HALKARA BECAME CLEAN
The swamp crystals were creatures that lived in swamps. One could say they were hardy enough to live in such dirty places, but maybe they absorbed nutrients from the muddy water itself.
The reason swamps were so clouded was because all kinds of gunk sank to the bottom. Gunk full of nutrients.
In short, the swamp crystals fed on those impurities—and ate the “dirtied” parts of Halkara’s heart.
Does that even count as nutrition? Well, this was a world where spirits walked around like it was no big deal, so I would believe in creatures that received nutrition from people’s sullied hearts.
I wanted to do something about this, but also, dinner was ready. I’d deal with this later. It didn’t seem like anything was wrong with Halkara’s health anyway.
“Halkara, dinner is ready, so can you put your asceticism on pause and come to the dining room?”
“You are providing me alms, I see. I shall gladly receive them.”
Okay, now that sounded like a lie… Yeah, definitely sounded fake to me.
I finally managed to bring her to the table.
Even as we walked down the hall, she had her hands in a weird position.
“Family, let us receive our food as we give thanks to our life in the midst of nature. Thank you, vegetables. Thank you, meat.” Halkara gracefully thanked every plate on the table.
“Halkara’s broken. Bet she ate a poison mushroom,” Flatorte immediately decided.
Not too long ago, Flatorte had turned into a model child after she’d used up too much of her cold breath, so she wasn’t in a position to say much. Although Good Girl Halkara was nothing like Good Girl Flatorte.
“So Halkara got sucked into one of the swamp crystals, which seems to have cleaned her heart and mind, apparently…”
I gave a quick rundown of the swamp crystal incident.
“I see. She is indeed much calmer than I would usually expect her to be.” I had a feeling Laika approved of the current situation.
“Yes. I live life ready to wait as long and as still as need be.”
“Well, whatever… Let’s just eat… Later, I’ll ask Momma Yufufu to ask Curalina if there’s a cure (?).”
Halkara hadn’t been in the crystal for hours, so I didn’t think her personality was going to be replaced by something totally different.
—But then, Halkara suddenly shot out of her seat.
Now what?
“Aah! Miss Rosalie, you are doomed to wander this earth, never free of your enmity!” She was facing upward toward the ceiling where Rosalie was floating.
“Huh? Sis Halkara, what’s going on?”
“I shall send you to heaven. Jugem, jugem gokonos rikire!” She started reciting a strange incantation.
“Hrgh-ghaaaa! I-it hurts… I feel my chest clenching…” Rosalie was thrashing and wriggling!
“Whoa, hey! Stop, Halkara! I don’t think you’ll be able to undo that!”
“Ghosts should not exist in this world. Though I am still undergoing ascetic training, it is nevertheless my role to lead her to where she belongs.”
“No it isn’t! Seriously, stop! Stop the spell!”
I clapped my hand over Halkara’s mouth from behind, managing to stop the act.
Rosalie’s pain vanished, and she came back to life (is it okay to use that phrase with ghosts?).
“Phew… I thought I was gonna die.” Rosalie was using some questionable phrasing, too… “I saw the light for a second. So bright, like it was always midday. Was that heaven?”
“You were a second away from leaving us!”
We really needed to be careful of how we treated Rosalie… I was pretty sure she was mostly freed from any of her hatred at this point…
Okay, right. Back to dinner.
“Oh no! Madam Teacher, this cannot be!” Halkara screamed again.
Now what?!
“This knife is not made of metal, is it?!”
Sitting in front of Halkara was a wooden spoon and a metal knife.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “What about it?”
“Metal! Oh! The source of the horrid coin, the tempter and beguiler of so many! The coin is a detestable invention, the cause of betrayal among so many people!”
Now what the hell is she on about?!
“Coin is no more than metal minted into circles, yet many people mistakenly believe the purpose of life to be collecting them. No matter how much one may have, it is still nothing but metal. One cannot use them to buy tranquility of the mind. Nutri-Spirits will not bring spiritual fulfillment!”
She was insulting her own product!
“Even if one did find some peace of mind with more money, it would only invite in the dark shadow of suspicion. And those with less begin to envy those who have more. How tragic…”
Sure, that might be true, but Halkara’s opinions right now were a little extreme.
“For so long, I have spent most of my days collecting money as a company president. It was all for naught… I should have started on the path of enlightenment sooner… O gods, please forgive me…”
She was starting to rethink her past. This transformation was more radical than I initially thought.
