Monogatari Series - Volume 28 - Chapter 1.01

Shinobu Suicide

001

There may be some commendable people out there who are so plagued with curiosity regarding how Araragi Koyomi is doing right now. But, in order to speak of now, I first have to look back on the spring of last year, the spring of two years ago, and even the “heyday”1 of six hundred years ago. I even wanted to look back to the Indian summer of a thousand years ago—though I am aware that an Indian summer isn’t actually spring.2 It would be a big deal if suddenly looking that far back made my head twist off, even in spite of my half-baked vampire constitution.

So, I’ll take the middle ground and first talk about the spring of five years ago.

But was it the middle ground that I took, or darkness?3

Back then, when I was a middle school third-year student, I aimed beyond my position for the private university-focused school known as Naoetsu High School, and I took their entrance exams with an excitement that could only be described as me having gotten carried away. And I would pay for it dearly—at that school, where the local elites would freely assemble, I had become an unbearably run-down and crumbling dropout, out-of-shape in both mind and body, experiencing a serious injury that made me feel as though I was on the verge of death.

I had completely been immersed in death, as though I was immersed in narcissism.

It was to the point that I was given the great honor of being the most delinquent student in the history of Naoetsu High—though the truth was that I was just a lazy, frivolous, school-hating student that constantly arrived late and left early. I wasn’t exactly that great of an outlaw, but alas, relative evaluations could be pretty tough. If everyone around me was an honors student, then someone like me would end up as a legendary poor student.

Depending on the umpire, it would be a down-and-away strike.4

I was a youngster that fit the mold.

And, to that life of mine, a huge turning point came during the spring break between my second and third year of high school, nicknamed “the hellish spring break”—I was attacked by a vampire.

Rather than a turning point in my life, it was more like a downturn. Or even corruption.5

In any case, it was some kind of fall.

The punch line of my life.6

It was astonishing to learn that I could fall even further than that—but after that spring break, various things had happened and various things had been lost, and at the very end, I’d even fallen, not metaphorically but literally, into hell, so I couldn’t just think of it as my luck bottoming out.

The future will always outsmart me.

It’ll take me by surprise and aim right for the heart.

Speaking of relative evaluations, because I came to experience that sort of hell, I’d switched to the overblown, or rather, the underblown position that I hadn’t fallen that far at all. And thus, from someone who was anxious about graduating even before the thought of entering university, I’d performed a class change into a proper examinee student—from an outsider’s perspective, I may have just seemed like some dependent guy that was suddenly filled with motivation after getting a girlfriend after Golden Week and was desperate to enter the same university as her, but I would like it if you didn’t come to such malicious conclusions.

It was rather complicated.

Having come this far, I couldn’t exactly say that I’d like for you to read all the volumes that have been published, but recently, it seems the culture of audiobooks has been spreading, so you may wish to use those as a reference for the details. But as a result, as a high school third-year, I did not learn from my experience and once again aimed beyond my position, setting my course for a national university where the local elites assembled, Manase University.

Like setting sail upon stormy seas.

Just how much did I like to mingle with the elites? Just what kind of complex was I carrying? The darkness in my heart ran much too deep.

However, after graduating, I came to realize that that elite, university-focused high school was not an assembly of naive elites and pure honors students like I’d assumed—it was something I couldn’t see without looking in from the outside. To use conventional language without trying to be original, the elites and the honors students had troubles that I didn’t have, and they had struggles with human relationships that I couldn’t have had. As a “delinquent student”, the fact that I had been lazily skipping out on more than just my classes was something I would regret for the rest of my life—and though I said “I didn’t learn from my experience”, that mistake from my high school years was something I would absolutely never make again in university.

Learn from experience.

Drill it in.7

It’s not repeating those mistakes. It’s not continuing them.

It’s starting over.

The class representative among class representatives that rehabilitated me was no longer around anymore, but that was precisely the reason why I needed to enjoy a respectable and righteous campus life—though I thought that, though I set my heart on that, all sorts of incidents occurred during my first year of university, making me think that it wasn’t much different from my dreadful high school life. But, through my skill as a person of experience, I’d like to say that I was able to deftly pull through those incidents one way or another, but anyway, that’s all for the preface.

That’s all for the headrest.8

From now on, it’s the futon, but not one made of feathers.

In April of the following year, leading up to Araragi Koyomi’s twentieth birthday, I’d ceremoniously advanced to my second year of university without dropping out or repeating a year, but due to a certain reason, I’d been forced to depart from the lodgings in which I was living alone and instead return to the home of my dear parents.

