Chapter 122

Chapter 122. He Needs Looking After

“I’m going to take a short vacation.”

It happened one day.

The moment I came out of the Maze Forest and saw Grandpa Alo waiting for me with an expression that said he had been preparing a long lecture, those were the first words out of my mouth.

I had played the game every single day without missing even one, and I had never once said that I wanted a vacation or even a break.

So naturally, Grandpa Alo was startled.

“A vacation? You?”

“Yes.”

“…I heard you suffered a terrible defeat in the Demonic Realm. What are you planning?”

“Planning? I’m not planning anything….”

I understood why he was suspicious.

Ever since the day the village chief and I had started working on the scenario for the Empire’s destruction, Grandpa Alo had stubbornly followed our every move.

Of course he would be nervous.

But this time was different.

I genuinely wanted to take a vacation.

“It’s for mental care.”

“I doubt your mind will recover just because you take a short vacation.”

“Haha. I don’t mean me.”

After briefly explaining things to the others, I returned to reality.

This place had once been horrible.

Then, for a while, I had thought, Maybe it isn’t actually that bad?

But after thinking about it again, it really wasn’t that great.

And the reason I came back was…

…to make breakfast for a kid.

“Can you really go back to your original world using that? It just looked like you were sleeping.”

Aien, who still couldn’t remove the bandages covering her face, spoke while hugging Modak, who was sleeping soundly.

I silently nodded, turned on the gas stove, and started frying some eggs.

This was strange.

Having another person inside my home made me feel a little uncomfortable.

Awkward, too.

My whole body felt strangely stiff.

“You haven’t eaten, right?”

“No. Honestly, I don’t really want to eat anything right now. I can still taste blood in my mouth.”

“…What kind of plastic surgery leaves you like that?”

“I don’t know either. I was asleep.”

Aien had been like this since yesterday.

Sometimes, I would think, Yeah, this is definitely the Aien I know.

Then suddenly, the traitorous woman would show through.

Aien herself seemed extremely confused by it.

For a while, it seemed I would have to focus more on taking care of Aien’s mental state than playing the game.

I thought she’d be fine because Pai was perfectly okay… Haa….

Pai also had Lucy Lowell’s memories.

Because she had simply said that, I had only thought, Oh, I see.

But if someone entered another person’s body while possessing every single one of that person’s memories, of course it would be confusing.

I had never even considered it.

She pretends she’s fine, but she can’t even sleep properly.

She would collapse from exhaustion and fall asleep, only to suddenly sit up again and scream.

Thanks to that, I had stayed awake all night with her.

She kept acting as though nothing was wrong, but inside, she was still completely confused.

At least Aien was the one currently in control.

That much was fortunate.

“…It seems this body was receiving an IV until yesterday. It feels like it’s been a long time since she ate real food.”

Hmm.

I really didn’t want to hear that.

I had pushed the thought aside for now, but hearing something like that only made me wonder whether this child had lost her body because of me.

The chairman was the true cause.

And if we had left her alone, she would still have been lying unconscious in a bed, surviving only through nutrients from an IV.

No.

If all they had done was leave her lying in a bed, that probably would have been considered good treatment.

Her brain was dead, but her heart was still beating.

Did that count as death or not?

And was modifying that dead body like this morally acceptable or not?

“Just eat for now.”

“Okay. This is pretty luxurious for breakfast. There’s even meat.”

If this had happened inside the game, maybe I could have ignored it.

But this was reality.

The traitorous woman had truly been a human who lived in the same world as me.

She might have been someone I normally wouldn’t care about at all.

But because I had stepped into her life and interfered with it, I felt a sense of responsibility.

Don’t think about it too much.

Right now, I had no idea how much of this had been part of the chairman’s plan.

I didn’t even know how much of what the chairman had told me was true.

For example, when I learned that the chairman had called Secretary Lee, it honestly felt like someone had struck me in the back of the head.

Why?

Secretary Lee should have absolutely nothing to do with any of this.

Maybe the chairman had simply wanted to eliminate him while he had the chance.

Or maybe even that had been part of some plan involving me.

I had no way to know.

My opponent was the chairman.

A man who knew an unbelievable amount of information and possessed enormous power.

The same man who had stolen twenty whole years of my life.

“…Ahh, my head hurts.”

“Mister, don’t talk to yourself when someone is sitting right in front of you.”

“Okay.”

When the world started behaving like a fantasy story, just how much was I allowed to behave like a fantasy novel character myself?

It was complicated.

For someone like me, it felt like the kind of question I could think about for my entire life and eventually answer with—

Ah, screw it. I don’t know.

Tsk.

This was why you shouldn’t do things in the heat of the moment.

Once emotions took control of your body, you acted recklessly, and then afterward you ended up regretting everything.

“Mm, that was good. I thought you only liked weird things, Mister, but apparently you can make normal food too.”

“Yeah… Come here for a second.”

Without any hesitation or suspicion, Aien casually walked toward me.

