Perhaps because no one before her had thought of studying the dead, it wasn’t until after Clarice had begun to investigate them that that fact was discovered.
However, that fact pointed to a single truth.
“There were still fragments of my mother’s consciousness drifting around this city.”
And so for as long as her own life continued, Clarice continued hunting the dead.
As she was hunting them, there was one thing on her mind.
“Maybe, if I can gather up all the fragments of my mother’s consciousness, my mother might come back to me.”
She continued hunting the dead, spending her days chasing after traces of her mother.
But one lifetime was too short.
Before she could finish collecting all the fragments of her mother’s consciousness, Clarice was facing the end of her life span. Before she knew it, she had turned sixty years old. She herself was nearing death.
Her life was about to end, and she hadn’t even come close to achieving her goal. Then she suddenly had a thought.
The things they called the dead were what happened when a massive amount of magical energy and the vestiges of a deceased person’s consciousness were floating around in the air and combined together.
This phenomenon, in other words, showed that people could remain in this world even after they died.
Supposing she managed to transplant her own consciousness into a living person, what would happen then?
She wondered if she could live on even after she died—
“That was when I first attempted reincarnation.”
By the time Clarice reached old age, she was respected and revered by almost everyone. If she said go right, everyone went right. If she said something was black, it was black. There were more people willing to obey everything she said than she could count on both hands.
And one of those people was pregnant with a child.
Without consulting anyone, Clarice transferred a portion of her own consciousness into that woman’s belly.
As for how that turned out, things proceeded according to her memoir.
When she was five years old, she showed up at the Crescent Moon Company and told them she had been reborn.
After that, she repeated the same process again and again. It sounded like the reincarnation itself was an easy task for her.
In order to transfer some of her consciousness into a child in utero, she had to touch the mother’s belly directly.
But in Twilight Helbe, there were plenty of pregnant women willing to let her touch their bellies.
“In the early days, I thought if I kept on reincarnating like that, I would be able to collect all the fragments of my mother’s consciousness.”
And after being reincarnated many times, eventually her very existence came to be celebrated.
The more times she was reborn, the more everyone rejoiced at her return. Whenever, as a child, she announced that her name was Clarice, the two people who had become her parents would throw up their hands in joy.
They would be delighted that Lady Clarice had become their daughter. They would plead with her with smiles on their faces to please be their savior again.
Clarice started to enjoy the fact that people relied on her like that.
She wasn’t sure when it happened.
But she stopped searching for the figure of her first mother in the streets at night.
In fact—
“Before I knew it, I had forgotten what my mother’s face looked like—”
She even forgot why exactly she was repeatedly coming back to life, even though she was supposedly making all that effort in order to bring her mother back into the world again.
And now, at this point, she was living every day being lavished with affection in Twilight Helbe, where only her admirers remained.
Over the course of many days spent surrounded by smiling sycophants, she began to forget her original goal.
“It was only after I met my current mother that I remembered how I was feeling in those early days.”
She was the only one.
The woman who was Clarice’s current mother was the only woman who had ever had a completely different reaction to her daughter.
The first time Clarice had spoken any words, her mother had been confused but happy. When Clarice first stood up, her mother had clapped for her. When Clarice had said that of course she could do these things, her mother had looked sad and fallen silent.
Clarice knew that her mother had lost her husband and that she was living alone, so she tried to make things just a little bit easier on her and arranged a place for her to live.
Gradually, the two of them stopped talking.
Even so, her mother always smiled kindly at her.
Clarice was certain her mother didn’t hate her, at least.
However, one day she realized that the looks she was getting from her mother were exactly the same as before—as way before, when she had been young in the true sense of the word, three hundred years earlier.
At that point, it had finally dawned on her that she had never really been loved.
At last, she knew there had been no point in gathering up all those fragments of memory.
“You know, really, I’d like to end this already.”
The nights spent killing the dead. The days spent fulfilling the expectations of the people around her.
She was sick of all of it.
“I’ve spent whole lifetimes doing nothing but what other people want, and now I want to be selfish, you know, and act like someone’s child, just once.”
Her wish, as someone who had never once received parental love, was—
—she wanted someone to love her as a daughter.
That was all.
“Once the fighting is over tonight, I think I’ll try to talk to my mother again.”
She looked at me with a lifeless smile.
And she and I rushed out into the evening streets.
Then we had to face off against the wandering dead.