Everyone, I’m home!

Not only that, but for quite a long time, I hadn’t been attending university—but it was certainly not the case that my dreadful habit of playing hooky had been revived.

In a way, you could say it was being a shut-in.

You know, that thing called remote learning.

Unlike my life, which I’ve been managing to live out in secret, there was probably no reason to reflect on this particular situation in ostentatious detail. Assuming there was no one stranded on some deserted island somewhere, then without exaggeration, it was something that affected everyone in the whole world—the novel coronavirus pandemic.

All in-person classes at university were suspended, and there was no sign of them resuming—I’d clung to my desk while vomiting blood, sacrificed my sleep, and crammed a ton of useless knowledge into my brain, all for the sake of acquiring that “GO TO UNIVERSITY” ticket, and yet it had almost entirely been rendered invalid.

Like someone who’d failed in the stock market.

What was the point in investing all that I had?

For what purpose had I studied so hard, even getting my girlfriend and the class representative involved? I couldn’t keep myself from bemoaning this—of course, I had unmistakably been in a blessed position, though it was hard for me to say that so openly, but my lack of insight had led me to believe that I’d been under a curse cast upon me by the elites that I had unfairly scorned.

I was cursed.

But no, I was actually blessed.

Perhaps I should say that I was blessed because of the curse—through the aforementioned “hellish spring break”, my constitution had become something like a half-vampire’s, and as a result, I couldn’t even catch the common cold.

For me, a healthy body was constantly maintained.

By force.

As an immortal monster who wouldn’t die from having his brains blown out or his heart gouged out, it was highly unlikely I’d lose my life to the novel or even the conventional coronavirus—and on the off chance that something did happen, it was possible for me to revive simply by having Shinobu suck my blood.

However, I couldn’t help but feel guilty, like I was cheating by using that supernatural safety valve… Meniko had said that, after hearing that this pandemic posed less of a risk to youngsters, she started feeling survivor’s guilt just by being young. That the term “youngster” had begun to sound like an insult.

Hamukai Meniko.

It had been a while since I’d met her, too. Even though she was one of the few friends I’d made at university.

Meniko was currently isolating at her lodgings—apparently she’d planned on throwing a surprise party for my birthday, but since she was naturally unable to do that, I’d received her present in the mail the other day.

It was a weird kind of dictionary.

If I’d received it in person, she would have gotten a great reaction out of me.

This disease sure was terrifying, to be able to spoil even surprises—in order to not spread the disease, I’d also shut myself in my lodgings and abstained from traveling, with no plans on returning to my parents’ home, but it ended up being a “family affair”, the kind that you’d see in any family.

Not a love affair. A family affair.9

I’d appreciate it if you would hear me out.

There was no reason to hide it anymore, and I didn’t really want to hide it anymore, so I’ll say this from the outset. Both of my parents were police officers, essential workers that needed to go to work for the sake of maintaining public order, especially in times like these—they couldn’t just work as police officers online.

Cyber police was a different department.

However, a police station was necessarily crowded to the point that a cluster outbreak could occur at any time, so it was not an easy decision for them, but they took the initiative to take up residence at their place of work, like partial self-isolation—as their son, I was shocked at how far they would go for their work, but I was almost twenty years old, and I had graduated from my rebellious phase when I graduated from high school.

I was already used to my parents’ busy periods.

I even felt that they were deserving of respect.

Or rather, I couldn’t refuse my parents’ request of, “Come back home and take care of your sisters”—in fact, I had also been worried about leaving my sisters, high school second-year Araragi Karen and high school first-year Araragi Tsukihi, on their own at home.

There was something scary about it.

Something scary, in an abstract way.

Though they may have disbanded when Karen advanced to high school last year, it would be ill-advised to leave the Tsuganoki 2nd Fire Sisters unsupervised for a long period of time, speaking as an older brother who had taken the initiative to live in extreme foolishness—especially in such a stressful state of the world.

Therefore, I would act as guardian on their behalf.

I was capable of doing that much. As an essential brother.

Originally, I’d planned on moving into my lodgings at the start of my second year in university, and I’d gotten ahead of myself and left home during my first year, instead. Returning home at the start of my second year gave me an immense “fleeing the capital” sort of feeling, so what would I do if I couldn’t even be a babysitter for my sisters?

