Chapter 192 – Confession (2)
“Why do you look like that?”
When I pointed out that he was utterly failing to control his expression, El abruptly came to his senses and raised the corners of his mouth again.
“What is wrong with my expression?”
Although he answered with a gentle smile, he could not erase the tension concealed within his eyes.
The emotions revealed in his eyes were so transparent that I nearly laughed in disbelief.
No matter how much I thought about it, the creature before me truly seemed to be Emperor Sierra Abiran.
If my assumption was correct, I had no idea how someone this careless had managed to conceal his identity for a thousand years.
No, perhaps I should instead question how someone this careless had become the god of this world and received people’s worship throughout those long centuries.
Then again, it was also puzzling how Sierra Abiran, the First Emperor, had ended up following the Master of the Prophecy around in the form of a squirrel.
What would happen if I asked him directly?
“You look awfully nervous. Almost as if you were Sierra Abiran.”
I stared at the creature smiling with his doll-like face.
Was he unable to reveal his identity right now?
As I stared at him expressionlessly, a small hand approached me.
“As you said, you are a child who keeps his promises. There is no need to waste time, is there?”
In other words, he was pressuring me to stop doing anything pointless and fulfill my promise.
After looking down at the small hand, I slowly extended mine.
Fine. The amount of time I would spend playing along with his lies had merely increased a little.
Besides, there was something I wanted to test through this as well.
I grasped his hand, closed my eyes, and concentrated on the sensations within it.
The moment I stirred the power inside my body, heat surged from deep within my energy core and spread toward my fingertips.
At the same time, I felt the other person’s power being forcibly drawn into my palm.
The heat was greater than that of our touching palms, and the pain of my skin burning began.
Unfairly enough, I seemed to be the only one feeling this pain.
Otherwise, he would not have been able to look at me with such a broad smile.
The annihilation energy gradually subsided.
There was no reason to hesitate.
If I died like this, I would have to relinquish the information I had yet to extract from him, but the risks were too great for me to simply ignore them.
However, the small imperial child continued to face me without the slightest problem.
His immaculate face showed no sign that he had been threatened in any way.
“I have no idea why you would suddenly say such a thing, child. I couldn’t care less how much abuse that dead emperor receives.”
This time, he responded from behind an even thicker mask.
Not a single drop of blood flowed from his mouth as it opened intermittently while he spoke.
I had tested him with a series of ambiguous questions, but were they truly insufficient to provoke any reaction?
He had said that he was under a curse that would kill him the moment his identity was discovered.
I had thought it was an absurdly convenient curse that not even a princess from a fairy tale would suffer from, but had that also been a lie?
Or perhaps its activation conditions were slightly more complicated.
For instance, perhaps it would only activate if he believed his identity had been discovered, or if I became certain that he was Sierra Abiran.
Did I need absolute certainty that I had uncovered his identity, rather than a lukewarm assumption that he might be the Emperor?
Or was even that merely another deception?
At least one thing was certain: his warning that repeatedly lying would cause one to lose credibility had clearly come from personal experience.
At the same time, I sensed that something had gone wrong.
I could not feel even the slightest presence from the fragment that should have been created.
I pulled my hand away from El’s, but nothing remained where our hands had overlapped.
What?
Did it fail?
I raised my head and looked at El.
Contrary to my expectation that he would fly into a rage because this differed from what we had agreed upon, he was staring at his palm with a dazed expression.
“Ha……! Hahaha……!”
Eventually, a fit of laughter burst from his mouth.
“Have you gone mad from disappointment?”
“There is nothing you could do to disappoint me, child. You can no longer disappoint me.”
Answering in a voice tinged with laughter, he held his palm out toward me again.
The gesture seemed to urge me to look more closely. When I brought my face nearer, I noticed an incredibly tiny fragment resting upon his palm.
It was about the size of two grains of sand.
Its presence was so faint that I would not have noticed it without examining it this closely.
Was he truly that delighted over seeing this tiny thing?
Ignoring my hollow stare, his eyes examined the fragment from every angle before turning toward me.
His eyes gleamed with ecstasy.
“You probably cannot comprehend how delighted I am right now, child.”
“I’m more interested in what you intend to use it for than in your feelings.”
“How you use it is more important than how I intend to use it.”
El took my hand, opened it, and carefully placed the tiny fragment upon my palm.
Why was he giving this to me?
“Was extracting the power itself your objective?”
“No. My objective included giving it to you.”
After that simple answer, the small imperial child closed my hand around the tiny fragment.
“Use it however you please. You may use it yourself, or you may give it to the Child of the Prophecy. I will respect your choice……”
“Really? Then I can do whatever I want with it, right?”
Cutting him off, I rose from the bed.
I did not know what he was scheming, but this was not something that required lengthy consideration.
The fact that he had deceived me all this time was reason enough not to act as he wanted.
I approached the window and opened its latch. El watched me with a look of disbelief, and his mouth fell open.
Watching his eyes widen, I threw the object in my hand straight out the window.
El belatedly rushed over, leaned outside, and stared in the direction where I had thrown it.
Apparently unable to speak, he repeatedly opened and closed his mouth.
He looked surprised, but his reaction was weaker than I had expected.
Contrary to my expectation that he would at least scream, he merely stared out the window, where the fragment of his power had vanished in an instant.
Even that did not last long.
His gaze soon settled on me.
“Is that your choice?”
He asked after calming his emotions somewhat.
“Then what else was I supposed to do with it? It felt too suspicious to keep for myself or give to someone else.”
My expectation that the small imperial child would finally become angry and berate me was wrong once again.
