Yae stopped walking when she found herself in front of Hotaru, who was still crying mournfully. She didn’t see any guards; maybe they were hidden. Tied down by the ropes, Hotaru lifted his swollen eyelids just a fraction. Tears fell from the eyeballs within, which had already turned to wood. Yae reached out a hand and brushed the edge of his mossy mouth.
“This must be so hard,” she said, her words melting into the night. Unbeknownst to her, an earnestness had filled her voice. “…I want to heal you. Or rather, I want to clear away your anguish. I don’t like seeing tears or having people look at me with sadness. I like smiles. But I keep getting these unpleasant thoughts. What if I only want to heal you because I’m afraid of disappointing everyone or because I want everyone to like and praise me? That’s a part of me, and I can’t do anything about it. Do I have the right to save someone, feeling like that?”
Just as she finished baring her heart, Yae suddenly felt someone standing behind her. She turned around in surprise and immediately felt her head being cradled. A soft heavenly garment brushed her cheek. It was Arai.
“You’re wrong, Yae. Those were my words. I guess I just assumed you were afraid of other people’s disappointment. After all, I really don’t think you have any obligation to heal someone from Miya Province. So I don’t like the idea of you helping them, and I wish you would walk away. But I’m not denying your feelings. I want you to know that… You’ve always had the right to do this,” he said.
“…Okay,” Yae responded.
“I can’t fully trust you, Yae… No, that’s not right. Maybe I don’t yet have the room in my heart yet to accept other people. Dammit, it’s me that… None of this is your fault, Yae. I want you to know that, too.”
Yae sniffled. She started to look up at Arai, but he pulled her face into his chest with strong arms. “Arai, are you comforting me?” she asked.
“…Is that a problem?” he replied awkwardly.
I see… Arai had uncertainty and pain in his heart, too. With a past like his, it was natural for him to have trouble trusting people. She would wait for the day he opened his heart to her. Trust would definitely form between them then. Yae needed to change, too, to ensure that day would come. As she was having these thoughts, she lightly gripped his sleeve.
A few days had passed since Yae began treating Hotaru. By now, nearly every person in Miya Province knew the story behind Yae’s arrival, but no one looked down on her. People treated her politely, and it seemed their impression of her was less as a Natureless bride who had been abandoned and more as a doctor who cured deformation. Akanagi’s attitude changed greatly, and he no longer spoke to her with abusive language. His foul mouth still occasionally emerged when he argued with Arai, however.
Yae was treating Hotaru basically the same way she’d treated Sui. She got Hotaru to lie down on his right side, tore open his abdomen, and set to work removing the corpse bugs in his bones and organs. It felt like she was exploring a ghost ship in a horror movie. Multiple ladders had been placed against Hotaru’s body, and she climbed them as she worked.
The majority of Hotaru’s bones had already turned to wood. His ribs had become branches, and they were growing flowers and berries. Corpse bugs were tightly packed onto the branches as well and were especially numerous in the upper half of his body. The corpse bugs resembled cocoons as they had last time, but they were entirely opaque and gray. The cocoon strings were too hard for Yae to cut from the bone without using a knife.
Because of that and the dinosaur-like size of Hotaru’s body, she wasn’t making any progress with his treatment. Asking for help removing the bugs was not an option. Yae could only do this without being infected because she was Natureless, because she had served as a medium for many years, and because she instinctually denied the reality of deformation.
“I wonder if corpse bugs have gotten into his skull, too. It does seem like his brain has begun to degenerate…,” Yae thought aloud.
“Hey, don’t get cold feet now,” Arai scolded as she moved behind Hotaru’s thick left ribs using the elder’s sternum as a platform and gazed into his dark, cavernous body. Arai was holding a small lamp for her. As it happened, this was a lamp Yae had made by melting and reshaping a fragment of glass she got when she expanded the entrance hole to her Whiskey House. It was one of the tools she had asked Arai to fetch for her the day after they arrived in Miya Province.
“You said you would heal him.” Arai still hadn’t agreed with Yae’s decision to treat Hotaru, but he had mostly put his opinion aside to support her. “Trying to remove the little ones is probably pointless. They’ll just reproduce and come right back. This monster won’t be healed until you smoke out the boss.”
It seemed the corpse bugs had a leader that was also the core of the illness, like a queen bee.
“I’m keeping an eye out as I remove the bugs, but I haven’t been able to find it… Sui is looking at Hotaru’s head right now,” Yae explained.
“Well now, I was wondering where he’d been all day. So he was inside this guy’s body the whole time…” Arai grimaced.
Yae sat down on the gently arcing breastbone. She put away the knife, lightly brushed her hands, and took a small pouch out of her waist bag. She plucked some dried fruits from inside and tossed them into Arai’s mouth. He had sat down next to her and leaned in, mouth open expectantly, and he gladly received the treat. She ate one herself as well. Fatigue left her unable to think straight. She needed sugar.
“I doubt this guy can still feel pain properly, so it probably only tickles him, but it’s got to be a burden having people walk around inside his body,” Arai said, making Yae feel bad about using Hotaru’s ribs as a seat. She started to get up to descend to the ground, and Arai grabbed her arm. “No, it’ll be fine as long as we don’t move around too much. Going in and out will disturb him even more.”
“Oh.”
“So, Yae. Which place are you going to choose after you heal him?” Arai asked, catching Yae off guard and making her choke on her dried fruit. Despite having caused her choking in the first place, he clapped her on the back to help her through it.