WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 356

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The King Who Kills Others, the God Who Kills Himself - 14

The Golden Mirror is not stupid. They say a clever person is more easily deceived, but this case is different. Every memory and emotion I read, I read here in this mindscape.

Why Elik had abandoned him. How the Gold State had fallen. The Golden Mirror already knew. He knew it deep enough to ache.

I spoke gently to the Golden Mirror, who had bowed his head. I said what had always lived inside him, what he had been working so hard not to see.

"The Gold State was not beautiful at all. If anything, it was more corrupt than most places. A land of craftsmen and technique. A land that made its money through trade. Packed with people sharper about profit than anyone, selfish to the bone, selling their pride for coin. Each of them chasing their own gain, and when the country teetered on the edge of ruin, they turned on you and hunted you down as a monster. Did you truly want to rebuild that kind of country?"

No answer. It didn't matter. All I had to do was keep talking to shatter his paradise.

"No, I imagine not. I can see it from the paradise you built. The Golden Palace, where homunculi work without a word of complaint, where you keep close only the alchemists you can actually talk to. The King of Steel praises you in a voice full of warmth, and everything in the world takes the ideal form you desire."

He had wanted to build the Gold State. So he had gone around transmuting everything around him, villages, tools, even paddies and fields. Pastoral landscapes, thriving cities, magnificent fortress walls. The ideal vision he longed for had become real before his eyes.

But an ideal is not real. The vision he had called ideal never actually existed. I pressed on that contradiction in the Golden Mirror.

"The Gold State you miss does not exist. Because this Golden Palace, built by shutting out the outside world and stitching together only the parts you liked, does not resemble the Gold State by even a tenth."

What I said was the voice of his own interior. No person can resist themselves. I forced the Golden Mirror awake and provoked him, this being who had shed his body and left only thought behind.

"Enough pretending. Your wish cannot be granted. Not because you lack the power, but because you yourself do not know what you truly want. That is why your final creation, the 'Golden Mirror,' has been drifting aimlessly through the earth for hundreds of years, carrying nothing but a meaningless wish. Still numbly transmuting new prey while jackals tear away at everything you made."

The Golden Mirror. A relic of a Demon God who sought to rebuild the Gold State, and the final work of the first alchemist who remembered it.

But the Golden Mirror had not rebuilt the Gold State. He wandered about transmuting everything around him for a wish he could not fulfill, and whatever traces of the Gold State he left behind became nothing but fodder for the jackals to gnaw on.

The Golden Mirror spoke through clenched teeth.

"What... is it you want."

I was going to end the Golden Mirror.

Not because he had gotten in my way, and not because he was about to start a war with the military state. The Golden Mirror was delusion. As long as it existed, his wish could never be fulfilled.

I would strip away every lingering attachment, end the Golden Mirror, and carry him inside me.

"I want your wish. If your wish is to repeat this fantasy forever, then in its own way that is your answer, but that is not what you wish for, is it? Why does the Golden Mirror exist? Why has the period you wrote at the very end of your story never been able to close it, dragging on and on forever?"

It wasn't only the Golden Mirror, of course. Every soul who had died. The delusions of those who had left the world while dreaming of heaven and hell in their hearts. All of those delusions, every one of them, had their origin in her.

In place of a heaven that does not exist, I became a mausoleum. Now it was the Golden Mirror's turn to enter.

"What is it that keeps the Golden Mirror bound to this wheel? What is your true wish?"

A living person might not answer. A wish can change at any time, and one need not speak it aloud to fulfill it by one's own strength.

But someone standing at the edge of death has no such luxury. On the verge of vanishing from the world, they pour out their regrets to leave some trace of what they wished for.

If that is true of the dying, then what of those already dead.

"...I will build a beautiful Gold State."

They cannot keep from saying it.

I asked again, slowly.

"Even though the Gold State was a wretched country that pinned its crimes on you and killed you?"

"Such it was, and yet I loved it."

"Even though the Elik you loved betrayed you at your hardest moment?"

"Such she was, and yet I adored her."

With each word, his heart grew clearer.

He had liked his country. Not out of patriotism, but out of nostalgia for the place that was his home.

He had loved Elik. Not out of loyalty, but because he had admired her appearance and her ability.

