The girl had spent her entire life in the same room, for as long as she could remember.
To anyone who saw that room, it might have appeared to be a sickroom, a laboratory, or perhaps both at once.
In truth, it was both.
It was a laboratory for handling its sole experimental subject—the girl—and a sickroom for nursing that same girl as a patient.
She was managed as a test subject. She was nursed because it would be inconvenient if she died.
That was the extent of how she was treated, but for a girl who had known nothing else, that was normality itself. That was everything.
Days spent simply lying in bed.
Days of experimentation and treatment.
The silver lining—such as it was—was probably that her keeper possessed the world's most brilliant mind and administered proper treatment.
What's more, the keeper's experimental objective was to observe whether the girl could grow up healthy and without problems, so she received a proper education to monitor her intellectual development.
A television was installed in the room, and the infrastructure was in place to receive correspondence education.
Without ever stepping foot outside the room, the girl received an education appropriate for her age.
But whether the girl's mind developed normally within that warped environment was another question entirely.
The girl lacked anything that could reasonably be called emotion.
She passed each day feeling nothing, simply drifting through idle existence.
Merely alive.
And the girl lived only so that she might one day die.
It was no different from being dead while still breathing.
And the girl's death was only a matter of time.
Her body was not normal.
She had been artificially created from processed sperm and egg cells.
A chimera—human, with genes from other organisms spliced in.
That was the girl's true nature, and that body, born in defiance of the natural order, was riddled with defects as though it were a punishment.
The girl's body had inherited the characteristics of one of the organisms that had been incorporated—a spider—and had acquired the ability to produce venom.
However, this was a function that humans did not naturally possess, and the body had no resistance to the poison whatsoever.
The venom was corroding the very body that produced it.
Moreover, that was not the only problem.
The production of venom—which the human body was never meant to perform—drained an enormous amount of energy from the girl.
As if that were not bad enough, the body, ravaged by the venom, required even more energy to resist its effects.
Furthermore, her internal organs had been weakened by the poison, and her ability to digest and absorb nutrients was impaired as well.
Because of this, she required several times the amount of food that a healthy adult would need.
Even eating that much, the girl's body remained emaciated.
No matter how much she ate, none of it was stored as nourishment in her body. Rather, it turned to venom and continued to devour her from within.
And yet, without eating, she could not even stay alive.
The girl had been born broken.
She could die at any moment—such was the girl's reality.
A life of immobility atop a bed.
A world contained entirely within that space.
An existence that simply lived, and remained there until the day she died.
A test subject whose only purpose was to leave behind a handful of research results for
A life that would be lost, known to no one but Potimas.
That fate was overturned by Potimas's international wanted notice.
For Potimas, being placed on a wanted list was a completely unforeseen development.
But the possibility had always lingered somewhere in the back of his mind.
Potimas was well aware of how the world at large regarded his research.
He was aware—and yet, the thought of stopping had never even crossed his mind.
And he had vaguely sensed, too, that his research had long since passed the point where it could be kept hidden.
Potimas recognized that he was exceptional, but he also recognized that he was not infallible.
If he were truly infallible, he would have achieved his goal long ago.
Since that was not the case, however brilliant he might be, there were things even he could not do.
He understood this, and therefore he knew that not everything would go according to plan.
That was why, although being placed on a wanted list was unexpected, he felt no particular panic.
Potimas gathered every piece of research material he needed and vanished.
Documents that must not fall into the wrong hands he kept on his person or destroyed. Those that did not matter were left as they were.
Among those left behind were the people who had been used as test subjects.
Potimas had established hidden laboratories in various locations where he had conducted inhumane human experiments, and he abandoned those facilities as they were.
He anticipated that law enforcement agencies would eventually trace his steps and set foot inside them.
And then, the girl was rescued.
Several days after Potimas had disappeared.
The girl, who could barely move from her bed, had naturally been unable to eat or drink. The nutrient drip that sustained her had run out, and she was drifting on the threshold of death.
Had the police arrived even a little later, the girl's life would have been lost.
But fortune smiled upon her. Her life was barely hanging on, and she was rushed to the hospital.
There, she was treated once more, given nutrient infusions, and just barely managed to pull through.
"Are you awake?"
When the girl opened her eyes, a woman was there.
A person she had never seen in the flesh—only through a screen—other than Potimas.
And since Potimas had never attempted to hold any real conversation with the girl, this was, in essence, the first time in her life that someone had sought to speak with her.
"Nice to meet you. I'm
"Ah…riel?"
"
The girl had merely repeated the woman's name in a murmur.
But the words that escaped her weakened lips came out slightly misshapen from the original pronunciation, and the listener happened to catch them as something else entirely.
It was all a product of chance.
But the girl, who had never had a name, received one in that moment.
The girl who was destined to simply live and eventually die had, in this way, met a goddess.