There Is No End Here — 7
Hyungkesuni glares at me.
A few things I ought to say rise to mind, but one question matters more than all the rest.
"Why did you stop me?"
If a single person had failed, I would have assumed they had made some mistake along the way. But the people in Andrew's Miriga Order who understood Yasle's knowledge debated it among themselves, filled in what was missing, and only then performed the rite. The chance of error was vanishingly small. And not long after the rite began, they were killed.
Which means there is a way to sense it. Even when someone attempted the rite and failed, that person was the first to die. Yes. My opponent can detect the ritual, knows how to stop it, and has the skill to find the ones who cast it and kill them.
Honestly, I had never even imagined Hyungkesuni in that role — and yet the moment I arrived in this world, she came running, didn't she? Once I knew the ending, the path that led to it joined itself together.
So I asked, letting the irritation show. Hyungkesuni's hand locked tight around her staff.
"Why? You're asking me why? Look at what you've done!"
She swept a hand at everything around us. All around stand things that were once people. Every head has become a dark-violet sphere, and inside them now there is no warmth left — nor any light.
Of what had been Tisha, only the lower body remains. Where the upper body ought to be, a hole has opened as if a flower were blooming there: the look of a heavy object dropped through a pane of glass, the center smashed, cracks spidering out through everything around it.
"Is this what a person looks like when they die?!"
"Then why did you stop me before?"
I asked again. This is the first time I have made anything like this. No — truly, I am seeing the phenomenon for the first time myself, and I can hardly believe my eyes. I don't know whether it became possible simply because the descendants were so many, all of one blood, and I was able to take every one of them when I reclaimed her, or whether Tisha and her line were something special. I'll have to look into it later. But it is, without question, a phenomenon I am seeing now for the first time.
Which means this is not the reason Hyungkesuni ran herself ragged trying to stop me before.
I was waiting for her answer when she suddenly swung the staff. It is shaped from a human upper skeleton and spine, torn free and assembled, and red blood sprayed along that skull and across my face. The blood came from Hyungkesuni's own palm. She must have driven her hand straight onto a vertebral process and opened it that way. So that was why she had clenched the staff.
With those strange words, my head was flung into the empty air. The world spins.
But has she forgotten? This isn't flesh. I only cobbled it together a little while ago, out of a mass of polygons. So I caught the head in my arms.
Thump. Thump. It rolled.
Ah. I dropped it.
Hmm. Something about my senses is wrong. If a head comes off, shouldn't I be down on the floor, looking up at my own body? Suppose some unknown power keeps the nerves connected even after the neck is cut — then I ought to be watching through my eyes and moving the body from there. But I'm simply here. I'm certain that, in the instant of the cut, my gaze turned with it. Now, though, my point of view isn't on the floor. It's in the head.
No. No. I just said it myself. My body was an amorphous thing, like a clump of polygons.
Was it actually cut? Does it need to have been cut? For that matter — could it be cut at all?
While I was thinking that, the head on the floor vanished the way fragments disappear in an old game, collapsing into a low-resolution shape and gone. And in the same moment, as if it had never been severed, a head was sitting on my neck.
Until now, everyone I blessed has died by having their head cut off. So this is how it was done.
"So it really was you, Hyungkesuni. This is how you killed the people I blessed?"
"You — weren't you only able to put yourself back together if you had warmth?"
A question for a question. But from the look of things now, the chance of being ejected back outside seems small. I'll answer.
"No. Have I ever, even once, said any such thing?"
Now that I think of it, the one who ran experiments on wounds was Hyungkesuni herself. Her face twisted. Yes. She worked it out on her own, without ever being told. I did behave in a way that invited the mistake.
"What about me was so frightening that you had to keep me from coming back?"
I asked. I never did anything that might have put someone in danger. At least, not until the very last moment. I held still. I endured it, and I bore it.
"You are that law. The law that when a thinking being of this world feels a fierce frustration and despair, it sets off an enormous explosion. And that was never anything but a way of eating people. Wasn't it? A law that will now go looking for them of its own accord, to devour them — with that standing right in front of you, how could anyone not be afraid? Unless they're too stupid to even picture that future, who wouldn't be terrified?"
I started to nod, then stopped, because something in it was slightly off. There is a misunderstanding here. I ought to clear it up.
"I don't eat people."
"Eat their warmth, and they die."
"No. Eat their warmth, and they change. Don't you remember? After I took a Sacrifice's warmth, the person standing beside me killed the Sacrifice."
