Chapter 134
Seen through Victoria's eyes, I was nothing but Soo.
Not entirely, though. Something of Choseol lingered in the likeness as well, faint and strange.
It stood to reason. What Soo had left behind was a passage bearing the name Soosim Gong Choseol, so there was nothing odd about Choseol's image being folded into it. What I could not understand was why Soo had left a thing like this at all. I hadn't even known a technique of that sort existed.
Victoria came toward me. She was a little taller than I was.
"Five feet? No—about three inches short of that. You've gotten so small."
"So it seems. This is what a person is like."
Strictly speaking, the flesh itself was still a monster's. The vessel had not changed. But the thing had never once been alive, and so it felt no different from a lump of clay.
"You said you didn't want to go home. If we part ways here, what are you going to do?"
What will I do?
"Live, I suppose."
I could mimic a human form now, so slipping in among people would be no trouble at all. From what I could see of Victoria's memories, at least, this place had never known a Harvest. In this third world, then, the chance of being killed merely for having purple hair was small.
The method was the same as ever: multiply the Harvests, raise a closed and insular cult, and make contact with people placed as high as I could reach. The difficulty this time was that I would have to build a religion entirely from nothing, rather than make use of one that already existed.
It would work out somehow.
I looked around. The ground had sunk in, as if a sinkhole had given way. The place had been made by tunneling underground, so when those tunnels collapsed it was only natural that a pit should open, like the trap an antlion digs. The one mercy was that it was not a sheer-walled sinkhole. The earth sloped inward toward the center, which meant I could climb.
Leaving Victoria to whatever she was turning over in her mind, I started up.
If I could grab the rock ahead of me. If I could just grab it. Hmm.
It was a height Choseol could have caught and climbed without any trouble, but at my present size even a jump fell short. I had Soo's memories, so I tried her footwork, wondering whether doing it the same way might let me use the martial art. The propulsion never came. Not the way it did for Soo.
As I thought, there had to be a force pushing from behind. In the first world, that force had been mana. In the second, qi. It seemed to be a power I was fundamentally unable to use. Even in Soo's body, I could not.
Setting that aside, I searched the slope for some handhold I might grab and crawl up by, and then water climbed my legs. A huge droplet swelled around my lower body.
What?
I turned, thinking she had finally decided to kill me.
She had not. Victoria was looking at me the way one looks at a truly pitiful creature.
"Leaving you like this worries me. Come along."
"Are you kidnapping me?"
"What a dreadful thing to say. If I leave you on your own, I doubt you'll last long before you drop dead somewhere. Don't you have some tremendous power or other?"
She came trudging over, stirred the empty air a few times with her hand, and a staircase of water took shape. She set a careful foot on it, confirmed that it would bear her, and then took hold of my arm.
"What sort of thing counts as a tremendous power?"
"The one I'm using right now. Didn't you give it to me?"
A thin stream of water slid through the air with a soft trickle. She was commanding it as she pleased. Put in danger of dying by water, she had gained the power to command water.
I shook my head.
"No. That ability is yours. When someone who contracts with me wishes desperately enough, they sometimes gain a power."
That desperation, as far as I could guess, came when they could not overcome what stood before them by their own strength alone. People who had been in relatively safe circumstances gained no supernatural ability upon becoming Harvests. Those who found death close no matter where they looked did.
"This?"
Droplets gathered and formed a question mark. She was handling it well from the very start.
The notion came from comic books lingering in faded memory, so it might sit quite far from the truth, but I suspected the power drew forth something like the potential a person was capable of having. That would explain why they could use it the moment they received it, as if they always had. Wide and Tisha both handled their abilities readily enough the instant they gained them. The way they used those powers in a fight grew more refined afterward, of course. Even so, watching Wide command fire and Victoria command water, it seemed that both the ability itself and the method of using it were known the moment the power arrived.
Where they drew it from, I had no idea. According to what I had learned from Yuanshi Tianzun, what I took from them was the Taiji—chaos that could do anything and become anything. It was not, as I had first thought, the union of yin and yang. Yuanshi Tianzun had called the infinite possibility that existed before all of that the Taiji.
If that was possibility, if that was warmth itself, then the warmth ought to diminish whenever they gained some special power. Nothing of the sort happened. If anything, it bloomed steadily brighter along with the light. The light shone a deep violet only because I was inside it.
