Chapter 73
When day came, the child whose name I didn't know woke up.
Watching them startle upright on the bedding in a corner of the kitchen was terribly funny.
One good thing about this body of mine is that I see people not by how they look, but as stoves. Appearance isn't the point. Warmth is. If you buy a stove cheap because it's pretty, only to throw it out when it turns out not to be warm at all, that's a waste, isn't it?
Wait. Is that the stranger thought?
In the faded man's memories, one line keeps being underlined: that I am not a human child.
There doesn't seem to be anything in me you could call a personality, and yet sometimes, in the middle of the night, a memory surges up the way an old embarrassment pops into your head and makes you kick the blankets off. Whether this is the early stage of a split mind, or whether I was simply always like this, I couldn't say. It isn't that important a problem.
The problem is food.
Judging by the amount, if we eat sparingly it will last three days. Factor in feeding the child, and it will be gone by tomorrow. Considering how furtive the Heavenly Demon is, I expect he will come back only a few days after the food runs out.
If it were only me, I could wait as long as I liked. This little one, though—there is a good chance they were sent here to die. He wants to see how I behave. So I will not do anything to this child.
Above all, handling borrowed things with care is common sense, isn't it? Reckless modification is not allowed.
"If you're awake, go and wash."
I pointed at the jar in the corner of the kitchen. It had originally held black water with insects floating in it, but I twisted reality until the jar was full of clean water.
If an object doesn't belong to this era, a crack forms. If it is simply a natural thing, I can bring it into this world without even a crack. Of course, wondering whether natural things were unlimited, I hauled in a great rush of water—and a crack opened, so I stopped at once.
The world is fragile. It can't be helped. I change what I can change, careful not to let the glass bottle break.
The child waking on bedding instead of bare stone was the result of an experiment too. That bedding had originally been a quilt inside the room, rotted all the way through. It isn't a quilt that never existed. If I twist and alter a thing that is merely broken, I hear less of the sound of the glass bottle splitting. Making something that was never there, and changing something that already was, seem to put different pressures on the glass wall.
The drawback is that living things must not be twisted. The pressure on the glass wall is stronger than with ordinary objects, and the body tears apart into something grotesque, the way a texture breaks in a 3D game, then turns to pixels and vanishes.
If I used this on a person, might it become an attack technique? No—use it on a person, and the glass wall might break first...
While I was turning that over, the child scooped only a little water into a nearby bowl and washed nothing but their face. This is karst country, stone pillars rising out of places brimming with water, so there shouldn't be any shortage...
Today I have a great deal of free time. No—ever since I entered someone's body, this is the first free time of this kind I have had. In Rebecca Rolfe's days I was practically imprisoned, so in a sense this is the first time I am exploring another world on my own legs. Even then I walked a fixed circuit and called it exercise, but the fact of being confined never changed.
This time I am free. If something makes me curious, I ought to go and look.
Filling in the schedule ahead of me, I put in a little less water than yesterday and made food.
Ah. It burned a little.
I can eat the badly burned parts myself. Cooking is difficult.
"Come on. Come and eat."
They had been watching me closely the whole time I cooked, and when I ladled the food into a bowl they looked up at me with a subtle expression.
What?
I tilted my head, and they immediately ducked theirs and ate. I couldn't tell what that had been. A look that said, you call this a meal?
It can't be helped. I have plenty of memories of people who cooked, but the ingredients are different from the root, and I have no idea how any of this is supposed to be done. So I guessed by feel, and it came out too thick, or it burned. Cooking is hard.
Not a faded memory—a recent one rose, then slowly sank.
Joanna Smith.
She was someone who made food for me, so she surfaced and vanished. That must be why. But that person isn't here. She's already dead, isn't she?
This child will die someday too.
Thinking that, I fed them and put the kitchen neatly in order. The child was fidgeting, so I asked why. They answered with hands and feet, and I couldn't make out a word of it. The face was hard to read besides—the muscles had already collapsed, and edema had swollen it up. So I ignored them and tidied the surroundings.
Meanwhile the child, still cold because it was morning, went to the fire and sat quietly.
The fire? It doesn't go out. That thing.
What kind of fire did I even bring here? Entropy, the conservation of energy—those words float up, but I am an extremely strange monster myself. Quibbling over it is strange too. Seeing that the child can look at the fire and not react at all, it probably isn't anything tremendously wrong, and what is good is good.
Once I had finished putting the place in order, I went outside.
Far off, an enormous structure rose into view. They had set buildings atop grotesque spires of rock that thrust up like pillars. The houses stood only on the stone, of course, and passages crossed the gaps between them. Lower my gaze from the buildings, and several doors led out of them, one line running from those doors all the way to here. A cliff on one side, a path tangled with rock and trees on the other; come down it for a long while, and at last you arrive at the house where I am.
They threw me quite far.
According to the memories of the four I harvested, where ordinary people live is a considerable distance from here. Looking through Jeonyang's memories, this area seems to have been inhabited once. A region, in other words, where no one lives now. But if people once lived here, that means there are buildings nearby.
So I set out, partly to look around. Circle the place, then go down to the water, and I thought I could spend the day well enough.
