My arm was broken, my whole body was covered in wounds, and my insides felt crushed. But I was standing. That was the most important fact.
Looking down at the mass clutching its stomach on the ground, I spat out a wad of bloody phlegm.
"Ptui."
It wasn't meant as an insult; something was just rising up my throat. My vision swam. The Water Barrier was so close it nearly touched my skin, and the potion’s effects were turning into side effects, demanding their price.
There was no time to savor the joy of victory; a wave of dizziness washed over me, and I collapsed to my knees. I felt like I was going to throw up. With my hands on the sandy ground, I knelt, gasping for breath.
I must have waited like that for about ten minutes. The sound of crunching footsteps approached. I let out a sigh of relief.
Thankfully, I hadn't passed out before they arrived.
"... You're late. What happened to Suirak?"
"In the end, I couldn't capture him. I came here as quickly as I could after that. But..."
Cold fingers touched my head. The nausea churning in my stomach subsided a little. As I barely managed to stop myself from gagging, I could hear the admiration in Dersia’s voice.
"Unlike me, you actually succeeded over here."
"It seems you didn't believe I could... Then why did you send me?"
"You don't seem to remember, but I never intended to send you. And, I also thought that you at least wouldn't be defeated."
"Really?"
"Yes. The mass is not from the Great System, and its only ability is to simply borrow bodies. I judged that to be slightly insufficient to kill you, who can now freely manifest the Great System. However..."
With a peculiar expression, Dersia took out a fountain pen and drew a few strokes in the air. The mass was painted over in black and then vanished as if it had never existed. She probably didn't kill it.
She must have trapped it somewhere so it couldn't kill itself.
"I truly never imagined that you would not only survive against a Red Lotus officer, but even win and capture him. Jern, you always exceed my expectations."
"If I failed, it would have all been for nothing, so I did my best."
As I spoke, trying to somehow set my broken arm, I suddenly remembered our earlier conversation.
"Come to think of it, that guy said something strange."
"What was it?"
"He said he never tortured me... Just that he threw the puppet's original body into the river? And that was me."
"It must be a lie."
Dersia dismissed it with a light shake of her head.
"At first, I also thought you were just an unbelievably unlucky child. But the hypothesis that they did something to you in your infancy is far more plausible than the probability of lightning striking a needle."
"Is that so?"
"The only things we don't know are why they tried to make you Fall before you turned ten, and the reason for what you've lost. Those are the remaining questions."
"I thought it was something another officer, one the mass didn't know about, had done..."
"This person held quite an important position in the Red Lotus. The chances of him not knowing are slim."
That certainly made more sense. As I was nodding, Dersia looked down at me and narrowed her brow.
"... But you're too severely injured. What happened?"
"It was using the bodies it stole from first-rate knights."
"Was that a problem? I heard your Tide Sense gives you an overwhelming advantage in fights against knights."
"There are some attacks you can't dodge even if you see them coming."
"Let's treat you first. We can talk about the rest later."
Dersia examined my injuries carefully, then suddenly raised her fountain pen and let a drop of ink fall onto a wound.
"Ouch. Won't my wound get infected if you drop ink on it?"
"This isn't ink."
When she rubbed the ink that had fallen, the wound was gone.
"... Huh?"
I was baffled. Wasn't healing magic supposed to not exist? I looked at Dersia with a slightly suspicious expression.
My trust in her had waned a little since the last kidnapping incident.
"This isn't some method that heals me by cutting down my lifespan, is it?"
"Look at my arm."
Dersia held out her pale, slender arm. On it was a cut identical to the one that had just vanished from my body.
"It's not healing. I'm transferring the wound to my own body."
"... I don't know what this is, but let's stop."
I was horrified and tried to refuse, but Dersia paid me no mind and dropped ink on my other wounds.
"Think about it logically."
The wound etched onto Dersia's arm healed in the blink of an eye.
"An elf's regenerative ability and that of a human child are beyond comparison. If the wounds must be transferred, then I shall take them."
"Are elves' healing abilities that exceptional?"
"You mean you didn't know?"
It seemed that elves being good healers was common knowledge in this world. Even though she was helping me— "Doesn't it hurt?"