Crimes, responsibility. Every kind of reason had been attached to justify his death, but the truth was that he had died as an outlet for anger, made an example of. If genuine malice were the measure, they should have killed the thousands who had filled their own pockets amid the chaos instead of him. Unlike the Golden Mirror, who could not bring himself to leave the country, those people had abandoned it without a moment's hesitation.

They could not do that, so they had killed the Golden Mirror.

And throughout it all, the Golden Mirror had loved his country and his king.

You can pile on every kind of reason, wrap it and dress it up, but in the end it all comes back to what is in a human heart. No lengthy justification is needed for that.

"Do you actually have reason to rebuild that country? From the look of things, if anyone other than you had discovered alchemy, it would have fallen apart on its own."

He should have had no sense of duty, yet the Golden Mirror found his reason with ease.

It was a wretched country with an irresponsible king, and yet the Golden Mirror had loved all of it. He wanted to return to the time when he had been happy inside it. So.

"Because I want to."

His mind was made up.

Click. The shackles binding his feet fell away. The guilt that had kept the Golden Mirror in chains was gone. He rose slowly on trembling legs.

I asked, as if to confirm.

"Even though it will be different from the Gold State you lived in?"

"When you repair something, it naturally comes out different from how it started. I will fill in what was lacking, restore what was broken, and fix what was wrong. That is what alchemy is for, and that is what the Golden Mirror is for."

Clatter. The chains binding his arms snapped apart, link by link. The Golden Mirror stretched out his newly freed arms and closed his hand around the golden bell. A clear, bright ring filled the room.

I asked one more time.

"Even so, is it possible? The Gold State the Golden Mirror builds will have no staying power. No matter how well you build it, without people to tend it, it will fade before long. And even with caretakers, the jackals will tear it apart. You do not want a country that disappears right away, do you?"

This time his answer took a little longer. Not long, though. Nothing could stop someone who had gathered his resolve.

"...If it has no staying power, then I will 'build' that too."

Build it?

Thud. The blade that had been pressing against his throat split and fell to the ground. Nothing bound him anymore. The Golden Mirror, completely free, raised his head and declared.

"If the homunculi are imperfect, I will improve them until they are. If jackals break apart the Gold State, I will remove them so they cannot. Fortunately, both goals can be achieved through a single method. Two birds with one stone."

Wait. Hold on.

That conclusion sounds oddly off.

"So that nothing can harm what I have built in my Gold State, I will collect them... and use them as material for homunculi. Homunculi who will move for longer and lead this country."

I may have just let a monster loose.

Until now, everything the Golden Mirror had made was frighteningly precise and practical, but his humans had always been somehow lacking. Probably because, as the Golden Mirror himself had said, he did not understand people well. Perhaps there had also been a slight reluctance when it came to creating them.

But now, having cast off every shackle and restraint, nothing could stop the Golden Mirror.

Ugh. What do I do about this.

"The dead cannot affect the world at all. Naturally they cannot fulfill wishes either. People who carry such precious desires and then simply die, I do not particularly like them."

But the Golden Mirror was a little different. He had not died and left his wish for me to carry. Instead, before dying, he had made something to fulfill his wish even without him.

The thought that remained here was his true wish. His desire, pure, bound to no one and commanded by no one. In that case, I ought to affirm it as well.

"Even in death, you left something behind to fulfill your wish. I will root for you, at least."

Not that there was anything else I could do, really.

I am the Magician. I can draw out a wish someone has hidden, but I cannot quell that wish with a counter-wind. Tricks look impressive at a glance, but in truth all they do is take something already possible and make it look more impressive than it is.

If I seemed like I might get in the way, he would kill me on the spot. The Golden Mirror had thrown off every restraint. Without power, I had no way to change his mind.

"...I have had only one teacher. And yet you, too, have given me a great lesson."

Fortunately, I was not among those he would bear hostility toward. Showing respect rather than animosity, the Golden Mirror took the bell and walked past me toward the door.

"I will accomplish what I could not until now."

The world rippled. With the story ending, I felt the sensation of my very existence being expelled. Pulled somewhere, as though being sucked away, I left him one last word.

"Try it. You never know until you do."

The world went dark, and I was cast out from his mindscape.

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