Rustle. Rustle.
I followed a path where only traces showed through the thick grass. Come to think of it, this body will need exercise too. Rebecca Rolfe used her heart in a strange way. Might I be able to use something like martial arts with this body? I should try once this evening.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I hadn't taken many steps when I heard someone running. I turned, and the child was hurrying after me in a waddling gait. No—your body is in no state for this. Wouldn't it be better to stay in the room?
No, that is a gentle thought. So why does not a human child surface again? Compassion? I would like that given to me.
Grumbling inwardly that someone ought to pity me, cold as I am, I met the child's eyes and asked.
"What's the matter?"
The child said nothing and seized a tight hold of my clothes. It wasn't that they had nothing to say. They couldn't say anything at all.
I walked the path with them. Their stride was small, and we slowed. I wouldn't get as far as I had planned. The water's edge would have to be given up. Watching them walk, the axes of their joints were turning strangely, so the fatigue had to be considerable. Well, with legs swollen like that, even walking would be hard. What were they doing?
I went all around the area with the child whose name I still didn't know.
Traces of buildings and roads remained, but not a single structure was intact—perhaps someone of powerful martial skill had fought here. Holes a child might be sucked into if you weren't careful. Marks like a landscape painting slashed with a sword. If something like this had happened in a village where people lived, it would be no surprise to abandon the place and go elsewhere.
Among the ruins thick with grass, something I took for human bone stuck out, but unfortunately no warmth remained. Sometimes even a corpse still holds light, and in those cases there was warmth. This one had been dead too long.
Suddenly the child gripped my clothes tight. They must have followed my gaze and seen the skull.
"Who are you?"
Just then someone addressed us in a voice rough as an old woman's.
I looked that way. A woman stood there in a wide-brimmed hat, the brim wrapped about with translucent cloth. She was hiding who she was. But I knew the clothes she wore. I had seen this person's face at dawn today. Gapjae had looked her in the face and spoken with her directly. Remembering the clear voice she had used then, the voice she was using now was false.
Well. If the previous cult leader's daughter does not want others to know she has returned, changing her voice is hardly strange.
I raised an arm and pointed toward the house.
"Since yesterday, I've been living in the house over there."
At my words, the woman looked where my hand indicated.
"That isn't a house fit for anyone to live in, is it?"
Fit to live in? This person knew what state that house was in. She had seen the place where I lived at least once. I didn't know what sort of person she was, but she did not seem to be on good terms with the Heavenly Demon. First, to show her that the Heavenly Demon was a bad man, I brought the child forward.
"After the Heavenly Demon sent me, he sent a child like this and called them a maid."
Hm. I couldn't read her expression, so I couldn't tell what the reaction was. Then the woman came toward us. Not toward me, precisely. Toward the child.
"That man is still no better than an insect. First, eat this, then sit with your back to me."
She drew a small pill from her bosom. The child looked up at me, troubled. Hmm. From the air of it, she meant to do something about the insects in the child's body. A dewormer, or something like one?
I took a step back. They made a face as if they might cry, but I looked at the woman and pointed at the child with a finger, meaning she could do as she liked.
"It's terribly bitter, but don't spit it out. Swallow."
Whether she had understood me, the woman pressed the child again and again as she handed over the little pill. The child took it and swallowed it down. Right after, the woman stripped off the child's outer clothes and laid a hand on their back. Was she sending qi? I couldn't tell whether she was using only a very small amount because it was going into the child, or whether it was something I couldn't feel at all.
Watch as closely as I might, it looked like nothing more than a hand resting on a back. Then, all at once, the child's face twisted, and the blood vessels stood out wildly. I watched, thinking they might die. The face that had gone bright red suddenly returned to its own color, and they bent at the waist.
"Kehek! Kuhuk!"
With a great quantity of blood, a hideous insect burst from the child's mouth. But it had no legs, so it was not the same kind as the insect that had been in my head.
The woman forcibly held the child, who was shuddering with pain, kept her hand on their back, and stayed that way a long while. When the child went limp, she let out a deep breath.
"The crisis has passed. The swelling in the face and body should go down within a month, so let them convalesce slowly."
She thought of me as their guardian? I shook my head.
"I can't."
"Why?"
The woman's voice rose, just a little. Getting angry—did that make her a good person? Even so, she was the previous cult leader's daughter, wasn't she? There was a good chance she hated the Heavenly Demon. So I meant to see if I could make this person collide with him once.
"This child is someone the Heavenly Demon sent. I have no power at all."
I said it to mean that if the Heavenly Demon decided to do something to this child, I could not reach out a hand.
"And what do you think of this child?"
Ah. This was a question I could predict. She was asking whether I could look after the child properly, wasn't she? So I answered in a way that would be easy to misunderstand.
"I see. Then keep them with you, even if only for a little while."
She had misunderstood me in exactly the favorable way.
The woman stroked the child, then rose and hurried off. In other words, she was about to cause some incident soon, wasn't she?
Hehe.
Thinking of the Heavenly Demon Divine Cult that would soon begin to shake, I took the child up on my back and returned home.