“And say, we did not ask to be created like this? I have lived a little too long to make such a naive plea… Besides, it seems you have an overidealized view of the Witch, Young Su.”
“‘Overidealized view of the Witch’?”
Subaru’s eyes went wide, as if he’d never expected that to be said to him. To that Subaru, Ryuzu said, “It is as if you are watching a dream,” forming a smile that gave off a rather desolate air as she gently shook her head.
“I take it, you are thinking along the lines of…if the Witch went to the extreme of such experiments to bring Ryuzu Meyer back to life, the girl must have been an irreplaceable being from the perspective of the Witch?”
“Well, yeah… I mean, is there any other answer?”
In point of fact, no other answer came to mind. The Witch had tried to bring the girl back to the point of drawing up a ritual to create a soul. So the girl must have been that important to her—what other answer was there?
“Ryuzu Meyer was a mere village girl. The circumstances of her birth were just a little special, but…she was certainly not close to the Witch nor were they related by blood. Ryuzu Meyer and the Witch were such strangers that the times they had spoken could no doubt have been counted on one hand.”
“”
“Incidentally, Young Su. Earlier, you deduced that the experiment in this land had failed, yes?”
“—? Y-yeah.”
Subaru was perplexed at how she had put the current discussion on hold and had gone back to a matter from a little earlier. But Subaru being thrown off did not make Ryuzu hesitate to land an additional blow.
“The experiment in this land failed not. I told you before—I am an example of its success.”
“Ryuzu, you’re an example of success…? No, wait! Something’s weird about that!”
Overwhelmed, Subaru thrust a palm out and second-guessed what had just been said.
Ryuzu’s wording was strange. After all, had she not explained previously?
“You said you were born empty. I know you said you were born the same as Piko is now, and you came to be as you are now. How does that make you a success?”
“My, my. Having that said to my face is rather hurtful, you know?”
“Please don’t make light of it! I’m seriously… I’m seriously asking this!”
He accepted that his statement was inconsiderate. But it wasn’t a situation where he could tread lightly.
The force of Subaru’s words brought a rather strained smile from Ryuzu. She gently touched a hand to her chest.
According to the explanation to that point, there was no heart beating behind her diminutive chest. However, Piko conveyed warmth to him as she sat by his side. Where was that heat coming from? he wondered.
This was the proof of the soul, the result created by Echidna’s experiment to create life—
“—That girl and I, born empty, are successes of the Witch’s experiment. Those words are no lie.”
As Ryuzu repeated her earlier words, Subaru calmed down his quickened heart and nodded.
Ryuzu was saying that their being born as dolls in an empty state and not as reproductions of the original, Ryuzu Meyer—this was by the Witch’s intent. What was the meaning behind this?
“Back then, the girls leaping at the Witch were all the same as Piko…”
Obeying Garfiel’s commands, the replicas had sacrificed themselves against the Witch enshrouded by a vast shadow without the slightest fear. They’d been made that way…like dolls, merely obeying the commands issued to them.
Was that what that white-haired Witch wanted? Was that what she was after?
“You could pass it off as curiosity to that point, but what could she learn from that? If she wanted that, brainwashing someone appropriate would’ve been a hell of a lot faster. Don’t tell me the motivation was madness of some sort—like, I thought of making them, so I did…”
And if it was so, that would be that. But for some reason, he was certain that it was not.
Why would Echidna make something from nothing, an empty vessel, something you could pour anything into—
“—Ah.”
Instantly, he saw it in the far distance, a possibility pieced together from various fragments.
It was simply a preposterous thought, the sort that one ought to forget about with a single shake of the head. But once the thought was given life, Subaru’s brain grabbed hold of it and would not let go.
This was the Witch of Greed, curiosity incarnate. She had a logical objective that lived up to that lofty title. She had a reason for constructing an empty vessel with nothing inside. After all, what is an empty vessel for—
“—It’s obvious. It’s for pouring something into it.”
If the empty vessel was the completed form, the objective was to fill it.
Just what would fill such a vessel? What could possibly be the ambition of someone called a Witch, a person who had a bottomless craving for knowledge and wanted to know all there was to learn in the world?
What was that something the Witch wanted to pour into an empty Ryuzu Meyer—
“—She’d pour personality, memory, knowledge…in other words, a soul.”
The deduction made Subaru feel like his throat had suddenly gone dry. In his place, Ryuzu picked up where Subaru left off.
Her blue eyes narrowed, and though the old woman seemed to be peering far into the distance, her gaze rested on her own offshoot standing right at his side—no, this was no offshoot. She shifted her eyes toward the doll that was like her own little sister.
“The Witch was supposed to pour herself into the body of Ryuzu Meyer. This was, in other words—”
“—one type of immortality.”
It was this conclusion that unveiled the truth about the experiment conducted in the Sanctuary.
5
Immortality. There were many legends about such a thing stretching from ancient to modern times, from Occident and Orient alike. Life reaching that point formed an ideal.
