WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 571

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Protect the World from the Regression

The Root Tree is Nevida's Demon God, a tree that has inherited the essence of the World Tree and holds within it the vast authority of a Demon God. Nevida, primordial druid and Demon God both, can bend this towering, magnificent tree to her will. Inside it, she is nothing short of divine.

True to that, Nevida made my room in a matter of seconds. It was wider and more comfortable than anyone would believe had been carved out of a tree. Perfect, except that my situation made going outside impossible.

A bed of soft straw. A table grown from the tree itself. The chair, fashioned from a tree stump, was cushioned with dried moss, and ivy climbing the wall had sprouted a hook for hanging clothes.

The room even had a bathroom, a kitchen, and a food storage. Clear water gurgled through a bamboo pipe overhead. Pull the cork stopper and it would pour right out.

Inside a cup shaped like a calyx, flower petals soaked in vegetable oil sat waiting. I tapped the bean pod mounted beside it and sparks flew, catching the oil alight. Fire and grass sharing the same space, natural enemies coexisting, had a quality that called to mind the mysteries of the natural world. I shut the lacquered wooden lid, and the smothered flame drifted back into its long sleep.

A civilization built entirely from nature. To furnish a home in an instant, furniture included, what else could you call it but divine? A temporary home that would vanish someday, but I was grateful all the same.

I brought the armless regressor into my room. She had barely survived thanks to me, and her gratitude was...

"Just kill me already...!"

Not forthcoming.

What kind of thing was that to say? I stared at her, baffled.

"Where did that come from? Think you're a captured female knight or something?"

"...Urgh. Not far off."

Captured female knights don't usually get their arms ripped out, so they probably get better treatment than she did, but still.

The regressor groaned through the pain, stared at the empty stumps of her shoulders, and clenched her teeth. Energy and emergency first aid had slowed the bleeding, but the blood seeping through the cloth made the situation clear enough.

"I've already lost my arms and my weapon. Chances of recovery are slim, and Nevida won't allow it anyway. There's nothing I can do anymore. If I'm going to die, better to do it quickly."

Deciding to end things wasn't unreasonable, really. The one small mercy was that she wasn't in genuine despair. A martial artist who had been defeated and had both arms torn away should have been crushed and desolate, but what I felt from her was more like fury.

'I have to stay sane if I'm going to regress properly. Dying in a broken state is merely wasted time. Ugh, I've lost so much blood. My head is buzzing and I feel like I'm going strange.'

That kept me steady too, not pulled into her emotions. If she had truly wanted to die, I might have helped her with that, so things were better this way.

"Don't be so bleak about it. What does that make all my effort to keep you alive? You save someone, and they make you feel like an idiot for bothering."

I meant it as comfort and encouragement. What came back was something more guarded.

"...You're after my body."

"What on earth are you talking about?!"

What? I wasn't after your body even when both your arms were intact! And now you're half a wreck with the limbs gone, and I'm supposed to be after you? There are better things to be after!

"The moment I revealed I was a woman, you said you wanted me..."

"Wanted to do what? Treat you! You're actually going to die like this!"

"And what good does treatment do. No arms, no weapon. Staying alive just means becoming a test subject for the great witch or a hostage for Nevida..."

That's exactly why I gave Nevida a good reason to keep you alive! So neither she nor the great witch could just kill you on a whim! What do you think I put myself through all that trouble for?!

I ground down my own dignity to pull this off, and this is what I get! Forget it. I'll just hammer in the cold truth.

'Huh? That man is the King of Humanity? Why?'

Wait a moment. Stay calm.

Someone's thoughts were bleeding through from outside. Like cold water splashed on my face, my head cleared. I stopped myself mid-sentence and turned my mind reading toward the thoughts drifting in.

'Mm. Yeah. He does vaguely resemble the one sleeping up there. But looks aren't a reason. Wait, the King of Dogs found him, and he borrows another's innate arcane? Who said that? The gear-kid's innate arcane, of all things...?'

The great witch's thoughts. She seemed to be in conversation with Nevida, though Nevida's thoughts remained so flat and even that they came through less clearly than the witch's.

'Still, it's strange. Setting aside that the Beast King is male, even among males the reproductive drive is low. Gender is merely a borrowed shape, and in essence the Beast King represents both male and female alike. The Beast King is, like a hermaphrodite, a complete being unto itself, and future generations arise naturally, so there's no worry about the line dying out.'

Tsk. She'd noticed the oddness already. I thought it would take longer.

Nevida was a druid, a master of grass and plants. The great witch, by contrast, controlled beasts as familiars and possessed deep knowledge of poisons and medicinal herbs, an authority on the animal kingdom. The two of them falling into a cooperative relationship was a natural outcome.

'There's a possibility the King of Humanity is a little different. If he was split in two, then he too would be incomplete. Mm, understood.'

