Free Web NovelChapter 298: Deep Thoughts
After a few minutes, I manage to calm my mind a little. Since the whole place is made of reinforced threads, the room is indestructible, so I don’t need to worry too much about Arial and Nerina barging in to bother me.
I also sense that Arial has "vanished" through magic—she’s no longer on the island. Nerina, on the other hand, is still here, but she’s quiet, staying at the far end of the house. freewёbnoνel.com
That at least shows she respected my request for space, which lets me think about the future in peace.
"..." I look at the little doll in my hand, its tiny belly straining against its little dress. This puppet is a "Chimera"—an attempt I made to fuse different types of marionettes.
I’d made a chimera before, but that was a chimera in terms of appearance, mixing various traits from different races. This little doll here, though, is a chimera of the marionette types I know how to use.
And that’s why this little doll is something that can get pregnant—because it’s a blend of a standard model marionette and a living marionette.
"Do you want to have this child?" I ask the little doll, who looks at me confused. She’s not very bright, because she isn’t a true living marionette; she only inherited the physical and magical traits of one.
"Do you want me to?" she asks, now able to speak, leaving everything up to me because she can’t really choose.
’Considering the chimerism and the type, it’s probably not a 100% biological child in the pregnancy sense. It must be more like cloning,’ I analyze the little doll’s body with magic.
The baby inside is likely a clone—like putting a small doll inside a slightly larger doll and leaving it there.
"It doesn’t matter now..." I still feel something deeply wrong, like the end of something is approaching.
’That "Evelyn Idol" mentioned killing Nerina... what does my fear have to do with killing Nerina? Am I supposed to choose to kill her? Esther... is she what I’m supposed to choose?’ That name feels very important.
"Urgh... what do I do? What should I do now...?" I wonder if I should try to remember the past, but my head hurts so much when I try, and a kind of panic attack starts just from thinking about it and feeling the awful emotions tied to the past.
"..." Feeding the little doll magic, I decide to at least finish the test. I accelerate the growth of whatever is in the doll’s womb and, using threads, perform a quick delivery.
"As expected..." What came out of the little doll is another, literally identical little doll, except for one difference: blue eyes instead of the pearly white of my own.
"Hello!" The newborn doll, no more than 8 centimeters tall, waves at me.
"Who am I?" I ask the miniature of a miniature.
"Evelyn-sama," the newborn doll answers, just as expected. I’m still her master, even if she came from such an irregular and strange creation.
’It’s somewhat interesting. The birth and the speed at which it normally grows would mean two days at most until she’s 100% developed...’ It’s different from a living marionette.
A living marionette would have a normal gestation with a long waiting period, and a standard model marionette couldn’t have children at all. This little chimera doll, however, had a pregnancy, but a highly accelerated one.
’The little doll seems to have lost 10% of her original strength, and her daughter has 5% of the mother’s original strength...’ It seems power doesn’t come from nowhere; it’s shared and divided between them, something that wouldn’t happen in a normal pregnancy.
’Arial didn’t impregnate this doll. She just activated parameters the marionette already had...’ The doll used its own magic to "get pregnant" and wasn’t exactly "impregnated" by Arial. The only trait from Arial is the blue eyes, and that’s just a sign of the magic.
"I’m going to destroy you both, okay?" I ask them to test something. I want to see if they’ll resist, refuse, or if their relationship with one another will become defensive. If it does, letting them continue to exist is dangerous for me.
"Understood, Evelyn-sama!" Both little dolls repeat with the same loyal gaze. I look at them for a while before unraveling their bodies—an important test to determine if they’re still mine.
Even the new marionette dissolves into magical particles, which implies that, yes, she is still generated by my power. This only proves she isn’t a real "baby" like in the case of a living marionette. She’s just a clone generated by excess magic within the body.
’The little doll must have used my vitality to get pregnant, which is why she still depends on my power...’ Now I’m alone in the room. Everything I’ve learned on this island has been important.
But the feeling never fades—the feeling that I’m in for something very bad. So I think about what I could do.
The reality, however, is that there’s nothing I can do. So I slowly go to my bed, lie down, and stare at the ceiling.
"H-Ha... hahaha... how strange... I’m feeling a bit hopeless about the future... but I feel like this has happened before?" The panic is there, the fear is intense, but the reactions cool down shortly after I calm myself.
Why do I seem so accustomed to this feeling of being cornered? My mind decides to simply wait. After all, I don’t know what the worst outcome could be, but panicking won’t help me.
"I wonder... if I just wait... will something happen?..." I’m not sure what to do, so I keep replaying the interaction I had with that strange "screen," thinking about the words I heard.
’Kill Nerina... I can do that... but that wasn’t what I wanted when I learned more about her body through the symbiosis...’ Since we had shared magic and emotions, I had learned something I didn’t tell Nerina.
’I should choose... but how can I choose without remembering anything...’ I stare at the ceiling as if it will give me an answer. Should I try to remember everything? Ignore what Nerina said?
...
...
...
"What the hell was that!" I shout, furious at Arial, kicking the sand on the beach. All the monsters around the shore have fled back into the sea.
"[I-I don’t know! I didn’t do anything! I just fiddled with that doll. That’s no reason for Evelyn to kick me off the island or get extremely pissed off!]" Arial tries to defend herself, but now Evelyn is there, alone in that hut.
"If I find out you did something, it’ll be your end!! Her reaction was not normal, and if she recovers her memories, it’ll be hard for me to erase them again," I tell her as she slips back into the spiritual plane.
"[I didn’t do anything! Besides, Evelyn kicked you out too. So it probably wasn’t about us. It was something else. You should go talk to her. She was clearly panicking.]"
"...Tsk... fine, you’re right. She didn’t look well. Her hands were shaking, her gaze seemed panicked, and she seemed more focused on the doll and what happened than on you."
"Besides, she sealed the room with those indestructible threads, so no one can enter until she opens a gap."
"And you didn’t even talk to her. She was sleeping in the room and woke up like that... maybe it was a memory lapse, or you accidentally reminded her of something, and her mind started fighting the hidden memories."
"I’ll handle this..." I try to think rationally and more appropriately about the situation.
"I’ll have a calm conversation with her. As long as she hasn’t remembered anything, I can soothe her. If necessary, I’ll even give her some magic to calm her mind."
"[Do what you want. Just don’t blame me again. I hadn’t even been here a full day, and my interactions with her were the most basic kind. If something went wrong, it’s entirely your fault.]" After saying that, Arial stops talking.
"Damn it... I worked so hard to make her peaceful and less paranoid. Now everything seems back to square one. Why is Evelyn so complicated?" I’m starting to get obsessed with this complex challenge.
It’s never been so hard to capture a prey’s mind before, and worse, NOTHING has ever slipped through my fingers. Meanwhile, Evelyn, who had already improved her relationship with me, suddenly turned chaotic and slipped right through my tricks.
"...My Cores... I’m spending way too much..." Maintaining this simplified domain around the island to prevent Evelyn from escaping was easy at first, but now I’ve burned through 14 cores just to keep it up.
After all, it’s active 24 hours a day, every day, for over two months. That’s way too long to maintain an abstract domain, even if it’s a simplified one. It’s moments like this I regret that my domain isn’t a physical one. freēwēbηovel.c૦m
"Evelyn is costing me far too much. 14 cores is over five thousand years of waiting." I wonder if this is still worth it, or if I should just give up and kill her. But thinking about that only makes me angrier.
I’ve already spent too much to give up now. Either I make her body mine and addict her to me, or I’ll suffer the biggest loss of my life.
’I’ll wait three or four days and then try to talk to her...’