“There are some good things about money, Halkara.”
“There are not,” she snapped.
“Well, think what you want. Eat your dinner.”
“No, I must not touch this metal knife! My hands will rot away if I do!”
“It’s not cursed!”
Hrrrm… This is getting a little extreme…
“Halkara, you can’t buy anything without money. You can’t eat anything. We need money.”
“I want to live without ever using it. To be more specific, I will fill my belly from samples at the sample food corner.”
“Cheapskate! Way to bother the store!”
At least grow your own vegetables.
“Then…don’t use the knife. Just eat. Some cultures eat with their hands.”
“Very well. Then that is what I shall do!” Halkara stuck her hands in her soup. “Ow! Now my hand shall rot away!”
“That’s because you shoved it in hot liquid!”
And the spoon is wooden, so just use that, please?
“I still need more training. My hand will burn if I place it in hot soup. I am yet far from enlightenment.”
Does enlightenment protect you from soup burns?
“You’re dumb. It’s because you didn’t cool it with cold breath.”
Flatorte, you’re the only one who can do that, but you’re on the right track anyway.
Afterward, Halkara proceeded to have a normal dinner—or so I thought, but she said things like “I will not eat meat,” which only added to the trouble. She was the one who’d said “Thank you, meat” earlier! Or maybe the influence over her was getting stronger…
After dinner, Falfa told me honestly how she felt. “Mommy, Miss Halkara’s being weird…”
This couldn’t go on any longer.
“I know. I’ll do something about it, so just hang in there, okay?”
I brought Halkara to Momma Yufufu and asked her to call up Curalina.
Curalina emerged from the next room with a really sleepy look on her face. Maybe she’d already gone to bed.
“What is it? Sleepyfish-fish-fish…”
She’s still sleepy!
“Halkara’s personality changed ever since she got sucked into the swamp crystal. Do you know a way to put her back?”
Curalina stayed silent for a while.
I wanted her to hurry up and say something, but I didn’t want to bother her too much. So I decided to wait.
She then pulled out a painting from her bag. “Look at this.”
It was a horrible picture—a whole crowd of people gleefully throwing rocks at a person clenching their head in despair. Curalina sure painted the darkest art…
“Okay, I looked at it. What are you trying to say…?”
“Humankind’s folly—no, the folly of all living creatures—knows no bounds. It is like a deep swamp. It has been the same for seventy thousand years, ever since I was born. The swamp crystal only absorbs a tiny portion of that folly, nothing beyond the reasonable limits of error.”
Oh, so she was using the picture as an aid.
“So then how do we put her back to normal?”
“…What happens to food, once eaten, when it is removed from the stomach?”
“It becomes vomit and excreta. Foul,” Halkara, who’d come along with me, replied right away. She did vomit often when she drank too much…
“Precisely. Once the swamp crystal has absorbed something, it will not come back. Jellyfish-fish-fish.”
So is Halkara going to stay like this forever…? I’m not so keen on that…
“Miss Curalina, may I accompany you on your wandering journey? I want to see the wider world! The elven forests are obstructed by trees, so I want to see all that I was never able to! Emancipation!”
Halkara was getting extra weird again!
“Don’t. You’d be a bother,” Curalina shot her down. She ignored Halkara and came to stand in front of me. “It’s nothing to worry about. No simple jellyfish could completely clean a person of their folly. Jellyfish are, in the end, jellyfish.”
“Should you be insulting jellyfish like that…?”
“I was emphasizing humankind’s folly, which means it was people I was insulting.”
Okay, fine. Still dissing jellyfish, though.
But I understood that she was trying to comfort me—I think she was trying to say time was going to solve this problem.
“But…there is one thing I refrained from telling you.” Curalina’s head drooped.
Uh-oh, hope it’s not anything too ominous!
“Swamp crystals are creatures of an entirely different type from jellyfish… But considering how they are often confused for jellyfish, I took them under my jurisdiction.”
“Spirits sure are sloppy when it comes to this stuff!”
“Still, swamp crystals are a type of tiny bug. It is still nothing you need to worry about. They cannot win against humankind’s folly. Jellyfish-fish-fish…,” Curalina said. With that, she left.
I had a feeling she’d told me something profound, but it didn’t solve anything.
