Nothing Goes Smoothly — 3
King Hypion, Prince Sorindiges, and Princess Lunarira all came to congratulate Aurora on waking.
I didn't see it myself. Once Aurora was awake, I was all but driven back to the place where I was being kept.
It wasn't much of a problem. I can watch through Aurora's eyes, so I knew well enough what they were saying.
There I heard a story Aurora herself hadn't known. They said she had wasted away under a witch's curse—and that the curse had been laid on her the very day she was born.
That thin resistance must have been a contract with the witch. Viewed from the moment of the contract, at least, it was weaker than Daegon's. Set beside the resistance I felt when I descended into Choseol's body, it was far too faint.
I went digging through Daegon's memories. The day I entered Choseol's body, the link with him was severed, and Daegon felt nothing at all. He only learned of it much later. Through the Bloodstasis Esoteric Sect, he came to know that something else had taken that body.
I searched the memories in case the reason was there to be found, but none of them shone.
A memory's shining seems like an unconditioned reflex. When something matches, it lights up of its own accord: I know this one.
And here the intelligence issue trips me up.
I can't draw a new fact out of the knowledge I already hold. With Daegon's memories and Yuanshi Tianzun's, I ought to be able to explain just about any phenomenon, shouldn't I? And yet all I can do is know the things I know. I can't prepare a step ahead and move. I only know how to move after something has already happened.
It would have been nice to be a little more intelligent.
While I was turning that over, King Hypion suddenly summoned the Harvesters to the capital.
I thought they were about to be ground up in another experiment. To my surprise, he gathered people at a broadcasting station instead and interviewed them one by one. The interviews weren't about what had happened in Berne City. They were about me—from the white-skinned all the way to the blue-skinned. Every one of them.
Before long, a documentary about me was broadcast across the entire kingdom. It wasn't only television. Newspapers carrying those interviews on the front page went out alongside it.
Hehe.
I like it. I like it a great deal. It isn't dressed up as a miracle of the gods or anything of the sort, and I like that even better: it states, plain and straight, that I came back through a special power, and that my body hair and my skin changed color in the process.
When I make Harvesters in this world from now on, I'll have a foothold. People will be less inclined to reject them.
In the second world, a Harvester's form made you a public enemy. In the third, the image that took shape instead was of someone who had come back from the brink of death. And there was already the image of a person who had gone around Berne City saving people, so the two ran together into something remarkably good.
I'm happy.
Happy, yes—but I did wonder why they would spread a thing like this so widely. I had thought an ability that could heal people was precisely the sort of thing a ruler profits by hiding. A monopoly is made to be resented.
I understood the reason near the end of summer.
Princess Aurora said, in an official setting, that she had recovered her health through my ability. The royal family announced that her beautiful blond hair had turned purple and her skin had been dyed blue, and that she had her health back all the same. They said, along with that, that the one who had treated her was me. In other words, Princess Aurora was the same as the people who had received the ability in Berne City.
Only then did I see why they had advertised the Harvesters.
They had arranged it so the country would understand that the princess's appearance was not something strange, but the result of having come back to life. The reason they had hauled fully into the light the Harvester who went around Berne City saving people, built her up as a good person, and advertised across the whole kingdom that she had returned from the edge of death—all of it was for Princess Aurora.
Mm. Well. Yes.
Looking through the eyes of a little over nine thousand Harvesters, this country is home to all sorts of peoples, and not one of them has blue skin. Other countries might. As far as the Harvesters know, no such person exists.
Blue skin is too alien to pass off as a merely odd complexion. It is an ill-omened color, like a corpse that has begun to rot, or like argyria, where silver seeps into the body and turns the skin blue.
If Princess Aurora had simply appeared, she would have heard unpleasant talk. The way a face left pockmarked by smallpox loses its worth, the princess's own value would have fallen. But public opinion has shifted. She is no longer merely someone who received the benefit of a miracle. She has become one of those who did good and were rewarded for it. There is, in fact, no causal connection at all—but isn't that what a crowd has always been?
And the country held a festival. The king emptied the treasury and threw a feast where people could eat and drink their fill. A way to fix the image in place, I suppose. Probably.
Even I got to pick up a few of the crumbs. Around the time the festival ended, this country's summer came completely to a close, and I was dragged off to the Royal Academy.
"Belle!"
"Hello."
The day of the transfer. I was standing blankly in the room they called my classroom when Victoria spotted me and came running. She, too, had been forced into the Royal Academy as of today.
"It's been so long, and you're so cold..."
"From the moment you made a contract with me, you haven't been apart from me for a single instant."
I see through Victoria's eyes, so she has never once left my own view of things either. At my words, she pulled me into a hug.
Eyes were on the two of us. Not one or two—nearly every student was looking. Their expressions ran a wide spectrum, from admiration all the way to contempt. A great many of them belonged to the upper strata. Which is to say, they were people with a high chance of becoming Harvesters.
While I was still considering what attitude to take, someone who looked like a teacher came in and, without any particular introduction, began the lesson. This place seems less a school in the sense of a public institution than something built like a university. They don't appear to take much interest in the students.
Class met twice, two hours each time. Once in the morning, and once in the afternoon after lunch. The moment the afternoon class ended, Victoria caught my hand and went outside.
