Chapter 238
In the third world, winter has slipped cleanly past. The further it goes, the fewer raiders catch the eyes of the harvesters roaming the length of the country—and that is not because things have gotten better. It means the people who chose the road of banditry just to stay alive are dying off. Public order, by comparison, is slowly improving with them.
More people are taking up transport work again. Society has not returned completely to normal, but it has recovered a great deal. The people of this country, however, are already facing a new problem: those who fled other countries simply to survive.
Harvesters have to eat and drink too, and for that they stop in at restaurants and taverns, where they naturally pick up talk of how the world is moving. Word is that people who crossed over from other countries, and who can barely make themselves understood, have multiplied. The talk is full of complaints—there is already not enough for us to eat, jobs have already dwindled, and those things are taking the places that remain. Or else the talk is that they have banded together and started moving as a new violent group.
The problems of the world inside my faded memories are showing themselves here, unchanged. The more connected a society becomes, the more one nation's trembling shakes the entire world. This world is not connected to that degree yet, so a single country shaking should not rattle everything all that much… though the three great corporations are transnational firms stretched across many countries.
I cannot predict the future with a head like mine, but I can analyze a phenomenon well enough in my own way. If I begin from the premise that my analysis may be wrong at any moment, then this is nothing but a game—a way to pass the time until the future comes when the harvesters send me warmth in abundance.
The fourth world is currently in spring. In other words, quite a lot of time has passed since I came here. My circumstances, though, have hardly changed at all.
Now and then the blindfold comes off, and I turn the experimental human set before me into a harvester. When that is finished, I am pickled in pleasure. It is extremely monotonous. Monotonous enough that I find myself wondering whether a demon truly fell to corruption over nothing more than this. Didn't they actually suffer something else?
Mocking the senior who entered some other vessel ahead of me and went rotten, I turn over the complaints I have picked up lately. I am making fewer harvesters. When I do make one, I will grant the part where they experiment a little and then grind it up. But the supply of subjects to turn into harvesters is steadily drying up. What on earth is the mage thinking?
The mage.
About a month has passed since I came to the fourth world, and in that time I have learned a few things about him. His name is Geber ibn Something-or-Other. I do not know the rest because he was cut off halfway through saying it. From what I hear, it is some mage house.
In the first world and the third, a mage felt like nothing more than a specialist. In the fourth, the notion is fixed in place that only the noble may use magic. No wonder he gathers test subjects so easily. The mage belonged to the privileged class.
And the ones I had thought were clones were not simple copies of a human being. They were humans manufactured artificially. There was a reason Badrol—the harvester presumed to be the original of these products—did not react when she saw their faces. They truly were not her face. He did use Badrol as material, though. That is why the contract kept carrying on.
For the record, the woman named Badrol was originally a warrior. She was skilled with a curved sword, ignorant of politics, framed for a crime she never committed, and made a slave. Not mere labor, either. A plaything. If you think of what Empress Lü did to Consort Qi in the histories kept in my faded memories, it is easy enough to understand.
She had been reduced to a horrific state, with death right before her eyes, and so she fell close to the surface. By good fortune, we met at the right time. So instead of exploding, she became a harvester. Perhaps because she had remained so long with her mind in ruins, she accepted a great deal of the memories of Yasle that I gave her. On that foundation she became a mage and took her revenge. Just as she was soaking in the joy of a revenge brought to its end, she was suddenly killed, gave her warmth to me, and vanished.
This had not happened in another city of the same country, but in an entirely different one, so even with Badrol's memories it was hard to tell that this was the world she had been in. And the one connected to her death is probably this mage called Geber. While he was examining my memories, he said they were not recorded in the brain. Which means there is a technology for extracting memory. I suspect the metal needles driven into my head are what do the work. He could have done the same to Badrol. That is how he used Yasle's magic and found me out. And while he was at it, he put that body to thorough use, making the women I call clones. That seems to be why the contract with the clones was completed.
I have learned a great deal about these clones as well. Or, since they are not wholly her, shall I call them chimeras? Anyway, there are several kinds.
First, the sort that handles petty odd jobs. They wear brass-colored necklaces, and their estimated operational life is about seven years. Their intelligence is not particularly high, and they cannot use magical power at all. Geber treats them as outright consumables.
Then the specimens who look after the child. There are three in all, and each has a name. They wear silver necklaces, know how to use magic, are quite intelligent, and above all—unlike the consumables—they have personalities. For the record, the child is not a normal child. It is a child made by experiment. A hybrid of demon or god. And not only that: there are young chimeras as well. I do not know whether they are simply a control group or meant for the same use as the named chimeras, but like the ones who do the teaching, they have personalities.
