The place Ryuzu led Subaru to was the detached cottage where she had once invited him for tea.
"Make yourself comfortable on the bed. I'll get something to drink."
"If it's just tea, I can make it? I've been trained by
"I'd very much like that, but I don't think now is the time."
With a voice laced with amusement, Ryuzu pointed at Subaru sitting on the bed and the girl who looked exactly like Ryuzu—the one who was clutching the hem of his clothes and refusing to let go.
She could only be described as a copy of Ryuzu, and after much deliberation over what to call her— "Hey, Piko still won't let go of me."
"That name you've given her—'Piko'—is questionable at best, but I suppose I'll accept it as an unfortunate consequence of events. It's what happens when you touch something of unknown nature so carelessly."
"Sure, you can say that, but…"
Ryuzu may have been admonishing him, but blaming Subaru for being careless when everything had been so uncertain was a bit much. As Subaru sat there wearing a look of disgruntlement, Ryuzu returned with a tray of freshly brewed tea.
"There—it's hot, so let it cool before you drink."
"I'm not a kid. I'm not going to gulp it down and burn myself."
"There's always someone restless and heat-sensitive nearby, so I've gotten into the habit of warning people."
The teasing tone brought to mind the prime suspect for that particular trait—Garfiel.
In his Great Tiger form, his restlessness paired with a heat-sensitive tongue certainly fit the bill. His apparent lack of learning ability, while prejudiced, also met expectations.
True to Ryuzu's words, the tea was quite hot. Subaru took a sip, moistening his dry tongue, and let out a breath. Come to think of it, this was the first time he'd had anything to drink since his Return by Death—meaning since he'd woken up in the tomb.
"Well, when you've been tasting nothing but leaves, anything's gonna feel great."
"I feel I'm being rather unfairly judged there."
"You're imagining things. Imagining things."
Subaru gulped down the tea he didn't particularly care for, then clattered the cup back onto the tray.
He then pulled a chair up to the foot of the bed and turned to face Ryuzu, who was watching him with a relaxed posture.
"So. Now that I've settled in, shall we get to talking about all sorts of things?"
"Indeed. I have quite a lot to discuss on my end as well."
Subaru felt a measure of relief at her willingness to talk openly, and turned his thoughts inward.
He'd had several opportunities to sit down face-to-face with the people involved in all this. Yet Subaru still hadn't reached the truth. Partly because they had been deliberately withholding information, but there was a more fundamental problem as well. Namely— "He himself hadn't yet arrived at the real questions he needed to ask."
The inquiry that would tie all the answers into a single thread—Subaru hadn't found it yet.
And so he couldn't even tell that he was being sidestepped, or that his questions were missing the mark entirely.
He needed to ask someone who knew the things he didn't know. But that much, at least, was too far out of Subaru's reach.
"That building… the facility from earlier. What exactly is it?"
"Hmm… I suppose we'll start with that question, then."
What had sprung to mind instinctively was a harmless question—one that could serve as a probe.
Before getting to the real topic, he wanted to test how willing Ryuzu was to face him squarely.
Hearing this, Ryuzu traced a finger along her chin with a crafty shrewdness that didn't match her appearance, and said, "If I were to answer what that facility is—in a sense, it's the core of this '
"One of the reasons the 'Sanctuary' exists…!?"
"First of all, Baru. Who do you think created this 'Sanctuary' in the first place?"
"Well, Roswaal, obviously…"
He started to say it reflexively, then caught himself. Roswaal did own this place called the "Sanctuary" and had been managing it up to the present.
But when it came to who actually created it—that was a different story.
"The one who made this place was… the
"Precisely. Echidna—she, the Witch—created this place. The 'Sanctuary' was made because it was something that witch needed. To put it in the most extreme terms, that's all it was."
"That's way too extreme. You're skipping too much of the process… Can't you at least go into a little more detail?"
"As for the details of the experiment—aren't you already looking at one of its successes?"
Ryuzu's words, delivered with a crooked smile, made Subaru's breath catch for an instant.
Because he could dimly grasp what Ryuzu was implying.
In other words, she was saying this: "The result of this place is—you? And this girl?"
"What a kind boy you are, Baru. Or perhaps a naive one. —You can call us an experimental result. That's quite acceptable."
Even for Subaru, saying that to the person's face gave him pause.
Being unable to read the room and being insensitive were two different things. And even Subaru could tell this wasn't the kind of situation to joke about.
"There was a girl in that crystal who looked just like me, wasn't there?"