For eternity, one would never grow old or wither, and the “self” would be tied to the world without passing through the great cycle of death and reincarnation. Even knowing that this violated the defining rules of life, there was much that was attractive about arriving at the pinnacle of living—
Yet, an exceedingly decrepit ring of truth rested behind those grandiose words.
“Immortality, that’s…a greedy thought even for a Witch. Immortality… It comes off as the goal of a small person obsessed with her own life, I’ve gotta say…”
“Whether being reluctant to part with life is a sign of poor character is open to personal interpretation, but at the very least, the Witch does not seem to regard her own life as a trivial thing. Fear of death is natural, as is searching for a way to keep it at bay. In most circumstances, it is the sort of desire one might laugh off, but…”
“Echidna was someone who had the ability to make it into a reality. And this is the result of that line of thinking?”
Looking down at Piko as she sat at his side, Subaru had the annoying sense that he couldn’t say anything bad about that. Piko did not react to his gaze, either. She simply had a vacant expression, as if simply awaiting his command.
“…If these girls really are empty, even making them cry like little babies would’ve been way better…”
“Apparently, that was not the Witch’s desire. What the Witch wanted in the end was a vessel…not one with a personality such as I but one beginning with the minimum intelligence required to obey instructions. To a certain extent, that would also give the Witch the option of keeping or discarding the memories of the girl from which they were extracted.”
Memory and intelligence were installed and saved within the empty vessel. Those were the easiest words he could use to describe it, but they weren’t talking about data. They were talking about a single person’s personality, memories, knowledge…a person’s soul.
“It’d let her implant her own memor
ies into a new vessel. By doing that, when one body became old, if she kept creating new vessels, that’d definitely become one form of immortality. But…”
Maybe you could call passing down the personality and memory one sure way of conquering death. If you saved a personality like data, even if one vessel was destroyed due to some mistake, you could be resurrected through installation into a new vessel.
You could copy the personality, and you could copy the physical body—that was the immortality Echidna had theoretically established.
And when he unraveled the method behind the immortality Echidna had aimed for, he realized something.
“Ahhh, so that’s it… So that’s how it is.”
“Young Su?”
Suddenly, a sense of acceptance calmed the inside of his chest, and a dry smile came over Subaru.
The smile made Ryuzu’s brows grimace, but Subaru did not give her any reply. After all, it was meaningless to speak about it. There was no one who could understand what was inside Subaru’s chest that moment.
“Finally, I get it… I get the reason why you acted all chummy with me.”
To the smiling Echidna on the back of his eyelids, Subaru quietly let out what seemed like admiration.
Echidna’s objective was to prepare multiple replicas to inherit her own life and the personality and knowledge therein—immortality achieved through transference of the soul. This was, in other words, none other than her method of preparing for what came “after” life.
“—Just how different is that from my Return by Death…?”
From their very first meeting onward, Echidna had harbored a great deal of goodwill toward Subaru. She’d been his confidant, speaking to him at great length, and through the conduct she had displayed, the distance between them had been reduced, and she had obtained his trust.
Now he understood the true intent behind those actions. This was the Witch’s joy…a joy akin to that of discovery.
“I understand how you felt at the time… I mean, I was happy enough to cry…”
When Subaru had revealed Return by Death, it had saved him. Truly, he’d looked at the world a different way since. Probably she’d had the same feeling from the first time she and Subaru had met. That’s why Echidna…
“”
Because he understood that, there was no way he could harbor ill will toward her works. If anything, it made him feel closer to her. The emotion Subaru harbored for the Witch really was genuine gratitude…gratitude at having met someone cut from the same cloth.
Echidna desired immortality. Subaru continued to pile on death to win his future.
The methods did not change that both were engaged in rebellion at the single “life” that they ought to have had.
If that was so. —If that was so, in a true sense, was not Echidna the one being who could truly understand where he was coming from, and Echidna, him?
“…Ryuzu, I understand your position…and what Echidna was trying to do, too. So knowing this, I ask you…did Echidna succeed in her goal?”
“Her goal, in other words…”
“She prepared the vessels. All that was left was to overwrite one with her. Did that overwriting succeed? No, if I was to put it more bluntly…”
—Was Echidna alive somewhere in that world that very moment?
He’d cut off his words halfway because he felt like his tongue was going numb. But as if she sensed what was in his thoughts, Ryuzu shook her head. Slowly, she shook her head.
“I imagine it is to the chagrin of the Witch, but her plan was a failure… Echidna was not passed down.”
“Wh-why not? Did the personality installa— Etching fail?”
“It was not a complete failure. However, from the Witch’s point of view, her wish was incompletely granted.”
“Whaddaya mean, incompletely?”
“It is a simple matter… If the amount poured is too great for the vessel, of course the rest spills out. If one portion spills out, what remains is already something different from the original.”
Blinking at the echo of the word vessel, Subaru looked at Ryuzu, then Piko.
“When you say the vessel isn’t enough to hold it, you’re not talking about physical size, are you?”
