Elqueeness [EN]: Chapter 159

159.

A warm remark weighed heavily on my heart. What would it feel like to accept having your existence erased for someone else’s happiness? Just hearing those words, I understood how much he cherished El. So much so that I felt guilty for even being mistaken for such a person. Swallowing the apology that rose in my throat, I barely managed to say, “You must have been very close.”

“Well, he was my first friend. You were the only one who reached out to me. I was able to abandon my preconceived notions about humans all thanks to you.”

“He must have been a really good guy.”

“It’s not just that. I felt like I gained strength just by being next to you. Like you were radiating light. Everyone else liked you a lot, too.”

“Everyone else?”

“Yeah. The people around you.”

“…Elquines, too?”

Mentioning Ellyuen was impulsive. As soon as I asked, I regretted it, because Sibelius nodded as if he’d been waiting for it.

“Of course. That cold and aloof guy took such good care of you. He blatantly acted annoyed, but he granted all your requests.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Perhaps you were the only one who received such special treatment from him, before and after. It seemed like there was a deep bond beyond just a contractual relationship. So much so that his nickname was ‘Father’.”

Father.

That unexpected word caused a momentary blank. I think I was slightly shocked.

“…Father?”

“Haha, unique, isn’t it? That’s what you called him. Elquines didn’t seem to dislike the title either. So most people thought of you as father and son.”

“You, be my son.”

The words I still couldn’t forget echoed in my ears again. I always felt good whenever I recalled it, but now I just felt numb.

I had always been curious about why he made that suggestion. Why *father* of all things, why he tried to adopt me as his son when he met me for the first time. No matter how much I thought about it, there was no real reason. But I never thought I would get the answer this way, in such an unexpected place. I think I knew why my heart became anxious whenever I heard mentions of ‘El.’ It was because I didn’t want to confirm this.

I don’t know what kind of expression I’m making right now. My clasped hands clenched involuntarily. I wanted to get out of here, but I also had the conflicting desire to stay and hear the rest of the story. Sibelius, seemingly unaware of my state, was chattering away with an excited face.

“Come to think of it, if you became the Water Spirit King, that means he’s already disappeared. Well, I heard he was close to disappearing back then, too. It’s a bit of a shame. I wonder what kind of expression he would make if he knew you were born as his successor.”

“…He didn’t seem to care much.”

“Huh? What did you say?”

“No, nothing.”

When I shook my head, Sibelius gave me a puzzled look, but soon returned to his own story: how eccentric the previous Elquines was, how much his contractor, El, suffered because of it, and so on. Most of it focused on Ellyuen’s slander. From the beginning, he didn’t seem to have good feelings about the Spirit King, so it seemed like they didn’t get along very well. But I was barely listening. My mind had already gone back to the moment I first met Ellyuen.

Yes, Ellyuen really had a nonchalant expression back then. He had a face that looked like he was seeing me for the first time. To be able to meet someone who looked exactly like the person he thought of as his son and not show any emotion at all… Even though Ellyuen was taciturn, I didn’t quite understand. Was that indifferent gaze just hiding his happy feelings? Or… was it because no matter how much I resembled him, I wasn’t ‘El’?

“Ah, come to think of it, how’s Trowell? Is he still the same? It doesn’t seem like it’s time for him to disappear yet.”

The moment I heard the familiar name, I suddenly came to my senses. I slowly blinked.

“Trowell?”

“Yeah, the boy with short black hair and golden eyes, right? With slightly cat-like eyes.”

“That’s right, but…”

“I knew it. I thought so. Geez, and you don’t know anything about it. That means he’s never mentioned anything about the past, right? Tsk, what on earth is he thinking? Anyway, he’s such a nasty guy.”

“…Um, wait a minute. Why is Trowell’s story suddenly coming up here? Could it be that Trowell also knows El?”

Even though I was thinking, ‘No way, no way,’ I ended up asking. I desperately wanted a negative answer. But this time, too, Sibelius nodded heartlessly.

“Of course, he knows. He was the one who taught you swordsmanship.”

