[311] The Wheel of Causality (3)
"I knew it."
When the woman craned her head as if to pull away, Jenoger slammed the back of her skull into the wall without mercy.
Dull thuds rang out in succession as the porcelain skin covering her face peeled away.
Beneath it was a grotesque man's face. No—by appearance, you couldn't even tell the sex.
No eyebrows, no eyelids—only eyeballs rolling in their sockets.
"Heh heh heh, a face made for disguises? You're as hideous as I am."
The unidentified assassin spoke for the first time.
"Ah, you haven't seen me before, then. I've been sick of your hideous mug for a long time."
Jenoger's expression crumpled.
It was the same line he'd once used on Arius. In a psychological duel, you mustn't flinch.
But a thought crossed his mind. Teraze's child always has one bodyguard. Yet he'd never seen Uorin's guard before.
"No, that can't be. You weren't detected by my senses? Where the hell were you hiding?"
The assassin altered his voice again.
"What are you talking about? I've always been behind you."
Jenoger went pale.
He knew whose voice that was—the nameless agent who delivered orders under Zion's command.
'Damn it! So that's how it is.'
Specialized disguise, unique movement technique, the line he'd used on Arius.
Putting all the clues together, it had to be an assassin sent by Uorin.
'Keep calm. His combat strength is below mine anyway. Don't get caught by a psychological trick.'
Jenoger used his six hands to clamp down on the spots where his opponent's power amplified. The feeble assassin—whose muscles had been burned away for the disguise—had no way to escape.
"From now on you will answer my questions. Lie and I'll tear out your limbs. Does Uorin know where the Spatur clan is hiding?"
"...She knows."
"Really? Tell me where. Answer quickly! As a direct guard, you can't not know!"
"The Wave Mountains. The Valley of True Name."
Jenoger felt his chest collapse.
Uorin knowing the hideout meant she'd already sent a purge force. By tomorrow morning the Spatur clan would be erased from history.
"Give it up. Even if you escape from here, there is nowhere that will take you."
"Ugh... Aaaah! Shut up!"
Jenoger did not give up.
If the clan was to be annihilated, all the more reason to survive. If it ended like this, what value would remain for a clan that had renounced being human for a thousand years?
"Die! You damned bastard!"
Jenoger raised his left central arm, curled his fingers to points, and, swift as a spear, drove them into the assassin's solar plexus and seized the heart.
The heart burst; the assassin's body convulsed. The startled eyes rolled wildly.
* * *
Clang!
One of El Crouch's porcelain dolls, lined up on the shelf, shattered. Its torso tumbled off the shelf and hit the floor with a secondary crack.
Uorin, sitting at the table, blinked slowly as if she hadn't heard. She walked to a cabinet, took out a strong liquor, filled a crystal glass halfway, and returned to the table. She sat, crossed one leg over the other, idly tapped a white calf, and drifted into thought.
"Hmm..."
A porcelain doll had broken.
That meant another life had ended.
The crystal glass parted her cherry lips. The clear liquid slid down, wetting her tongue, then flowed out again.
"What a boring night."
* * *
Jenoger glared at the assassin with a terrifying stare.
He'd killed countless people, but he'd never faced anything like this. He had stabbed the solar plexus and burst the heart—he could still feel the heart cooling in his hand. Yet why...
"You don't die, then?"
"It died. Once."
Somewhere between comprehension and insight, Jenoger accepted the assassin's words.
A flicker of curiosity passed through him, but it was only a moment. There was nothing someone leaving this world needed to know.
"An assassin, then."
"It's not people who kill."
The assassin swung his only free hand. A flash sliced through, and with a sharp ching, Jenoger's head flew off.
"It's the situation that kills."
Watching Jenoger's head bounce on the floor, the assassin plucked the arm embedded in Jenoger's chest free. Jenoger's body collapsed, emitting a rough glow, and a fountain of blood spouted from the severed neck.
The assassin showed no emotion. Even if there were feelings inside, none could be read on that face.
The dollmaker El Crouch.
Only a very few knew that the man active two hundred years ago had been obsessed with black magic.
When he first drew attention with his technique of seamless-jointed dolls, a woman visited him.
Surprisingly, the visitor was Teraze, ruler of the continent.
They talked at length, and the day after Teraze left, Crouch died. At least officially.
Hundreds of notable figures attended his funeral. But while they wept, Crouch sat on a small ship bound for the East.
Following Teraze's instructions, he arrived at a dollmaker's household. Already steeped in black magic, he quickly learned the craft.
How to instill attachment into a doll. How to build a perpetual power device said to be taught by demons. How to install mechanisms into the bodies of the dead, and so on.
Crouch mastered every process and left the East.
When he returned home, a full 180 years had passed. But having converted his body into a doll, he could not die even if he wanted to.
First he retrieved the works he'd made long ago. Only dolls containing the artisan's soul could be used to disperse life.
But most of his pieces had been sold, so there were only a few he could reclaim.