Fortunately, elementary, middle, and high schools reopened earlier than universities, so my sisters, of a generation younger than mine, were using their smartphones (that our parents had bought for them due to the pandemic) to adapt reasonably well to the situation.

Reasonably, or rather, skilfully.

I could even say, inventively.10

Though classes had resumed, it was still inevitable that choir competitions, cultural festivals, sports festivals, and field trips were suspended, postponed, or reduced in scale, which was a big deal—especially for Tsukihi.

“I may not be a restaurant employee, but I’m still smiling beneath my mask!”

said Tsukihi, in high spirits.

I could tell just from her eyes that she was all smiles.

She was Tsukihi the Quokka.

I’d already known that they were the type of sisters that grew even livelier the more cornered they were, so it was not particularly unexpected, and if anything, it was completely within my expectations. During disasters like these, there were always people that increased their presence and took the lead, and these former Fire Sisters reached out to their middle school classmates over social media to hold plenty of online events.

I’d been worried that this would be a depressing start to their high school life, but at this rate, it wouldn’t be long before Karen and Tsukihi reunited as the Fire Sisters in Tsuganoki Private High School.

How energetic of them.

It almost made me doubt if they were really my sisters.

Perhaps more dreadful than an enfant terrible, who could be reproached for their youth, was the current social landscape—but there was no point in envying those that were younger. If anything, I suppose I could view things positively, as I would’ve never had the opportunity to stand in the kitchen for the sake of my sisters. It didn’t make up for those hostile days where we would get into fist fights on sight, but I was earning experience points that would be hard to obtain otherwise. I could also say that I was feeling less depressed than I’d been in the apartment that made up my lodgings.

Speaking of lodgings… There was Oikura Sodachi.

Our very own Euler.

In the first place, it was out of concern for that childhood friend that I’d moved up my plans to leave my parents’ home in order to become her neighbor (thinking about it now, that was the only reason I’d started living alone—if it weren’t for that, I might have spent the rest of my life at my parents’ home), but unlike Meniko, who was always-online and TeleHodai-connected11 with notifications constantly appearing on her smartphone from her friends and boyfriend, and unlike Senjougahara Hitagi, who was isolating in a dormitory and thus had no choice but to live communally, Oikura was “living alone” in the truest sense, with no parents’ home to return to. Was she able to stay in her right mind in this situation?

It was concerning.

I wanted to show my concern.12

Well, she hadn’t exactly been in her right mind even before all this… But I felt guilty about having returned to my parents’ home and having left Oikura on her own.

Not to mention, she wasn’t exactly good with remote classes.

Or rather, she was bad at using a computer or her smartphone camera… I could imagine that having a pathological aversion to being photographed made it hard to live in this world of surveillance, but the state of the world had become such that it would be unbearable.

How unblessed could she be?

It was times like these when people who weren’t compatible with remote conferences were reproached for being relics of a bygone era, but Oikura had been persecuted for the majority of her life, not just times like these. So she simply couldn’t put up with even the indirect gaze of a “camera lens”... It wasn’t just limited to pandemics, but weak people seemed especially weak during these times.

If there were those that found it hard to breathe because they had to wear masks all the time, there were also those that found it easier to breathe because they could avoid others’ gazes and maintain anonymity thanks to wearing masks. People were truly diverse.

It was ironic that an identical form of harm made that diversity so much more distinct—but was it making it distinct, or making it fluctuate?13

Even if it weren’t for that, Oikura was prone to being stuck in her own head, so one day, as her loyal childhood friend, I summoned up the courage to invite her to my home, but I was curtly refused.

“What’s wrong? We’re basically family, so until in-person classes resume, why not stay at the Araragi home, just like old times? I’ll come up with a good explanation for Hitagi.”

“Die.”

She hung up on me with a slam.

How do you even hang up on a cell phone with a slam?

That’s the only line you’re going to get to say this time around, but are you okay with that? At least she seemed fine… That was all that mattered.

Later, when I checked with Hitagi, apparently Oikura was actually becoming healthier in both mind and body, even in the midst of this pandemic, because her stalker-like neighbor had moved away.

Huh, so she’d had a stalker-like neighbor?

Was it the neighbor on the other side? But I thought Oikura’s apartment was situated at the end of the building… Well, whatever. If Oikura was even a little happy, it made me the happiest in the world.

Thank you for bringing me happiness.

Right, right, speaking of a stalker-like person—there was Kanbaru Suruga.

Though I wanted to keep that part of her in check.

