38. Lillian (2)

Lillian hummed a tune to herself as she tipped the kettle. A fragrant, herbal scent rose as the clear tea streamed in a thin line into the cup.

But I couldn’t quite bring myself to touch it.

Eve’s warning echoed around in my head. Eleven percent more, and Lillian would shed her human shell and awaken as a full-fledged demon.

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

I swallowed dryly.

Up to now, I hadn’t been all that worried about DV, and for a simple reason.

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. For the time being, I’d written off the risk of NPCs demonifying at all.

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 worried a little about Lucius, whose head had to be in pieces after he failed the Trial of Arms. But no matter how far his mind sank, there was no way his number was hitting 89%.

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

She poured tea without a care, smiled bright, tossed off 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, past eighty, an NPC either lost all sense of self or flew into a berserk rage. That was the rule. And yet here was Lillian, sipping tea in perfect composure.

“What? Are you worried I dosed it with poison?”

Lillian pushed the cup toward me with a beaming smile.

“Have you ever seen a big sister feed her little brother poison? It’s a tea that’s good for calming the nerves. I made it because I was worried my little surprise experiments had startled you, so hurry up and drink!”

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

“The scent’s nice.”
“Right?”

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

Maybe this tea was what kept her demonification from progressing.

Turning the thought over, I asked,

“Is there really nobody here besides you?”

Living alone in a place like this cottage simply didn’t add up by any ordinary reading of it.

“Mm-hm, I’m the only person here.”

The answer was a little strange, but for now I let it ride and kept the conversation going.

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

I lost my words. Of course someone’s DV would rot like this after that long cut off from everyone.

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

But she’d just told me a second ago that she was alone. …Wait a minute?

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

Right then, outside the window, the vines I’d cut earlier reappeared. They swayed side to side, as if waving a hand. And Lillian, gazing out at them through the glass, waved back.

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

Instead of answering, Lillian rested her chin on her hand and stared at me intently.

“Before that — why did you come?”

I could feel her deliberately steering away from the research. No need to go poking a sensitive hornets’ nest.

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

I’d used the institutional title ‘head of the house’ on purpose, instead of ‘Father.’ I wanted to see how she felt about Kairon.

“Why would Papa want that?”
“That part, I don’t know either. Probably he wants to tell you in person once he sees you.”
“Hmm.”

She pursed her lips into a pout, the look of someone with no interest at all. Still, an order was an order, and 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 refuse?”
“Hmm, it’s not that I want to refuse…”

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 instant a deeply troubled look crossed her face. And then.

“Your wishes are what matter most, Sis.”

She papered over it at once with an unbothered smile. Anyone watching would have read it perfectly: torn, but bravely trying not to let it show. The complete 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 rose to my feet.

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

I left her with 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. Not a flicker of hesitation, not a trace of lingering attachment.

After walking for a while.

The vines Lillian had called her friends came 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 deciding whether to give one a pat when it happened.

— Don’t go.

A voice came out of the mouths dotting the vines. Lillian’s voice.

— 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 sharp enough that I could almost have wondered whether this was even the same person. She’d gone terribly composed, her bearing low, almost resigned.

“It’s all right. I’m curious why you’re like this, Sis.”
“Like I told you earlier, right? That I’ve been doing the most boring research in the world.”

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

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

I leaned in, listening. I had a strong feeling something hugely 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 — that I wanted to live somewhere with no people.”

Her words were piling up into something I couldn’t square with common sense. She was poisoned, but the poison didn’t kill her directly. She hadn’t wanted to die, so she’d moved off 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 settle? No way…?

DV, at its core, fed on human negative emotion. And all those negative emotions traced back to human relationships. Lillian had figured out, on pure instinct, the true identity of the thing gnawing at her mind.

“Before you became alone — how was the poison tormenting you, Sis?”
“…I had nightmares. No — not just in dreams. Even in real life, I was constantly seeing auditory and visual hallucinations.”
“Could you tell me what you were seeing?”

At my question, Lillian’s 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…”

Lillian 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 your neck.”
“…”
“You couldn’t breathe; you were flailing, trying to get away from me. Even as your face was turning purple, I didn’t let up on my grip.”

Lillian 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 were unbearable.

“After waking from a nightmare like that, my heart would swell up like it was about to burst. An overflowing urge to destroy the people I love would surge through me.”

Love, and the urge to kill. Two of the most contradictory emotions there are, coexisting in a single body.

The two collided, and neither side ever won out over the other.

To force love on a person through the appalling act of butchering their own family: that was the cruel system called DV, the engine of demonification.

“That’s why I ran. Into this forest.”

Lillian raised her head. A tear that had gathered at the corner of her eye spilled over.

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

This was poison, just as Lillian called it. If something that wouldn’t let a person live as a person wasn’t poison, then what was?

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

“Here, I started my research — 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, even without her saying it, I knew how the research had ended.

It must’ve failed.

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

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

How was anyone supposed to piece back together the mind of a family man whose family had been butchered by demons? In the end, it always came down to two options. Manage them with the most painstaking care, or…

…killed them before they demonified.

It always came down to that same binary. Now that I understood her situation, I could see exactly 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.

“Most people, when misfortune comes for them, blame somebody else — blame the world. But you didn’t, Sis. That isn’t something just anyone can do.”

I knew how staggering Lillian’s effort had been.

“Thanks. Actually — I’ve found a way to get the poison, at least partly, 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. To collect myself, I knocked back the herbal tea in one shot.

“That’s actually possible?”

Lillian filled my empty cup back up with herbal tea.

“I’ll show you.”

Lillian held her index finger out over the cup. When she shut her eyes and concentrated, a strange shimmering haze rose off her fingertip. A moment later, a single drop of dark red, viscous liquid welled up at her finger.

Plip.

The drop fell into the cup. The instant it landed, the clear tea went black in a blink and began to bubble and froth.

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

That’s an absurd amount of power.

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

Maybe even more than that.

Gulp.

I swallowed without realizing it.

If this other world handed out a Nobel Prize for the sciences, I’d have wanted to give her one. She’d done what nobody else had ever managed.

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

Unlike me, thrilled as I was, Lillian’s expression stayed dark.

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

Lillian 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 terms you’d find easy to follow… the urge that used to be ‘I want to die’ shrank into just ‘I want to cut my own body.’”

With no one around to direct her destructive impulses at, those impulses had turned on herself.

“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.”

She’d managed to give her DV reading a physical form and draw it out of her body. But even so. Were NPCs fated to fall into corruption simply incapable of ever clawing back to their right minds?

KA-RUMMMBLE—.

Just then Lillian gestured, and the floor shuddered. A vine came shooting up out of it.

Where a flower should have been, a mouth fitted with hideous teeth gaped and snapped shut, a shape I couldn’t get used to no matter how many times I saw it. Lillian stroked the grotesque thing as though it were the most lovable creature in the world.

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