“Indeed. No matter how much time passes, only a small proportion of people reach enlightenment. But realizing one’s own foolishness is an important first step.” Halkara patted me on the shoulder. “Perhaps we will soon reach the starting line.” She smiled.
“I’m trying to fix you, but you’re consoling me instead?! I don’t get it!” I sighed. “I guess we just have to wait for her to recover…”
Halkara didn’t seem to be having trouble with her daily life, so we could just wait for it to go away, but I knew we were in for a headache in the intervening days…
“Oh, Azusa, cheer up. Curalina said it will resolve itself rather quickly.” Momma Yufufu offered some words of comfort.
“Yeah. But I have a feeling Curalina’s sense of time says that a few centuries counts as ‘quick’…”
She herself said she’d been alive for seventy thousand years…
“Oh, you may be right~ I can see that~”
If Halkara stayed like this for three hundred years, I think I’d lose my mind…
The following morning, a new problem presented itself.
“Miss Halkara, you will be late if we don’t leave the house soon!”
“I do not need to make any money! The path of a company president leads away from enlightenment!”
Halkara refused to go to work at the factory. Laika was telling her it was time to go, but Halkara wouldn’t give her the time of day. She was just sitting with her arms folded.
“Laika, go ahead and tell the employees that the president is going to be out today. Things should still be operational even with her gone. I know the normal Halkara’s done well to account for things like that.”
“You may be right… The company would get thrown into chaos if she went to work like this.”
I wholeheartedly agreed. It would be a huge problem if this version of Halkara went to work and told all her employees they should stop working, or if she went around firing them all. In that case, it was better she stayed put.
That was when she emerged carrying a thick stack of papers that looked like company documents.
Was she back to normal now? Had her previous values come back now that she was thinking about Halkara Pharmaceuticals?
“I cannot run this company! I give it to any one of you!”
She was about to throw the papers, but I hurriedly stopped her. “You can’t just give up something like that! You have to keep it!”
I can’t let her near her company until she gets better…
“But we are naked the moment we are born. No one is born with a coin in the palm. And yet, we come to learn many unnecessary values and thus desire ownership over many things. Owning an entire company requires a lifestyle distant from enlightenment.”
We weren’t getting anywhere.
But then something suddenly came to me. There was one thing I could try instead of worrying until I lost my mind.
“Kaaaaaaaaatsu! Hah!”
I yelled at her like she was a Zen practitioner.
Halkara stiffened like a board.
“Listen to your teacher’s words, Halkara! You are rushing to throw away all you own. Isn’t that a form of preoccupation with yourself?”
“That is precisely correct, Madam Teacher!”
I knew it. I was wondering if she would listen to what her teacher had to say, and I succeeded.
But I wasn’t her “teacher” in that sense… More of an herbs teacher.
“Now that you mention it, there is a saying: If you are served tea, drink it. It is important we live our lives as we are. There is also the saying: When spring comes, grass grows of its own accord.”
I didn’t know if that was a real idiom, but it made sense enough to her.
Things were getting strange enough with her just staying at home…
Rosalie was clearly avoiding her, too. “Whenever I get close to Sis Halkara, I feel my heart get all warm, like I’m about to go somewhere else…”
So our resident elf was now apparently exuding some kind of saintly power…
“Then I will return to practicing asceticism in my room. There is another saying: All roads lead everywhere. If I put my mind to it, I will find my path anywhere, and I will find enlightenment wherever I look. There is also the saying: When a flower blooms, the butterfly comes of its own accord.”
All these sayings were starting to get on my nerves.
Halkara left for her room, and when Laika came back from announcing Halkara’s absence at the factory, we had a family meeting. Sandra must have been in the dirt somewhere, but we couldn’t find her.
“Er… Anyone have any thoughts…?”
Shalsha raised her hand. “Halkara was borrowing the words of a great practitioner of asceticism. The way she carries herself is out of respect for and acceptance of the natural state of things, yet also respectful of all the necessary harmonies.”
“Right, I think I get what you mean… Not sure how you got all that from posture, but I think you mean calm and gentle.”
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the information I needed.
“We could do a shock treatment on her by suspending her over a ravine.” Flatorte suggested the extreme.
“What a horrible thing for you to say, Flatorte. Simply awful,” Laika admonished her.
“But she’s just pretending to be working toward enlightenment right now. That flimsy mask of hers will peel right off. If we hang her above a ravine, she’ll get scared enough and all this stuff about enlightenment will just go away.”