"…Yeah. The spitting image. Of you—and of this girl, too. Can I think of you as triplets or something?"
"If you're grouping together everyone who looks alike as relatives, three is a bit too few for us."
"A bit too few?"
"Just a bit."
When Ryuzu said "a bit," did she mean a difference of an entire order of magnitude?
Having actually seen roughly twenty copies of Ryuzu, Subaru couldn't help but think so.
He let out a breath and cleared his mind.
At this point, Ryuzu showed no sign of dodging. He could put aside the probing—it was time to push forward.
"What is your relationship to the girl inside that crystal?"
And so Subaru asked the question head-on.
Ryuzu received it with her usual calm expression. Twirling the tips of her pale pink hair between her fingers, she cast a meaningful glance at Subaru—or rather, at the silent girl sitting beside him.
"This isn't something that concerns only me. That girl is in the same position as I am."
"Including the girl in the crystal."
"No. That girl alone is different. The girl in the crystal is the real one."
The words came so smoothly that Subaru couldn't process them for a moment. He furrowed his brow, made no effort to hide his confusion, then chewed on the meaning and straightened up from the bed.
"The real one—what do you mean by…"
"Don't rush. An old person's story requires some time to burrow into memory. You need to settle in and wait patiently."
"Don't start playing the old person card in ways other than your speech patterns at this point. Judging from how flavorless this girl next to me is, I can tell that's nothing but seasoning."
"Hmm, that's a rather unfortunate misunderstanding. To me, everything that makes up who I am now is precious—what you might call an acquired individuality."
"Acquired individuality?"
It was a turn in the conversation he couldn't let slide. Subaru repeated the words back as a question. Ryuzu nodded, prefacing with "Indeed," and continued.
"As you've guessed, Baru—the original version of me was created just like that girl, as an empty vessel. Over the years, I've been filling that emptiness, piece by piece, all the way until today."
"Wait, wait, wait, wait—you're moving a little fast again. Created? From nothing? What does that even mean? It must be related to what you said about the crystal's contents being 'the real one,' right?"
"That crystal contained the genuine, original Ryuzu Meyer. All the others—including myself—would be copies of Ryuzu Meyer."
She revealed her own origins with a casual air. Or rather—Subaru was no longer sure whether he could even call her Ryuzu.
What Ryuzu had just told him was essentially the hypothesis that had been floating vaguely in Subaru's mind since the moment he'd seen the multitude of Ryuzu clones. He had half-believed it already, but the reason he'd never reached full conviction was nothing more than "a distaste for the existence of a friend's clone."
To put it bluntly, that too was prejudice born from Subaru's rigid sense of common sense.
"Does hearing that I'm a copy change the way you look at me?"
"…I don't know. I want to say it doesn't—genuinely. But even if I feel that way… if you're asking whether I could say it to the person's face…"
—He couldn't say it with certainty.
Being in another world, Ryuzu's existence couldn't technically be called a clone. The method of her creation was probably quite different from the vague image Subaru had imagined.
There was no doubt that this was a life brought about through magic, not science. This was a time to say that birth held no hierarchy—though whether he could actually say it was another matter.
"I don't have the confidence to look you dead in the eye and say it doesn't change a thing. So I won't say nothing's changed."
"I take back what I said earlier. You may be kind and you may be naive, Baru—but more than anything, you're painfully, stubbornly honest."
It shouldn't have been a compliment, yet Ryuzu nodded with apparent satisfaction at his response. Subaru chewed on his frustration, then looked at the girl sitting next to him—Piko, as he called her, a girl in the same position as Ryuzu.
—Piko, who was silently clutching the hem of Subaru's clothes and gazing about the room with vacant eyes. Those eyes should have been looking at the same sights as Subaru's, yet the total absence of emotion behind them made them seem almost like glass beads reflecting the scenery.
Her expression never changed—she hadn't even let out a single sound. And that was— "When you said this girl was empty… you meant…"
"She's a copy who was only recently born and given her role. She has enough knowledge to follow simple instructions, but beyond that, she's no different from an infant. The upside is she doesn't cry or fuss, and doesn't need food—so she's easy to look after."
"She doesn't need food…?"
"Creating a replica body isn't as simple as all that. Can you imagine the principles behind how that girl and I exist as we do?"
Sensing the test in her tone, Subaru held back his urge to immediately blurt out an answer.
He couldn't be a child who merely took and received. That wasn't what Ryuzu wanted from him.
Feeling the weight of Ryuzu's serious gaze, Subaru turned over what she had said in his mind, then marshaled everything he knew until— "Could it be… mana?"
