TL/ED – Miso

Dersia’s Workshop.

When I brought her the bottle containing the True Blood, she examined it from every angle with considerable fascination.

“So this is the blood of a god.”

[The Creator.]

“He says it’s the Creator.”

“Hmm…”

After a low murmur of thought, she shrugged and answered.

“It seems worth studying. For now, I can’t tell much difference between this and ordinary blood.”

She set the bottle in her hand down on the table, and only then did I offer the suggestion I had been preparing.

“How about trying a sip?”

[Master, have you truly lost your mind?]

“…Since when am I your master?”

[I gave up being human and chose to become an object. The one who possesses an object should naturally be called its master.]

As I bickered with Mallo, Dersia tilted her head quizzically.

“Jern. Do you wish to kill me that badly?”

“What? No. I have no reason to.”

“Then I fail to understand why you would tell me to drink this liquid that spawned those monsters. What is your reason?”

“Mallo said that True Blood fulfills one’s Deepest Wish.”

It was a slightly unsettling thought that the Deep Sea Creatures’ Deepest Wish had been to see me, but considering that Mallo himself had become a Holy Relic through the same process, it was more or less accurate.

“You have a Deepest Wish too, Master. Why not try using this to reach the Celestial Realm?”

[Why do you not tell her everything? True Blood is not some all-purpose elixir that simply grants wishes. It makes one abandon everything else…]

“That sort of thing doesn’t matter to Master.”

I met Dersia’s gaze without concern.

Having spent a considerable amount of time with her, I knew.

Dersia cared about nothing except magic. She was helping me now on something of a whim, but her most important purpose had never changed.

It never would.

“To reach the end of the Path of Magic, you would be willing to give up anything, wouldn’t you?”

“You know me well.”

Dersia lifted the bottle of True Blood with a calm expression and gently swirled it.

“I appreciate the thought, but I cannot use it right now.”

“…Pardon?”

“Because I cannot fully trust the words of that being.”

She glanced at Mallo and murmured.

“The true nature of these so-called Holy Relics is also rather intriguing. For the time being I am leaving it be since it helps you, but if I had my way, I would like to ‘dissect’ it a little to see how it is constructed.”

[I am made of nothing but thread and blood. Even if you tear me apart…]

“Secondly, I can reach it without relying on something like this.”

It was not so much a boast as it was conviction.

And more than conviction, it carried the weary drawl of a teacher restating something she had already explained countless times.

It was convincing enough to believe. There was no way Dersia would trust the words of some scrap of cloth and put an unknown liquid into her mouth.

“Was that too presumptuous of me?”

“No, if it’s you, Master, I’m sure you will. I think I was the one thinking about it wrong.”

“…I will hold onto it for now. I suspect part of your motive was the thought that if you made me into a guardian of the Celestial Realm, you might also find a way to escape the Deep Sea… but still, thank you.”

She hit the nail on the head. As I sat there grinning, she tucked the True Blood away somewhere and said in passing,

“Also, she has woken up. She seems to have much to say, so perhaps you should go comfort her.”

“Oh, already? Understood.”

I had expected her to sleep for much longer. So she really had grown after all.

I could never be grateful enough to Elysia. Just as I was about to hurry back, Dersia called out to me.

“Jern, and…”

“Yes?”

“…”

Dersia paused, choosing her words for a moment, then shook her head.

“It’s nothing.”

***

She would reach the pinnacle of magic.

How long had she harbored that thought?

‘I’ve heard people say that sometimes one’s purpose fades along the way, but…’

Unfortunately, Dersia was not the sort of elf to whom such ordinary wisdom applied.

She had recorded every event down to the minute, down to the second, and she remembered precisely the moment she had resolved to reach the pinnacle of the Path of Magic.

An unwavering resolve she had held since the days when she was still young and naive.

-That she would not defy her own nature.

‘Did I think it was foolish back then…’

She drew a single drop of True Blood and let it fall onto a book, then drifted into old memories.

When every elf realized that, in time, they would all succumb to Madness and become monsters that destroyed the world.

When they became aware that they were forsaken beings with no reason to go on living.

They chose a rest worse than death. They entrusted their lifelines to a single elf and hoped for a savior, a kindred soul who would one day tell them it was alright to live, who would prove their existence through their own life.

Salvation by Proxy. They wished for someone else to struggle in their place.

Dersia found that more loathsome than anything.

“Hmm…”

Her reverie halted before the writhing book.

She immediately sealed off the surrounding area and watched the book that had just begun to move.

All the ink in the book pooled together and vanished, and before long it had turned into blank pages.

No matter which page she turned, there was nothing written.

It did not seem to be alive. Remembering Jern’s words that it fulfilled wishes, she turned the pages.

[In the basement of the Violet Magic Tower live creatures born from the fusion of humans and animals.]

And she realized her hypothesis had been correct.

The book wished to be read. Because it had been created for that purpose, its mission had become to spread information by being read by someone.

The Creator’s blood had fulfilled that book’s wish.

Whatever one thought of and asked, it answered.

One could praise the grace of a god for being so magnificent, but… regrettably, seeing as it could not describe what those creatures looked like, it was ultimately an incomplete Holy Relic built only from the reader’s own knowledge.

In the end, it was nothing more than a false book that recycled what one already knew.

If all of the True Blood were poured into this book, perhaps it could become a truly omniscient Holy Relic, but…

Now that she knew the blood’s effects were real, she could not waste it on something like that.

“…”

Dersia gazed at the bottle of True Blood.

The opening was already uncapped from when she had extracted a single drop.

If she drank it, she could achieve it.

She recalled the vow she had made long ago, that she would reach it even in a broken state, that she would prove being whole was not the only path.

