more.
more.
Wow.
Every time I stepped on the fleshy floor, it clung to the soles of my shoes like wet mud. As they walked along the bumpy road, Pearly began to speak.
“You don’t wonder what will happen if I take the bowl, you wonder what will happen? For example, the safety of the citizens of this capital, which has nothing to do with you!”
“For now, yes.”
Pearly smirked and shook her head.
“It’s a bit disappointing that I have no idea how I’ll change after taking the bowl! huh! I’m sorry!”
For a moment, I felt a gaze from somewhere. I quickly turned my head to look around, but all around were the meaty walls and floors we had seen so far.
“why? why? What’s going on?”
“Is there any chance that there will be someone other than us in here?”
“In this? Maybe not?”
Pearly took a step, tapped the wall of the meat, and shrugged.
“As I said earlier, staying inside for a long time is not good enough, so the priests of Liberatorio guarding this place also guard the entrance, so they don’t have to stand guard inside! Besides, since I went in to hand over things earlier, I made sure that all the kids from the hideout were outside!”
“Hmm, then it must have been a simple misunderstanding.”
Am I mistaken because of the peculiarity of this space? I opened my mouth without letting go of the strings of tension.
“So what happens when the vessel activates?”
“According to the original plan, it was supposed to resonate throughout the capital, engulf most of the living humans, and then reborn the bowl as a true ‘God’s Vessel’!”
Pearly said ‘Dig’ and put a choo-im-sae into her mouth and spread her clenched palms wide open to describe what would happen in the future.
It was a half-joking gesture, but if that situation actually happened, countless people would die.
Suddenly, a question occurred to me.
“The majority of the empire’s people living in the capital are about to die, so why is the Emperor of the Northern Empire looking after Liberatorio?”
Pearly grinned.
“Of course you don’t know how to die so many times! I heard that the Emperor of the Northern Empire was tricked into telling the number of humans needed to complete the bowl? But um…”
She patted her lips a few times and tilted her head.
“Since he is a great man to put a hundred serpents in the old emperor’s sword, he probably has quite a few hidden numbers! Things won’t go so smoothly for Liberatorio, that’s for sure! If it’s the emperor, you’ve met him once, so don’t you understand what I mean?”
The old emperor tending the garden. The old man I met certainly did not seem like a great man to be fooled. Moreover, judging from the fact that he gave me a fragment of a key that could stab Liberationio in the back, even though he was obviously hostile to Liberationio, he must have had some plans of his own.
“It is not easy.”
“Life is like that!”
“So how does the outcome change when Pearly jokes like this?”
“Actually, it’s so simple! The reason why God’s vessel requires so many victims to contain God is because ‘God’ is what goes into the vessel! But what if it’s not ‘God’ that goes inside, but this very slim and pretty ‘me’? What do you think will happen?”
Instead of putting God in a bowl, use it as a body that holds the soul of one Pearly.
“From what I hear, I don’t think we need many victims.”
“no! no!”
Pearly snapped her finger and wiggled it from side to side. She said with a mischievous laugh.
“If I use it, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa)) If I needed even one victim in the first place, I couldn’t ask you so easily! huh! huh!”
blah blah
A very small sound. But it was the sound of something very sticky opening and closing.
“…So when they activated the bowl, I took control of the bowl as a precaution, and then I threw myself into the bowl! In order to do that, of course, I need to go directly to the place where the bowl is…”
“Purly.”
I stopped Pearly, who was chattering and explaining. She stopped talking and smiled.
“Why?”
“Why is it so long here? It would be impossible for a long, straight passage to continue endlessly in such a shallow basement.”
The end of this meaty hallway was still not in sight, even though we had been walking non-stop throughout our talk.
“That’s because this space we are walking in is a space created by the power! Are there ruins of an ancient empire that you can enter by inserting a key? If you feel the same way, you can see it! In real life, the resonance point occupies only about the size of a small room!”
“Then when will this hallway end?”
“About the hallway? But today, especially, it takes a little longer… Huh?”
blah blah
The meaty walls opened and small eyes appeared. That one eye was looking right at me.
“that’s interesting. This is really my first time ever. Until now, when I went to other branches by myself, nothing special happened, but looking at something different this time, it seems that the cause is not me, but you? huh?”
“I haven’t done anything in particular…”
“Huh.”
Pearly reached for the eyeball and in an instant poked it open with her finger. The pierced eye twitched and let out a soundless scream, then spewed out a wisp of blood before shrinking and disappearing.
“Hoo.”
“What if you start attacking without knowing what it is?”
Pearly took a handkerchief from her pocket to wipe the blood off her fingers and shrugged.
“He opens his eyes strangely.”
“That’s why you burst your eyes…”
Jjook.
A line the size of a grown-up’s body appeared on a wall of meat. The lines that appeared slowly parted and widened.
Incomparably larger eyes than before came out and looked at Pearly. Pearly smiled and twirled her arms.
“If you pop that one, you’re a little curious about how much bigger eyes will appear next time?”
“Don’t do it. Just looking at it, isn’t it clear that if we explode something that big, we’ll be soaked in blood and flesh that comes out when it explodes? Personally, I want to go back to this pristine state.”
Suddenly I realized one thing.
