Chapter 123

A beautiful form was far more frightening than a grotesque one.

Not a single ray of light entered the place, yet somehow he alone stood out with perfect clarity.

Hair like shadow, a smooth forehead and straight nose, a gold drop earring hanging above his collarbone. Black serpent scales slowly climbing over skin as white as plaster, every inch of him bare.

Only his inhumanly beautiful appearance remained sharply visible.

"Um... uh, good morning."

Erabelle stumbled over the words a little under his unwavering stare.

For some reason, he sighed.

"Do you want it wrapped around you that badly?"

"I'm sorry."

"Hm? I asked if you wanted to."

"I've always wanted to try it at least once."

Dezeb buried his face against his sleek arm. Judging by the faint trembling of his long, slender back, his stock had clearly fallen yet again. After a long sigh, he looked at her sidelong and smiled.

"Darling."

"...Yes?"

She had been briefly distracted by his face, so her answer came a little late. As though he knew exactly why, he smiled again.

"Aren't you going to give me a morning kiss?"

"I..."

Erabelle hesitated.

"I haven't brushed my teeth yet."

Dezeb sighed again, then pulled her in, pressing kiss after kiss to her lips as he lifted her with one arm. The tens of thousands of tentacles surrounding them receded beneath his shadow.

As though they had never existed.

Erabelle flinched and froze as the surroundings brightened.

Everything around them was a complete mess.

Her eyes widened as she looked at her ruined belongings. They had not merely been knocked aside. They had been utterly smashed.

"I'll pay you back."

He said it as though getting ahead of her.

"I was really startled yesterday. You left saying you were going to work, and then suddenly disappeared."

"Yes..."

"If you don't want money, should I repay you with my body?"

"Where do you even get such... things to say..."

You don't even have your memories, so where in the world—

"It was a line from that drama you were watching."

"...I do think a body is better than money."

A sense of crisis told her that if she failed to play along, the drama she had been watching might vanish, so Erabelle even nodded enthusiastically.

"I think so too."

Dezeb snorted, though his lips continued nibbling at her small shoulder. Erabelle hunched up and shivered.

He laughed lightly again and carried the trembling woman deeper into the research facility.

The place was in ruins, but not every surviving section had been destroyed.

He went down a flight of stairs, switched on a flickering light, and found an intact shower room.

The management system seemed to still be running. The hot water came slowly, but it came. A nearby cabinet even held several sets of brand-new clothes, still in their packaging.

They were all employee uniforms of the same design.

Dezeb personally washed Erabelle and even dressed her in the uniform before asking whether she knew where they were.

"Yes. I don't know exactly where this is, but I've been here before. There was a time when you abandoned me here, Dezeb..."

"I did that?"

He asked as though he genuinely had no memory of it.

Of course, at the moment, he genuinely didn't.

"It must've been because this was somewhere safe."

I don't think that was it.

But she had no time to think about it further.

"This is the research facility where they experimented on me."

"...What?"

"I was a test subject."

"What?"

"I said I was a test subject."

Erabelle stared rather blankly at him as he tossed the words out so casually. Dezeb picked up the dazed woman and continued walking, following the signs.

The interior was far larger than she had expected.

There were not many intact areas left, but Dezeb set Erabelle down in what appeared to be a cafeteria near the shower room.

"There should still be something to eat."

Erabelle remained dazed even then.

Dezeb returned from somewhere with several preserved meals. He did not look particularly pleased about them, but apparently decided they were better than starving. In any case, the preserved food was in perfectly good condition.

"Um... when you say you were a test subject..."

"It was an experiment to transfer divinity."

An experiment conducted jointly by Sanctuary and the Imperial Family.

"I only found out after reading the records myself. I haven't known for very long either."

He went on in the same light tone, explaining that Sanctuary had wanted to provoke the master who had founded the early Empire and then fallen asleep, while the Imperial Family had wanted to obtain the highest-ranking divine being to manifest for the first time since the early Empire.

"They wanted the same thing."

There was nothing in his voice, so calm it bordered on casual, that suggested the agony of the roughly fifteen hundred biological experiments conducted on him over three years.

It was a number that could drive even a saint insane.

Erabelle was a transmigrant from Earth, and transmigrants made easy test subjects. As someone who had always lived warily aware of that possibility, she could not simply let that number pass.

