“…Let’s get started on Sui’s treatment while it’s still safe,” Yae said, pushing away those dark thoughts and smiling at the silver-haired man.
“Go ahead. Do as you will,” Sui encouraged softly, sitting on a slumping, misshapen boulder.
Yae understood that deformation was different from normal illnesses, but she was overcome with an indescribable emotion as Sui smiled and peeled open the skin over his chest. She gathered herself and leaned her face forward to study the affected area.
“Your skin has hardened.” She felt around his open chest with her fingers and found it had the consistency of a rough tree trunk. I said I would treat him, but how do I actually do that? She had confidently declared she would heal him after Arai talked her up, but she didn’t know anything about medicine. That said, no amount of specialty medical knowledge she might have gained if she had been a doctor in her previous world would have been useful for treating deformation.
“Most of his organs have been eaten by bugs,” Arai said, walking up to join her and frowning.
Yae calmly observed the inside of Sui’s body. Due to his organs becoming more like stones and his bones becoming more like branches, his insides more closely resembled the framework of a pocket watch than the inside of a living being.
“He might get better if you remove all the bugs,” Arai suggested, perhaps noticing Yae’s hesitation.
That’s a pretty reckless suggestion, but there might actually be some logic to it. Even in my last world, surgical procedures were carried out to remove malignant tumors. She couldn’t think of anything else, so she may as well give it a try.
“…Is it still okay for me to touch with my bare hands?” Yae asked, and Sui responded with a yawn.
“You don’t seem to be at risk of being infected, so I suspect you’ll be fine.”
“I’m asking for you. I don’t want it to hurt…”
“It won’t. Feel around all you want.”
How can he be so carefree about this? Yae thought as she took a cloth from her sash that she used as a handkerchief. Oh yeah, and where did the rabbit meat he ate earlier go? Could it have simply disappeared as soon as he swallowed it?
She used the cloth to wipe away the cocoon-like corpse bugs clinging to his bones, but some were sturdy and wouldn’t come off. Just like the first one, the cocoons that fell from his bones turned into clumps of silver. She wanted to take some tweezers and pluck them all off…
Arai quickly grew tired of watching as Yae struggled with the corpse bugs. “I’m gonna go scout the area,” he said, transforming into a tiger and running off into the trees without waiting for a reply.
Yae returned her attention to the inside of Sui’s body. Mixed in among the cocoons she had been unable to remove was a single clear one. There was a white insect that looked like a silkworm inside it. Finding it strange, she pinched it casually, causing it to break.
“Huh?!” she leaped back. The silkworm-like insect jumped out of the broken cocoon and fell to the ground, immediately growing to the size of a human child. It had a white torso, and over its face, it wore a mask like a dog’s skull.
“S-Sui!” Yae called out, voice trembling, her eyes fixed on the monstrous corpse bug. This was probably the leader of the group, the equivalent of a queen bee. Sui wasn’t responding, and his body was all balled up as if to protect his chest. Had he died? She turned toward him in a panic, but just then, the corpse bug began to wriggle its silkworm-like body. It was going to run.
“Stop!” Yae screamed without thinking. She felt a little silly; what reason would it have to listen to her? As soon as she thought that, however, the corpse bug jerked its body around and faced her with its dog-skull mask.
“No-name flesh,” it said.
It can talk?! Yae was too shocked that it had spoken to process what it said.
“No-name eyes.”
“Wh-what?”
“No-name mouth.”
“No-name mouth…?”
“No-name hair no-name nose no-name hands no-name feet.”
The corpse bug continued in a hoarse, monotone voice. It was a strange voice that sounded neither male nor female.
“No-name guts no-name being meaningless being ground to powder and scatter.”
“…This person is named Sui!” Yae yelled to drown out the corpse bug’s words. She had the feeling it was trying to place a curse on Sui that would erase his existence. “He was once a sublime god. He hails from a revered realm and graced this one with a fiery spark. I will call his name again. This man has a form. He does not stiffen; he does not bend. His form possesses a name.”
The speech Yae had launched into was the prayer that Chief Kadaru had performed when she was saved after her awakening. She got the feeling the real prayer was longer and more abstruse—she was only rearranging the parts of it that she remembered.
“He is named Sui. He has a form in this land.”
After responding to the corpse bug’s curse with her own, a strange phenomenon began to occur around them. The undergrowth around the bug began to frost. The air chilled like the middle of winter and turned her breath white. It was snowing before she knew it, the snowflakes big and powdery enough to obstruct her vision.
