“The man was killed ten... days ago,” Dasa said. “The woman received... visitors seven days ago. And she was last seen three days ago.” She calmly laid out the facts. “But the remains... we found in that xenobeast must... be at least seven days old.”
“Oh!” Fiona exclaimed. “Are you sure about that, though?”
“Seven days at the very least,” Dasa said. “Perhaps more than ten days. Bones... are remarkably hard to digest. In my sister’s... laboratory, we learned that when we had to dispose of... the bodies we used in our experiments.”
According to Dasa, the alchemist Jirina had created several homunculi, artificial humans, before Yukinari. But although they were physically similar to humans, they lacked any spiritual power or sense of self; in addition, their hearts did not beat on their own. They were, practically speaking, corpses—and because they were of no use, the Church secretly ordered them disposed of.
But because chopping them up or burning them would attract too much attention, Jirina chose to dissolve the bodies in acid. It was almost as if the corpses were being digested in an artificial stomach. Even so, it took more than ten days before everything was gone.
Nobody knew if a xenobeast’s stomach contained exactly the same chemicals, so it was impossible to say for certain, but it seemed unlikely that the creature’s stomach acid would be more powerful than the agent Jirina used. Meaning...
“It doesn’t add up,” Fiona muttered.
The man had been killed about ten days earlier. Seven days earlier, his wife had appeared at the door of their house and told visitors the man was indisposed with a cold; that was why she was a suspect to begin with. And finally, an eyewitness had last seen her three days prior. Yet it seemed that at least seven days had passed since the owner of the ring had been eaten by the xenobeast.
So who was the woman the eyewitness had seen?
For that matter, if the remains did belong to the woman, and if she had been eaten by the xenobeast more than ten days ago, that would mean she was already dead when her husband was killed.
“C-Could she have been... a ghost...?” Berta asked fearfully.
I guess even in a world where monsters literally walk the earth, ghosts are still scary, Yukinari thought. But maybe monsters and ghosts were scary for different reasons. The terror of xenobeasts and demigods and erdgods was an instinctive response rooted in the desire to avoid death. But the fear of ghosts was something more intellectual—they defied normal expectations about the world, made people question their own place. Life and death. Existence and nonexistence. Ghosts made even these baseline assumptions seem questionable.
“I don’t personally believe in ghosts, but let’s say for the sake of argument that they exist,” Yukinari said. Fiona, Dasa, Berta and Ulrike all looked at him. “I mean, maybe she would be less a ghost than the living dead...”
“The living... dead...?” Dasa asked, mystified.
Of all those present, Dasa was the most versed in this kind of rare knowledge, but even she didn’t seem to know what a zombie was.
“Sorry. It’s, uh... It’s when a living thing dies, but then... somehow starts to move again...” It turned out to be surprisingly difficult to explain.
In this world, where medical science and the like were not much advanced, even the definition of death itself was somewhat ambiguous. Even in Yukinari’s previous world, there had been debate about whether it was brain death or the stoppage of the heart that constituted true death, and even once brain waves ceased or the heart was no longer beating, the cells of the body survived a short while longer. If those cells were quickly transferred to another living person, they could even go on without dying.
Obviously, none of that would mean anything to the people in this room. If they didn’t understand when he called it a “moving corpse,” what more could he say? But then—
“It is something like me!” Ulrike broke in. She seemed oddly proud of this conclusion. “I am deceased as a living thing, but as a plant I continue to live and move!”
“Er— well— yeah, I guess that’s true...”
“Moving corpse” wasn’t exactly a compliment, but Ulrike looked so pleased that Yukinari refrained from pointing this out. He decided they had gotten too far into the weeds; it was time to move the conversation along.
“But anyway,” he said, “where would the remains have been?”
“Where...? Oh!” Berta seemed to grasp what he was getting at. Until that morning, the remains with the ring had been digesting inside a xenobeast’s stomach. Even if the corpse had gotten up and walked around, even if it had been able to speak—even if any of this were possible or had happened, it still couldn’t be the woman in question.
Well then, what about a mass of spiritual power? In essence, the ghost question again.
But typically, spiritual power couldn’t exist on its own. It required some vessel, and if it were to overflow that vessel, it would soon dissipate. The vessel was a living body, along with the red liquid—Holy Oil—used by the True Church of Harris. Spiritual power was a real and recognized phenomenon in this world, but it wasn’t exactly the same as a ghost.
Even if, hypothetically, spiritual power could have appeared as a ghost under some particular circumstances, how could it have killed the husband? And even if that were possible, it was hard to imagine the ghost would simply run him through once with something sharp. It would have been incorporeal precisely because it had no living vessel.
“And that means...” Fiona murmured, cocking her head, “it’s not her...?”
“That seems like the best explanation,” Yukinari said.
The wife had put her ring on someone else and fed them to the xenobeast. After that, she killed her husband and disappeared—this at least would explain the things people had seen and heard.
“I just don’t know why,” Yukinari went on.
Why go to all that trouble? After all, it was sheer dumb luck that Yukinari had defeated the xenobeast and noticed that it had eaten someone. Misdirection didn’t work if nobody ever noticed it. If she’d only wanted to hide her husband’s death, why feed someone else to the monster? Why not just give it her husband?
So were these just the inexplicable actions of a disturbed individual? Or...
Yukinari didn’t say anything. He couldn’t think of anything else. With no one able to come up with an explanation that made any real sense, a chill and unnatural silence settled over the living area of the Schillings mansion.