The thought popped out, prompted by the image of the great cat spirit that crossed his mind.
At Subaru's reasoning, Ryuzu raised her eyebrows and lightly clapped her hands.
"Impressive. You actually arrived at that answer. And I don't imagine anyone told you."
"You guided me to the right answer, though. I only figured it out because I happen to have a spirit hanging around. …So, was I right?"
"Almost correct. In practice, creating a body through mana alone is extremely inefficient. To work around that, the Witch of Greed devised a special formula and forced the problem to be sidestepped."
"Forced formula, you say?"
"She constructed a pseudo-'Od' generation organ through a magical formula, and once a certain amount of mana had been accumulated, she materialized a body. The result was a body made of mana, but one that functioned like an ordinary living creature possessing an Od."
Od—unlike the mana that pervaded the atmosphere, this was energy that living beings possessed from the very start, performing the same function as mana.
However, unlike mana, Od could not be absorbed from the outside, and the total amount a single life could hold was determined at birth. Spending Od meant directly shortening one's lifespan, making it the ultimate "trump card that can't be cut"—deplete it, and death was certain.
One might say it was like using HP to cast magic when MP ran out—except the HP in question was irreplaceable.
"You say that so casually, but… isn't that an incredible thing? Reproducing a pseudo-Od—that's essentially the same as creating a life, isn't it?"
"Of course, it's apparently a phenomenon that requires very specific conditions to be met before it becomes possible. Regrettably, this old noggin of mine couldn't grasp all the finer details. —But it is a fact that the Witch succeeded in creating life, wouldn't you agree?"
"That's mind-boggling… She really was something, huh."
The image of the white-haired witch rose in his mind, and he could almost see her smugly looking down at him. But soon, another thought followed.
"Wait, but didn't
The white-haired witch appeared in his mind once more, bristling at Subaru's dismissive evaluation and stammering, "I-I wasn't doing it to receive praise, you know."
"My, what a pleasant expression you've got. You're having quite the heartwarming little fantasy, aren't you?"
"Strangely enough, I feel like my wariness toward her kind of melted away over our few encounters. Anyway—I understand where you came from now. Echidna created copies of a girl named Ryuzu Meyer in this place. That much I've got."
He understood the principle behind the Ryuzu clones, and that the Ryuzu before him had accepted this fact. And so, if he were to layer another question on top of that— "The next question is: why did Echidna do all this?"
"Hmm…"
"As a complete outsider when it comes to magic and everything related to it, I can only see the surface of what Echidna accomplished. But even at that surface level, I can tell it was something extraordinary."
Subaru continued, watching Ryuzu fold her arms and settle into a listening posture. He took a breath, then pressed on.
"What was the motivation behind doing something this big? What drove her? Why did Echidna need to create copies of Ryuzu Meyer?"
The position of the girl named Ryuzu Meyer within the "Sanctuary" was unclear.
In the current Sanctuary, Ryuzu's role was representative and clone. Then what kind of position had the original Ryuzu Meyer held in the Sanctuary's founding?
Or—if she herself had been the catalyst for the Sanctuary's creation— "There are a couple of possibilities that spring to mind right off the bat."
"Oh?"
"The go-to theory for stories like this, and the leading contender: that Ryuzu Meyer died for some reason, and they tried to create a substitute—a copy."
In manga and novels, the search for ways to reclaim a lost life was a recurring theme. Creating a clone of the deceased—producing an identical existence through DNA—was a popular concept. In most cases, these attempts ended in failure for the reason that "the body may be the same, but the soul is not."
"Judging by what you've told me and the way Piko is, it seems likely that the Sanctuary's attempts hit the same wall. Even if you can make them look identical on the outside, you can't copy what's inside."
If they kept creating clone after clone without ever giving up—if they repeated nearly twenty failures and still persisted in the hope that a soul might take root in the next body—then that could only be called madness.
"I don't want to write it off as mere obsession…"
You couldn't say it was wrong to want to bring someone back that badly. At least—Subaru, of all people, absolutely could not say that.
Right now, even as they spoke,
The means and the process were different—but how different was it, really, from the Witch's attempt?
How the Ryuzus who had been the result of all this felt about it—only they could answer that question. It was a realm of answers no one else could provide.
Having laid out his theory, Subaru trailed off. Ryuzu let out a soft sigh at this.
"You're quicker on the uptake than I expected, Baru."
"If you went through all this setup for me, I'm probably too slow if anything. And you made me say a bunch of stuff I didn't want to say, too."