“Haha, I see. So that is your answer. That is acceptable as well. This will not end after a single attempt anyway.”
Laughing lightly, he stepped closer and quietly peered into my face.
I opened my mouth to tell him to move his intrusive eyes elsewhere, but at that moment, he abruptly transformed.
“We should stop here for today. It seems I am not the only one who wishes to speak with you.”
Having returned to the form of a squirrel, El climbed up my shoulder and swiftly leaped onto the windowsill.
Apparently excited about something, he vigorously waved his paw before jumping through the window and disappearing.
As I watched him vanish after saying only what he wanted to say, I soon realized what his cryptic words had meant.
Bang!
An uninvited guest with silent footsteps suddenly threw open the door without warning.
* * *
Lia followed Edan, who kept glancing behind himself with unnatural frequency.
She could hardly walk beside someone behaving suspiciously while holding hands with him like a close companion.
Then again, his behavior had already been strange enough from the moment he secretly left the house after saying he wanted to organize his thoughts alone in the kitchen.
Following Edan without being noticed was not difficult.
He occasionally limped after tripping over Ratel and Jing’s legs and tumbling across the floor. It also helped that he deliberately sought out the particularly deserted roads around the village’s outskirts.
Still, weren’t there far too few people around?
Lia took in the village, which was as silent as though it were empty, and then looked at the sun high in the sky.
She then remembered something she had briefly forgotten.
Everyone must have gone to pray.
After the Lucha tournament ended, more people than usual gathered at the temple to pray. They sought to make up for the displays of faith they had neglected during the tournament and to console those who had been eliminated.
At this hour, the villagers would be gathered at the temple and deeply immersed in prayer.
‘I was too afraid to mingle with the villagers, so I always went secretly with my brother.’
Although it had happened only recently, it was a bitter memory that felt as distant as the remote past.
Along with that memory came a small measure of hope.
That’s right. He might simply be going there to pray.
Lia preferred to believe that Edan was merely more shameless and thick-skinned than she had been back then and that he was going to pray without caring about the villagers’ stares.
That futile hope persisted even when his steps led not toward the temple’s main entrance, but toward a small rear entrance whose existence she had not even known about.
Lia watched blankly as Edan glanced around and quietly slipped inside the temple tower.
Feeling her heart grow cold, Lia cautiously followed him inside.
The corridor was silent.
Once the door closed, the building seemed to deny that it had ever permitted anyone to enter.
Lia walked down the long, dark corridor while searching for traces of Edan.
Not a single person blocked her way as she walked while suppressing the sound of her footsteps.
It could not help but feel strange.
To Lia, the temple had always been an intimidating place.
The priests, who stood closer to God, were people to be revered.
Whenever she entered the temple where they gathered, something about it overwhelmed her.
At least, that was what she had believed.
But all she could feel now was an unpleasant darkness and the ominous atmosphere it created.
Shaking off her discomfort, Lia quickened her pace and finally found Edan.
No matter how she looked at him, he did not resemble someone who had come to pray.
If he intended to tell them about her and the companions who had entered Lucha Village with her, she could not allow him to continue.
Just as she was about to rush forward and grab Edan, a large hand covered her mouth and pulled her backward.
At the sudden attack, Lia instinctively swung her elbow behind her.
However, her opponent immediately caught her arm.
“Calm down. It’s me.”
Lia, who had been preparing to kick him next, relaxed at the familiar voice.
When Jing felt her abandon her fighting stance, he also released her.
“Sorry for startling you.”
“N-No, that’s not important. Edan……”
While accepting Jing’s apology, Lia urgently turned her gaze toward Edan.
In the distance, she saw Edan confidently turn at the end of the corridor as though he knew the place well.
Hiding around a corner, Lia watched as Edan selected one of the countless rooms, steadied his breathing outside it, and knocked somewhat roughly upon the door.
“What should we do? He’s going inside. If we leave him alone, he’ll tell them that we secretly escaped.”
Lia anxiously shuffled her feet, not knowing what to do, but Jing remained calm.
“No. If that were his intention, there would have been no need for him to come here in secret. Let us watch a little longer.”
At Jing’s words, Lia could only watch helplessly as Edan entered the room.
The moment the door closed and Edan completely disappeared from sight, Lia turned toward Jing.
“It’s still not too late. We should charge inside, knock everyone unconscious, and leave. I tried it once before, and I discovered that if I strike quickly enough, I can finish them before they even see my face. We must stop Edan before he tells the temple’s people about us. Edan is entirely capable of doing that. You saw him too, Jing.”
“Calm down. There is no one inside that room anyway.”
Jing calmed the rambling Lia.
“There’s no one inside?”
When Lia repeated the question in confusion, Jing nodded.
“That’s right. Edan is the only one inside. If he knew beforehand that the room would be empty, then he must have something to do that requires avoiding other people. If he did not know, he will wait until someone arrives. I believe it is the former.”
Saying that they needed to proceed cautiously for now, Jing silenced his footsteps and moved forward.
Lia followed while imitating Jing, who concealed the sound of his steps even more skillfully than she did.
“If you came alone, does that mean Ratel stayed behind with Ran? Then again, it did seem as though he had something to discuss with him. He glared at Ran as though he wanted to kill him whenever Ran said anything.”
“Yes. He already knew everything, so he could simply have said he was leaving. Instead, he made me look like a senile old man.”
Lia looked at Jing as if asking what he meant by his muttering.
Jing recalled the past several minutes, during which he had mistakenly believed they were following Edan together.
“He pretended to follow me, then turned around and went straight back. I have no idea how long I spent talking to empty air.”
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