“Perhaps it is better to say, the capacity for the soul. People are suited to the various souls that are inside of them. The vessel of Ryuzu Meyer was simply insufficient to accept the Witch of Greed.”
“Didn’t she…know that beforehand somehow?”
“I cannot know the entirety of a Witch’s thoughts. But the vessel chosen by the Witch, Ryuzu Meyer, was insufficient for the Witch’s hopes. As a result, her plans went awry…and a terrible failure came to be born.”
“Goodness,” went Ryuzu, a tired look on her as her shoulders fell. Subaru felt the same way.
Echidna had overlooked something in the fine details, an unfathomable error for a Witch. Knowing the person concerned, Subaru thought such an error was eminently understandable and predictable but—
“So the plan failed…but she still made replicas after that, right?”
“…However, those replicas were born from filling the magic crystal in that facility with a certain level of mana. The Witch designed it so that the magic crystal itself forms them.”
“The magic crystal itself… You mean she made it make the replicas automatically?”
“As a result, after the Witch’s death, only the facility remained, and even today the number of replicas continues to grow… It is all a matter of mana. That we require no material resources to live is the single saving grace.”
These words spoken, Ryuzu audibly sipped her tea with the same mouth that had just announced she required neither food nor drink.
“…You seem to drink tea just fine, though.”
“This is a hobby of mine. It is an individual quirk I acquired over the course of a long life.”
Subaru’s listless jab made Ryuzu’s little throat ring out with laughter. Feeling a little rescued by that laugh, Subaru let out a long sigh and put a question onto his lips.
“So what about this first ‘failed’ replica? Even if you couldn’t stuff the entire soul in, she must’ve inherited part of a Witch’s memories, right? Even if it wasn’t all the way, she’d still end up pretty witchy, right?”
“When poured liquid spills, one cannot pick and choose which part spills out? If it is minor memories that spill out, there might be no hindrance to everyday life, but if parts with a crucial impact on personality spill out, it is already beyond salvaging.”
Subaru thought Ryuzu’s roundabout explanation must apply to the first failed replica. In other words, she became something far from the Witch’s expectations—
“Thanks to that replica having a completely bankrupt personality yet having inherited a fragment of the power of the Witch of Greed, it was apparently quite the uproar. Though she was disposed of, it caused the Lady Ros of prior generations quite a bit of anguish.”
“Disposed of… I see.”
“Of course, if she was one to give up after a single failure, she would not have pursued immortality to begin with. Reflecting upon her failure, the Witch’s next thought was perhaps the net volume of the soul could be modified.”
“Takes one hell of a soul to come up with that!”
In other words, the idea was nothing short of compressing the data before transfer. Subaru could understand because he had a passing familiarity with computers and the concept of moving amounts of data around, but Echidna was quite something to arrive at the same idea without that knowledge and apply it to the soul at that.
“But it sounds like…that failed, too.”
“It did not. The Witch did not make it in time. The Witch of Jealousy swallowed her up before she could do so.”
After the last of that statement, of how the great hope harbored by Echidna the Witch had gone to waste, she let out a distinct sigh.
Subaru, too, knew how the six Witches bearing the titles of the oth
er Deadly Sins had met their end. Already destroyed by the seventh Witch, the Witches in the false, transient encounters within the castle of dreams were nothing more than vestiges of their souls.
Or perhaps remaining in soul form alone was simply a matter of Echidna’s stubbornness.
“So Roswaal’s family has been administering the Sanctuary since Echidna passed away. Ryuzu, can I assume…you live here for the same reason?”
“It is so where Young Ros is concerned, but I live here because I am bound by the pact.”
The word pact brought a dramatic rise from Subaru’s eyebrows. He didn’t have any good memories of that or similar words since arriving in that world: pact, vow, covenant—the whole bunch.
Not noticing the state Subaru was in, Ryuzu made a very deep sigh.
“As the replicas go, I was one of the first four. I was granted the knowledge and personality required to administer the Sanctuary as the number of replicas continue to increase. That duty continues even now.”
“So you were given a personality and a role from the time you were born?”
“My quirks come from my upbringing after the fact, but it was quite a hardship at first. I had a duty, yet I had no memory. Many years would pass before I could truly appreciate living each and every day.”
Somehow, her words had a pained echo to them, no doubt from thinking of the months and years that had passed to date.
Only Ryuzu could know the hardships she had faced on the long road she had walked. It had been four centuries since Echidna’s death—it was a span of time that Subaru couldn’t even begin to imagine.
“I am grateful for your consideration, but you need not wear that painful look. I believe there is deep meaning behind the duty I fulfill. Their circumstances are varied, but because I was here, I was able to save a great many brethren. Maintaining this place has tangible meaning.”
These words spoken, Ryuzu smiled, and Subaru felt pressure inside of his chest.
By brethren she had saved, she meant the demi-human people living in the Sanctuary had been exposed to bias and discrimination, unable to stay in any one place for long. Whatever the Witch’s intentions, this had become a place of peace to them, a homeland they had attained at long last.
Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World-, Vol. 12 Page 7