“Aren’t those eyes looking at Pearly now, not me?”
“I’m the type of person who keeps looking at her because she’s prettier when I look at her.”
“I don’t think you watch it because you like it… Huh?!”
floating sensation. In an instant, the floor that Pearly and I were on disappeared. Following the natural laws of physics, my body tried to plummet downward.
I stretched out my hand and tried to grab onto the floor right in front of me, but when I reached out, the meat floor moved away as if playing a game and distanced myself.
Embarrassed, I turned my head to see Pearly dangling from the ceiling with a string stretched from my hand.
“Purly!!!”
I also called her to hold on to the thread, but Pearly smiled and nodded and cut the thread. Soon, she started freefalling just like me.
I fell and screamed at her.
“No, you shouldn’t have fallen together, you should have caught me there!”
“I thought you meant to go with me, even to the end of hell!”
At those words without a solution, I felt like I had a headache. I let out a short sigh, calmed down, and shouted again.
“What are you going to do now!”
“What!”
As if he had fallen free once or twice, Pearly controlled the speed of his fall with skillful movements, then came to me and put his hand on my shoulder and whispered.
“If you receive an invitation like this, of course it’s polite to show your face.”
***
Flutter!
The end of the fall that lasted for quite a long time was softer than expected. The balloon-like soft film of flesh gently caught our falling bodies and bounced them back upwards.
“Hehehe! This is so much fun!”
After bouncing around a few more times, we finally came to a stop and came down from the fleshy lump cushion.
It was so spacious that it could not be compared to the narrow corridors that Pearly and I had walked through. There was nothing in the large space plastered with lumps of flesh, as it had always been.
He sighed as he brushed off the small lumps of flesh on his clothes.
“I don’t know the purpose of this space. Is it always like this?”
“no?”
Instead of brushing off her own clothes, Pearly brushed the flesh off mine with me.
“Originally, the hallway isn’t that long, and there’s a slightly larger room at the end of it, isn’t it? All you have to do is pour some of my blood into the flesh bowl in the middle of it and do something about it! I think it’s not because of me, but because you came in together! Any guesses?”
Of course it couldn’t have been.
“Not at all. It’s wide by the way, but it’s completely blocked, so I don’t know where to go. It seems like we’ve been away too long to climb back up the hole we fell into.”
“I think differently. Maybe if I climb up the wall, it won’t be long before I can go up the hallway from which we are separated?”
“How do you know?”
“Feeling! Besides, the reason we’ve been apart for so long isn’t really that deep, so I think we just needed time! To the entity that created that hole!”
As I roughly brushed the flesh off my clothes, Pearly grinned and leaned over to me.
“Since I helped you shake it off, you have to shake off my body too, so it’s fair! Right! now! You can rob it anywhere you want!”
“Ha, please, play around with that. I ‘m
not even sure if I can get out of here…”
The floor of the huge cavity cracked open, and chunks of flesh began to coalesce. Pearly smiled contentedly at the sight.
“I gave it enough time, so whatever it was, it was time to show up! cancer!”
The gathered chunks of flesh slowly took on a human-like shape.
“What do you think of that?”
“Well, it’s probably a similar role to the bowl in the center somewhere else! Although it has changed a little!”
The flesh that slowly grew from the tips of the toes passed through the knees, stomach, shoulders, and finally took the shape of the head. Finally, a hole was formed in the face made of flesh, presumably a mouth, and he tried to spit out a sound.
“….”
Puck!
The head that was made at best was blown off by something pure white that flew like a beam of light.
“I think that monster was trying to say something…”
grinned Perley, the culprit who blew his head off with a piece of flesh.
“You didn’t come to talk with us in the first place, did you? So, of course, there is no need to talk to him!”
“No, but I think it’s a bit like using force blindly against an opponent who seems to be able to communicate. In case you don’t know…”
“Huh? Now I see that monster is trying to imitate you?”
“yes?”
Only then did I take a closer look at the body of the fleshy monster. The exterior of the monster, similar in body type to mine, was copying the shape of the clothes I was wearing.
Hair that grows and protrudes. This time Pearly didn’t attack. Then the mouth was dug again, and the monster finally spoke again. looking straight at me
“Oh…”
Kwaaang!!!
Before I could finish the very ominous words, I reflexively activated the bracelet at the monster and fired the magic cannon at it.
Seeing me like that, Pearly smiled meaningfully.
“Then am I the mother?”
“Shut up. I hate responsibility without pleasure.”
The forms crushed by the magic cannon came together again. The speed at which those lumps of flesh were attaching shapes was accelerating.
Perhaps it was learning, the monster with its mouth in the middle of its chest instead of its head spoke out again with a grunting voice.
“Dad… eat… I… become… dad…”
Pearly gave a brief chuckle at the monster’s words.
“My child seems to like his father a lot more than his mother!”
I answered, pulling the despair out of my waist.
“Looking at that monster’s personality, it looks like it’s from Pearly’s side.”
“…what?! Where are you looking!”
Before I knew it, the monster imitated me almost identically, except for the crushed face.
Pearly laughed bashfully at the sight.
“You look exactly like you? Hmmm, then we look like half and half!”
At Pearly’s words, the monster growled with its mouth pierced through its chest.
“You…Mom…no…”
“…”
