Chapter 65 Volume II – Chapter 31: Other Half

Just before he turned a corner with the other boys, Carl suddenly stopped and looked back anxiously.

“Oh no! My bracelet… I can’t find my bracelet!”

There was no one who didn’t know about Carl’s bracelet. Even if no one knew the story behind the bracelet he proudly wore on his arm, Carl always showed it off.

“I think I dropped it while eating dessert!”

“What do we do now, Carl… If the old witch finds your bracelet, she’ll know we ate the desserts!”

A girl voiced her thoughts with concern.

It was the first time I had ever seen Carl like this. At the time I thought it was because he was worried about his bracelet. Then… I had an idea.

What if I took the bracelet? If I did that… Wouldn’t I then become Carl’s best friend? Wouldn’t my ‘friends’ glorify me if I managed to get that bracelet and save the day?

As someone who had never been very much in their company or in their games, these selfish desires of mine had suddenly risen to the top. I wanted to have fun, I wanted to hang out with them, and I wanted to be ‘one of them’.

“I…”

Suddenly everyone turned to me.

“I’ll get it…”

With a slight smile, Carl put his hand on my shoulder and started thanking me.

This boy, two years older than me, who normally bossed everyone around, now looked like he would cry with joy in front of me. Even though this was very strange to me, I didn’t care because I was happy.

“You’re the best, Ethan! We’re going back to the dormitory, it’s dangerous to stay here. You can come after us after you find my bracelet.”

My brow furrowed with worry for a moment when I realized I was going to be alone for a while, but I didn’t want to show them that I was scared, so I gave him a stuttering nod and then watched their backs until they turned the corner.

As I turned around and headed for the kitchen, I was scared but excited at the same time. When I entered the kitchen again, I quickly looked around for the bracelet, but no matter how hard I looked, the garish bracelet was nowhere to be found.

I came to the dessert stocks, wondering if he had dropped it in them.

I was opening and looking at them when suddenly something caught my attention.

The stocks were… too short.

Even though we had perfectly cleaned up what we had eaten, it was very easy for someone opening the stock to realize that they were missing.

“Hey! What are you doing there?!”

I froze in my tracks as I heard the voice of the security guard, whose voice I knew quite well.

“Are you eating the fucking desserts? What the hell are you doing!”

“N- no-”

The guard came rushing up to me, tugged on my arm, and pulled me out of the kitchen. No matter how much I tried to explain myself to him, he wouldn’t listen, and it didn’t take me long to realize that we were in the headmistress’s office.

I remember begging security, I knew this wasn’t going to end with a simple beating, what we had done was technically theft. The punishment for this would be much, much greater.

I was struggling with the fear of these thoughts, but then I stopped struggling when I saw something as I passed through one of the corridors.

Carl was looking at me from around the corner with a smile on his face. On his arm was the bracelet he told me to look for.

That’s when I knew… I was… a bait from the very beginning.

Carl and the others wanted more dessert than they had originally planned. In doing so, it was clear that they would be exposed. After all, there would be a shortage of dessert packets, and when the headmistress found out, and on top of that, if no one took the blame, each of the kids would be punished.

So they needed a victim, they needed someone to take the blame. And… that person was me.

I had spent a lot of time trying to forget the days when I slept in the cold basement for a month and got caned on my bare feet every night because of my own selfishness, and my own greed for friendship.

I never spoke a word to Carl and his friends after that day, and they never paid any attention to me either.

I think that was one of the first memories I had of greed, and remembering it all again helped a lot.

The darkness behind my closed eyes was slowly covered with a purple glow after my recollection.

I had achieved my goal and I opened my eyes with relief.

Half of the world looked purple, or rather mixed with purple, but the moment I realized this, I frowned.

It shouldn’t normally be like this.

At first, I closed my left eye and the world returned to its original color. Then, when I opened my left eye and closed my right eye, the world turned a more purplish color.

Does this… mean that only my left eye is purple? Is it because I’m half wiera?

That’s really interesting…

It was a really strange feeling to come across things I didn’t know about this world, but I couldn’t think about that right now. I had to do what I had to do.

I opened both my eyes and imagined touching that warm feeling that surrounded me in the atmosphere. Still, I didn’t try to direct it like mana.

Ordea and caora were not things that could be controlled like mana. Even if I could control mana as my own limb, just by imagining it, I could not do the same for caora or ordea.

Controlling mana is like raising one’s arm. When one raises one’s arm, the body provides the energy for this work with the nutrients that are eaten spontaneously. Then the arm is lifted up by signals from the brain to the arm muscles through the nerves.

The mana is exactly the same. The only difference is that the energy expended comes from one’s own mana reserves. The signals needed to move it are processed through the system.

So when I imagine using mana, I simply use it. For ordea and caora, it’s not like that.

In order to move my arm, I have to bring the food to it myself, I have to offer it to it personally. I have to carry it to my arm, saying ‘please’, rather than waiting for the signals from my brain to go to my arm on their own.

And even if I do that, my arm may not rise, meaning the caora may reject me. This is what caora and ordea are like.

In short, I cannot ‘command’ these energies as I can with mana, I can only ‘ask’ for them, and in doing so I have to provide them with the necessary food.

As for food, I have to give them positive or negative emotions and thoughts, as their kind is predisposed to do, so the choices are many, but there are certain emotions and thoughts that I would call their ‘favorite foods’.