"I am accustomed to pain."
I couldn't shake the uneasy feeling.
After finishing up some basic first aid, we returned to the kingdom and went to the room we were assigned on the top floor. It was already the dead of night.
"Seeing you both safe, I assume things went well."
"How's the prince?"
"He's sleeping soundly now."
Ciel was playfully twirling the hair of a deeply sleeping Rahyan.
"I didn't notice when he was awake, but now that he's asleep, he looks exactly like you, Jern."
It was true. With his expression hidden in sleep, the resemblance was uncanny. As I was feeling a strange mix of emotions, Dersia shot a look at me as if I were pathetic.
"It's still just a puppet. When this is over, it should be disposed of, and we should tell the king the truth."
"What? No, that's not right."
Startled, I shook my head.
"Why dispose of it? Even if it's a puppet, it can think for itself, and it helped me. I want to just leave things as they are."
"Jern, that puppet stole your life."
Dersia added, dumbfounded.
"You could have lived a life without want as the prince of a small kingdom. That puppet is in the place that should be yours."
"Rahyan didn't steal it, the Red Lotus did."
"That is true. But regardless, that puppet's position is rightfully yours, and it is also an undeniable fact that you should receive it. Are you really going to leave things as they are?"
"Things went on fine without me. There's no reason to butt in and cause a conflict."
"What about your parents? Is it acceptable for your father to never know you and live on believing a puppet is his son? Do you think that's fine?"
"It's a little sad, but you have to consider his perspective. How devastated would he be to learn that the boy he thought of as his son his whole life, whom he cherished and loved, is just a puppet, and his real son has some terminal illness and is wasting away. Let's just leave it."
"Jern."
Dersia's gaze turned frigid.
"Just say you don't want to be a prince."
"Yes. I don't want to. I really don't." I hate positions with responsibility, but positions with only responsibility are even worse.
The most dreadful thing in the world. Seeing my genuine look of disgust, she sighed and relented.
"If that's what you think, then I don't want to force you. In the first place, even if you were to become a prince here, there would be more to lose than to gain."
With that, Dersia took a small book from her robes.
"Then, let's begin the interrogation."
"Ah, yes."
Forgetting the pain in my body, I focused. A mix of excitement at the thought of finally learning a fragment of my past and anxiety over what on earth this body had gone through made me strangely agitated. Then I realized something was off and asked.
"But... are we doing it here? There are people outside, and it might get noisy at night, which could be a hassle. Shouldn't we go to a dungeon or somewhere like that?"
"This interrogation will use a slightly different method. Do not worry."
What did that mean? As I wondered, Dersia opened the small book and dropped a bit of ink onto it.
"Where is the mass?"
"It is here."
At first, I didn't understand what she meant. But as I moved closer and looked into the book, I saw the ink writhing as if it were alive, forming letters, then words, then sentences, before dissolving again. Eventually, it formed a single sentence that floated on the page.
[Where the fuck is this place] "...
Master?"
I called out to Dersia, feeling uneasy. She replied as if it were nothing.
"I have turned him into a record. It was difficult, but it was possible. No matter how much he screams, no sound will escape, so there is no need to worry."
A record.
I looked at her with pity.
"When exactly did you Fall?"
"... This is a legitimate form of magic."
"No, no matter how I look at it, this seems like a heart-realm ability..."
"This is the highest form of magic among those I can use."
"A part of me, about the size of a fingertip, is rooted in the Heavenly Realm."
"Have I not told you that the difference between the heart-realm and the Heavenly Realm is merely the difference between being a ruler of a world and a prisoner?"
When she put it like that, I had nothing to say. But it was a truly, genuinely creepy ability, so I sat a little farther away. Trapping a person in a book and turning them into a record.
In a way, it seemed like the perfect magic for Dersia.
"Let's start with the first question. We don't have much time, as we have to ask before he is completely digested."
Dersia lightly flipped a page of the book and wrote down several commands in a language I couldn't understand.
"What's the question?"
"I asked for memories related to your existence. All related records should soon appear."
Before long, a dialogue log, like a transcript of a conversation between beings, unfolded in the book.
[We have to take over the cities? Why is that necessary? Can't we just kill them all?]
