The Princess's Trial (3)
“Find the princes!”
The citizens scattered, each group pouring into one of the three branching paths.
Their footsteps hadn't drawn all that close yet, but if we failed to find an exit in this maze, we'd be caught eventually.
“Jisan, over here! We should twist the route as much as possible!”
Apparently deciding that shaking off the citizens came first, Jang Siun sprinted this way and that, cutting corners and changing directions.
“Where on earth are the princes?!”
Whether it was her method working or sheer luck, the confused voices of the citizens faded a little further behind us.
*Now I need to find the exit.*
“Jisan, I see light!”
Having spotted a faint glimmer far off in the distance, Jang Siun shot toward it at a dead run.
Do PE majors just come with good eyesight or something? Marveling at her physical prowess, I ran after her with everything I had.
And sure enough, just as she'd said, sprinting straight on brought us out into a bright room.
*It's awfully cramped to be calling this an exit.*
Jang Siun and I stumbled inside, gasping for breath. Then the heavy door creaked shut behind us on its own.
*Oh no—a dead end. ...?!*
The red room, which seemed to have once belonged to the imperial household, was so thick with dust that every breath felt stifling.
And yet, ironically, the walls were hung with paintings that clashed completely with the ornate floor decorations.
“?! That's freaking creepy….”
Jang Siun recoiled, visibly repulsed.
Countless Mona Lisas packed the walls from floor to ceiling.
“You're right, Siun. Even masterpieces stop being beautiful when they're massed together like this.”
Until now, I'd been amazed by the very experience of seeing even the fake artworks with my own eyes—but wasn't this going too far? And there was more.
*It's not just the sheer number of Mona Lisas that's unsettling.*
There was another reason these paintings felt so wrong.
“Hey. Jisan. …You know how they say the Mona Lisa's eyes follow you around?”
“Yes.”
“Well, do ALL of these eyes have to follow us?”
“…No.”
Every single Mona Lisa in the room was staring straight at us.
Famous as the Mona Lisa is for meeting the viewer's gaze, there was no way this many paintings could naturally fall into so nakedly confrontational a composition. It was as if artificial eyeballs had been slapped onto them separately—the stares came at us from every conceivable angle.
“O humans who passed the sorcerer.”
“?!”
Then a strange voice echoed through the chamber.
It was as husky as the old sorcerer's had been, but deeper, and its enunciation was crisp.
“This room is called 'Tunan's Smile.' Tunan burned every portrait of herself, and so a woman like her guards the castle.”
*The Mona Lisas are the princess?*
Race, features, clothing—there wasn't a single thing about them that resembled her.
*Right. Not the time for this kind of thinking.*
Like every floor of the tower so far, it was most likely a metaphor.
Not knowing where to direct my eyes, I tilted my head back at the empty air and addressed the mysterious voice.
“Who are you? Where are you?”
“I am at the very heart of the castle. Find me, and you may fulfill the sorcerer's request.”
Meeting this man would let me answer the riddle. He seemed poised to supply the hint the sorcerer hadn't.
“Young Tunan's eyes always followed her mother, and a smile always played at her lips.”
*So how did she end up the way she is now?*
So even that cold creature had once been a child. It was hard to believe, when I thought of the woman she was now—stacking severed heads beside the palace steps.
“You seem curious about Tunan's past.”
“No, not particularly—”
“You may reach me through Tunan's past, young man.”
*So the answer's fixed. Tunan's past is the hint.*
“Those paintings, then—they can show me her past.”
“Quick-witted, aren't you.”
As one, the Mona Lisas nodded their heads in harmony with the voice.
“Women see only truth. Give us fragments of your true past, and only then will we surrender Tunan's.”
We had to trade away pieces of our past, fair and square.
It was a different set of terms from everything so far, which had simply held our lives as collateral.
Frowning, I pressed the voice for details.
“And what happens to our past, once we give it?”
“The larger fragments will be forgotten from your memories.”
“—!!”
Jang Siun's pupils and mine shook at the same instant.
My past—permanently erased from my memory.
“I hope you will come and meet me, young ones.”
“W-wait a moment—”
Trying to bargain for better terms, I reached for the disembodied voice, but no further answer came.
“…….”
“…….”
Neither Jang Siun nor I could reach a decision easily; heads bowed, we sank into thought.
Our pasts. Twenty-odd years of living had built up all kinds of memories.
“Jisan. Is there a memory you want to forget?”
A memory I wanted to forget.
At her question, it rose in my mind at once.
The fire that had swallowed my parents.
Without that memory, the Kim Jisan of today might be living a somewhat more vibrant life.
“Yes.”
“Same here. …But why does my heart feel so heavy, now that I'm actually about to forget it?”
Having evidently dredged up some memory of her own just as I had, Jang Siun gazed at the Mona Lisas with dimmed eyes.
“Because so much else lives inside those memories. For you and for me.”
If I lost the memory of my parents' deaths wholesale, my wish itself might change. If the memory vanished and only the fact remained, without any of the feeling—
Then perhaps even that desperate longing that had driven me to survive in this tower would vanish with it.
*No matter how horrific a memory is, if I lose it, the person I am inside loses its meaning.*
“But I don't want to lose the happy memories.”
“That's… only natural.”
I agreed with Jang Siun immediately.
But the voice had specified a *large* fragment—so we couldn't get away with offering something trivial either.
“Let's each decide what memory to offer.”
It was agonizing, but we couldn't stall forever either. When I looked at Jang Siun with a grim face, she seemed to have steeled herself too, and simply pressed her lips together.
