38. Lillian (2)

Lillian hummed to herself as she tipped the kettle, and a thin stream of clear tea ran into the cup, bringing a fragrant, herbal scent up with it. I couldn’t make myself reach for it, though.

The warning kept circling in my head. Another 11%, and she’d drop her human shell and wake as a full-fledged demon.

“Ta-da~ Special blend, delivered right to you!”
“…Thanks.”

I swallowed, dry-mouthed.

The reason I hadn’t worried much about DV until now was simple.

Back when I was playing the game, the war with the demons was in full swing, so it was common to see surviving NPCs go through demonification.

But in this world no war against the demons had been declared yet, so for the moment I’d crossed demonifying NPCs off my list of risks.

Even Valerian, who I’d pegged as the highest-risk case, stayed in the 40% range under normal circumstances — and didn’t break 60% even in full battle-maniac mode.

I’d been a little worried about Lucius, whose head had to be in pieces after he failed the Trial of Arms, but however low he sank, there was no way his number was hitting 89%.

“Why aren’t you drinking it!? It’s good!”

She poured tea so peacefully, smiled so brightly, tossed off her jokes, and all the while her insides were boiling like a reactor seconds from going critical. I couldn’t believe it.

She’s keeping her sanity in that state?

Normally, once you crossed 80, you either lost your sense of self or went berserk. That was the standard. Yet here was Lillian, sipping tea and perfectly composed.

“What? Are you worried I dosed it with poison?” She pushed the cup toward me, beaming. “Have you ever seen a big sister feed her little brother poison? This tea’s good for calming your nerves. I made it in case my little surprise experiments spooked you, so hurry up and drink!”

She kept pressing, so I had no choice but to pick up the cup and wet my lips.

“Smells nice.”
“Right?”

The herbal aroma and the warmth of the tea cleared my head.

Maybe this tea was what kept her demonification from progressing.

Turning that over in my mind, I asked, “Is there really nobody here besides you?”

A setup like this cottage, with one person living in it alone, just didn’t add up by any common-sense reading.

“Mm-hm, I’m the only person here.”

It was a slightly strange answer, but I decided to keep the conversation going for now.

“How long have you been here?”
“Hmm, about ten years!”

I had no words. After that long in isolation, of course anyone’s DV would go bad like this.

“Weren’t you lonely?”
“Nope, I have friends!”

But she’d just told me she was alone.

…Wait a minute?

“You killed a few of them, but it’s okay. I can just bring them back.”

At that very moment the vines I’d cut earlier appeared outside the window and swayed left and right, as though waving a hand. And Lillian, looking at them through the glass, waved back.

“Oh, and I’ve been doing a bit of research, too.”
“Re…search?”
“Well, it’s the most boring research in the world, though.”
“What kind of research?”

Instead of answering, she rested her chin on her hand and stared hard at me.

“First, though, why are you here?”

I could feel her steering away from the research on purpose, but there was no need to go poking a touchy hornets’ nest.

“The head of the house ordered me to bring you back.”

I’d picked the institutional title, ‘head of the house’ rather than ‘Father’, on purpose, because I wanted to see how she regarded Kairon.

“Why would Papa want that?”
“I don’t know that either. He’ll probably tell you himself when he sees you.”
“Hmm.”

She pushed her lips into a pout. It was the face of someone not at all interested, but it was an order, so she seemed to be wrestling with it. That told me her view of Kairon wasn’t a particularly bad one.

Which made things simple.

“Do you want to say no?”
“Hmm, it’s not that I want to say no…”

I pretended to mull it over with her for a beat before answering. “If you’re really not up for it, Sis, I can tell him you couldn’t make it.”

“Hm? Are you allowed to do that?”

For the briefest of beats, I put on an enormously troubled face. And then:

“What you want is what matters most, Sis.”

I quickly pretended to be fine and said it flatly.

This way, anyone watching could see the conflict, and how hard it was being kept from showing. A completed package.

“You’re leaving already?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a lot on my plate, so I have to head back right away.”

Doubling down on the act, I got to my feet.

“Stay a little longer.”
“I’ll come again next time.”

I left her on that line, I’ll come again next time, and walked back the way I’d come without so much as a glance over my shoulder, showing not the slightest hesitation or lingering attachment.

I walked for a while.

The vines Lillian called her friends were tagging along at my heels in a little procession.

What is this, a puppy?

I’d never seen a pet vine in my life.

Mouths attached here and there… can’t exactly call them cu… nope, not cute.

I was in the middle of debating whether to give one a pat when —

— Don’t go.

A voice came out of the mouths on the vines, and it was Lillian’s.

— There’s something I want you to hear me out about.

I came back to the cottage.

“I’m sorry. You’re busy, and I’m bothering you.”

The playful tone from before had vanished without a trace. The contrast was so sharp I could almost have wondered whether this was the same person, so terribly composed now, her whole bearing low and nearly resigned.

“It’s all right. I’m curious why you’re like this, Sis.”
“I told you earlier, didn’t I? That I’ve been doing the most boring research in the world.”

I nodded, and she turned to look out the window.

“Ten years ago, I realized there was a certain kind of poison inside me.”
“Poison?”

I leaned in to listen, because I had a strong feeling something extremely important was buried in this story.

“Mm-hm. I called it poison, but it doesn’t directly take my life. Still, if I leave it alone, it’ll definitely kill me.”
“Kill you?”

Lillian furrowed her brow and nodded. “I didn’t want to die. So I asked Papa to let me live somewhere with no people.”

