Until the New Story Begins
Until the New Story Begins
The condition the Demon King proposed was simple.
In times like the Great War, when many humans had to be killed, she would let herself be the one to step forward. If that was granted, the Demon King said she would reveal the way to save Rosaria.
From Canaria's perspective, it made no sense.
Because a demon's deal is, by its nature, founded on absurdity. The scales those vile dealers use only tilt and find balance through transactions of that kind.
Lifespan, health, future, life, gold...
The greater the injustice gained, the heavier the absurd offering that had to be given to the Demon King. Yet what the current Demon King demanded carried almost no risk at all.
—You think it's too light. I know. You're suspicious. So I'll swear it right here, on this spot. The condition I set is no lie. I'll stake my very existence, beyond that, so rest easy.
That friendly attitude only deepened the suspicion. So Canaria asked her the reason for it.
—A story from the back pages, one you wouldn't know. Because of a promise I made with Solomon... you can think of it that way.
But she avoided revealing the true answer.
However, what mattered to Canaria right now was not the cause but the result before her eyes. After all, creating paradise would require a purge regardless. Mountains of corpses were already slated to be made.
Canaria yielded the world's apocalypse to her.
Then she asked for the method.
—Do you know how the world handles contradictions?
The Demon King asked. Canaria partially affirmed. She herself had been the Demon King's vessel, so she was not ignorant.
A contradiction—like the clash between an unbreakable shield and a spear that shatters everything—meant something that could not happen. The conflict between two opposing concepts, the problem that arose from it, was itself a contradiction.
Then, taking the shield and spear as an example,
how would the world handle that contradiction?
The answer was... it made sure it 'never happened in the first place.'
To ensure that shield and spear could not exist simultaneously in that world, it would lock down the possibility of their creation, twist their fates to prevent the two objects from gathering in one place, or place a curse upon them.
And Rosaria's soul had brought about a similar contradiction.
A saint does not go to hell. But one who takes their own life invariably falls into hell. In that case, how was the soul of Rosaria—a saint who took her own life—to be handled?
—That child is currently entering reincarnation.
The answer was to ensure she belonged to neither heaven nor hell from the start. Completely erase all the memories carved into the soul, grant it a new fate, and cast the soul that had caused the contradiction into another world, giving it a second chance.
—If you offer a sacrifice, you can have it retrieved from the ferryman. Of course, since the soul you want to save is a saint's soul... a vast number of human souls will be used as the price. But that doesn't matter to you now, does it?
Just as Serena had said, it did not matter to Canaria.
If she could recover Rosaria even if it meant killing tens or hundreds of millions, she was someone prepared to stain this world in a sea of blood. She was a being prepared to destroy the world itself through the injustice she wielded for love.
A cheaply bought deal,
and a gamble with nothing to lose.
From that day on, Canaria joined hands with the Demon King for Rosaria's resurrection. Then, without resting day or night, she began moving to fulfill the conditions presented to her.
First, Rosaria's physical body had to be perfectly revived.
Until Serena retrieved the soul, she had to keep that body alive continuously. So for a long time, she kept restoring the flesh of Rosaria from which the soul had departed.
She made her breathe, made her heart beat. She kept her blood flowing, maintaining her as though she were merely in a deep sleep. So that the moment the soul returned, she could wake at once.
Thus Canaria did not sleep for a single moment.
No matter how much she had become an existence beyond cognition, the body of a demon was weak to desire by nature. A hedonistic body: though it did not need to eat, it coveted delicacies; though it did not need to sleep, it indulged in slumber.
But she pushed all of that aside.
Even if her mind grew strange, it did not matter. Even if her very being fell apart, it did not matter. Believing only in the resolve that if she failed to save her this time as well, she would simply die, she kept watch beside her for a long time, taking neither meals nor sleep.
It was agonizing, and yet it was not.
The second was the souls of humans to match the ferryman's fare.
Because a saint's soul was exceedingly precious, the quantity of souls the ferryman demanded was also considerable. But Canaria knew of a nation that bore the responsibility of coughing up those souls.
The Holy Empire—the culprit that had attacked the Holy Kingdom and caused that catastrophe.
She chose the nation of sinners that would be the first paradise and the first offering. As soon as the choice was made, Canaria moved. She granted Erika, a former saint, three days' worth of divine power, then had the Demon King move her body to destroy a single empire.
On the first day, the Emperor of the Empire died. Zeke, forced to accept the deal Canaria proposed, killed his own father, the Emperor. Then, donning that crown, the day he became the Demon King's dog arrived.
On the second day, everyone who resisted became pillars of salt. Canaria kindly gave them a chance to oppose her. And as a result, those who surrendered their very lives to emotions like justice, a sense of mission, and responsibility bared their fangs at her.
So she turned them all into offerings.