“Oh… Well, if you put it like that…”
They do say that a person’s true nature comes out when their life is in danger. So it was probably true that she could only keep up the act because she was here with us.
“Falfa would feel bad about hanging Miss Halkara in the air… She hasn’t done anything bad…” The kindhearted Falfa showed some worry.
“You’re right… It’s not like she’s being a terrible person…”
It was the same when Flatorte’s personality changed—some people might think she’s become an even better person. It would be a little strange to bully her into her previous self, too.
“But keeping her like that just creeps me out. She’s practically a different person…”
I understood what Flatorte was saying. I wanted to put her back to normal, too. There had to be a peaceful way to bring the old Halkara back…
Then the door opened, and there was Sandra. She was covered in dirt, so she had probably been in the ground.
“Hey… Can you do something about that box of swamp crystals…? They feel different from people; it’s very eerie…”
A plant had come to file a complaint.
That’s right—we didn’t put the swamp crystals back in the swamp, but instead took a few home with us. The one who’d brought them back (Halkara) had changed so drastically that she was just leaving them alone now.
But Sandra’s question was bringing me back to where this all started.
“That’s it! The swamp crystals!” They must have the key to solving all of this. It all started with them anyway.
And using the crystals meant one thing.
“Let’s feed Halkara the swamp crystals.”
It was worth giving it a shot.
“The swamp crystals absorbed all the dirtied (?) parts of her. So if we feed them to her again, maybe those parts would come back to her…?” I wasn’t sure if it was going to be that simple, but… “And she was the one who wanted to eat them anyway, so now she gets what she wants.”
Sandra wouldn’t like it if we just kept them hanging around in that box.
Everyone nodded. I guess that meant this was a unanimous decision.
Well…Halkara herself wasn’t here, which meant she hadn’t agreed to eat them herself… But I could convince her by telling her she was the one who wanted them.
The impatient Flatorte went to Halkara’s room and came back. “She said she’ll eat ’em. It’s not meat, so it doesn’t go against her precepts or whatever.”
I doubted there was any religion that took much thought to decide whether those weird creatures were okay to eat or not…
But there was one problem.
“Um…how are we supposed to prepare the swamp crystals for consumption?” Laika asked.
“Oh, right…” I couldn’t even picture how we’d cook them. “Why don’t we take a look at the swamp crystals themselves first, then?”
That might give us some ideas. I really hoped so, anyway.
We went outside to where we were keeping the swamp crystals.
We had a huge box out back filled with water.
“The swamp crystals are in here.”
I wished we had a transparent water tank, but we used a box instead. Laika had to make it; we didn’t have one like this, and they weren’t sold anywhere.
“Why’d you put them in water, Mistress?” Flatorte asked.
“It’s like getting the sand out of clams. We had to switch the dirty swamp water for clean water.”
I’d bet that eating it with all that swamp water in there would only make us sick.
Still, I didn’t really feel the need to eat them even after keeping them in clean water, and if the swamp crystals themselves were poisonous, then we’d get sick anyway…
“Shall we look inside, then?” Laika pulled out the plug in the center of the box, and the water came rushing out.
“Don’t let too much of the water get in the soil… This is plant abuse,” Sandra complained, but this was in the back of the house, so I hoped she’d forgive us this once.
Next, Laika took off a corner of the box. I can’t fully emphasize just how user-friendly the box was—not only was she a proper young lady, she was also super handy.
And for the first time in a little while, we got to see the swamp crystals up close and personal.
“They…have gotten quite small.” Laika was shocked—each swamp crystal had shrunk down to the size of a large melon.
“I think they got this small because they haven’t had anything to absorb. That’s just as scary.”
I grabbed a tuft of grass from the ground and stuck it into one of the crystals.
No response.
“Just a guess, but I think now that they’re so small, they don’t have room to absorb anybody.”
I didn’t have any proof of that, but as house representative, I had no choice but to touch it myself. Even if it did try to suck me in, I should be able to resist.
But I was still scared, so I gently poked it with my finger.
Blup-blup, blup-blup.
“It’s like a rubber ball. All right, here I go.” I lifted it with one hand. “Yes! I’m safe! We should be okay!”
“It’s so pretty with the light bouncing off it!”
“It’s like a jewel. It really is a swamp crystal.”