It was at that point Teraze gave her first directive: attend to her daughter Uorin.
Uorin liked Crouch, and from then on she began collecting El Crouch's porcelain dolls.
"Lady Uorin, it's me."
Crouch knocked on Uorin's door.
For an assassin who could infiltrate anywhere, knocking was unnecessary, but today he thought it proper to offer formal greetings.
"Come in."
Crouch opened the door slowly and entered.
Uorin reclined against the chair back, sipping her drink. Slightly tipsy, she greeted him with a new, sultry smile.
"Well? What is it—you searched my whole room?"
Crouch laughed, but without facial muscles he couldn't show it; the laugh was only in his voice.
"I have eliminated the Spatur mongrel, Princess Uorin. No—"
Not content with a bow, Crouch dropped to his knees and prostrated himself on the floor.
"Empress Teraze."
Uorin snorted and turned to the window. Dusk still darkened, but dawn was approaching.
"You're perceptive."
Crouch shook his head and confessed frankly.
"To be honest, I didn't know until yesterday. I realized when the wind charm arrived. Even I, who stay by your side twenty-four hours a day, was deceived. When did you awaken?"
"Two years ago."
Crouch clicked his tongue.
As a dollmaker he was attuned to human expression. That someone who never missed the slightest muscle movement could fail to notice Uorin had awakened for two years was shocking.
'Well... she has lived through the ages.'
Teraze is the Mitochondrial Eve.
Mitochondria are passed only from mother to child. Follow that line and you find the ancestor of all humanity—that is the Mitochondrial Eve.
Long ago, a woman's mitochondria underwent a strange mutation: an absolute hereditary ability to pass her memories one hundred percent to her offspring.
Teraze's daughter, after age ten, perfectly awakens to the memories of predecessors. When a mother bears a child, the child becomes the mother again.
Though it borrows reproduction as a means, it amounts to one human living indefinitely.
She likely existed before she bore the name Teraze—perhaps back when she was merely a primate. She does not know the moment of her emergence.
But from that point on, history is stored in her mind: from humanity's beginning to the present.
Thus she was the only human who retained McClain Griffin's déjà vu.
Teraze long knew that mere replication of herself would eventually lead to extinction.
She could fall to disease, be dragged into war, or be wiped out by natural disaster.
She worked to strengthen the efficiency of the individual. After a breeding experiment lasting four thousand years, she discovered how to selectively insert a father's genes into the oocyte.
From then on Teraze became superior in every respect.
She inherited traits from aesthetically superior men and grew more beautiful, and she received the blood of a transcendent being to gain an iron will.
She absorbed the resourcefulness of wealthy merchants, the physical prowess of great sword lords, the intellect of archmages—every trait that helped dominate the world—and passed them to the next generation, then reawakened memories and repeated the process endlessly.
By repeating herself like that, Teraze grew strong.
Since these traits did not manifest in her sons, she founded a nation herself in a female body. She now reigns as the Emperor of Kashan and as one of the Three Sovereigns.
"Long time no see, Crouch. Your once-dapper handsome face has become quite damaged."
Crouch realized the remark was addressed not to the fourteen-year-old Uorin but to him as he had been two hundred years ago, and he bowed politely.
"By the Empress's aid I obtained immortality. To a dollmaker, a face is mere packaging. My pride lies in the mechanisms that make up my body."
"Heh heh, that's like you. Indeed... it was like that the first day we met too."
Uorin remembered everything, but Crouch's memory was hazy.
Unable to answer immediately, he asked a question to break the awkward silence.
"The wind charm arrived. If it's the Empress, you must have anticipated it and called it. Did you know Shirone would survive?"
Uorin went to the window and drew back the curtains. The garden below the apartment lay peacefully asleep.
"Politics isn't about giving one thing and taking another. It's about making an offer where, whatever the opponent chooses, you win. Shirone surviving would be good, but even if he died, it wouldn't have been a bad outcome."
"I see."
"But I can say this: he was fully deserving to survive."
"I understand you tested him several times."
Uorin looked at the ceiling and recalled that time.
"At first I tested luck. When I turned the 'Daily Gifts,' he won an excessive prize. I thought perhaps it could be."
Crouch tilted his head in incomprehension.
"Did you know a piece of my work would arrive as a gift?"
Uorin nodded.
"The world is like a marble vending machine. Inside are blue events and red events mixed together. Observers outside can't know the pattern in which marbles will come out. That's humans. They go to the machine and turn it, not knowing what will come out. Crouch, do you believe in luck?"
"Luck, huh... Well. Looking back, I suppose I think I was fortunate."
Uorin smiled and continued.
"There is no such thing as luck. Nor is there misfortune. The order of marbles in the box is already determined. Feeling it as luck or misfortune is only because humans cannot look inside the box. For someone, only blue marbles may come out forever. For another, only red marbles. Of course, far more people will alternate between blue and red. And all of that is human life—living."