“You mean the gestation sacs?” I asked.
“Yes…”
During the construction of the facility, she must have had plenty of chances—whether carrying them, installing them, or just working around them—where she couldn’t avoid encountering those things. Even Celestia, for all her composure, seemed worn down by it; her expression clouded as she stared off into the distance.
Just thinking about the gestation sacs is enough to make me recoil.
It wasn’t only that they’d implanted false memories into me. The very fact that I’d been born from a lump of flesh that didn’t even resemble a human body filled me with a deep, visceral disgust.
Having real, blood-related parents, what should have been an ordinary, unquestioned assumption, turned out to be nothing but an illusion. That alone dealt a heavy psychological blow, pressing down on my heart like a weight.
If I don’t want any more people to be sacrificed like that… I’ll have to settle things with those human production facilities someday.
To erase the cult from the world, it wouldn’t be enough simply to defeat the seven executives. Systematically destroying the facilities that formed its operational backbone would be just as effective.
“By the way, Celestia, feel like taking your mind off things for a bit?” I asked with a smirk.
“Yes. Very much so!”
“Good. Then come with me. This should be perfect for a change of pace.”
“Understood.”
By “taking her mind off things,” I meant the organ-exchange experiment.
Since the procedure could trigger changes in personality, in some cases, it might completely rewrite the way a person thought. Calling it a change of pace wasn’t entirely inaccurate.
Having effectively abducted Celestia, I brought her to the torture room where Joanne was waiting. I closed the door behind us and locked it, trapping Celestia between us, with Joanne at her back and me in front. No escape routes left.
“We’re about to begin an experiment,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“It’ll hurt a little, but I need you to bear with it.”
“That blade of yours doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.”
“I’ll give you a quick rundown of the experiment,” I said. “From here on, we’re going to swap your organs with Joanne’s, then observe you both for a few days. That’s the basic outline.”
“Ugh… where do you even come up with such grotesque ideas? It’s disgusting…”
Lured in by the promise of a change of pace, Celestia let out a voice full of disappointment and disillusionment once she heard what that actually meant.
“Isn’t this just you forcing your hobbies on me?” she asked.
“No,” I replied. “That kind of thing is Joanne’s specialty.”
“So that’s how you see me?”
“Well, yeah.”
I already had Pawk’s permission.
When I’d asked to run an organ-exchange between Joanne and Celestia and then perform a Transfer on top of that to see what would happen, she’d cut me off halfway with a weary, “Do whatever you want already,” and washed her hands of it.
Having an executive personally sign off on me doing whatever I wanted to Celestia? Couldn’t ask for better.
Maybe something in me really had snapped the night everything changed, because I could put a scalpel to both of their bodies now without the slightest hesitation.
The organs going into Celestia had originally been mine. But no normal person could tell one set of guts from another just by looking, and Celestia was no exception. She never noticed a thing. She simply accepted my organs into her body without question.
If anyone could have seen through it, it’d be Stella. She was far too sensitive to the smell of blood and flesh.
I’d given Joanne a heads-up beforehand, and we agreed she’d keep her distance from Stella for the next few days. In the end, it turned out to be needless worry. Stella had already returned to the Northeastern Branch.
Two days later, when I saw Celestia looking exactly the same as ever, I finally reached a conclusion.
Secondary transplants didn’t trigger memory transfer.
No change had appeared in Joanne either, despite her having received Celestia’s organs. That was the biggest mystery of all.
“With that, the experiment’s over. You really helped us out,” I said.
“No, please, if there’s any way I can be of service, call on me anytime… Though, well, I’d really rather never do this again.”
“Can’t blame you.”
After putting their insides back where they belonged and letting Celestia go, I chewed over the results in my head.
Secondary transplants didn’t trigger memory transfer.
No, that part was still acceptable. What I couldn’t wrap my head around was why Joanne, who had carried Celestia’s organs for a couple of days, showed no signs of memory transfer at all.
I, on the other hand, had started suffering from it immediately after receiving Joanne’s heart. Sure, individual differences exist in how the human body handles all kinds of processes, but for neither of them to show any change after two whole days was completely outside my expectations.
So in the end, whether memory transfer happens or not comes down to luck? Right now, that’s the only conclusion I’ve got… and it’s a damn problem.
I’d been scheming to use memory transfer to destroy the cult from the inside. Now that I was staring straight at how unreliable it really was, all the wind went out of my sails.