[A sustainable base must exist.]
[Why?]
[Because it's necessary.]
A conversation between the mass and another officer. I couldn't tell who the other officer was. My best guess was that it was Suirak.
[I knocked out that prince brat and brought him here. Anything else?]
[Hmm... Good work.]
[What, you're just going to throw him in the river? Then I could have just killed him and brought him back.]
[Because I couldn't trust you so easily. I had to confirm it myself.]
And.
That was the end.
"...?"
"?"
We looked at each other with bewildered expressions.
"Is there nothing more?"
"... I commanded it to tell me everything it knows about you. This is likely all there is."
"So, to summarize..."
I was simply kidnapped for the sake of creating a sustainable base, and after they created an opening to put in the puppet named Rahyan, I was no longer needed and was carelessly tossed into a nearby river. To put it even more simply.
"It seems I'm really nothing special, am I?"
I was connected to the Red Lotus, but only just barely. They had never tortured me, nor had they paid me any mind. So the reason they didn't recognize me was simply because they didn't know who I was.
All they had done was toss me in a river. How could they possibly remember that?
"... I don't understand."
Dersia staggered and sat down. She looked confused.
"I had thought that even if the connection was weak, the Red Lotus had at least tortured you and then, seeing no results, abandoned you. But if even that didn't happen..."
"... Figuring out my past just got a lot harder."
I sighed, watching the deep sea creatures swimming around me. Finding the reason for their existence had just become even more of a mystery.
"Then what should we do about this?"
"It's not over yet."
She shook her head and wrote something else in the book.
"Just because we don't know the cause doesn't mean we can't find a solution. There must be a clue. I will find everything related to it."
Dersia wrote furiously with a ghastly expression. For nearly ten minutes.
"—! I've found it."
At the same time, another dialogue log was written in the book.
[Creating the Three Calamities. That is our most immediate and primary objective.]
"... Ah."
Three Calamities.
I had heard that term a few times. They had been debating amongst themselves whether I was one of the Three Calamities or not, so I had only managed to deduce that one of them was the Deep Sea. An unknown member of the Red Lotus continued in an explanatory tone, as if speaking to several people.
[The stimuli we use to make mages Fall is, in the end, an artificial burden. We must grind through hundreds of mages. And even then, using only young children, we can barely create one. This is far too inefficient; we can never reach our goal this way.]
[Well, I'm against it.]
[What's your reason?]
[So, I get that you want to apply a faint burden across the entire world.]
Though the dialogue log was still playing, I couldn't just let it go. The scale of the story was on another level. We looked at each other.
"Is something like this even possible?"
"... It is impossible. However, it is certain that this is their goal."
Regardless of our shock, the dialogue continued.
[But why the Three Calamities? That's just a legend, isn't it? Is there a reason why we specifically need their burden? What I mean is, if we spread that bastard Suirak's burden across the world right now, a thousand people would Fall in a single day.]
[Mass, you stupid bastard. A faint burden. Faint! Do you think spreading a heart-realm across the entire world is some fucking easy task?]
[So what? Is it different for the Three Calamities? Are they that much stronger when spread across the world? Even the Great Ocean's burden would only be enough to make someone Fall a little slower if they jumped. Do we really need to find them?]
[Mass, I understand your question. Perhaps because you have not lived for very long, your knowledge of the Three Calamities is lacking.]
[Of course. I'm not even sure if they actually exist. And even if they do, I don't see what's so different about them.]
[It would be best to explain this simply, considering your intellectual level.]
[What?]
The dialogue ended with the following.
[You are right. Even if it is the world of one of the Three Calamities, if it is forcibly stretched to cover the entire world, its burden will not be that strong.]
[Then what's the reason?]
[Life exists within the worlds of the Three Calamities.]
[... Life? What kind of things are they?]
[What kind of things, you ask...]
[If their burden spreads across the world, regardless of its strength, the world will transform into a place where the very act of living is a burden.]
[Because those things will roam the world.]
[Such are the beings that live in the worlds of the Three Calamities.]
I silently watched the deep sea creatures swimming around me. Even if I tried to deny it. No matter how I looked at it... ...it seemed like they were talking about me.