The words were piling up into something common sense couldn’t follow. She was poisoned, but the poison didn’t directly kill her. She didn’t want to die, so she moved somewhere with no people. What was that supposed to mean?

“Once I was alone like that, the poison inside me stopped acting up.”

So cutting off human contact made the poison stop?

No way…?

DV, at its core, fed on humans’ negative emotions, and those emotions all came from human relationships. Lillian had worked out by instinct what was eating away at her mind.

“Before you were alone, what did the poison do to you, Sis?”
“…I had nightmares. No, not just in dreams. Even in real life, I was constantly hearing and seeing things that weren’t there.”
“Can you tell me what you saw?”

At my question, her voice trembled. “I stabbed my older brothers and big sister Seraphina to death with a sword, and Father — I poisoned him to death. And — and then, Arden. Your neck…”

She bit down on her lip, unable to go on. For some reason, I felt as though I already knew what was coming next.

She continued.

“I strangled it with all my strength. When you were little, you were so much weaker than me, a sickly child. Unlike the others, I could kill you without using any tools. So I strangled you.”

“…”

“You couldn’t breathe, you were flailing, trying to get away from me, and even as your face turned purple, I didn’t let up on my grip.” She looked down at her own two hands. “And finally, when your body went limp… I was so happy I started laughing.”

She hugged her own shoulders, as if the memory was unbearable. “When I woke from a nightmare like that, my heart would swell up like it was about to burst. I would overflow with the urge to destroy the people I love, right then and there.”

Love and the impulse to kill. The two most contradictory emotions there were, coexisting at once, colliding, and neither side ever winning out over the other.

To make a person feel love through the appalling act of killing their family: that was the cruel system known as DV, the system of demonification.

“That’s why I ran. Into this forest.”

She raised her head, and a tear that had pooled at the corner of her eye dropped.

“If I wasn’t going to kill my family, I had no choice but to disappear from their lives.”

It was just as she’d said. Poison. If something that didn’t let a person live as a person wasn’t poison, what was?

But she hadn’t run away. She’d cut herself off from the world by her own hand so she could stand and fight it, and by her account she’d spent ten whole years living here alone.

“Here, I started researching a way to get rid of the poison.” Lillian wiped her tears and went on calmly. “Research into pulling this vicious poison out of my body.”

Sadly, I knew how that research had ended without her saying so.

It must’ve failed.

Once an NPC’s DV reading crossed a certain threshold, no method could bring it down.

In the end, even I never managed to crack that part of the puzzle.

How were you supposed to put back together the mind of a family man whose family had been butchered by demons? In the end, you either managed them with extreme care, or —

…killed them before they demonified.

It always came down to those two options. So now that I understood the situation, I could see why she’d called it the most boring research in the world.

“I respect your choice, Sis.”

But I wanted to applaud her, all the same.

“When misfortune comes for them, most people blame somebody else, blame the world. But you didn’t, Sis. That’s not something just anyone can do.”

I knew how staggering her effort had been.

“Thanks. Actually, I’ve found a way to get at least some of the poison out of my body.”

“Even if your effort doesn’t pay off, Sis, I’ll stay by your side and help you — wait, what?”

For a moment I doubted my ears.

“You found what?”
“I’ve developed a way to pull the poison out of my body.”

I was dumbstruck, so I downed the herbal tea in one shot to compose myself.

“That’s actually possible?”

Lillian refilled my empty cup with herbal tea. “I’ll show you.”

She held her index finger out over the cup and closed her eyes to concentrate, and a strange shimmering haze rose from her fingertip. Soon after, a single drop of dark red, viscous liquid gathered there.

Plip.

It fell into the cup, and the instant it landed, the clear tea turned black in an eye-blink and started bubbling and frothing.

I couldn’t believe it. With her own magic, Lillian had just twisted a law of the system that nobody had ever managed to beat.

That’s an absurd amount of power.

This wasn’t something to brush off with a casual “oh, neat.” If Lillian was on the team, we could bring NPCs back from the brink of demonification.

Maybe even more than that.

Gulp.

I swallowed without realizing it. If this other world had a Nobel Prize for science, I’d want to give her one. She’d done what nobody else had ever managed.

“You succeeded, so why haven’t you come back!?”

Yet for all that I was thrilled, Lillian’s expression stayed dark.

“Because it isn’t perfect.”
“…What’s the problem?”

She stared, fixated, at the now-blackened teacup. “At first I was happy too. The whispers of death that filled my head quieted down. To put it in a way you’d understand… the urge that used to be ‘I want to die’ shrank into just ‘I want to cut myself.’”

With no one around her to aim her destructive impulses at, they’d turned on her instead.

“I tried burning the extracted poison, I tried burying it in a deep hole and packing the dirt back over it, but nothing worked.” She looked down at the teacup with a bitter expression. “In a few days at most, exactly that much poison would fill back up inside me.”

So she’d managed to materialize her DV reading and pull it out of her body, but it came back. Were NPCs destined to fall into corruption simply incapable of ever returning to their right minds?

KA-RUMMMBLE—.

Just then Lillian gestured, the floor shuddered, and a vine sprouted up out of it. Instead of a flower it had a mouth fitted with hideous teeth, gaping and closing, a shape I couldn’t get used to no matter how I looked at it. Yet Lillian stroked this grotesque vine as though it were the most lovable thing in the world.

“That’s when I happened to find out. When this poison is placed inside a living vessel, it doesn’t disappear.”