She wiped the snow from her eyelashes and blinked, then gasped with shock. There was a line of shadow people carrying black lacquer trays and walking past either side of her. The shadowy figures had blurred outlines as if seen through frosted glass, but the black lacquer trays were perfectly clear. On one of the trays, Yae saw a large gray stone. It had the kanji for “Blood” written on it in scarlet ink. Each of the trays carried a similar stone with Japanese characters written on them. First Flesh, Second Flesh, First Organ, Second Organ, First Bone… Yae was dumbfounded.
The procession surrounded her and circled counterclockwise. Actually, they weren’t concerned with her—they were delivering their trays to the silkworm-like corpse bug in front of her. The giant bug ate each of the stones it was given. Yae froze for a moment, then her face went pale.
“That flesh and blood isn’t for you. It belongs to Sui. Return it,” she said. The procession halted. “There’s nothing to freeze here. Return it now.” As she repeated her demand, even the snow paused in midair.
“Return it,” she repeated one more time, and it was as if time were being rewound. The snow went back up into the sky, and the procession began to circle in the opposite direction. When that happened, the corpse bug broke into a tantrum, flailing around. It roared, flung its fat body into the shadow figures, and trampled the black lacquer trays that fell to the ground.
Then it came rushing straight toward Yae. “No way, wait a second! Stay away from me! I can’t fight… Arai! Arai, help!!” she screamed, calling Arai’s name without thinking.
The golden tiger ran past her an instant later like a gust of wind, holding the black sword in his mouth. He parried the corpse bug easily with a front paw, then assumed his human form and unsheathed the sword in a single motion. The brilliance of the naked blade was as blinding to Yae’s eyes as the sun, and Arai beheaded the corpse bug with one strike. It was a perfectly fluid movement.
A violent wind assaulted them the moment he cut through the bug’s body. Yae closed her eyes and used her arms to cover her face. She quickly dropped them again to survey the situation. The snow had stopped, and it felt like summer again. Arai was ahead of her, holding the black sword with his back turned toward her. The headless body of the corpse bug was there, too.
“Arai, the corpse bug…!” She was about to rush to his side when she saw the corpse bug’s body crumbling like a miniature avalanche. Actually, it would be more accurate to say it transformed into silver pellets which then collapsed to the ground in a pile. The “pellets” were the size of walnuts, and shaped like them, too.
Arai shook off the black filth that clung to his blade and turned toward Yae, who was still staring at the bug’s remains. “That was well said.” She had no idea what he meant at first, but then she realized he was praising her for responding to the corpse bug’s curse with a curse of her own.
Arai sheathed the sword and put a hand to his waist. “I had a bad feeling. Looks like I was right to turn back,” he muttered. “Is this real silver? I wouldn’t have thought even the corpse bug’s core could change into metal.”
He stared at the large pile of silver on the ground doubtfully.
“Corpse bugs are a sort of death god. Normally, people make them rot with medicine or weaken them with incantations…but removing corpse bugs once they have latched on to a host is very difficult. Even if you do get lucky and succeed, the concern then becomes where to send them next.”
Yae looked down at her hands as she listened to Arai’s explanation. She wasn’t a doctor, so she didn’t know anything about the proper way to treat deformation, but she had heard it was difficult to cure. It was also very contagious. But unlike elebeasts, humans were resistant to deformation, and Yae was Natureless on top of that. Even now, she did not appear to have been infected with the curse.
“You can’t respond to the corpse bug’s voice. You are guaranteed to get infected if you do. But if you don’t respond, it’ll escape and end up taking hold of someone else. That’s why everyone hesitates to perform treatment. Especially Wild and Blessed Natures, who are the most susceptible to catching it.”
“…Oh,” Yae said, and fell silent. Arai looked toward her and smiled meaningfully, as if to lift the mood. She tensed.
“You didn’t disappoint. You were able to drive the corpse bug out of Sui’s body and resist the curse.”
“That was the first time I’ve ever touched a corpse bug, though. I guess being Natureless kept me safe?” Yae said.
“It’s not just that. You’re shockingly odorless,” Arai claimed, approaching her brazenly and touching her hair. She lost her nerve and tried to back away, but he pulled her face toward his to look into her eyes and brushed her hair behind her ears. Yae froze like a deer in headlights. “From the corpse bug’s perspective, you are alive even though your lack of odor says you shouldn’t be. It’s not surprising it found you strange. It thought you were a living corpse.”
“That makes me sound like a zombie,” Yae remarked.