For some reason, I was the one who stepped backward.

It wasn’t like I had much experience being this close to another person….

How many years had I spent living alone, whether by choice or because circumstances forced me to?

My social skills were terrible, and I was selfish.

That was probably why I was trying to just move past what had happened to the traitorous woman.

Yeah.

If someone suddenly told me that from now on I had to care about the lives of complete strangers whose faces I had never even seen, my head would probably fill with question marks.

Why should I?

…Wait.

Am I a psychopath?

Is that it?

No.

Right?

Rustle.

I slowly removed the bandages covering Aien’s face.

She had every reason to dislike it, but Aien quietly waited for me to continue without complaining.

From the moment I had first met the traitorous woman, I had thought she resembled Aien.

But after the plastic surgery, she truly looked exactly like the Aien I had seen inside the game.

However, because the surgery had been done in such a hurry, the surgical marks were still clearly visible.

If she was left like this, her face would probably be covered in scars.

“…How did they change your eye color? Contact lenses?”

“What, suddenly worried about me now? Feels like they put someone else’s eyes into my head. Fuck, my head hurts, so stop asking so many questions.”

“You keep switching back and forth.”

“It’ll probably be like this for a while. A created soul entered a dead body. Still, I doubt it’ll take very long before I disappear completely.”

If I used the Flow, I could probably reconstruct her face again.

But that would hurt too much.

For now, I decided to simply check her condition and wrap the bandages around her face again.

There was one other unusual thing besides her face.

The scales and jewel-like parts that had appeared when she merged with the Sea Dragon Armor were now growing from Aien’s arms even in reality.

Maybe that was why she had become so ridiculously strong.

Another difference was her height.

The traitorous woman had originally been shorter than Aien.

But if the chairman had truly been trying to create Aien, I would have expected him to alter something like that as well.

The fact that he deliberately hadn’t done so made me wonder if there was another reason.

Considering the chairman’s abilities, increasing a kid’s height by ten centimeters probably wouldn’t even be difficult for him.

Aien was sitting on the floor, staring directly at me.

I sat across from her and stared back while thinking.

…Wait.

How am I maintaining eye contact with her right now?

My God.

Have I become the second person in the world who can actually look Aien directly in the eyes?

Since she had become some strange mixture of Aien and the traitorous woman, calling her my daughter as casually as before felt slightly awkward now.

Interesting.

“Do you know anything else?”

“My memories are blurry. I remember being trapped somewhere in a completely white room, but I only have fragments of memories from the laboratory. I wasn’t in my right mind. I do remember there being other children besides me.”

The chairman had said something about Lucy Lowell being an incomplete result.

If that was true, were the children the traitorous woman remembered involved in other experiments?

Or had the chairman lied to me?

Had he already been researching what Lucy Lowell had done?

I really can’t come to any conclusions about this.

…Should I raid the place again?

It probably wouldn’t be easy this time.

That man had manipulated me for twenty years.

At this point, I was becoming suspicious that even my attack yesterday had somehow been used by him.

Was this how conspiracy theorists ended up falling deeper and deeper into conspiracy theories?

“…For now, should we go buy some daily necessities?”

“…Ah. For me?”

“Who else in this house needs daily necessities besides you?”

At my words, Aien slowly glanced around my tiny room.

“Mister, I don’t think you’re exactly living a very human life either. Why are the towels in the bathroom so damp?”

“….”

When I failed to answer properly, she picked up my blanket, sniffed it once, and glared at me.

N-No!

Sure, it had been a while since I washed the blanket!

But it wasn’t that smelly!

It didn’t smell like mold or anything!

“The blanket smells too.”

“Ugh! N-No, it doesn’t!”

“It’s because you don’t wash things properly. Have you never done laundry before?”

Damn it.

Was Aien seriously going to nag me even in reality?

It felt so incredibly like Aien that I couldn’t even properly describe the feeling.

“Try washing a blanket by hand yourself. Do you know how hard it is to hand-wash a blanket?”

“Why would you hand-wash it when you can use a washing machine…? Fine. We’ll deal with that after we come back.”

I searched through the house and found a mask, sunglasses I didn’t even know I owned, one of my hoodies that was a little too big for Aien, and an old padded jacket that I had barely been able to wear when I was younger.

Aien put them on and gestured for me to hurry up and guide her.

…Strange.

This was definitely my house.

So where the hell had all this stuff come from?

Had Pai secretly picked them out when we went shopping together before?

“Is there anything you need?”

“Clothes first. And besides that, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and shampoo. Why did you leave the empty shampoo bottle in the bathroom?”

“What are you talking about? If you put water inside, you can use it a few more times.”

Hahaha!

I might be slightly lazy when it came to laundry, but I cared quite a lot about cleanliness!

I even kept my room nice and clean!

Hahaha!

“…Follow me.”

With a slightly irritated voice, Aien grabbed my hand and headed toward the front door.

Was there some kind of problem?