If not that, then how was I supposed to deal with the executives and bring the cult down?
It’s not going to go as cleanly as it did with Fuankilo and Joanne. Those two cases were miracles, freak events that only happened because a bunch of conditions lined up just right…
Even with a surprise attack, I couldn’t picture myself taking down any of the other executives. I’d pinned my hopes on organ exchange, and now the whole plan lay in pieces.
As I sat there stewing, a familiar husky voice brushed against my ears from behind, as if it had slipped straight into my thoughts.
“You and I share a bond of hearts, and we love each other more than anyone in this world. That’s why it happened. That phenomenon belongs to us alone.”
I jolted upright, startled by Joanne cutting in on my inner monologue out of nowhere.
“Can something that convenient really be possible?” I asked.
“It’s happening in front of you. Deal with it,” she replied.
“Well. When you put it that way.”
Maybe the time we’d spent together, the emotions we’d built up—maybe those were factors in whether memory transfer took root.
If I could overwrite someone a full hundred percent with my own thoughts, it’d be a viable option. But if not, it was just a high-risk, low-return blunder of a strategy.
With that, we were out of ways to undo Celestia’s brainwashing. At this point, the only thing that came to mind was having the Orthodoxy executive Cress Walker use his lightning magic to tinker with her brain circuitry, otherwise called a “reverse brainwashing.”
“This plan’s a bust, Oakley. What’re you gonna do now?” Joanne asked.
“We’ll put undoing Celestia’s brainwashing on hold for now. From here, I’m planning to head to the Northeastern Branch and at least build up some basic strength.”
“You iced Fuankilo, didn’t you? I’d say you’re already pretty strong.”
“No. I still have a long way to go.”
“Hmm.”
She had a point. By most standards, I was fairly strong now.
But I couldn’t possibly be satisfied with “fairly strong.”
Because I knew someone like Alfie Judgment existed, an outlier, a walking exception.
Back in the original game, Seeker of the Netherworld, there had been a status system, and the protagonist, the playable character Alfie, could grow nearly without limit.
To give a few examples of his feats: there was a route where he faced Joanne one-on-one and beat her to a pulp in a straight brawl. Another where, despite not even being an executive, he casually knocked Stella’s magic aside with his sword. There were a handful of stories like that, scenes that were just a little too absurd to be called ordinary.
In key route battles against heretic executives, upon meeting the right conditions, Alfie could power up enough to defeat them head-on.
Even though Alfie was technically classified as a normal civilian, his accomplishments were so monstrous that fans jokingly called him an “exceptional extraordinary,” a not-so-subtle way of saying he’d broken out of the human category altogether.
You could say Alfie represented the upper limit of how strong a so-called “ordinary person” could possibly become.
His growth and power had only ever existed in the game’s world, of course. Here and now, in this reality, I had no idea how far I could go until I tried.
I started rebuilding my plans from the ground up, refining them in my head. Just as I was about to share them with Joanne standing in front of me, her chaotic eyes narrowed slightly.
“Hey, Oakley. You’re not… avoiding me, are you?”
“Come again?”
“You rewrote me, and yet you’ve been walking on eggshells. Why?” Joanne leaned in and peered up into my face. I couldn’t even begin to read her expression.
Before, she’d been fatally bad at lying or hiding anything. Every emotion she felt showed right on her face. If she tried to spit out a lie, her eyes would dart around, and she’d trip all over her own lines. She’d always been that kind of easy-to-read person.
But now, Joanne was different. In every way that mattered, she’d changed.
And facing that changed version of her, I’d apparently started to act differently without even realizing it. Joanne spoke in a level, almost eerily calm tone.
“I’m really hurt, you know. I was hoping that after being reborn, I’d finally be able to have a normal relationship with you, Oakley. But these past few days, you haven’t looked at me that way at all. Even last night, I was very obviously trying to seduce you, and you ignored every single signal. Not even letting me hope a little. Don’t you think that’s cruel? Even I have feelings, you know?”
From the moment she started speaking to the very end, the girl didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow.
Facing her head-on, I told her, “Right now is not the time to be wasting our energy on that kind of thing.”
“‘That kind of thing,’ huh?”
In an instant, a pitch-black fury roared out of her small frame. Since her awakening, this was the first time Joanne had openly shown emotion, and the alien pressure of it made me instinctively recoil.