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Before five minutes had passed, a beautiful young woman appeared.
She wore a dark veil that obscured her features, but she had black, lustrous hair and red lips, and the soft curves of her body were sheathed in a vivid jade traveling robe. The woman had perfumed her clothes by burning an incense that had a vaguely sweet, old-fashioned scent, and she was in the summerhouse before he was aware of her presence.
“How do you fare, Master Krusty?”
“Fine, thanks. You look well, Enchantress Youren.”
“I’ve asked you to just call me Youren, you know.”
Although Krusty had thanked her for asking about his health, he didn’t feel any particular obligation to the woman, but he kept that to himself and treated her deferentially, with the utmost courtesy. He’d learned that most humans were satisfied if you treated them with respect.
In the first place, being polite was a way of confirming whether you and the other party were the same sort of person.
For example, if you passed a ferocious beast on the road, it might suddenly latch on to your head with its jaws. That was a scary thought. Of course, since you’d be able to tell it was a ferocious beast just by looking at it, all you had to do was run away. However, if the other party was a barbarian, since they were human, it would be hard to identify them as such on sight. Since their common sense was different from yours, though, they might suddenly strike you with a blood-stained two-handed ax. If you’d assumed they were just like you and the attack took you by surprise, you’d die.
That said, it was very difficult and time-consuming to be on your guard against every person you passed on the road.
Politeness was a way to save yourself this trouble.
I’m one of your kind, and I speak your language.
I won’t suddenly display an interest in the taste of your flesh.
It was a ritual to confirm these things.
Humans tended not to take an interest in strangers’ inner selves. Since that was so, as long as they had that minimal guarantee—in other words, that they wouldn’t abruptly suffer harm—they were generous about everything else.
Of course, it was a fact that, when it came right down to it, manners weren’t something you could count on. Sudden disasters, sudden changes, sudden lunatics: Krusty knew that true human nature actually lay on that side of things. Fundamentally, this world was a circus of unfair chaos, a place where anything could happen.
In that respect, the woman in front of him was rather uninteresting. She was an ordinary person who plotted mundane affairs in the regular way.
He couldn’t trust her, but he didn’t actively dislike her, either. She wouldn’t abruptly attack him with bloodshot eyes; she wasn’t unpredictable enough for that. In a way, you could say she was a disappointment.
She was the sort of person you could find anywhere, so he wasn’t very concerned with her. Those were his unvarnished thoughts.
If possible, he’d have preferred that she leave him alone, but unfortunately, this self-styled Enchantress was the type who didn’t listen. That was a common characteristic in women who were otherworldly attractive.
“How do you feel, physically? What about your memories?”
“There aren’t any major problems.” He shrugged.
His physical condition had neither improved nor worsened since he’d regained consciousness after having been flung to the Zhongyuan server. The level-150 bad status known as Soul Darkening Curse hadn’t changed, either.
NATURAL HP RECOVERY IS SUSPENDED.
HP MAY NOT BE RECOVERED THROUGH RECOVERY SPELLS, OR THROUGH FACILITIES OR ITEMS.
THE TELECHAT FUNCTION IS SUSPENDED.
MOVEMENT ACROSS SERVER BOUNDARIES BECOMES IMPOSSIBLE.
MEMORIES ARE LOST.
The effects of the bad status were wide-ranging and serious. When he checked it against his memories, even though they were patchy, he could tell that the curse’s content wouldn’t have been possible in the days of the game.
Krusty had been carried to this fairyland on the back of the enormous wolf dog Gumon, but both Zhu Huan—who’d saved him—and Hua Diao had blanched at his status.
They’d told him it was a terrible, unprecedented curse. Since the HP he lost when wounded didn’t return, that was probably accurate.
He currently had about 5300 HP. That was roughly half his maximum.
The display looked like a warning, and it was an ominous red. Krusty wasn’t particularly disturbed or concerned, though.
This was because, while his HP was down by half, it didn’t seem as if it was worth making a big fuss over. HP was a resource in combat, and when you were up against a strong opponent, it indicated how durable you were. In other words, it was a tool for fighting enemies.
If he actually got into a fight against an enemy and didn’t have enough HP, he would probably think about it. However, under those circumstances, the issues that would come up were “How do I increase my HP?” and “How do I break through this situation with five thousand HP?” and if he accepted that for what it was, it was nothing to agonize over.
Was it inconvenient? Well, maybe. He thought it might be, at least.
However, if asked whether it was a problem, he would have said, Not particularly.
On Earth, it was likely he would have been half paralyzed or in a coma, which would definitely have been inconvenient, but in Theldesia, it didn’t even hurt. It was part of the reason he ended up taking things easy.
“‘No problems’… How courageous you act. It’s heartbreaking.”
If anything, what struck him as dismal was the woman in front of him.