“Taught me swordsmanship?”

“Yeah. You asked him to teach you, and he accepted. I heard he trained you quite harshly. But you liked Trowell so much, no matter what. You clung to him so blatantly even though he was annoyed, and later Trowell gave up. His nasty temper got a little better later on, and you can see that it’s all thanks to you.”

“…”

Following Ellyuen, Trowell also had a connection with him. Thinking about it, he also seemed overly kind to me from the beginning. I thought the happy expression he made when our eyes met was thanks to the end of a long drought, but it seems that wasn’t the only reason. Ah, come to think of it, was he also the one who first said he would call me ‘El’?

“…I see, so that’s how it was.”

I let out a large breath. I thought I was greatly shocked, but surprisingly, I didn’t feel so bad. It’s natural to be kind to someone who resembles a precious person. I probably would have understood everything if he had told me honestly. I just felt a little disappointed that it would have been better if he had told me directly rather than hearing it through someone else’s mouth.

But why? Suddenly, I felt a chill around me. I shrugged at the rapidly permeating cold and wrapped my arms around myself. I shouldn’t be able to feel temperature, so it’s strange. Sibelius, who had been chattering away, looked at me worriedly, perhaps because I seemed strange.

“El? What’s wrong? You don’t look good.”

“Uh-huh, no, it’s nothing.”

I forced a smile and shook my head, but it must have been awkward. But right now, I didn’t have the mental capacity to care about how my expression looked to others. It was already too much to sort out the complicated emotions.

‘Even if you weren’t the Spirit King, would they have loved you?’

The voice I had heard in my dream asked me again. It was as if that question itself was an answer now.

The misaligned wheel begins to find its place again. The things that had been filling me up until now were collapsing all at once, and I could do nothing but watch blankly. I didn’t even know if I was allowed to catch them. I felt a little empty and a little sad at the same time.

* * *

Ellyuen’s palace was very busy today as well. The sight of documents held in the arms of angels piling up on the table faster than they could be processed was already familiar. Especially recently, with the addition of the work from the Demon Realm that he had been forced to take on, he was literally working without a break.

In the middle of that fierce scene, Nadiel slowly blinked. Her head had been strangely dazed for a while. The other angels hadn’t yet noticed her condition.

“He shared his blood?”

A low voice containing a clear resonance spread into the air. Ellyuen, who had been reviewing a report, spoke. It was just a simple question, but the angels standing across from him blushed as if they had heard a secret whisper.

There are many gods with outstandingly beautiful appearances, but they were confident that there was no god with such a good voice. So much so that even the voice of sarcasm when he was angry was so attractive that they wanted to hear more. Of course, the day this fact was known to him, it would not end with mere sarcasm. The angels, reminded of this, hurriedly focused on their work.

“Not often, but he occasionally held banquets and gave blood as a reward or to commend them.”

“Is it all human blood?”

“Yes. Judging from the quality and freshness of the blood, most of them were under twenty years old. It seemed to be from humans who had not reached adulthood.”

Tap, tap.

Ellyuen lightly tapped the desk with his finger while resting his chin on his hand. It was a habit he showed when something displeased him.

Following the hint he had heard from Shannon, the god of the underworld, he had recently been investigating the blood distribution process within the Demon Realm. However, every circumstance that came to light didn’t have anything particularly problematic. The demon king Karyudrian was very skilled. He handled most things in public and didn’t leave behind any clumsy trails. There was no trace of magic, nor was there any evidence that he was monopolizing the blood alone. If there seemed to be any suspicious parts, a reasonable alibi always followed. The situation was so clean that it was rather suspicious. Ellyuen suddenly recalled his last conversation with Shannon.

“If it’s a solo crime, how serious is the situation?”

It was just a question he asked to gauge the worst-case scenario. Challenging the power of the chief god meant shedding one’s own body and becoming a transcendent being. Dark magic is generally of poor quality, but the reason why only that magic is prohibited is for that reason. Shannon answered seriously.