Flawed as it was, I’d managed to enjoy at least one year of my campus life before the pandemic started, but for Kanbaru Suruga’s generation, the generation one year younger than mine, they weren’t even able to spend a day at university, much less a year… In front of Kanbaru and Higasa-chan, my lamentations meant nothing.

Though I understood the suffering they felt during entrance exams, there was no way for me to know how they truly felt.

It was meaningless to compare problems like this, and to a shrewd individual, it might even seem as though I was trying to find people with worse problems and convince myself, “At least I’m better off.” And that made me feel even more sorry… With Kanbaru and Higasa-chan, and with the members of the girls’ basketball team that I’d forged bonds with only after graduating, I’d seen up close how they struggled through entrance exams and secured tickets to their schools of choice, so I couldn’t help but feel pity for those girls’ current situations.

It would be ruined even for the honors students of these top schools.

It was outrageous.

And on top of that, I couldn’t go and visit her in encouragement, nor could I invite her over for a meal. What was going to happen to the inter-high competitions this year… As someone who’d never been a part of a sports club, I had no way of knowing how athletes felt, but things were probably going to change completely for high school sports and their club activities.

They were even saying that the promising new vaccine shouldn’t be given to minors just yet—ah, well, it hadn’t been for the sake of encouraging her, but after I’d returned to my parents’ home, I had met Kanbaru once.

Of course, while practicing social distancing… I’d visited her house to help clean up.

She had already been the “superstar incapable of cleaning up”, but now that she was staying home round-the-clock, her room wasn’t just a simple mess. Before worrying about virus contamination, the contamination of her home was much more serious. Was she trying to cause global warming by herself? Seriously… She might even catch some other disease.

However, it was true that living together with her grandparents made it a high-risk setting, so her room needed to be made into as comfortable an environment as possible—you could say that a messy room was comfortable in its own way, but now that she’d graduated from high school and become a university student (even if it was in name only), Kanbaru had realized that she couldn’t live messily forever, deciding to get a fresh start and clean up her room. And, after an hour, she gave up and came crying to me for help.

What happened to your sporty attitude?

Really, I never expected that the periodic cleaning-up of Kanbaru’s room, which I’d started because I couldn’t just leave it alone, would last this long and even become a lifesaving act. And if I were to say “Well, considering the times, please clean your room by yourself,” it would be being far too distant for my junior—we couldn’t shake hands or hug or high-five after the cleanup, but the fact that I was able to use it as an excuse to check up on Kanbaru was enough of a reward.

For a girl so active she’d run ten kilometers every morning and evening, it must be hard for her to be cooped up in her home, unable to move around even if she wanted to. But she still acted strong for my sake—even if she was still incapable of cleaning her own room, it did mean that she wouldn’t remain a high school student forever.

Though she hadn’t even spent a day at university.

And, even if I was used to it from my high school days, for people with lots of friends like Kanbaru and Higasa-chan, this environment in which they “couldn’t make any new friends” would surely affect them greatly… Though I could only imagine how painful it felt.

Under circumstances like these, “being the same as always” was equal to “pushing yourself too hard”.

And, while we were on the topic of friends, I was reminded of my friend, Hachikuji Mayoi—normally, it would be much too disrespectful to simply refer to her as my friend, as she had now become the god of this town, but as for what she was doing now, she was taking udon noodles and praying to Amabie-sama.14

Like Koto-chan from Kotoden.15

Well, though she may be a god, Hachikuji was the god of taking walks and the god of lost children, so she was weak to the idea of staying at home… In terms of personality, she was basically as active as Kanbaru, the complete opposite of shut-ins. Still, it may be due to her divine favor that this pandemic hadn’t spread quite so much in my hometown. She was protecting the act of taking walks for the sake of good health.

She became a god at quite the difficult time, too.

I couldn’t help but feel responsible.

After becoming a university student, I’d been keeping myself from hugging that elementary school fifth-year ghost from behind or rubbing our cheeks together or planting kisses on her or stripping off her clothes like I used to mischievously do, but now, there wasn’t even any need for me to display such a forced sense of ethics.

What a world we lived in.

Such close contact was only allowed between family members. Good grief, for what reason was I even alive, then? Was I only supposed to mess around with my sisters for the rest of my life?

Because staying at home made it riskier for family disputes to occur, I could say that I was at least glad that this didn’t occur when I was on awful terms with my sisters or my parents. As a specialist in child abuse, I truly felt that.

Well, it was good that my hometown was peaceful.

