43 — Chapter 43

Ignoring the commotion around her, Deborah suddenly went limp, spreading her arms wide across the bed.

‘I feel it…! Right now… I can feel the universe…!’

The microcosm that constructs the human body.

She thought of that tiny universe, containing thousands of lives, merging with the great cosmos through a cycle of creation and destruction.

Closing her eyes rapturously, Deborah contemplated silence, death, and truth from a small corner of the profound and vast fundamental principles of the universe.

‘Oh! The exploding light, the colliding life. The breath of truth blowing across the great cosmos, a body like a tripod howling, at times stagnating, seeking expression, moving, wandering—the radiance of a sad yet beloved impulse emerging from the outer shell of consciousness, turning the circle of the Tri-Dosha, aiming for the Sattva of Ayus, am-shoy-skwplpwjna-csp-iskl—’

The rest was beyond words.

Those around her were equally speechless.

Faced with Deborah, who had suddenly taken on an ecstatic expression, then screamed, and then looked as if she were about to take flight from the bed like a bird, the maids finally broke free from their paralysis and leaped to their feet.

Their arrogant mistress, after a massive tumble on the bed, was thrown against the floor and vanished from sight.

They scrambled toward the bed to check on her, but—

“…!”

Eventually, the “mistress” picked herself up from the floor, and the sight caused every single person there to scream in unison.

“WHO THE HECK ARE YOUUUUU!?”

Where there had once been a plump, unhealthy-looking woman, there now stood a slender, healthy-complexioned young noblewoman with adorable, round eyes.

Lucas was also stunned, but remembering that the person before him was a young lady, he quickly turned to face the wall.

Behind him, a beautiful girl in her disheveled underwear let her gaze wander with a hazy, unfocused look.

“Wh… where am I…?”

As she looked around in a dreamlike state, there wasn’t a trace of the dark circles that had once plagued her eyes.

Her straw-colored hair, which should have been dry and brittle, now boasted a glossy wheat-gold sheen reminiscent of a harvest field. Her body, once sagging, now traced feminine curves that could only be described as ideal.

And what’s more—as if all the excess meat from her entire body had been gathered in her chest, her bust had been “violently” enhanced.

Elma held out a mirror with a click, and Deborah’s eyes went wide.

As if witnessing a miracle, she touched the girl in the mirror and her own cheeks over and over. On the verge of tears, she turned back to Elma.

“I can’t believe it…! What on earth did you do!?”

The skin color was different.

The luster of the hair was different.

If that were all, it would be one thing, but her body lines were that of a completely different person.

Elma tilted her head, appearing puzzled.

“I simply boosted your metabolism and made your fat listen to reason.”

“In what world—!?”

In that instant, Deborah, Irene, the maids, and even Lucas—who was still facing the wall—screamed with their hearts in perfect sync.

You can communicate with fat!?

The Tamer of Fat—Elma—however, seemed entirely oblivious to her own abnormality.

She merely inspected Deborah thoroughly, gave a satisfied nod, and asked quietly.

“How do you feel, Lady Deborah? Don’t you think you look quite beautiful now?”

“Eh…”

Having lost the thread of the conversation, Deborah reflexively peered into the mirror again.

Reflected there was a lovely girl who certainly carried the resemblance of the mother once called the “Sun.” Not to mention, two very bountiful swells.

“I’m beautiful… so, so beautiful…”

She still couldn’t believe this was her.

“Tell me, are you a Holy Medical Mentor, or a mage, or something? To take the ugly me, leave not a shred behind, and transform me like this—”

“No, Lady Deborah.”

Elma cut her off just as Deborah began to murmur with a sigh of admiration and a look of near-worship.

“I simply boosted your metabolism and requested your meat to move to its proper positions. This is your original form.”

“My original form…”

“I shall ask you once more. You claimed that you were plain because of your ‘Miasma-Weak’ constitution, and that it is only natural for a plain person to harass a beauty. Therefore, your harassment of Irene should be forgiven. …Is that, in fact, the truth?”

The question made her flinch.

Raising her head to stare at the bespectacled maid, Deborah answered in a trembling voice.

“No…”

No.

Because right now, she wasn’t an ugly woman.

Even if she was Miasma-Weak, she could be this beautiful—no, she was supposed to have been this way all along.

Now she understood.

Deborah had been “ugly” not because the miasma had ravaged her body, but because she had used that as an excuse to shut herself in the mansion and live a life of self-indulgence.

The proof was that even something like a bug shrouded in a tiny amount of miasma caused her no problems at all when ingested.

“It was me… I was the one who was wrong…”

This girl had said she would overturn Deborah’s argument from its very foundation.

In practice, she had done exactly that.

More than just her argument, the very values Deborah had clung to had been upended.

Now that her stubbornness and prickly attitude had been melted away, Deborah found herself able to apologize with a sincerity that surprised even her.

“I’m sorry. I was… I was wrong.”

Admitting her fault resonated strangely within her; it was as if all the messy, disorganized feelings in her heart were suddenly pulled into a single, straight line.

Deborah finally understood that she had been hurting all this time.

“I… I was just sulking. Ever since that day… the day I collapsed after touching the scales of the Demon Moth.”