*Neither of us wants to lose our memories. Which means….*
Jang Siun had made up her mind, but perhaps she balked at speaking her past aloud in front of me, in front of the Mona Lisas—her mouth opened and shut without a word.
It was the first time I'd ever seen her hesitate like this.
I didn't particularly want to lay my past bare either.
*But as always, survival comes first.*
“My memory—”
The moment I opened my mouth, every Mona Lisa's eyes gleamed, hanging on my words.
“I had an older brother. I respected him. I loved him.”
The vivid light in the paintings' eyes abruptly went dull and murky.
Did they take that for a lie?
*It's not a complete falsehood.*
It was simply that respect and love weren't the whole of it.
“…But I hated him, too.”
The light in their eyes flared back to life at once.
So I couldn't hide a single thing about my past in front of Jang Siun.
*I still don't want to hand over the happy memories. And I don't want to forget the memory of my parents' deaths, either.*
The memories that made my survival in this tower a desperate necessity had to stay with me. So I was sorry, but the dark feelings I held toward my brother would have to accept annihilation in their place.
“I was jealous of my brother's talent. Before I knew it, jealousy had curdled into dislike.”
“…….”
Trying to show me some consideration, Jang Siun looked away and pretended to be interested in something else.
As if she could possibly fail to hear my voice in a room this small.
*It's mortifying. But if I spill everything first, it'll make it that much easier for her to speak.*
“But my only talent was a kind heart, so I couldn't even manage to be jealous properly.”
And now even that pathetic talent had become useless inside this tower. No—it was worse than that. These days I didn't even have that hypocritical kindness left in me.
Even after I'd stripped myself bare like this, the Mona Lisa went on watching me in silence, as if to say: keep going.
*Ha. Still not enough, huh?*
Given how large a fragment they demanded, I'd apparently chosen well.
“Then one day, my brother left the house.”
It wasn't because of my jealousy. He was brilliant, but he'd never been the type to read other people's hearts with any care.
*And like that, he was gone—*
“After that… strangely, I don't remember.”
“…?”
The eyes of the Mona Lisas and of Jang Siun took on the same expression. Bafflement, at my suddenly trailing off with a claim of amnesia.
“Whether I sealed it away myself from the shock of that day, I can't say—but for some reason I remember very little about my brother. Even less about anything after he left.”
A memory I wouldn't miss even if it were torn clean out of my head.
…It was a past I couldn't recall anyway.
“I'll hand over that hazy fragment of memory. Do with it what you will.”
“Jisan!”
“If you're all right with it, Siun, it wouldn't be a bad approach for you either.”
Jang Siun actually applauded at my little scheme.
“I can't believe you pulled a move like that. …We will take your fragment of memory.”
“!!”
Then the countless Mona Lisas spoke in chorus, as if singing in unison. The soft voices of the women rang through the chamber, and the world went dark before my eyes.
“…Ji…san…?!”
My vision blurred, and Jang Siun's voice receded from my ear.
*So this is the handover of the memory fragment.*
My feelings toward my brother, and the memory of him and his vanished traces—they were fading away.
……
……
……
“Haaah—!”
Had I blacked out for a moment? Light was seeping back into the blackness before my eyes.
I sat slumped on the floor, then helped up Jang Siun, who was clutching her forehead.
“Siun, are you okay?”
“Yeah. I'm… uurp—”
Perhaps because her brain had taken damage, Jang Siun's face went pale and she gagged.
A soft shffle—
◈ Description: When the three memories are joined, the past shall unfold.
“Ugh—”
A blinding clump of bright light materialized before us. Jang Siun hurriedly spread open her Leaflet and slipped the memory fragment inside.
“What kind of memory fragment do you think you handed over, Siun?”
“Hard to say. Because of you, I answered that I'd give up my cringeworthy past that I can't even remember. Whether that counts as a memory or just a keepsake, I couldn't tell you.”
It was a past I'd already forgotten before anyone took it from me, so I couldn't even feel cheated.
“…Siun. I asked you earlier, remember? Do you still want to keep that memory?”
“Well, sure, it'd be nice to have it back—but it's already been given away, hasn't it? And even if I got it back, I'd just forget it again anyway.”
*Who knows what past she gave up to the Mona Lisas, but at least her little dodge held.*
A grating creak—
Thankfully, the closed door swung open, leaving us no time to brood. It was the door on the opposite side from the entrance we'd come through.
“If it weren't for you, Jisan, I might have had to sacrifice a memory I actually treasure. An escape this easy—thank you!”
To my relief, Jang Siun's face looked considerably lighter than before.
“All right. This time it's a much bigger room.”
Without having to run the length of another maze, we reached the second chamber almost immediately.
In the first room, despite all the Mona Lisas, the floor and walls had carried the feel of the Chinese imperial court. The second room was bare, featureless white.
“You managed to slip past their gazes. A relief.”
It was the man's voice from the first room again.
“This time, you must cross a valley.”
“A valley? Ah… yes. I can see that.”
Surveying the room—white, and nothing but white—Jang Siun drawled sardonically.
I could already guess what kind of headache-inducing riddle was hidden in there this time.
“This valley scatters when you grasp it, and spreads open when you release it.”
“…?”
“The more it vanishes, the clearer it becomes. This is a dream. Tunan, too, once had a dream.”
I was hoping the man would offer up another hint as he recited the riddle, line by line—
“Cross over.”
“Uwaaagh!!”
The instant the man cut himself off, both Jang Siun's body and mine were flung into the air.