One week had passed since all the commotion caused by my splitting in half. We had returned to Dolkness County, and things had settled down. I wasn’t sure if saying they were now at peace was quite correct, but the hero and the Demon Lord had disappeared, and I had both sides of my body back.
The side of me that had died felt that coming back to life would be bad, but that was a conclusion I had come to when I didn’t know that only half of me had died and things had gotten a bit jumbled after my losing control and whatnot.
My wedding, another event where I had a bad feeling would bring some kind of trouble, was coming up, so I was really glad that this situation was wrapped up in a day.
Still, the battle between my left and right sides had seemed to take quite the toll on me. I was feeling the exhaustion of both sides at once, so I hadn’t been able to do much for the past week.
I’d recovered quite a bit now, so I wanted to return to my usual work starting tomorrow, and I was discussing that with Patrick.
“I’m fine now. It was less of a physical toll and more a mental one from having two sets of memories in my head.”
“Your left side met with the hero and the Demon Lord early on, right?”
“Well, I met with other people before the Demon Lord, like a calico cat that wasn’t afraid of me.”
“Was it actually a cat?”
How sharp of you to notice, Pat-Pat. That calico was a middle-aged man. I think I’ll wait to tell him about the cat brothers, though. I feel like the load of remembering the shocking image of the cat-eared man combined with trying to get him to believe me will be exhausting.
Since the brothers were reunited in the Kingdom of Twilight, the younger brother had the chance to reveal the truth about his made-up travel logs, and I felt that they had a nice ending. As for the hero and the Demon Lord...
“Do you think it was good that they reunited after death?”
“It was probably good since they were able to get rid of the regrets they had.”
“That’s true...”
Seeing the hero and the Demon Lord disappear into the sun together, it was hard to imagine that they had once hated each other. The hero had spent centuries in Twilight, while the Demon Lord spent that time sealed away. It had taken quite a while, but at the end, they were friends...or at the very least, they’d returned to their previous relationship.
As I imagined what the hero’s face had looked like when he’d returned to his barbarian form, since I hadn’t been able to catch a single glimpse of it, Patrick mumbled something as if overcome with emotion.
“I never expected there to be an afterlife.”
“Just like Lemn explained, I’m not really sure what the point of that place is, though.”
The reason the Kingdom of Twilight existed was unclear. Unless someone was an exception like me, no one there would be coming back to life. It could be hellish for someone to just spend their time there, continuing to hold their regrets from when they were alive.
Still, I’d seen people who seemed to be saved by the Kingdom of Twilight, so I questioned its existence, but I couldn’t reject it.
“I’d like to hear what happened there one day,” Patrick said.
“Yeah... I’ll tell you about the cat-eared man when I have the energy for it.”
“That sounds like an exhausting story.”
“I don’t think I’d be able to endure telling it while I’m feeling down.”
Since he’d just said he wanted to hear about it, Patrick grimaced, realizing he couldn’t take it back. Should I just tell him now? I have the story about the brothers who wanted to be cats or the story about the woman who swapped reality with paintings and turned into actual abstract art.
Patrick sensed something bad coming, so he changed the subject. “You’ve caused various commotions in the past, but I can’t believe your left and right halves split.”
“Would you have been able to believe it if it was my top and bottom halves?”
“Top and bottom...?”
Maybe I should try to split into two horizontally next. I feel like I’ll be able to keep one half from dying. If I say I’m going to do it, Patrick will probably try to stop me, so I’ll keep it to myself.
Speaking of, I haven’t told Eleanora about the cat-eared man—I mean, the unfortunate perfumer, Quartus. I told Patrick I would be off and headed to see Eleanora.
“Lady Eleanora!”
Eleanora was in her room. As soon as she saw me, Eleanora handed me something I’d never seen before. What is this...? There was a string with a heavy, metal button on the end of it. Eleanora held up the string and began swinging it like a pendulum.
“Yumiella, you are getting sleepy, very sleepy...”
“I’m not.”
She was trying to hypnotize me, and the metal button was being used like a five-yen coin, which Japanese kids used to do the same thing. This kingdom didn’t have any coins with holes in them like Japan, so that was probably why she’d used the button.
I didn’t know that this world had a similar form of hypnosis as what I’d seen in my past life. I wonder where Eleanora gets her information from... Also, I would never get hypnotized by something like this. You hypnotize someone by whispering a countdown in their ear. Oh, but if Eleanora were to whisper into my ear, I feel like she’d scream out of nowhere and burst my eardrums. That sounds terrifying...
As such silly thoughts ran through my mind, Eleanora continued her silly hypnosis.
“You are getting sleepy, very sleepy...”
“Like I said, I’m not.”
“Maybe you’re someone who’s resistant to this. I’ll try it on someone else.”
The only people this sort of thing works on are gullible and a little stupid. But there isn’t anyone who fits that description around us.