While we waited for the elevator, Aien searched through the traitorous woman’s memories and rapidly formed a shopping plan in her head.

She kept muttering to herself.

Just buying everything I could hear her mentioning sounded like it was going to cost a fortune.

Did girls really need that many daily necessities?

“Haa… There’s way too much to buy… It can’t be helped. Today, we’ll only buy what we absolutely need. We can order everything else online.”

“Wow, Aien. You’re adapting really quickly.”

“If I don’t adapt quickly, you’re going to keep living like this.”

“Why? Is there a problem?”

Aien was still having difficulty walking and staggered every few steps.

So I carried her on my back as we left the apartment and caught a taxi.

I had thrown out the question without much thought.

But Aien’s answer came back covered in thorns.

“Do you want me to go through everything one by one? First of all, why are you still using a toothbrush whose bristles are completely worn out?”

“Hey, do you know how expensive toothbrushes are?”

“They’re not!”

“Come on. You just don’t know.”

“Sorry, but this girl lived a pretty difficult life herself, and even she thinks it’s ridiculous for someone who lives in an apartment like that to complain that one toothbrush is expensive! Stop being so stingy!”

Maybe because she possessed memories from two completely opposite lives, Aien spoke as though she had actually had a conversation with the traitorous woman.

Most likely, Aien’s own feeling of I don’t understand this at all had been covered by the traitorous woman’s memories and the resulting sense of disbelief.

Still, when she concentrated, the sudden changes in her speech became less frequent.

Soon enough, just like Pai, she would probably be able to fully separate herself from the traitorous woman.

“You’re not listening to me, are you?”

“No, no. I’m listening.”

For her own clothes, Aien simply entered some random shop we passed where each outfit cost five thousand won.

She quickly picked out whatever fit her body, then climbed onto my back again and told me we should go buy the daily necessities.

The shop owner saw Aien covered in bandages and was so shocked that she looked at us with pity and gave us a discount of several thousand won.

That left quite an impression on me.

Even more impressive was how brightly Aien smiled the moment she heard the word discount.

“Oh, this is cheap. Let’s buy this.”

“Mister! How can someone who claims he lived in terrible poverty choose something that easily? Look around more and check properly before buying!”

“Uh… O-Okay….”

“Give me your phone! Seriously, why don’t you use the internet when you live in a world where you can search for everything?”

It took thirty minutes just to buy laundry detergent and fabric softener.

Most of that time went like this—

“What do you think of this scent?”

“This one smells too strong. You don’t like scents like that, right?”

“Just because I said not to buy the cheapest one doesn’t mean you should immediately grab the expensive one!”

“Huh? The internet isn’t working. What? You use a budget phone plan…? Someone with that much money… Fine. Do whatever you want about that.”

That was how thirty minutes disappeared.

When I told her how much money I had in my bank account, she only became stricter.

“There are actually a lot more things I’d like to buy, but they’re not exactly daily necessities, so we can take our time.”

“Huh? There’s more?”

“Things that make life more comfortable. You don’t even have a washing machine, Mister.”

“If you want to use a washing machine, you can just go to a laundromat. The closest one is… what, about a thirty-minute walk?”

“Who goes somewhere that far away just to do laundry?!”

“Haha! True. But paying money every time I do laundry makes me feel like I’m dying inside.”

“….”

Haha.

When I had gone to the department store with Pai, the prices had gone so far beyond what I considered acceptable that my brain simply stopped processing them.

But shopping for ordinary daily necessities like this?

There was so much to talk about.

It was actually pretty nice.

“…Mister….”

“What?”

“I’ll work hard…!”

Aien’s eyes were burning with determination.

Well, seeing her energetic like this was much better than seeing her depressed.

Still, I had no idea what she was so determined about.

Was this what puberty was like?

My own puberty had been covered entirely in depression, so I had no idea.

Besides, Aien’s body was still in poor condition.

What did she mean by work hard?

Until she recovered, she needed to rest.

“What are you talking about? Your body isn’t even healthy yet. Just rest.”

“No. Mister, you need someone to look after you. If you have money, then spend at least some of it!”

“Hey, I do spend what I have! Do you know how expensive these clothes are?”

“What about anything besides those?”

“…Hmm… Uh….”

Now that she mentioned it…

There really wasn’t anything.

The gym membership I regularly paid for was probably the last luxury I had left.

Still.

Me?

Needing someone to look after me?

How many years had I lived alone already?

“I’ll work hard!”

“Good grief… Do whatever you want.”

Still, this was better than Levi interfering with every single thing I did and lecturing me about it.

Aien only nagged me once and moved on.

That was much easier to handle.

I should think positively.

I had already survived Levi.

Yeah.

I could handle this.

“…Huh? Why does this feel strange? It feels like our positions somehow got reversed. Like the guest suddenly became the master.”

“Mister, this is that thing, right? An Avatar or whatever?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah.”

“Tsk. It’s ridiculously expensive. Should I find a used one?”

…Was it just my imagination?