That is why, when Yasle gave me Sacrifices, she handed them over apart from the room where the warriors were. Because once they lost their warmth, they became monsters.
"If that isn't dying, then what in the hell is it? And those humans you blessed — every last one of them got drunk on that power and changed! Every one of them was turning into a monster! Even that upstart went mad on the power and set out to take revenge!"
The upstart is probably Yasle.
"Hyungkesuni. I gave blessings, but I didn't specially change anyone's heart. Let me ask you something. If I had twisted people, could Tisha ever have come to be?"
The most alien of them all. And, seen from a certain place, a genuinely good person — not merely kind, but someone who could be resolute in the moments that called for it.
"You made her that way because this is what you wanted!"
Ah. Of course. It could look like that.
I shook my head.
"No. I didn't do anything. From the very start, I couldn't do a thing to people whose sense of self was strong — Tisha, or Wide, or Isla. You should remember it too, Hyungkesuni. The title you fastened on me: Outer God. When you tested them by telling them to say those words, the ones with a strong ego didn't so much as stir."
At that, Hyungkesuni stares at me with an expression gone very sharp.
"A test? So you did eat Yasle's memories on purpose! And then, the same way you made them spit out that title of Outer God, you spread the method for summoning you!"
Shouting it, she moves to swing the staff again. All of that strange magic issues from this staff as its starting point. So I reached out an arm and caught it. No — let me correct that. Several of the bodies whose heads had become dark-violet spheres moved, and seized Hyungkesuni's staff. Oh, they move? They move just like my own hands and feet. If they move, so much the better for me.
Ah. She's trying to run.
Catch her.
Innumerable palms seize Hyungkesuni and bear her down.
"Ngh—!"
Several of the sphere-headed people rush in at once, and Hyungkesuni, her whole body crushed flat to the floor, lets out a groan. An ominous blue-black energy begins to move.
Irritating. I thought I could take hold of it, so I seized that blue-black energy in my hand.
"Khuk—!"
Hyungkesuni convulses as if I had closed a fist around her windpipe. A hand really has gone into her chest, of course, but it hasn't actually pierced the flesh. This body is a truly strange thing. I only notice how strange it is after I've already done it. Anyway, better if she isn't hurt. There is still something I want Hyungkesuni to do for me.
I swallow the blue-black down into dark violet. A faint, buoyant feeling lifts in my fingertips, and then it is gone. When I drew the hand fully out, there was no wound on her chest, and Hyungkesuni retched and coughed.
I lifted her and set her properly upright. "Set her upright" is a generous way to put it — she is held in the shape of someone seated in a chair, restrained by people like dolls. In a broad sense, though, one could say she is sitting.
"Please don't run. I'm irritated with you, Hyungkesuni."
Half of it isn't even anger at her. It's anger at a god. Still, let her be the one I take it out on. We spent half a year together, didn't we?
"Is this your true nature?" Hyungkesuni asked, steadying her ragged breath.
"I wouldn't know what ought to be called a true nature. I already told you what I am, didn't I? I've always wondered — why are you so afraid of me? At least until the Future Hope Order fell apart, I never did anything dangerous."
At that, Hyungkesuni laughed. Not from fear. It was a sneer.
"I told you a moment ago. I thought a monster that eats people would go on, from there, to hunt them in earnest. And a monster that covets something called warmth, handing out the power of a blessing for nothing? A Sacrifice? How could one mere human ever be equal to a blessing that enormous? There had to be something else. So I decided I would drag it into the light before things became truly dangerous."
With a palm pressed to one cheek, the words coming out a little mumbled, Hyungkesuni glares at me and goes on.
"But that upstart ignored me. Said she was going to take her revenge on the Kingdom of Anselus."
She's the sort of person who, under ordinary circumstances, would still have listened to Hyungkesuni. No. Ah. I see. Hyungkesuni must have put it badly.
"Did you perhaps say it like this? Let's stop the blessings for now. Something along those lines…… Yes. That's it."
She is glaring murder at me before I have even finished. Of course I remember what was said to Yasle!
I opened my mouth at once, to cover whatever Hyungkesuni was about to spit out in anger.
"I really did give blessings, Hyungkesuni. I don't even know why anyone grows stronger, or why an ability appears. I simply did everything Yasle wished for."
"So you played at knowing nothing, and deceived us."
Yes. I played at knowing nothing. I deceived them, too. Because if I had shown what I really felt and done as I pleased, my head would have gone flying, don't you think?
"I don't remember lying."
"So you didn't lie. I'll grant you that."
Hehe. That's right.