Falfa and Shalsha were delighted; this angle really did show just how sparkly and beautiful the swamp crystals were.
But holding it made me think of something else, and I gently threw the crystal onto the ground.
Boiiing!
With a silly sound, the crystal came back up to my hands.
“It really is like a ball… We could play dodgeball with them…”
After that, Falfa and Shalsha started playing catch.
“Here we go, Shalsha!”
“If Shalsha can stop its movement with my stomach and hold it with my arms, then that will be a good catch.”
Despite her bold claims, Shalsha did not catch the ball.
“You throw too hard, Sis. That’s not how you throw to your little sister.”
“But Falfa doesn’t want to treat you like a little kid. You’re my twin. That’s a bad argument, Shalsha.”
Very insightful, Falfa.
Now we had a toy that had come from an unexpected place. You never know where you’ll find something you never knew you wanted…
As for me, I brought a swamp crystal into the kitchen.
Laika was in an apron, on standby as my assistant.
“Now it’s time to get swamp-crystal cooking. But…how are we supposed to eat it?”
“Let us try cutting it in half, Lady Azusa. It may be only hard on the outside, like a portion of fruit.”
“Got it. Let’s go with that, then.” I carefully cut it in two with a knife.
Just as Laika said, the inside was softer than the outside, but there was still a lot of resilience to it.
To be honest, it looked a lot like jelly…and suddenly, I wanted to take a bite.
“Halkara said she’d happily eat anything so long as it isn’t meat, but shouldn’t we cook it through anyway?”
“We should… It’s been sitting in clean water, but we should still cook it.” I took out the pot.
“Um… Would it be better to use the pot we don’t typically use…?” Laika didn’t want me to use the same pot we normally cooked in! To be honest, I felt the same.
“Sure. Let me get the other pot…”
I placed thin slices of the swamp crystal into the extra pot and turned on the heat.
As more of the water left the crystal, it turned from a jelly into a firmer, bouncier substance like agar.
How did they make agar again? Wasn’t it from seaweed?
“It certainly looks quite tasty.” Laika also seemed to have high hopes in how it was transforming.
“So you want a taste, then?”
Laika and I exchanged glances.
She vigorously shook her head. “No thank you!”
“Didn’t think so…”
Eating something that people didn’t normally eat required just as much courage as venturing into an unknown dungeon. I’d say it was just as difficult an adventure.
Then I got started cooking for real.
Once the swamp crystal was cooked, I cooled it and diced it up, then put the cubes in a glass cup, drizzled some sweet syrup over them, and heaped fruit on top. I also added some of the sweet bean anko I had prepared for the edible slimes.
Halkara wouldn’t touch a metal spoon anymore, so I stuck the wooden spoon in it, and—
“There, our swamp crystal anmitsu is ready!”
“An-meets-oo? I have not heard of it, but it looks good (on the outside).”
“Right? It does look good (on the outside).”
My first impression of it was that it just looked like regular anmitsu, a jelly dessert. There was nothing to show that we used swamp crystals as our main ingredient.
I wasn’t going to try it, though.
The swamp crystals probably don’t taste like anything, right…? It’s probably just like agar, right…? So there’s no need for me to taste test…
“Right, then we’re done. Now, we need to be ready for what happens after she eats it.”
Laika gave me a strange look, so I gave her the answer. “I mean, we need medicine for stomachaches…”
We finally called down Halkara—it was time for her to eat the swamp crystals.
“Here, I made this for you, Halkara. Eat up!”
I wasn’t lying. I did, in fact, make this for her. The problem was that I didn’t know if it was any good or not.
“Oh! I see this will be refreshingly sweet. These square blocks are perfectly clear, like an enlightened heart. This must be good luck.”
Likening enlightenment to swamp crystals might be a tad rude to the enlightened.
Halkara’s eyes were sparkling, like she was from a shoujo manga from two generations earlier than when I was alive in my past life.
It was better than having eyes glazed over like a dead fish or something, but the prospect of dealing with Pure Halkara for the foreseeable future was kind of irritating… I think it was similar to those eerie kinds of people who only ever said positive things.
“Go ahead, eat as much as you like. But if you start feeling sick or you think it tastes bad, you stop, okay?”
“My, there is nothing among the blessings of nature that makes one sick! One can even nullify the effects of a poison mushroom with love and courage!”