The incident in the vineyard that had triggered her withdrawal from the world—the truth was, she had gone there fueled by her own sense of justice.

As the daughter of the Lord, she wanted to inspect the lands. To inherit the will of her mother, who had passed away just days prior, and to understand the fields as the dependable next mistress of the house.

And yet, she had collapsed.

Her skin had broken out, and her body had swelled.

In that moment, she had thought: I tried to do something good for the territory, and this is the thanks I get? How cruel.

She felt miserable. Truly, utterly miserable.

“I pitied myself… and even as my body grew heavier and my skin grew coarser, I believed the root cause was what happened that day. I thought, ‘I scarred my body for the sake of the land, I’m a pitiful woman.’ And yet, I wondered why no one would praise me or comfort me… That’s what I believed.”

But that wasn’t it.

The reason Deborah had let her health decline was her own doing.

When she realized that, her face felt like it was on fire from sheer shame.

“I… I… please, forgive me… Lady Irene… and everyone else I’ve taken my frustrations out on until now.”

Her plea for forgiveness was as faint as a mosquito’s hum.

As Deborah muttered with her head bowed, Irene and the other maids—who had kept their distance until then—exchanged brief glances.

Then, with a small clearing of throats, they each offered her a gentle, respectful bow.

“—Of course we do.”

That was the signal of their reconciliation.

Deborah, her mind and body now completely purified, blushed happily at the response.

There was no trace left of the haughty, unattractive woman. There was only the figure of a poignant, lovely young girl.

While Deborah approached the maids and let them briskly help her into a dress, someone nearby spoke to Elma with eyes as dull as a dead fish.

“—Hey, Elma.”

It was Lucas. Until this morning, he had been at his wit’s end due to Deborah’s obsession with him, but now his existence had been completely forgotten.

“You… what on earth have you done…?”

“Eh?”

Ignoring the dark clouds hanging over Lucas, Elma tilted her head with a look of genuine confusion.

Lucas thought to himself that behind those glasses, she probably had the most sincerely puzzled expression in the world.

“I don’t know what you mean… I simply performed some maintenance to help Lady Deborah become beautiful, which in turn corrected her irritating words and actions stemming from her inferiority complex.”

“No, you…”

To be blunt, she had gone way beyond the dimension of “becoming beautiful.”

Do you usually open someone’s chakras during maintenance? Do you completely remodel their physique and appearance?

And do you really just describe a Count’s daughter’s behavior as ‘irritating’ to her face?

So many retorts bubbled up at once that he found himself at a loss for words.

As Lucas’s lip twitched, Elma suddenly looked up, a glint reflecting off her glasses.

“By the way, how did I do, Your Highness?”

“Huh?”

For some reason, she looked incredibly proud of herself.

Elma looked straight up at Lucas and declared in a tone that was, perhaps, a bit bouncy.

“This time, I managed to get properly angry at an objectively unreasonable situation. Furthermore, I succeeded in eliciting an apology from my opponent without straying from the path of humanity, both legally and ethically. This means… wouldn’t this be a situation described by ‘that’ specific word?”

“…”

Did she really think that after “magically remodeling” a human being, rebuilding their spirit from the ground up, and revolutionizing the field of weight-loss aesthetics, she still hadn’t strayed from the path of humanity?

Sensing a bad omen, Lucas tried his best to keep his voice calm as he pointed it out to her.

“…Look, Elma. Even if you were angry about Lady Deborah’s behavior, it’s a miracle that the damage was contained to this level. And legally and ethically speaking, there might indeed be no problem with your actions. But, listen. Normally, humans don’t remodel someone’s appearance and personality from the root just by rubbing them with their hands—”

“Right, right, that’s exactly it. It would have been much more effective and faster if I had used a scalpel for plastic surgery or performed liposuction. But I thought performing invasive surgery in this setting wouldn’t be ‘normal,’ so I decided against it.”

“What?”

It wasn’t because Lucas was foolish that he couldn’t understand Elma’s logic.

As Lucas stood there agape, Elma pushed up the bridge of her glasses with pride.

“I didn’t stain my hands with blood, and I reached a reconciliation through purely verbal and physical dialogue—”

She asked him: “Surely, this counts as ‘normal,’ right?”

The space froze.

An indescribable silence stretched between the two of them.

She was looking up at him with such focus, like a dog wagging its tail.

The way her eyes—well, physically, her lenses—sparkled as she waited for her “normal” evaluation (a compliment) was almost endearing.

Lucas steeled himself and exhaled.

“Elma… you…”

Forcing himself not to be swayed by her cuteness, he spoke in a low voice.

Because beyond her—behind Elma’s back—a phenomenon was occurring that he simply could not overlook.

The fact that she had dynamically transformed a human being with her miraculous techniques was, of course, shocking enough, but—

“Normally, I don’t think the person you’ve reconciled with is supposed to look at you with the fanatical gaze of someone seeing God while offering up prayers.”

The formerly haughty and plain—now pure and beautiful—daughter of a Count was kneeling with her hands clasped together, looking up at Elma in a trance.

“I offer you my deepest gratitude, Lady Elmaaaa…” she whispered.