"You waited all that time, and in the end you got Yasle's memories. After that, you taught the people who received your blessing how to summon you. What do you mean to make of this world?"
Now Hyungkesuni asks in a voice sunk under its own weight. Little by little, I have the feeling she is falling. Resignation and despair — both of them are wearing her heart away. She speaks as if I intend to bring the world to an end. I have no such thought.
To begin with—
"I don't know what a world is. I only want warmth, Hyungkesuni."
That really is all of it. Reaching into other worlds, drawing out more Harvesters, making proxies for my blessings — every bit of it is only because I want warmth.
All at once, I looked up at the ceiling.
And then, with a small tap, from deep inside — a man whose color had faded to gray said a single thing.
Because I was a man once, a way of speaking like that slipped out. But if you ask whether the urge is really there — well. On this side, it isn't so urgent. It is only the sort of impulse in which you wonder whether to drink barley tea or Solomon's seal tea, and decide that today it will be barley. That is the size of it.
At my words, Hyungkesuni's head shot up as if it had sprung. The eyes fixed on me are very round.
"What?"
"Didn't you know? A very long time ago, I was a person too. I didn't know why. I opened my eyes in the deep place beneath a sea where there was nothing, and I had to shiver in the cold until I understood that I was the sea."
Long ago, when sky and sea could not be told apart. A small light rose suddenly above the sky, and that light slowly spread, and it spread until it became the night sky. When another came into being, I recognized myself.
I was the vast sea lying across the floor. At first I wondered whether I might be an ocean world. I am only a plane.
An endless plane.
And I am beneath a certain boundary. I fill everything below it. A boundary I could not climb.
At first I could reach an arm toward the light that drew near the surface, and now I have climbed all the way to here.
"Hyungkesuni, people ought not to blame me. I kept the contract. I give of myself, and when they die, I take it back. I never imagined I would be able to take the descendants as well — but I never meant to reach for the descendants in the first place."
As I said it, I pointed at the sky.
"I made the contract first, and you blocked it. That is a failure to perform. Break a contract, and you have to be punished."
In truth, the whole affair was unforeseen from beginning to end, and it only turned out this way by accident — but I'll say it all the same. Honestly, I didn't know I could catch Hyungkesuni so easily. Oh, I wonder whether a death beam might be possible, but the dark-violet energy doesn't so much as stir at a thought like that. From the moment I appeared in this world, everything I have done has been improvisation, and the motive has been irritation. So this is an opportunity.
"I am not a cruel law. From now on, instead of making the people who come to my side explode, I will grant them blessings. Only when they agree, of course."
I neatly leave out the part about being unable to make a contract if they don't agree.
Hyungkesuni's eyes glare at me: don't lie.
"It's the same as lending money and taking it back with interest. Of course, if the person who received the power wastes their life and dies, that loss is mine — but isn't every investment like that?"
Of course I leave out the fact that what I gain is warmth, so I am already in profit the moment the contract is sealed. And the part about how, if the contracted person kills someone, that person's warmth comes to me.
"A Sacrifice is eating the fruit already in front of you. A blessing is planting a seed and waiting for fruit to ripen on the tree. I chose the way that brings me more fruit. I have no intention of harming the tree. I would rather it grew well."
Just like Tisha.
That is why, instead of seizing warmth however I could, I chose blessings alone. I chose a good method, and a gift came along with it.
"I don't intend to interfere by my own hand from here on, either. If someone wishes for a blessing, I will give them a blessing."
"Just how many Sacrifices do you mean to gorge yourself on, you monster?"
Hehe. A good question, Hyungkesuni.
"Sacrifices? Yasle gave me those because she liked to, didn't she?"
Hyungkesuni's face goes blank. She thinks it over carefully, and then looks at me as if she has understood something. What on earth did she understand?
"Why in the world are you trying to persuade me?"
Ah. Oh dear. I've been found out. But she asked a question. Rules are rules. Even a rule I set myself — I mustn't lie.
"The summoning method. I'd like you to write it down in a book."
In the first place, the magic for summoning a wicked being was something Hyungkesuni taught Yasle. For the record, the method of sending one back is not magic at all, but a legacy of the Yeongnang Theocracy, so I can't use it.
"Get lost!"
Hyungkesuni glares at me with a look that says she would sooner end her own life. Persuasion, it seems, is going to be a difficult business. And the greater problem is what I am supposed to do about this place, right now. Until this moment it has been where the family keeps watch over Tisha's end, so everyone else is outside.
There is a great deal I still have to see through.