Now she was talking like a scam artist, but she was not normal right now, so I didn’t bother to correct her.
Halkara took the wooden spoon and scooped up one of the swamp crystal blocks, then readily tossed it into her mouth.
She ate it…
The entire family watched her carefully.
Then she clapped her hands together.
“Delightfully delicious. I pray for your happiness, Miss Azusa, for blessing an ascetic practitioner like myself with such a wonderful dish.”
“O-oh… Okay… Thank you…”
Her reaction told me that the Pure Halkara (aka “weird Halkara”) was still around.
But it wasn’t reasonable to expect immediate results, so it was hard to say yet.
“Though these clear little cubes have no taste, they have taken on the sweetness of the syrup to create a delicate flavor. I believe this would be the perfect way to cool down in a hot summer.”
It sounded like the anmitsu was doing its job.
If the swamp crystals turned out to be totally harmless, then I wonder if I could sell them as agar…?
I wasn’t so keen on eating it myself, but maybe I’d bring it up to Beelzebub. I had a feeling the demons would readily take something like this on.
Halkara continued to eat the anmitsu, enjoying her dessert.
“Mom, Shalsha wants to try…” Shalsha was succumbing to the delicious temptation.
I was happy to hear that as the person who made it, but I really wasn’t sure if I should feed it to her!
“Shalsha… At least wait until we know it’s not going to affect Halkara negatively, okay…?”
But Halkara finished her anmitsu without showing any signs of a stomachache or her personality going back to normal. I couldn’t tell if that was good or bad.
Halkara brought her hands together toward me in thanks. I guess she was a monk now. “Thank you for the meal. Please allow me to recite my own original incantation. It is the least I can do for you.”
“Uh, no thanks.”
If she made it up herself, then it probably didn’t do much.
She seemed okay after eating the swamp crystals. That was nice info to have, but it didn’t put Halkara back to normal.
Maybe all the impurities it absorbed from her left while they were soaking in the clean water? Did we have to feed her swamp crystals that were living in the dirty water?
But suddenly…
“Ahhh! Ghaaa! Hnggaaagh!”
Halkara brought her hand to her chest in pain!
“Halkara! It might be the swamp crystal poison! Go to the bathroom and get it all out!”
“No, Madam Teacher… This is not a physical problem!”
She appeared to be in excruciating pain, but I had a feeling this current Halkara wasn’t going to tell lies. She’d probably say that lying was a horrible sin.
“A demon has entered me! It is trying to lead me astray from the path of asceticism! That is all!”
Sheesh! She was so consistently weird now that I had no idea what I should believe from her!
“Damn! I shall not run along such an easy path! Silence! Leave! Ondabadaba haluant kuaaa! Ondabadaba haluant kuaaa!”
She was reciting another strange incantation! Where on earth did she learn about this stuff?
Then—Halkara’s head drooped, and she stopped moving.
She stopped chanting, and silence fell over the room. She appeared to be staring hard at the table.
Did she get rid of it? Should we be happy she got rid of it?
Halkara slowly raised her head.
Her eyes weren’t sparkling anymore; there was a familiar spaciness to them now. “Wow, I’m so sorry to have worried you all~” She scratched her head. This was the Halkara I knew.
“You’re back, Halkara?! Yes!!” I hugged her. My swamp crystal strategy was a success!
“Oh, stop it, Madam Teacher~ You’re making me blush.”
“Oh, it’s fine. This is special.”
“—Madam Teacher’s love. Yeah, about fifty thousand gold,” Halkara whispered, so I stepped back. This was weird.
“Huh? What does that mean?”
“Exactly as I said. This table is 150,000 gold; this glass cup is valuable, so 250,000 gold; and the spoon is 300 gold. I suppose the total value of this house would be 80,000,000 gold.”
She was putting a price to everything!
“Uh, Halkara? Putting a price on everything is kind of indecent.”
Halkara gave me a flat stare. “Complaints are zero gold.”
Her character had changed again!
“The world is money, Madam Teacher! Money is everything! I can’t believe it took me so long to realize something so obvious! Mwee-hee-hee-hee!”
Ugh, what a laugh!
“Boy, I sure have been through a lot, but now I see that there’s nothing in this world as useful and perfect as money. You can’t measure love or whatnot anyway. You’d be a fool to use those feelings as your bottom line. That’s what takes you off the path. We use the concretely measurable money as our yardstick to determine the rules of people’s lives. That’ll make everyone happy!”