It seemed that the “Itadaki-mask”16 campaign of silent meals, which our local government proposed, had completely taken root. Those days when problem children would constantly hold lunch meetings were now a thing of the past.

But despite being peaceful, I couldn’t help but say that it felt like a psychological lockdown… It made it harder for me to leave town, and even if in-person classes were to resume at university, I wasn’t sure if I’d feel ready to leave my parents’ home again.

Would I really be living with my parents forever?

Would I really have to take care of my sisters for the rest of my life?

In that sense, I was concerned about those two that had left this protected hometown… Of course, I was referring to Sengoku Nadeko and Hanekawa Tsubasa.

How were the two of them doing?

Really, how were they doing?

It was entirely my own fault that I was out of contact with Sengoku, and it was much too arrogant, or even insolent, for me to show concern for that old friend at all, but how could I remain calm after hearing the crazy rumor that, after graduating from middle school, she’d gone to the capital without even moving onto high school?

What in the world happened…?

Even when I asked Tsukihi, she just pretended not to know…

And then, there was Hanekawa Tsubasa.

My Hanekawa Tsubasa.

Hanekawa… Even under normal circumstances, we’d been out of contact to the point that nobody knew where she was or what she was doing, but before we could track down her exact location, the world had ended up in this state—we’d managed to learn that she was volunteering to provide medical care on the African continent, but just when it seemed that that thread of information snapped off, this unavoidable situation began.

This infectious situation.

Even with all the mistakes and miscalculations, I felt that Japan had just barely put up a good fight, but when it came to foreign countries, the situations could be completely different even in the same pandemic—health care, political systems, cultural customs, social conditions, disparity, population density… We could divide it into any number of things. How much I needed to worry about Hanekawa would wildly fluctuate depending on which country she was in, but considering who she was, I doubted she was in a safe zone.

If anything, during this pandemic, she seemed like she would proactively travel to more difficult areas—the reason she cut off contact not just with me, but also with Hitagi and Oikura, was likely to avoid causing unnecessary (or perhaps justified) concern to those of us living in a peaceful country and to avoid dragging us into trouble, but I doubted even she could have predicted this pandemic so far.

Because she didn’t know everything.

Well, if she was working as a volunteer in providing medical care, then was it not actually that much of a surprise, and was it something she expected would happen eventually?—was it within the bounds of “I only know what I know”? From what I knew, the intellectual sphere may or may not have said that, in this global society, an outbreak of infections was a probabilistic inevitability.

If so, then there was nothing I could do. I could only pray that she was safe.

Anxiously.

Seriously, I hate you, Oshino—

Normally, if she were to be overseas, that class representative among class representatives, that honors student among honors students, should really instead be studying abroad at MIT or Cambridge or the like, but the reason she became a wandering backpacker after graduating from Naoetsu High was in no small part due to that Hawaiian-shirt guy’s influence.

That wandering old man produced a wandering girl.

Of course, Oshino Meme’s wandering was fundamentally restricted to being within the country, so Hanekawa had already surpassed her master… Well, when it came to that old man, I had no reason to worry.

No reason, and no obligation—if anything, it would just be out of gratitude.

Before even staying at home, Oshino didn’t even have a home to begin with, so I couldn’t exactly calmly wonder about how he was spending his days, but I had the baseless confidence that he was probably getting by somehow—perhaps that specialist had found another abandoned cram school to take shelter in, and perhaps he had entered into negotiations with Amabie-sama, but there was no point going on about what-ifs.

But, because it was a time like this, I wanted to hear it.

“You sure are spirited, Araragi-kun. Did something good happen?”

That pretentious line of his.

Hearing it might even lift my spirits.

It was possible that “the onee-san who knew everything”, Gaen Izuko-san, would tell me about Hanekawa’s or Oshino’s whereabouts if I asked her, but right now, we had cut ties to great acclaim17... And it wasn’t because of social distancing.

It was the antonym, personal distancing.

But if she were going to tell me, then I would like it if she told me about how Ononoki-chan and Ougi-chan were currently doing—a person that does not treasure his connections can easily become isolated in times like these.

A solitary death, much like a vampire.

It seemed so likely to happen that it was laughable.

Well, when it came to those two, the corpse doll and the “darkness”, it was hard to even figure out what I should be worrying about in the first place—if anything, they were a pair that were especially reliable in times of chaos like these.

A shining corpse and a shining darkness.