That was why the great witch had a sharper grasp of beasts and the Beast King than most. She finished the exchange and turned her thoughts inward.

'But there might be something else going on. Nevida won't surveil him, that would be sacrilege to her. But that doesn't apply to me. Voyeurism is a witch's specialty, after all. I can't pass up the chance to study the King of Humanity's habits.'

Don't just go around turning witches into voyeurs like it's perfectly normal! The reputation is bad enough already, and behavior like that is exactly why witch hunts happen!

The great witch, caring nothing for any of that, forced a handful of nearby insects into familiars on the spot. The proper way would have been to raise them and build a bond over time, but the great witch, being a witch with vampire blood on top of it, had long since left that kind of limitation behind.

Twenty insects crept through the gaps and settled in corners around the room. The eyes and ears of a voyeuristic witch. An ordinary human could never decode the signals sent by twenty bugs all at once, but these familiars, fused with bloodcraft and made part of her own body, would serve as the great witch's eyes and ears.

Surveillance. So I couldn't even let my guard down and rest here. Not that I put my guard down often to begin with.

Nothing to be done. Gah, it really stings my pride.

"No. Shei-ssi won't be becoming anyone's test subject or hostage."

"...How would you know."

"Because Shei-ssi is going to be my girlfriend."

"Wh, what?"

"So stop digging in your heels over things that aren't going to work and let me reattach your arms. Do you want to die?"

'What, suddenly, what is he saying?'

I grabbed the flustered regressor and sat her down in the chair. She was too disoriented to resist and moved wherever I led her.

Ugh, this is humiliating. I've had plenty of confessions made to me, but I've never been the one making one.

But you can't always do only what you want in life. To protect the regressor's life under the watchful eyes of Nevida and the great witch...

No.

To protect this world from the regressor's life, this was the only way!

"I do have normal aesthetic sensibilities, so I'd rather not spend my time next to someone dripping blood with no arms, writhing around? Look. You smell and you're a mess. It's revolting."

"...I can't help it! My arms, urgh. They were ripped off...!"

"That's exactly why I'm trying to put Shei-ssi back together again. All right. Bring your shoulders here. I'll try to heal them with Tyr's Demon God, so hold the connecting points steady with your energy."

I lifted the two arms I had kept so carefully, the very arms the regressor had lost. With injuries this severe, before worrying about reattachment I should be worried about whether the body would survive at all, but that depends on the person.

Even in the worst of it, with her arms torn free, the regressor's Heavenly Mirror had shut off blood flow to those limbs and cycled it back through her body, minimizing blood loss. It was the kind of precise response you'd expect from someone who had lost her arms before.

"Here. Shei-ssi's lost left arm and right arm, which I brought back for you. Wave hello. Oh, right, Shei-ssi doesn't have hands to wave?"

"I'm half dead and you're making jokes...!"

"Weighing down the mood in a serious moment only makes it heavier. Let's stay positive."

I held up the two arms Nevida had torn free and gave them a little wave. The bones were twisted and the severed muscles dangled, but there was still circulation, all because I hadn't let the blood stop moving for even a moment.

The comparatively intact arms gave the regressor a flicker of hope, but she shook her head almost immediately.

"...Even if you reattach them. Getting my strength back will take months. And even then I won't be back to where I was."

"Then you recover over those months. You have more of your life left ahead of you. What's a few months of recovery?"

'...True. Hughes wouldn't know. That I regress. Fighting for months to reattach lost arms is worse than dying and starting over.'

This is for my sake, not yours. This cycle has been going unusually well for me, there's a chance I might get her back to full strength if it comes to that, and I can't afford a reset just yet.

"Think of it as training? Living a few months without arms might open up an entirely different level of mastery."

"Does that even make sense?"

"And 'my arms got cut off so I might as well die' makes sense? Someone who can actually have them reattached, saying that. That's an insult to every person in the world living without arms. And it's a pretty awful thing to do to me, too."

'But from Hughes's perspective, not knowing about regression, I must look strange for wanting to give up on life. Urgh. Right. There's still a lot to get out of this cycle. Starting over is a hassle too, so I'll see it through. And... what he said is on my mind.'

The regressor shifted in the chair and nodded her head in place of the hands she no longer had.

"...There's an elixir in the pocket. If you process it the way I tell you, it'll help with reattaching the arms. Joining the muscles back one by one takes a lot of energy."

"Good. I have a lot to say, but first things first, the arms."

"Mm. Mm-hm."

The regressor being tense wasn't merely because of the treatment ahead.

...Ha. It's been a while since I felt this way, playing gracious host at a host bar for a guest. Satisfied now, great witch?

'Mmmhm. So this is what it's like. Not bad...'

I read the thoughts of the audience watching me and carefully kept moving forward.

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