She’d gone in the total opposite direction!
“Let us put our faith in money, everyone! Money will not betray us! Money is the only thing that will not betray us! Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!” Halkara leaned backward really far as she laughed. It was super creepy!
She leaned back so far to the point I wondered if she’d always been that flexible, until she finally made a bridge.
“Mommy! Miss Halkara’s scaring Falfa!”
And now Falfa was scared! Heck, so was I!
I gently embraced her. “It’s okay, Falfa… Nothing to be afraid of… Well, maybe a little, but she won’t hurt you… Er, I don’t think…?”
I didn’t know if I could handle this Halkara forever, either.
“All right, I’ll start lending out money with high interest!”
“Halkara, get a grip on yourself! Did you have too much of the swamp crystals?”
“Madam Teacher, I do have a grip on myself. I am objectively sane because I am using money as my standard for everything. Hee-hee-hee-hee!”
“Stop laughing like that!”
She had more of a witch laugh than I did.
“That’s right, if I collect enough money, then I’ll gather all the people sunk in unpayable debt and play all sorts of games. Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!”
That was a really evil thing to say!
“A perfect idea. I’ll even put them on a leviathan so they don’t run away, and then I’ll make them play a game where they might be able to turn things around and repay all their debts. Only the most foolish people would try it, don’t you think? Hee-hee-hee-hee!”
Now she was just dragging the demons into it, too.
“Mommy, are there any poison mushrooms that can calm her down…?”
“We shouldn’t turn to poison mushrooms as a first resort, Falfa.”
But I was still painfully aware that we needed to do something about this situation.
Halkara then stood up and headed into the kitchen. She returned holding knives.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, if she starts swinging those around, we’ll be in serious trouble!
But considering how she balanced them in both hands, it didn’t seem like she was going to use them as weapons.
“What do you think she’s trying to do this time, Lady Azusa?” Laika seemed considerably shaken. I guess people like that were enough to scare a dragon…
“I don’t know… Everything she’s doing is already way beyond anything I would have imagined…”
Halkara was enraptured as she gazed at the knives. “O metal, O metal! It’s all thanks to you that I’ve kept a firm sight on my life. Thank you, thank you…”
“Don’t worship it!”
“I gained so much in life thanks to you. Yes, even others’ hearts…”
“You can’t own other people’s hearts!”
Halkara huffed over her shoulder at me. “Heh.” She was angry. “You can, Madam Teacher. I’ve done it countless times before. Don’t believe me? Go outside and show a grasshopper a coin, then ask it to jump. It’ll do it.”
“Jumping is just what grasshoppers do, though.”
“Big Sis, this is really bad… I think I’m getting the chills…” Rosalie withdrew back into the ceiling. Now even a ghost was scared of her. “There’s no evil spirit possessing her at all, but that’s the only explanation for her behavior… How could a normal person become so warped…?”
“So it’s scary for a ghost if there’s no paranormal explanation for something?” I said.
With a cool look, Flatorte dropped a coin onto the floor. She was going right into experiments.
Halkara fell to her knees and gingerly picked up the money. “Ahhh, coin, ahhh, coin…”
“Your personality’s a mess, Halkara! A creepy rich person would never get on their knees for a single coin!” Flatorte argued. Sound logic.
She was right. That was something someone with no money would do…
“No! I want! Every coin! I can possibly get!”
“You’re so stingy!”
So no matter where the swamp crystal’s influence landed, it was always extreme.
“Laika, let’s go to another swamp where swamp crystals live…”
Laika nodded vigorously. “Indeed… We need them to absorb at least some parts of her wickedness…”
“I have no idea if it’ll make things better, but”—I glanced at Halkara before continuing—“I can’t deal with the stress of this.”
Afterward, we fed Halkara to the swamp crystals, then fed the swamp crystals to Halkara over and over, and she was finally back to normal after a couple of days.
As a result, I perfected the anmitsu recipe, but I wasn’t about to feed the swamp crystals to any of the other family, so there wasn’t really any point.
Halkara went around apologizing to the rest of the family. “I am so terribly sorry for causing you all that trouble… Even I’m shocked and terrified that I said all those things to you…”
“There’s a very good reason why people never cooked and ate that creature…”
After watching what happened to her, I learned that nothing is good in extremes.
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