Her eyes were still hidden by her thin silk veil, but her posture as she spoke to Krusty made her seem to be looking up at him. The conversation was probably her way of showing her worry. Even Krusty understood she was hoping for some sort of reaction from him.
Why is she worried about me?
Good intentions.
That seems rather implausible…
Even if her intentions are good, they’re self-centered.
As part of a negotiation.
She wants a definite statement that I’m in dire distress.
I’m not in dire distress.
And so Krusty played along with her, letting his shoulders slump.
He wasn’t actually discouraged or anything like it. It was a technique for getting along in life: He was matching her mood. He knew from experience that, in most situations, it was safe to respond this way.
He thought scratching Gumon behind the ears would be a more positive and constructive thing to do, but apparently, doing it in the middle of a conversation was considered rude. It made Hua Diao become obviously cross.
“It really doesn’t seem inconvenient to me. This place is peaceful, and anyway, I spend all day watching the peach blossoms.”
“—Doesn’t it frighten you not to have memories?”
At the Enchantress’s words, Krusty broke off and considered.
Was it frightening enough to mention?
If you lost your memories, you simultaneously lost your motive for getting them back, and he didn’t seem to feel any real need to do so. He thought he was probably the sort of person the world referred to as “cold-hearted.”
Krusty gave a little smile. “That doesn’t seem to be the case.”
“What about this amuses you?”
This time, apparently, he really had discouraged the Enchantress.
Inwardly, he thought it was funny.
“Master Krusty.”
The Enchantress tried to take his hand, and he evaded her slim white fingers.
“That curse is unknown, and there is no one who can cure it. If left alone, there’s no knowing what calamity it may invite.”
As Krusty gazed at her, smiling, the woman repeated a treatment suggestion she’d made several times before.
“I may not look it, but I preside over the mystic art of healing. The art was granted to me by the Queen Mother of the West, who lives on the moon. If you’ll only give me permission, Master Krusty, I would like to brew an elixir of life for you.”
“I’m not good with bitter things, you see.”
Still smiling, Krusty declined the offer.
Was the Enchantress saying medicine she brewed could cure this, even though it was “an unknown curse no one could cure”?
Didn’t that mean it wasn’t exactly incurable?
In any case, immortal wizards and mystic arts struck him as fishy.
Well, even Krusty wasn’t flatly denying the woman’s words. That sort of paranormal skill probably did exist. This was a secluded region where mysterious peach trees bore fruit all year round, so something on that level could exist. Since he’d passed level 90, Krusty himself was something like a low-ranking immortal wizard, and that was fine.
However, he didn’t like the way Enchantress Youren had confirmed his weakness, then proceeded to force her good intentions onto him. He didn’t care enough to angrily criticize her for it, but he also didn’t want to get actively involved with her.
The theatrical atmosphere that hung around the woman was boring as well. Was there anything in the depths of that aura? Probably not. It was likely this affected air and way of thinking were the woman herself. In other words, the Enchantress thought her good will—although he didn’t know whether it was actual good will or merely for her own benefit—would get through. She thought that other people would acknowledge it. That her way of doing things would get the job done.
She thought Krusty would agree.
In his hole-ridden memories, many women were like that, so he didn’t intend to single out the Enchantress for criticism, but this was dull. If her goal was to get consent, she could just have been aboveboard about it and handed him a consent form or a contract. Assuming the conditions were appropriate, the matter would move forward easily.
A negotiation over promises in search of profit, before advancing to the stage of consent: That was how society worked, and it was probably necessary, but there was a definite smell of corruption about it.
What should he call it, a sense of not being connected to anything?
Even if Krusty fostered this relationship, it was likely he wouldn’t gain any new knowledge. He had a hunch he wouldn’t even manage to lose anything by it, let alone profit.
She wasn’t fun to tease, either, the way ? or ? had been.
Krusty shrugged, letting his eyes go to the distant, drifting peach blossoms.
He’d been told that attempting to descend the mountain would be suicidal, so he hadn’t tried it yet, but if things were like this, there was no telling how true that was. Now that his wounds had largely healed and he’d learned all there was to know about the surrounding situation, this fairyland was much too boring.
Unless something happened soon, he’d end up spending his time doing nothing but stifling yawns. That said, it wasn’t as if he had any leads to follow even if he did descend to the world below.
So, maybe not having memories actually was inconvenient. But after thinking just a little, he knew there was no way he’d have had acquaintances on the Zhongyuan server to begin with, so the presence or lack of memories wouldn’t be an issue toward finding them down there.
So no, it really wasn’t an inconvenience.
The Enchantress was speaking to him in tones that sounded sincere, but in the spare moments between his responses, he was scratching the soft fur behind Gumon’s ears.
He felt sure that, even if he didn’t get impatient, an uproar would break out sooner or later.
The stirring in his chest was alerting him to the approach of that disturbance. To Krusty, it was a far more familiar friend than the suspicious woman in front of him.
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