Her conviction that she would one day reach the Celestial Realm was unwavering, but…

If she could shorten that tedious road, what reason was there not to?

Dersia’s hand slowly reached toward the bottle.

“Hmm.”

But instead of lifting the bottle to drink the blood, she turned the page.

[If you reach the end of the Path of Magic, you will not need it.]

The book answered her question with the knowledge she already possessed.

Glancing beside the book, she noticed Jern’s Encyclopedia of Deep Sea Creatures.

Her deliberation was long. For nearly an hour, she stared at the bottle.

-Click.

Her conclusion was to close the lid.

At this point, however the other elves lived their lives was no concern of hers.

She smiled lightly, opened the Encyclopedia, and winced at the grotesque illustration of the “Barnacle” on the last page.

‘His drawing skills…’

Jern was always growing.

This time, though, it was a rather unnecessary kind of growth.

***

After she had actually been of help to me,

Elysia found her motivation.

“I, I was, you know…I was beaten ever since I was little…and then…um…”

“What did they hit you with? A club? A spear? A sword? Arrows?”

“Uh, um, u-usually wine bottles?”

“Wine? Beer? Glass, right? How thick was it?”

Thanks to that, Damyu was having a thoroughly miserable time…

Damyu, now treated entirely as a test subject, seemed, unexpectedly, to be fairly content with her current life.

I deserved some credit for that. I had made it clear that she was the type who could escape from anywhere no matter where she was locked up, so they had shifted from torture and threats to persuasion.

Damyu had jumped at the offer, and in exchange became a prisoner who was not quite a prisoner, obligated to answer every summons…

And right now, she was squirming under a barrage of questions.

“Hmm, I see, I see…”

Elysia, brimming with enthusiasm, jotted down every word Damyu said, pondered for a good while, then nodded.

“Alright, now try using your ability on me!”

“B-but won’t that get me killed?”

Damyu looked over at me anxiously. I was sitting in a nearby chair with my hand submerged in a canteen.

“I won’t kill you. As long as you don’t cross the line.”

“What line?”

“Just use your judgment.”

“Eek, eek…”

With a terrified expression, Damyu barely glanced at Elysia’s feet.

The floor began to ripple and soften, and before long, Elysia’s feet sank slightly into it.

“Whoa! What is this? The floor is all squishy! Kind of slimy too…”

Elysia flailed around in surprise, then quickly caught herself and put on a serious expression again.

“Ahem, anyway, good. I think I’m starting to understand. Here, you step in too.”

“Okay…”

Damyu promptly sank her own feet deep in.

The two had a considerable height difference, but now they were nearly at eye level.

Elysia closed her eyes and murmured something.

“Swamp, swamp, swamp…”

“…Huh?”

From the outside, nothing seemed to have changed, but…

The floor where Elysia stood no longer shifted.

It looked as though someone had done a poor plastering job, with only footprints left imprinted in the surface.

Elysia looked a little tired, but she smiled proudly.

“Done! I did it!”

“W-whoa! You really did! My legs won’t move… they won’t move?”

“Impressive.”

The swamp had been neutralized.

Elysia had understood Damyu, and through that understanding, she had negated the very concept of swamp. As a result, Damyu was now trapped as if locked in a prison made of marble.

“U-um. How do I get out of this?”

“Now I really feel like I’ve got the hang of it!”

Elysia trotted over to me and launched proudly into an explanation.

“What I do is embrace the person I’ve touched and pull them toward me!”

“Pull them?”

“Yeah. So like, people stuck in bad worlds, like Jern or other Fallen, I kind of yank them out like this, so they can be in the same place as me!”

“I’d appreciate it if you could pull me out too…”

Ignoring Damyu’s wailing, I nodded.

“I see. Pulling, huh… That’s a nicer way to put it than cutting.”

It was closer to guidance than severance. Of course, that was just how she, still a child, perceived it, but it was also true that it suited her far better.

“Good job. You’ve improved a lot compared to before.”

“Hehe.”

It was not just flattery. Elysia was truly progressing at a remarkable pace.

Even now, it had taken her less than thirty minutes to understand and redirect Damyu’s world. Eventually, she might be able to do it in just a few minutes.

The most disappointing part was that it did not last, but surely a solution for that would come in time. As I patted her head in admiration, she looked at me curiously and asked,

“What about you, Jern?”

“…I’m getting nowhere.”

The canteen was the same temperature as before I had put my hand in.

No, if anything, it might have gotten even warmer…

I had tried everything I could think of, but the Extreme Ice world remained out of reach.

“I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do.”

There was nothing inside Decay’s body.

Naturally, there were no clues for activating any Extreme Ice ability either. In the end, all I could do was keep my hand in this canteen and try whatever I could until something changed.

The Deep Sea Creatures would gradually acquire the Extreme Ice ability, and if I alone made no progress in the meantime, I would have done nothing but pile more Burdens onto myself.

When I said this bitterly, Elysia watched my expression and cheered me on.

“It’ll work out! You’re smart, Jern!”

“Thanks for saying that, at least.”

“Oh, then how about we go somewhere to clear your head?”

“…Clear my head? Where?”

“There’s some kind of event, or something, happening in the Capital, and they’re doing plays and a special market is opening! How about we go check it out?”

Elysia was clearly just excited to go herself, but still.

Well, staying here was not going to solve anything, and I wanted to grant Elysia’s requests as much as I could.

I nodded in agreement.

“I mean, sitting around here isn’t going to make things happen…”

As if she had been waiting for exactly that, Elysia dashed off to grab her bag and was out the door before I even finished speaking.

“W-wait, me too…”

It was a beautiful day.