“He has absorbed quite a bit of power, but he has not yet progressed to that point. He is probably sleeping a lot now because he cannot adapt to the power of the changing body. If that state progresses further, the full molting will begin. That will be dangerous.”

“Does that mean he will become a god?”

“It’s not just any god, Ellyuen-nim [a respectful title]. It is an evil god born by swallowing thousands and tens of thousands of blood. When that power is completed, it will be comparable to the power of the chief god.”

Chief god. Ellyuen frowned without realizing it.

The chief god is the creator of all gods and the parent of all things. The birth and death of life, and all the systems necessary for living, operate according to the rules set by the chief god. If it was the same power as him, it was no different from saying that no one could stand against the evil god.

That was a very serious matter for the current divine realm. The world has been in a state of absence of the chief god for a long time because he fell into a deep sleep and sealed his own body. New divine souls are created from time to time and receive praise from the chief god, but that is only a trace of the power he left behind, and no one knows where the real chief god is. In this situation, if an evil god is born, it was obvious that the world would fall entirely under his dominion.

The problem is that there is no evidence to prove that fact. The Demon Realm is one of the four dimensions along with the Spirit Realm, the Divine Realm, and the Underworld. Unlike the Middle Realm, the four dimensions coexist under equal conditions, so no one can arbitrarily intervene or come and go. Therefore, even if a problem arises, it is slow for the other side to grasp it, and it is difficult to actively resolve it. The reason why the Divine Realm belatedly grasped the abnormal phenomenon that occurred in the Spirit Realm is also for this reason. Among the gods, only the chief god, who is free from all conditions, the demon god who created the demon realm, and only those two could directly interfere with the demon realm.

“Oh, come to think of it, I found out one more interesting fact.”

Moreover, what Shannon implied wasn’t the only thing. Ellyuen pressed hard on his rapidly fatigued eyes. In addition to the traces of the forbidden, there was one more thing to find evidence of. In some ways, it was an issue that disturbed his mind even more than the harbinger of the birth of an evil god.

“Do you remember the incident in which the current Spirit King Elquines went missing and returned? Ah, well, it’s such a famous event that you can’t *not* know about it.”

“…So, what do you want to say?”

“I investigated all those in charge of distributing souls at the time. Traces of hypnosis were found in one of them.”

“Hypnosis?”

“He alone remembered the situation that everyone commonly testified to differently. For example, he recognized the number 3 as 2. He knew that he was heading to the fifth passage, but in reality, it was the second passage. It was such a subtle distortion that it would not have been discovered if it had not been examined in detail. It seems that it has been like that until now. Perhaps more will come out if we follow the trail.”

“That means…”

“It seems that you have the same thoughts as me. I will tell you honestly. I believe that someone intentionally interfered with the birth of Elquines.”

It felt like the blood in his whole body was turning cold. Seeing Ellyuen’s eyes shining fiercely, Shannon smiled silently. He must have heard the rumor that Ellyuen adopted the Spirit King Elquines as his son.

“The culprit?”

“Unfortunately, I am still tracking him down. Of course, it’s not that I don’t have any guesses.”

Ellyuen immediately understood Shannon’s words. As Elquines disappeared, a great disaster occurred in Arkadon, and many children died. And all that blood was distributed to the Demon Realm. The situation that can be guessed from these facts was too obvious.

“Are you saying it’s the work of the Demon Realm?”

“They needed a stage.”

“A stage?”

“They started the work with the intention of collecting blood from the beginning. They would have found a place where they could distribute it smoothly. A land where life overflows as much as possible, and where the surveillance of the Divine Realm is less effective. From that condition, there would have been no place as optimal as Arkadon. The only thing that would have been a hindrance was the existence of the Spirit King, but it was the time when the generation was changing. Perhaps they even calculated that. Just by preventing the birth of one Spirit King, they could tie up the feet of other Spirit Kings, and a disaster would occur in Arkadon.”

“Of course, it is only my personal opinion.” Seeing Ellyuen’s momentum becoming more and more ferocious as the explanation continued, Shannon hurriedly added the last words. But both Shannon and Ellyuen knew very well that it was nothing more than just an opinion.