"So that's why you left me without hesitating. If you were something like a god, I thought that since you'd given me power, you'd demand I do something in exchange."
Ah. Of course.
It was there in Daegon's memories, and in Yuanshi Tianzun's as well. Immortals, or gods. Among such beings there were many who formed contracts as I did, and who often gave something only to take a price in return.
"I am not a god. And so I do no such thing. When I was down below, all I ever did was ask someone who had fallen into despair whether they would make a contract, and then contract with them."
But that was not salvation. No matter how it went, the structure was one in which I could not help but obtain warmth. Buy at the lowest point, and every situation after that is a peak. Of course there was more of it than at the bottom, and yet, set beside the brightest moments, there had also been times when harvesting at the very warmest yielded the greater share. Those cases were the minority. Most of them gave a great deal of warmth when they lived a long time. So I would keep to a policy of leaving them free.
Holding my arm, Victoria climbed the stairs of water up out of the sunken ground and asked me,
"And you say that isn't being a god?"
"No. If one were a god, there would be no need to make a contract at all, would there?"
The god I pictured was like that. Perfect, without flaw. An absolute being who could do anything. Anything less, I thought, was only a half-formed impostor, or someone who did not know their place. Even so, I had no intention of denying it outright. If someone claimed to be a god, or if the person beside them said they were, I would simply think, is that so, and let it pass. If they interfered with my obtaining warmth, though, I would nurse a thoroughly unreasonable grudge.
"Why did you say it like a question?"
"Because I don't know anything. A human child is dragging me along, her hand is reasonably warm, and my present impression is that I may as well stay still."
Victoria looked at me the way one looks at a child.
Did I seem that much a child? This time it was a genuinely simple impression. There was no particular need to look like one. In the Future Hope Cult I had stilled my breath on purpose to win Yasle's trust, and so I had acted that way, but it would be perfectly all right if I parted from Victoria here. Soo's last words, spoken before she began the incantation, were still with me as well.
Talking as we went, we came to a low rise. Between the hills, traces remained of where the ground had fallen in. The place I had been summoned was a base made by excavating this whole stretch of land, so when it collapsed, all of it sank.
"Wow. It really did all come down."
Victoria looked around in open wonder. Following her gaze, I found it traveling backward through the places she had passed. The last place it arrived was where she had been taken. She remembered every step of the road she had walked.
She blinked at the empty air as if thinking something over, then suddenly looked down at me.
"Then you don't have anywhere to go anyway, do you? Come with me."
It was true that I had nowhere in particular to go, so I nodded.
"All right."
"You agreed awfully fast. What, were you waiting for that?"
"Anywhere is fine."
"Once we're outside, if some strange person tries to lure you off by offering you candy, you must not follow them. I mean it."
"In that case, of course I should follow."
Villains of that sort, once made into Harvests, gathered warmth quickly. Quickly, and in quantity, and the end came quickly too. Virtuous people made into Harvests had felt like health food. Villains had felt like fast food. Of course, in a world where the wicked held sway they would live longer, and so be more likely to give me more warmth. But until now, Harvests who chased nothing but gain and threw their power around had a way of dying on the road.
I answered with that in mind, and Victoria stared at me with the most extraordinary expression.
"You. Until we get to my house, do not leave my side."
She said it in earnest.
Finding it amusing that she was treating me entirely as a child, I said,
"Obsession is bad."
"Call it protection, not obsession. Honestly, when you were a twenty-five-foot monster I had no idea what I was supposed to do with a thing like that, and now you're completely a child..."
Victoria clutched her head as if it ached. Objectively, she was not wrong. She was still a student, and in her eyes I looked younger than she was. My behavior, besides, showed not a trace of caution. She had every reason to be at a loss.
She glanced around, seized my hand tight, and set off.
"You called me a monster, and yet aren't you holding on a bit too tightly?"
It felt, somehow, as if I had slipped into Soo's own gaze—an exceedingly strange sensation—and half as a joke I pointed out what Victoria had muttered a moment before.
"I think so too. But you really are too much like a child. Now that I think of it, how old are you?"
Age. If I counted only the human memories, how many was it?
"A two-digit number, just barely short of three?"
"So you were a total grandma."
Even as she marveled, Victoria did not let go of my hand. She was heading for the harbor where she had been kidnapped. It seemed she meant to take me home.