Most transmigrants were discarded after two or three experiments.

It was not uncommon for them to be disposed of after only one.

"And this is how they succeeded."

Tap.

With one long finger, he touched the drop earring hanging from his right ear.

The sound it made was chilling.

"......"

Erabelle could not bring herself to speak.

Ripheisa, the pharmaceutical company Dezeb owned, also conducted biological experiments from time to time. Most of its subjects were condemned prisoners, but that was hardly an excuse.

Was this the vicious cycle of a victim becoming the perpetrator...?

Erabelle was appalled to realize her own heart was beginning to lean in one direction.

She was making excuses for Dezeb now.

But fifteen hundred times...

"May I look around here?"

"Honestly, I wouldn't recommend it. You're not going to see anything pleasant."

Dezeb smiled with an awkward expression.

"Of course, it's safe, so you can wander around as much as you like."

The way he emphasized that was a little...

Erabelle hunched her shoulders and turned away.

She had nearly thought he was cute.

I'm not that far gone yet.

"Ah, the early experiment logs should probably be fine. Want to look at those, at least?"

"Yes... I'd like to."

Outside the cafeteria, several employee offices and supply rooms lined the corridor.

This time, he walked more cautiously than before.

There were several places where he would not even let her turn her head, yet she still saw several shattered experimental tanks with dried culture solution crusted inside them. Some areas were completely inaccessible because enormous Molts had grown tangled through them.

She could imagine how this place had ended.

The Molt of the enormous monster that must have blocked signum and devoured every living thing lay as still as the ruins themselves.

And using the excuse that there was too much broken glass, he picked her up again.

They walked for quite some time before Dezeb finally stopped in front of an office.

A monster's Molt had tangled its way inside here as well, but the area around the desks and drawers was relatively intact.

He sat her down on top of a desk, then pulled a thick file from one of the drawers.

"Pretty, wasn't I?"

Dezeb tapped the photograph attached to the first page with his fingertip.

Just as he said, the gentle-looking boy was very pretty.

Black hair, black eyes, snow-white skin...

The boy wore that mild expression even with page after page of experimental history plastered around him.

Erabelle was afraid to turn the page.

When she reached a photograph showing his abdomen split vertically from the solar plexus to the navel and stitched shut with black thread, she could go no farther.

She closed the file.

Working as his adjutant, she had seen all kinds of horrific sights, yet a handful of photographs was enough to make her hands tremble.

Perhaps this was why people said humans were fickle, and that the arm always bent inward toward one's own.

But she simply could not keep turning the pages...

"I actually hesitated for a while over whether I should tell you."

Dezeb smiled, leaned down, and kissed her lightly.

"There are a great many things I don't want you to know."

"......"

"But since we've already come all the way here, it would be ridiculous to say nothing at all. And I thought it would be better for me to tell you myself than for you to know only bits and pieces. We're going to be family soon, after all."

At those words, Erabelle, who had been slightly out of it, flinched.

"What's with that reaction?"

Dezeb narrowed his eyes.

"Why? Planning to eat me and throw me away? The alimony would be rough on you."

"No."

"Well, I suppose being family doesn't mean you have to accept everything about each other."

From a half-open drawer, he took out a small pendant and placed it in Erabelle's palm.

It was silver.

A pendant engraved with the crest of the marquisate.

The two halves were slightly misaligned, but the tiny pendant opened with surprising ease.

And inside was exactly what she had half expected to find.

"......"

A young boy who looked about twelve.

A blond Marchioness with one arm around the child's shoulders.

And beside them, a black-haired Marquis with a kindly face, looking strikingly similar to the boy. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ

It was the very same portrait that hung in the entrance hall of the marquisate residence, practically forcing every visitor to look at it.

"...Dezeb, you really were naturally beautiful."

Erabelle looked up from the child inside the pendant to the man who had grown so much taller.

"Hm? Why are you saying something like that while crying?"

Dezeb did not remember what he had once told her.

With too many thoughts tangling together at once, Erabelle squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again.

"The Marquis and Marchioness..."

"They never acknowledged me as their son."

It had looked less like refusal to acknowledge him and more like outright denial.

"The paternity test came back negative too. But they knew, and I knew."

He looked at her.

"That I was their biological son."