We left the academy building, laid out in a squared U, and walked straight down the avenue that runs to the main gate. Near the gate we turned right, and the dormitory showed far off in the distance. Victoria, it seemed, meant to take me there. I followed her stiff face and her silence all the way to her room.
The moment we arrived she locked the door and let out a long breath.
"Haaaaah. I was scared."
With that she staggered to the bed and flopped onto it.
"Scared?"
As I remembered it, there had been no fear in her expression.
"You know how there are tons of people you can't even talk to? And they're nobles—people who live in a completely different world from me. That's terrifying!"
She did have a weapon that could kill on the spot. Even so, I think the more frightening one is the Victoria who took that as reason enough to switch from skulking in hiding to a regime of slaughter, killing head-on everyone who came into sight until she reached the place of the descent. More than that: even now, while she says she is scared, her face is closer to someone steering clear of a balloon that will burst if you touch it, because the thing is a nuisance, than to any fear of overwhelming power.
"If you hadn't helped people, you would never have had cause to come here."
So I said it, once. Before any resentment could turn toward me later, I said it ahead of time. Victoria is a good person. She would deny it here.
"You're right. If I hadn't moved back then, I'd probably be back at Clockwork Knight school by now. Yeah."
She said it looking straight at me, her expression clear of even a speck of cloud.
"But I don't regret it for that. Even if I went back, I'd still save people."
Yes. I know. Victoria is that kind of person. I don't know how long it will last. Let her be bullied here for a while, and her heart will change, won't it? Being stubborn against pain doesn't mean you can endure it forever. Thinking back on the students' faces from class, the odds that they will torment Victoria are high. So before she breaks, I ought to slip out from under the responsibility in advance.
"Are you giving up on being a Clockwork Knight?"
"No. I looked into it, and they have classes for that here too. I'm thinking of going that way."
I know that. But Morris, who was the one to tell her, had added something else: that the place is less where you learn to be a Clockwork Knight than where you learn the viewpoint of the people who will have Clockwork Knights working under them. Not a technician's eye. A manager's. So what she had just said was bluster. And if you are going to bluster, you have to make good on the words. Victoria will.
"That's a relief."
At that, Victoria smiled with an awkward look. She really is a good person. She had said it to be considerate of me. Even if she breaks from here on, the breaking will be aimed at other people.
"What about you, Belle? I heard you treated the princess at the palace. For a while, if you turned on the TV, that was all that came on. Did you talk with her? What kind of person is she?"
Victoria changed the subject.
At the palace I was a guest in name, and closer to a tool. I don't say so. Not out of any worry that it would trouble Victoria, but because a subjectivity would get into it—the subjectivity that they treat me without human feeling. It isn't time yet to show a subjectivity of my own. If I have one, they will try to deal with me. If I have none, and move like an object, then the person keeping me watches the people trying to use me, rather than watching me.
Easy mode is nice. Easy mode.
When someone sets out to deceive me, there is no guarantee I will catch all of it. That stays true even if they become a Harvester. It would be pleasant if a Harvester came with a brainwashing ability, or gave me affection no matter what. Unfortunately there is no such function, so it can't be helped. Safely, then. One step, and then another. There is plenty of time.
But I mean to use what the second world taught me, and not shrink too far—to be bold. Keeping the balance is difficult. I'll have to manage it somehow. This is my assignment.
"I don't know. I met her for only a moment, and after that I stayed in a room at the palace the whole time."
And if the person who enters my room is replaced, at the longest, once every three days, then the intent is plainly vicious. Even surrounded by people, if you engage with none of them, you grow lonely. Solitude wears a person down with very little effort. The conditions are perfect for gaslighting.
It is the same reason cults force their people out to proselytize in crowded places, subway stations and the like. The real purpose is not to bring in strangers who know nothing. Cults are despised. The proselytizer tries to convert the many, and is mostly ignored or cursed at. Along with the humiliation, it plants the impression that they are a worthless failure. Come back empty-handed, and the cult asks why the converting went so badly, shatters their self-esteem, wears mind and body down to nothing, paralyzes their reason, and leaves them dependent on the cult.
Give them the sickness, then offer the cure. Isolate them, then make them dependent. A method rulers use often, when they want to turn a person into a stupid subordinate.
"Ahh. Well, it is the palace, so I guess that could happen. I thought you'd have met the prince and everything, but you didn't get that either?"
"I saw his face and we greeted each other, but that was all. We didn't even exchange names."
"Wow. That's kind of..."
Victoria, looking sour about it, sat down and patted the spot beside her. I went and sat, and with me there at her side she began to tell, one thing after another, what had happened in between. Crowds from the broadcasting station had come and gone. She had been invited to the palace and gone, only to be unable to meet me. After that, a great many strange people had come looking.
She told me Morris had been let go from his company, and that the family had held one another and cried over it—and she neatly left out the part where a strange person broke into the house, and they ended up moving.
A pity, Morris. If he had discarded just a little of what made him human, he would be an excellent man at that company by now.
As for the move, it was to the outskirts of Berne City. Measured against a faded memory, it is like leaving Seoul for the province of Gyeonggi. A great many people who suffered in the Berne City incident have gathered there. In other words, there are a great many Harvesters. If being on your own concentrates you as a target, then going where the targets are scattered is a sound method too. They moved well.
So, thinking over when I might tell her this part of it, I spent the time with Victoria as she laid her own story out.