Chapter 208: Beware of the Monster You can Become!

She stood with a dark glare towards me. She probably didn’t expect that I would face her like that, given how I had just rebuked the lady that called herself Pale Rose. Even I hadn’t expected it.

’I guess I really am just a sucker for the justice of moralism.’

It was slightly funny coming from someone like me. I was also in no position to point at what the standard of moralism should be or should not be.

I beheld her face with a stern stare. The circle of white flames surrounding me had long since calmed down, forming a scorched desert circle, blazed but low, just below my knee level.

I stared at her, my arms still folded and a ghastly glow covering the atmosphere like a blanket.

“You asked what gives her the right to be a distributor of justice,” I said, my voice carrying across the sand. “A fair question. I agreed with you. But let me ask you something in return.”

Her tails swayed behind her, agitated but controlled. She was listening.

“Do you even know what you took?”

The fox lady tilted her head, her expression shifting from defensive to genuinely puzzled frown.

“I took souls. I already told you this.”

“No.” I shook my head slowly. “You took lives. Twenty thousand of them. Do you understand what a life is?”

She stared at me like I had asked her to explain the obvious.

“A life is… existence. A span of time between birth and death. Mortals have them. They end.” She shrugged, her massive breast shifting with the motion. “I simply ended them sooner than they would have ended anyway. What difference does a few decades make?”

’She genuinely doesn’t get it.’

The realization hit me harder than I expected. It wasn’t that she was being cruel, to her this was just what was necessary. It was indifference… and frankly I didn’t know whether to be relieved or even be more fearful of her.

“A few decades,” I sighed and repeated. “Let me paint you a picture. One of those twenty thousand souls you consumed… maybe he was a father. Maybe he woke up every morning before dawn to work fields he didn’t own, breaking his back under a sun that didn’t care, just so his daughter could eat. Maybe he dreamed of saving enough coin to buy her a ribbon for her hair. A simple ribbon. That was his ambition. And that ambition to him was his everything.”

The fox lady’s brow furrowed. Not with guilt, with confusion.

“And you erased him. You erased the ribbon. You erased the daughter’s smile when she received it. You erased every morning he would have woken up, every meal he would have shared, every moment of tired joy he would have stolen from a world that gave him nothing.”

“But he was going to die anyway,” she said, as if explaining something obvious to a child. “In sixty years. Maybe seventy. His daughter too. They all die. I simply…”

“You simply what? Harvested him early?” I felt something cold settle in my chest. “That’s exactly my point. To you, he was a resource not a person with a story, to you he is just a mere number in your count toward awakening another tail.”

Her tails stilled behind her. She was processing, I could see that much. But the understanding I was looking for wasn’t there.

“I have lived for over four hundred years,” she said slowly, her voice losing some of its earlier playfulness. “I have watched people rise and crumble to dust. I have seen generations bloom and wither like flowers in a field. Do you know how many humans I have watched die of old age? Of disease? Of their own stupidity?” She spread her arms. “Millions. Tens of millions. They die whether I touch them or not. The only difference is that when I take them, their deaths mean something. They become part of something greater.”

’Four hundred years. Fuck.’

It didn’t come close to Kassie and the rest but it was still a lot. Besides, she wasn’t a Spirit.

’Damn, does that mean people are allowed to live that long over here?’

To some extent, I could say, I understood now. This wasn’t a monster in the traditional sense. This was a creature so far removed from the human experience that the concept of individual human value had simply… eroded. Like a cliff face worn smooth by centuries of waves.

“You think you’re giving their deaths meaning,” I said. “But you’re not. You’re just taking. There’s no transaction here. You didn’t offer them a choice. You didn’t ask if they wanted their souls to fuel your ascension. You simply decided their lives were worth less than your tails.”

“Because they are.” She said it without malice, without cruelty. “A mortal lives for a blink. I will live for millennia more. The power I gain from their souls will shape the fate of nations. One life, weighed against what I can become… how is that not a fair exchange?”

“Because they didn’t agree to the exchange!” My voice rose despite myself. “You’re standing there talking about fair trades when you’re the only one at the negotiating table. The merchant who robs a corpse and calls it commerce.”

She fell silent for a moment. Her dark eyes studied me with something that might have been dark curiosity.

“You speak with such passion,” she said finally. “For creatures you’ve never met. Creatures whose names you’ll never know. Why?”

’Why indeed.’

I didn’t have a clean answer. I wasn’t a hero. I wasn’t even particularly good. I had my own darkness, my own sins that would make confession booths spontaneously combust.

But some things were just wrong.

“Because that’s what separates us from monsters,” I said quietly. “Not power or longevity or the ability to level cities or command flames. It’s the ability to look at something weaker than ourselves and choose not to consume it simply because we can.”

The fox lady’s lips curved into something between a smile and a sneer.

“How very human of you.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It wasn’t meant as one.” Her tails began to sway again, but the motion was different now. Slower… and more thoughtful. “You speak of choice, of consent. But tell me this, Spirit Summoner… when you eat meat, do you ask the animal’s permission? When you pluck a flower, do you negotiate with the stem?”

’Damn. She’s not stupid.’

“Humans aren’t flowers.”

“To you, perhaps.” She stepped closer, and I could feel the ancient weight of her presence pressing against the air. “But to me? To beings like me? The gap between human and flower is… smaller than you’d like to believe.”

I held my ground, keeping my arms folded, keeping my expression carved from stone.

“Then that’s exactly why you’re the worst of all.” I let the words hang for a moment. “The Pale Rose kills because she believes she’s righteous. She’s deluded, but at least she recognizes the weight of what she takes. She counts her kills. She justifies them. She needs to believe they deserved it because somewhere in that twisted heart of hers, she knows that taking a life means something.”

I pointed at the fox lady.

“But you? You don’t even have that. You kill twenty thousand people and call it cultivation. You harvest souls like a farmer harvests wheat, and you genuinely, truly, in your heart of hearts… don’t understand why that’s monstrous.”

Her expression flickered. Something passed behind those ancient eyes.

“The Pale Rose is a hypocrite,” I continued. “But hypocrites at least acknowledge the standard they’re failing to meet. You’ve abandoned the standard entirely. You’ve convinced yourself that human lives are resources, and because you believe it so completely, you feel no guilt, hesitation or weight.”

I let my arms fall to my sides.

“That’s not strength. That’s just… emptiness. You’ve lived so long that you’ve forgotten what it means to value something smaller than yourself. And that makes you the most dangerous kind of monster. The kind that doesn’t even know it’s a monster.”

The fox lady stood motionless.

For a long moment, the only sound was the low crackle of my dying flames and the whisper of sand against sand.

Then she spoke.

“You are… strange.” Her head tilted, studying me like I was a puzzle she couldn’t quite solve. “I have met many powerful beings in my centuries. None of them have ever spoken to me like this. They either feared me, desired me, or sought to destroy me. But you…”

She trailed off.

’Please don’t say something that makes me feel sympathy for the mass murderer. Please.’

“You speak to me as if I could be better,” she finished. “As if you expect something from me.”

I didn’t have a response to that.

Because honestly? I wasn’t sure what I expected. I wasn’t naive enough to think a speech would undo four centuries of a fundamentally different worldview. I wasn’t arrogant enough to believe my words carried that kind of weight.

But I’d said what needed to be said.

Whether she understood it or not… that was her burden to carry.

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