I’d heard through a different route from Tsukihi that Ononoki-chan was sticking close to Sengoku, so it’ll be fine no matter what happened, which was a bit of a relief. And Ougi-chan, who had resolved to stay at Naoetsu High, would surely keep protecting that high school, and not only the juniors in the girls’ basketball team… Though her form of protection was rather unique.

Well, in one way or another, everyone was managing to get by during this pandemic—the stage of panic, of people buying out toilet paper or being unable to acquire masks, was over for now.

Because things could be somewhat taken care of remotely, and out of concern that I might respond thoughtlessly, there were times when my responses were delayed, just like the in-person classes that were never restarting. But in spite of all that, I felt that I myself had gotten used to this staying-at-home lifestyle.

Though I wasn’t sure if it was a good or bad thing to get used to this.

Even if the panic was over, the pandemic continued.

If the situation showed no signs of improvement, then it was better to adapt to online classes as best as possible, but if I got too used to being remote, then it might be even more tiring when in-person classes eventually resumed—what if I started feeling that it was too much of a hassle to attend university now, or that I didn’t want to live on my own anymore, or that there was no point to university now and I should just quit?

Even this specialist of child abuse couldn’t exactly poke his nose into the affairs of others if he was sitting quietly at home, so in terms of matters unrelated to the pandemic, it was a peaceful period of self-restraint. I would not be catching a girl falling from the stairs, I would not meet a lost child, I would not be stalked by a superstar, I would not be bound by a snake curse, and I would not get entangled with a stray cat—nor would I get my sister killed by a zombie, be swallowed up by the Darkness, or be killed by my childhood friend.

I would not travel through time or fall to hell.

This story, which had ended and ended and yet kept ending, had now been completely lost. Even though this story had ended and ended and ended and ended and ended and ended and ended and ended and ended, and yet kept ending.

What a ridiculous story.

If this outbreak had occurred two years ago, then during that spring break, I would never have met Hanekawa, nor would I ever have met a vampire—or would I have encountered them remotely?

A livestream of a high school girl’s skirt being flipped or of a vampire with her four limbs severed would be immediately banned, though.

As I saw off my sisters who were leaving for school at separate times, I was spending my free time deeply reflecting upon the “summary of everything so far”, when…

“My master.”

A voice was heard from my shadow—oh my.

That golden-haired young girl had been “staying at home” since that spring break two years ago, long before this period of self-restraint began (hiding herself first in the ruins of the abandoned cram school, and then in my shadow), but what was she doing, sluggishly crawling out in the morning?

Oshino Shinobu.

A golden-haired and golden-eyed young girl that looked to be eight years old.

However, her true form was the remnants of the iron-blooded, hot-blooded, cold-blooded vampire—the dregs of the King of Oddities that had lived for six hundred years.

Speaking of which, when we’d met, she’d deceptively rounded down her age to “five hundred years old”, but two years later, she was now a young girl with a full six hundred years of experience that could not be rounded away.

The six-hundred-year-old young girl and the twenty-year-old me.

How stylish.

I hadn’t really gotten excited about how a guy like me would greet his twentieth year—it was a huge disappointment that Meniko’s surprise party had been suspended, but there was no doubt that the world had become engulfed in a much bigger surprise.

I hadn’t had any intention of indulging in drinking or smoking the moment I turned twenty, but in a world where even elections were counted as risks, there was nothing new that could come from my birthday.

“I have a small proposal, but is now a good time, my master?”

“Yeah, it’s fine. As you can see, I have nothing better to do, so I could use a good proposal. I’d love to fill in my blank schedule a little bit with any sort of plan.”

I’d talked about how I’d gotten used to staying at home, but I wasn’t exactly as much of a shut-in as you were… Now that I’d become keenly aware of the cruelty of binding this young girl to my shadow, I felt like I would hear out any request that she had.

What could it be? Donuts?

Recently, Mister Donut had changed their policy, and the number of high-class donuts had increased. They certainly seemed like they would fit Shinobu’s tastes, with her being born of noble blood.

If Shinobu, who was nocturnal by nature, was awake in the morning, then perhaps her lifestyle had been disrupted in a way that was hard to notice in this depressing world, so there was no problem with keeping her company as a diversion.

I wasn’t exactly her attending servant anymore, but I was more than happy to attend to this young girl.

That was how I’d carelessly responded, but the six-hundred-year-old young girl and expert of staying at home easily surpassed the predictions of a beginner like me.

“I was thinking of taking a trip to Europe now, so how about you come along with me?”