? I couldn’t get a read on it at all.
“…It’s okay, come here? I won’t eat you…”
Hoyeon, on the other hand, called to the unicorn with a bright smile, as if its behavior meant nothing whatsoever.
It wasn’t intelligent enough to understand speech, so watching her call to it like that was cute…
But I couldn’t stop a flicker of doubt from rising in a corner of my mind.
What if she wasn’t a virgin?
I knew it was an absurd assumption. And even if it were true, I wouldn’t distance myself from her. Readers might be picky; I wasn’t that selective.
Still, all else equal, a virgin would be better.
Hoyeon tilted her head as if wondering why it wouldn’t come closer, then began walking toward the unicorn.
The unicorn, matching her pace, edged backward little by little, maintaining the distance between them.
Had she never had friends, but once had someone she loved? Seeing how she knew a man’s body, it wasn’t completely impossible.
Or maybe she had never known love at all and simply chased pleasure.
If my suspicion turned out to be correct, I might feel a little betrayed.
“I said come here. I won’t eat you, really.”
I was just about to tell her that the unicorn didn’t have the intelligence to understand words when something unbelievable happened.
The unicorn approached Hoyeon with the face of something walking to its death.
Even someone like me who couldn’t read animal expressions—especially horse faces—could tell the unicorn was trembling with fear.
…Surely it couldn’t actually understand speech.
The author had officially stated that unicorns only had the virgin-detection function and no other special abilities.
So what exactly was this scene?
Judging by what had just happened, it had clearly understood her words. Did Hoyeon have some ability to converse with animals?
There was a setting that beastkin were close to animals, but nothing about being able to communicate with them.
“…There, good boy. That’s right, that’s right…”
Watching it obediently approach despite being terrified somehow made it overlap with my own image.
Right now the unicorn seemed to be feeling the same emotions I did when she scolded me.
Like prey standing before a predator, every step oozed reluctance.
“…What a good child. You don’t need to be scared.”
Seeing it rub its head against her suggested my suspicion had been wrong after all. But why did the unicorn still look so pitiful?
Terror shone in its eyes. Even while requesting a lap pillow, it seemed to be begging her to please let it go.
“…Mm, you can go now.”
As if it had understood her words, the unicorn bolted in the opposite direction and vanished.
So she was a virgin after all.
I must have been possessed by a brief paranoid ghost. Besides, with someone watching her in real time, no one would have the guts to do anything like that.
Byeolbi still frightened me. When she said she was watching everything, my resolve had nearly broken—and for a while it actually had.
Until Hoyeon suddenly forgave me at lunch, I had seriously considered giving up.
But receiving Hoyeon’s forgiveness had changed my thinking a little.
Don’t give up. Capture her and figure out the identity of that unknowable “question.”
Hoyeon was already showing me plenty of goodwill, and Byeolbi had said I could do anything as long as I didn’t kill anyone. That was the conclusion I could reach.
…It was still too early to give up.
On the harem, and on the happy ending.