For the ordea they are simply chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience, and humility. For the caora, it’s the opposite: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, and pride.

Well… the game has stolen directly from the seven cardinal sins and virtues instead of trying to work on them, but that’s not important right now.

I have to focus on my work.

As I thought, I fed the caora that started flowing in my body with negative emotions from my past and then it was time to ask for something…

I wished for the caora, the caora in the atmosphere, to move to the corpses in front of me. I put almost all my will, and all my mental strength into it and ‘wished’ for it.

Yet, no matter how long I waited, the caora did not obey me, and did not move toward the corpses.

With each passing second, I panicked. I thought I couldn’t do it, but then Absolute Mind took over. I calmed down. My mind cleared quickly.

I have to focus more, what I am trying to do is not an easy thing in the first place.

I put all my willpower into the caora again. If I didn’t succeed, there would be big problems for Olivia and for me afterward. So I ‘had’ to do it and concentrated especially on this desire.

And then something happened that I never expected, something I never even imagined could happen.

I heard a voice.

‘Hi!’

Reflexively, I turned around, and when I saw the person standing in front of me, time seemed to freeze, and I stiffened hard.

“H- how…?”

Standing about three meters away from me was a person about my height.

He had curly brown hair. He wasn’t handsome, he had what I would describe as an ‘ordinary’ face and he was… thin. Really thin, he looked like he would collapse if I pushed him. It was a very hard body to see in this world. And on top of that, he had bright, violet eyes, but I didn’t care about any of that.

Because the person in front of me was… me.

Or rather, it was the same old me, except for the violet eyes, it was Ethan Subter. He looked like me right before I died. Yet he had such a smile on his face that even though he looked like me, he looked like everything but me.

‘Oh? You’re trying something fun! Can I help you?

He came running toward me. I couldn’t do anything but stand where I was. I couldn’t move a muscle.

He grabbed the right one of my two arms that was resting on the bodies and widened his smile.

‘You have to do it this way, not that way.’

At his words, his evil eyes glowed even more fiercely and my hand began to burn as if I had put it in lava.

I screamed from the instant pain, pulled my left hand away from the pile of corpses, and squeezed my right hand as hard as I could, but it was useless.

It was as if my hand was melting before my eyes. It wasn’t happening, of course, but it felt like it.

Still, when I saw what happened next, I couldn’t even focus on the pain.

The purple-colored caora, which came out of nowhere after gathering around my burning arm as if it was literally on fire, surrounded the corpses as if they were a crackling flame.

Not only that, it splattered all the excess things in the area like ‘blood’. The next thing I knew, a notification I never wanted to see was in front of me.

<<——————————

???: %1,5 –> %1,8

——————————>>

I remembered what I saw last time before I went crazy. I had seen this notification at that time and when I thought about it a little more, I started to guess what this notification could be.

For a short while, I just froze where I was, but I quickly shook myself out of it, because the intensity of the caora coming out of my arm and the pain I was in was so intense that I was having trouble breathing.

I was having difficulty standing as if the gravity had increased several times, but then the caora coming out of my hand suddenly stopped.

I had exceeded my limit, and the pain that came with it was gone.

<<——————————

???: %1,8 –> %2,1

——————————>>

‘Ethan’ stopped holding my arm, pulled back and I lost my balance. Then I fell to the ground.

I was trying to crawl away from the corpses that were literally ‘melting’ in front of me, but more importantly, I was scared.

For the first time since I had the Absolute Mind skill, I was so intensely terrified that I was trembling.

The source of this fear was the person with a look of amusement on his face.

“Wh- what are you? Who are you?”

He tilted his head to the side and narrowed his eyes at my words.

‘Come on, Aiden, have you forgotten about me?’

He took a step toward me and spread his hands to his sides.

‘I’m you, Aiden!’

His violet eyes glowed even more fiercely in the darkness of the night. The big smile on his face, which resembled a mad demon, widened even wider.

‘Have you already forgotten your promise to me?

As he said these words, what he was talking about came to the surface of my mind.

I remembered the person I had faced in that dark place, in the place that had caused my body’s state.

I remembered nine-year-old Ethan, and how his eyes turned purple before he went behind that door. And then… I remembered the abnormal status effect I saw in my statistics window.

‘You got that right!’

His expression became mocking.

‘I am the other half of your soul that you abandoned.’

I felt like the world was closing in on me, I didn’t know what to do, or how to act.

Why wasn’t the Absolute Mind working? Why wasn’t it clearing my mind and calming my fear as usual?

It was wrong… something was wrong…

‘Meh, I thought you would have a more drastic reaction.’

He pouted and lowered his outstretched arms to the floor. Then I realized something, his body was slowly fading away.

‘Well, I won’t be staying long anyway!

His sullen expression gave way to a smile and he started waving at me. Of course, while this was happening, his body continued to dissolve into thin air and I could do nothing but watch him.

‘See you next time…’

When only his head remained, he narrowed his eyes again, then whispered.

‘A-i-d-e-n.’

The last remnants of him faded away. Where he had just stood, now there was nothing.

All I could do while all this was happening was just watch. Apart from that, almost all of the corpses in front of me had been eroded to dust and disappeared into the air.

The purple caora slowly began to fade, and with his departure, a silence fell over the area so heavy that I felt like I was in an endless void.

The most important thing, though, was that the Absolute Mind was now working and I was calming down. So that only one question was on my mind.

What exactly have I… experienced…?

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