Next, the sort that works in the laboratory. These are similar to the consumables, but they wear bronze necklaces, and from what I hear their lifespan is longer—around thirty years, compared with the odd-job sort. These are mainly the ones who become harvesters. But seeing as he sometimes takes even chimera harvesters apart and picks through them, these too seem to be mere tools.
And last of all, the chimera Geber calls his assistant. He clearly treats this one with attachment. She wears a necklace set with jewels, you see. It is funny, pouring attachment into a doll he made so it would listen only to him. The chimera he calls his assistant outperforms the others. Like the chimeras who teach the child, she can use magic, her intelligence is high, and she has a proper personality. Of course she is lacking beside an ordinary person, but it means she truly has emotions. The consumables' emotions are thin.
And so, one day, while I was watching one man's amusement park—
"Hey. The Violet God's abdomen. Hasn't it gotten smaller?"
I was disappointed that Geber had come to the laboratory without bringing anyone for me to turn into a harvester, and then he spoke in a puzzled voice. For the record, the Violet God is me. I never thought he would name me by color alone. But the abdomen, shrinking? Don't tell me this thing has rotted.
Footsteps drew near, and something cold and metallic touched my belly. It was a place the chimera harvester's gaze did not reach, so I could not see what he was doing. Whatever it was soon pulled away, and Geber's shout burst out.
"Bring me every bit of biological data from the moment this was installed until now!"
The chimeras inside hurried about, and before long they brought a long sheet of paper. Then—smack. The chimera who had brought it took Geber's palm across the cheek and collapsed to the floor.
"There's been only one heartbeat since the summoning! I told you to report at once if anything was abnormal, didn't I? An abnormality like this showed up, and you haven't made a single report until now—what have you been doing? You can't even manage something this simple? You piece of trash!"
He bellowed at the chimera. It lay on the floor and could not properly get up. It tried, but from the way it failed, something must have broken when he struck its cheek. After shouting for a long while, Geber brought his foot down on the chimera shuddering on the floor, broke its leg, and said this to a chimera nearby.
"Grind this one up in the crusher, and bring the surgical tools. Now."
The chimera took the one collapsed on the floor and disappeared. Then a chimera harvester picked up surgical tools from one side of the room and approached Geber. He took them, came toward me, and called the assistant. He spoke some string of symbols to her, and she immediately worked the machine just as she had been told. Something was injected around the bones of my neck. Anesthetic, most likely. Of course it does not work on me. I do not feel sensation through the central nervous system.
Geber put on gloves and a mask and adjusted my position so my belly faced upward. Then he cut me open with a knife a little too large to call a scalpel. I felt the pain of my belly being split, and he held it open with cold iron. Next he put the knife into the organ that held the baby and drew it through.
A wet, ripping squelch. The organ split, and the fluid inside sprayed out. Amniotic fluid?
The moment that fluid touched skin, it rose in a hissing smoke. And Geber screamed.
"Aaaagh!"
Huh? Was amniotic fluid always that strongly acidic? The assistant rushed over and wiped his cheek. He spat curses for a good while, changed to a thicker pair of gloves, came back, and finished cutting the organ open.
"What is this."
Through the chimera harvester's eyes, I looked into my own belly as well. Inside was a thick, viscous fluid. Geber thrust a hand into the cloudy liquid and drew out of my belly something like a tree root, tangled with several pure-white masses. Then he said this.
"You insane little monster. All this time you weren't growing the fetus—you digested it?"
He said it as if he had come face to face with something horribly repulsive, and he hauled on the root-like thing.
"This isn't a placenta and an umbilical cord. It's a digestive organ that grew to suck up nutrients."
He examined the place where the root began, then cut it there. After studying the cross-section closely, he said that and pulled the mass out of my belly. He set the root-like lump, tangled with white stones, on a nearby tray, and put his hand back into my organs. Muttering specialist talk—that this was not endometrium but something like a stomach wall, that the form was the same while only the structure had been changed—he investigated my insides. Then he suctioned my belly clean with a machine and sutured it shut again.
Well now. Not rot, but digestion. The human body is a curious thing. Or perhaps it is because I am in here.
He kept spitting curses as he dissected, with a knife, the digestive organ I had called a tree root. And from his muttering I learned what the white stones tangled in it were. Half-dissolved bone, he said. Fragments of skull, a shoulder blade, and the remains of the hip bone, he muttered, cursing the whole thing as loathsome.
Of course, reabsorbing the young in one's belly may look a little horrific, but I know it is a thing that happens often enough in nature. Plenty of creatures, when the mother is in danger, halt reproduction and choose to preserve their own lives. Compared with that, isn't Geber—making hybrids however he pleases—the more horrific and repulsive one?
But instead of putting that into words, I stayed still, as though I were incapable of thought. I know that will bring the better result.
Heehee.