He could have kicked himself for how slow his mind was. Subaru swallowed his frustration.
But Ryuzu merely gave a gentle shake of her head. That gesture, however, was not meant to comfort him. The faint smile on her face held a quiet loneliness, and— "You may be thinking about this a bit too much. I'd say you're being a dreamer."
"A dreamer…? I didn't think my guess was that far off…"
"You are a dreamer. Here's what you're really thinking, Baru: 'She went through all this trouble to bring a life back. For the Witch of Greed, Ryuzu Meyer must have been someone worth it—a precious existence.' Am I wrong?"
"…………"
That probing, tilted-head question struck Subaru dead center, and he couldn't continue.
It was true—he had been thinking exactly that. A person for whom a new formula was devised and an elaborate process undertaken just to sustain their existence—naturally, one would conclude that this person must have been precious to the Witch.
But Ryuzu denied Subaru's conclusion, all while wearing a smile—a terrible, brittle smile plastered across her face.
"Ryuzu Meyer was nothing but a village girl. She wasn't particularly close to the Witch of Greed. There was no blood relation, no kinship of any kind. Ryuzu Meyer and the Witch were, at every level, strangers. They barely exchanged more than a handful of words."
"That can't be… Wait, hold on."
Struck by the shock of Ryuzu's words—as if she had witnessed it all firsthand—Subaru held up a palm to stop her, tapping his own forehead with his free hand.
"That doesn't add up. You said earlier that, like Piko, you were born empty. So how can you know anything about the Ryuzu Meyer in the crystal? That doesn't make sense."
"That, in fact, is the result of another experiment conducted in this 'Sanctuary.'"
Softly catching Subaru's objection, Ryuzu placed a hand over her own chest.
If what she said was true, there was probably no heartbeat beneath that touch. If so, where did the warmth come from?—Setting that thought aside, Ryuzu closed her eyes and spoke.
"Ryuzu Meyer was not close to the Witch. But she dedicated herself to the experiment. The Witch used Ryuzu Meyer's body, sealed it within a crystal, and granted it eternal time. Then she constructed a formula—a mechanism that, every time a certain amount of mana had accumulated, would generate a pseudo-Od and produce a copy of Ryuzu Meyer."
"…For what purpose?"
"The copies of Ryuzu Meyer are born in a state no different from infants, except for a bare minimum of knowledge—language and the most rudimentary common sense. But that's already strange, isn't it? If they were truly infant-like, they should know nothing and be completely innocent. So why do they possess just enough knowledge to follow basic instructions?"
"That's… No way."
Reaching the worst possible conclusion, Subaru was rendered speechless.
From Subaru's expression alone, Ryuzu seemed to understand that he'd gotten it. She nodded.
"The Witch constructed a means of selecting what knowledge to pass on to the copies that would be born. She then gave them only the bare minimum and let the rest be empty."
"So everything up to them being born knowing nothing—that was all by design? But then… what was the point?"
It would reduce the whole thing to a ritual for creating mere puppets that simply obeyed commands. Of course, that possibility couldn't be entirely ruled out. But it seemed far too removed from the nature of the Witch of Greed—of Echidna.
He couldn't imagine that white-haired girl going through such an elaborate, roundabout process just to create beings that moved like extensions of her own limbs.
"If all she wanted was loyal servants, she'd have been better off just kidnapping random people and brainwashing them or whatever. It's something else—there has to be a deeper reason."
Creating something from nothing—a blank, pristine existence— "—Ah."
For one brief instant, a possibility flashed through his mind.
But it seemed too outlandish, and Subaru shook his head, trying to forget it. Yet once that thought had taken hold, it refused to let him go.
If it were true— —"I wasn't trying to make you despise me."
The Witch's intention to conceal the true meaning of her actions from Subaru—suddenly, it made sense.
And so did the reason why Ryuzu, the one before him, had inherited at least some of Ryuzu Meyer's memories.
"If you can select what knowledge to include, then why create empty copies at all?"
"…………"
"You prepare an empty vessel—then what? What's an empty vessel placed on the table for?"
"…………"
"—To be filled. Obviously."
If empty, clone vessels could be prepared, and knowledge and memories could be poured into them…
If the original—the one inside the crystal that could never be lost—could generate unlimited copies, and unlimited knowledge and memories could be retroactively poured into them…
Then that meant— "If Ryuzu Meyer's body could be used to burn in one's own memories and knowledge, over and over—then if that were possible…"
"—It would be a kind of immortality."
—And that was the true nature of the experiment being conducted in the "Sanctuary."