There is no paradise for those who resist, is there?
On the second day, Canaria had sifted away quite a lot of stone dust.
The final third day was a day of choice. Using her divine power, she crushed the embers in their hearts. Though the Holy Empire boasted a population of ten million, half of its people became offerings.
Moreover, most of them never even saw the Demon King directly.
Because the Holy Empire was vast in size. Yet the Demon King's divine power that Canaria possessed could easily blanket an entire nation, so the majority of people likely died without knowing why they were dying, without knowing who the being that had asked this question was.
It did not matter.
Their lives were endlessly light, after all.
Instead of the world's destruction, they were making a noble sacrifice.
The scriptures would regard their deaths as sublime.
After all, had they not died protecting the world—
given their lives for the very world the Demon King would have destroyed?
The merciful Chief God would guide every last one of them to heaven.
Because five million sacrifices were fewer than the destruction of the world.
That was the way the scales of a god—whom humans cannot comprehend—tip.
She calculates those lives as numbers. Sublimity, too, would ultimately appear as numbers in their eyes. No? Then that is regrettable. Believe it that way, think of it that way—so Canaria said.
In an instant, chaos descended.
But it did not matter.
It was already accounted for.
And fortunately, not even their corpses remained.
Was it not simply a matter of touching everyone's memories?
She erased the existence of the dead from this world.
Then no one would grieve the loss of that existence.
It could only be called mercy. Because Canaria was an experience impossible to endure. They say sometimes oblivion is the finest medicine. And so, on that day, Canaria forcibly inserted her own distortion into the survivors of the Empire.
She ransacked all their memories, imposing a forced causality—that your family had never existed from the start, or that for one reason or another you had already received word of their death.
For there is no one who rages at a memory that does not exist. She bestowed upon them the gentlest repose.
And while she was at it, once more, she inverted the world's perception.
Because it was possible that those who knew the secret of the saint might target the resurrected Rosaria. She changed her own features into the symbol of the saint and, more forcefully than ever, wielded that distortion to overturn the world's knowledge.
In that moment, most people forgot Rosaria's existence. The one who filled that void was Canaria. On that day, she created a second world—one in which everyone remembered and recognized her as the saint.
Of course, she did not manipulate everyone's memories.
Erika, who had sworn to protect Rosaria; Isabella—her sole living precious friend; Francesco, who would have to keep remembering the Holy Kingdom's dark side and act differently from them; and Zeke, who had sworn to become a slave and offered up his heart—roughly those.
Beyond that, there were humans who could not be manipulated to begin with.
The Hero, the King, and the next Hero. Only a small handful of humans—this many at most—would retain unaltered memories of the previous world... but it did not matter. They were beings she would have to destroy anyway in order to create paradise.
She simply wanted the garbage that might harm Rosaria to feel the sensation she herself had felt—the sensation of the world they knew being overturned—and to agonize over it until they died.
Of course, there were a number of actions in the preceding process that were inconsistent.
But Canaria did not care in the slightest.
Because she was not in her right mind to begin with.
Half of her consciousness cast aside, she simply repeated endlessly the deal with the Demon King and her memories of Rosaria.
"...I will make you happy."
Day after day, she stayed by Rosaria's side. She had laid that body within the Crown of Ten Thousand Lives—a device that allowed divine power to be bestowed without interruption—and kept that flesh alone alive, exactly like a living person.
When she held her hand, it was warm.
That, at least, was the same as it had been back then.
She could hear the faint sound of her breathing.
A faintly beating heart and blood flowing slowly.
Rosaria's flesh alone remained alive in a state of suspended animation.
And that made it all the more agonizing.
Because Serena had said it would take about a year.
Canaria promised
to remain by her side for all that time.
If she failed now, then it would truly be the end.
Broken, she lived on.
Endlessly craving hope, she denied reality.
Her scales were already so shattered that they would not tip even if she placed the world on them. Neither the guilt of slaughtering countless people, nor the responsibility of having altered the world's laws, nor the sin of having defiled the scriptures could change her. Because ashes already extinguished could not catch fire again.
Thus Canaria lived in a gray-white world.
And then, to reclaim color, to reclaim the light that had been stolen from her, Canaria lived alone in that gray-white world, meeting no one, in solitude.
Was it not said that time is relative?
Depending on one's mind, the flow of time was intensely relative. So that gray-white time—spent in madness, lost in a sense of loss, in helplessness—seemed to flow more slowly than anything in the world.
Sobbing, the one year she spent beside her light, whose life had vanished, felt longer than someone else's entire lifetime.
The tears she shed might have submerged the seas.
The divine power she poured out might have revived those offered as sacrifices, and if she drew her yearning as a line, it would have reached the edge of the universe.
That was how heavy the loneliness in Canaria's heart was.
And by that same measure, Rosaria was precious to her. Even if it meant offering up every last star in the sky, she was an existence she absolutely wanted to save.
It was the day that wish came true.
...In truth, Canaria could no longer remember the contents of the contract.
Only the price of Rosaria's life that the Demon King had demanded remained in her memory.
...She was certain the Demon King had told her the reason after that, but in any case, what mattered now was not that, was it?
Serena had brought Rosaria's soul back.
Into the vessel she had painstakingly restored over the course of a year, she placed the soul.
Rosaria in a coma.
The saint's eyes could see that the body had reclaimed its soul.
It was about three days before the story would begin.
From this point on, Rosaria was not the Saintess.
The daughter of the lord of the Versian village,
the most precious existence in the world,
a lovely girl whom no one must ever harm.
That was Rosaria's life in the second world that Canaria had altered—and perhaps it was the peaceful life that Rosaria, in the memories that existed within Canaria, had most longed for.
The moment she realized and perceived that,
Canaria collapsed in a faint, blood running from her nose.
Because all the tension and fatigue of the past year came crashing down at once.
The being who was both saint and Demon King fainted as though dead for the first time.
Erika took that Rosaria to the Versian household,
rewriting history as the head maid who would protect her.
Then, about ten hours later, Canaria opened her eyes.
She was anxious. How should she speak? They said Rosaria had no memories—how could she become Rosaria again? What if that fate temporarily filling her place rejected her? No, but that existence, too, was Rosaria. In that case, should she accept her? But then it would be too painful. Then, she would love that existence. If she could make that existence love her, wouldn't that be enough?
She kept hypothesizing arguments rife with fallacies. And as she did, for the Rosaria who would face her for the first time, she wrote a letter filled with sincerity. She had made her the daughter of the Versian family so she could live freely, yet she still harbored the selfish wish to live together in the Holy Kingdom. So for now, she would write down her love as she always did. She would write down her true feelings—that she missed her.
She would express that desire for her to come here.
Canaria was swallowed by her obsession.
She wrote dozens of letters in a single burst. Because she wrote down her love and adoration for the one who had allowed her to endure that gray-white time that had felt so terribly long.
Then she heard the news that she had opened her eyes.
As expected, she did not remember, and she was telling lies.
But it did not matter.
Still, she was Rosaria.
'...Could it be that her soul cannot receive divine power?'
Since she had not yet healed the vessel that had once contained the saint's authority, her mobility would be impaired. In that case, she would have to continuously expose her to divine power and holy power to mend that vessel so she could move.
But what if the soul destined to reincarnate in another world could not receive it? What if she could not receive all of it—the bestowal of divine power and the memories of Rosaria that lay beyond, which she also needed to implant in that existence?
She was uneasy. She was terrified.
In that moment, a flash of inspiration crossed her mind.
She would use the chocolate that Rosaria had loved.
Because it had been the dessert her severely picky-eater most favored. She would put the tiniest bit of her own blood—capable of holding divine power—into it and test her. To see if that soul harbored any rejection of divine power.
...All of it was joyful.
Because at last, she would be able to see the living Rosaria.
She looked at herself in the mirror for the first time in a long while,
wondering if there was anything strange.
Everything was strange.
Her appearance was a wreck.
The deeply etched tear tracks,
the scars of self-harm on her wrists from the times she had wanted to die,
and even her face, twisted with a madness difficult to describe.
Everything was utterly different from when Rosaria had been there.
...Still, she thought it did not matter.
Because Rosaria would love even this version of herself.
Thinking that, broken as she was, she intended to go and meet her.
Because she lacked the patience to endure the time it would take to mend her mind and body.
She had already spoken with Erika, who had become the head maid. The Saintess would visit for treatment. She rode in a carriage and, for the first time, turned her steps toward the house where Rosaria was staying.
The door opened. As she climbed the stairs, she thought.
Her heart felt like it would burst.
How should she look at that face?
What should she say first?
Estrangement, bliss, fear, tension... and so on.
Many thoughts and emotions passed through her.
And then, she stood before a single wall—a door.
She could hear a voice. A murmur born of vague tension—how should I handle this?—reached her ears.
That voice was so lovely.
At last, she had reached the star she had lost.
Only then did the gray-white world reclaim its colors.
As for what to say,
she had already decided as she climbed up.
With a creak, she opened the door and approached 'Rosaria.'
"Hello?"
First, a greeting.
The thing she had so desperately wanted to say,
but could not until now.
And for the next, truly, there were no words other than these.
"I missed you, Rosaria."
Holding back her tears,
she approached that 'existence'
—fervently hoping she would return as the Rosaria she knew.
The embrace, for the first time in so long, was unbearably warm.
Because it felt as though a sun had risen over her frozen heart.
......And in that moment, a new story began.