Chương 19: Playing With My Food

Being that I simultaneously love and hate to take risks, deciding which poison to pick turned out to be surprisingly easy. After all, if both options might lead to my discovery, and I don't have the faintest clue which is actually the most dangerous, I might as well just go ahead and choose the one that allows me to be productive. And thus, I am now standing in front of the gates to a public graveyard where commoners are buried in droves.

I would have thought that such a place would be somewhat tucked away from the rest, and it somewhat was, in a sense, surrounded by a stone wall and some trees. Ironically, making the place where corpses were gathered the greenest part of the area, but also, it was sort of just in the middle of habitations. I guess it made getting rid of the dead more convenient, but as I could feel, it made for a resting place of very low quality.

Although I was not allowed to absorb it, I could clearly sense many negative emotions hanging in the air, and also what I presumed to be full-on negative energy… It's a shame that this buffet was not one I could enjoy, but it was a good sign nonetheless. This should indicate that there were actual spirits just hanging around. The system hadn't told me explicitly what it was that I could just go and consume to improve my 'Nature' as either a Steel-Bound Curse or Vengeful Spirit.

But since I was technically a curse, and eating a curse had worked, I deemed it perfectly logical that eating spirits would count toward improving my side as a Vengeful Spirit. It just made sense. I just need to get in… Which I do with unsurprising ease, the stone wall is barely tall enough to stop an adult from climbing it up, so with my superior strength, I scale it without problem and land feet first right on top of a grave that has nothing more than a rotten wooden cross to mark its existence.

This cemetery looks about the way I expected. Most graves are simplistic, tombstones crafted from cheap rock, and the occasional grave that is nothing more than a glorified hole in the ground, such as the one I am stepping on at the moment… The correlation between burial quality, environment and dead people being upset is a mystery to me, but as soon as I arrived within the graveyard. I felt something, like a bucket of icy water had just fallen on my head during the height of the summer season.

Taking a few steps forward, the old wooden cross was crushed beneath my feet as I headed deeper within the cemetery, although I could sense the presence of delicacies, my eyes were only seeing a regular graveyard, and faint moonlight somewhat illuminated what was around me. I strolled right up to a particular gravestone, the words engraved upon its surface have long since faded away, the name of the person buried here is unknown…

But I couldn't care less about some dead guy's moniker, what I was focusing upon was the smoky apparition kneeling right beside the grave, hands held in prayer. Theology is not my forte, so I frankly have no idea what divinity that is a prayer to. Stopping beside them, it takes a few seconds before a reaction arises out of what looks like an old man with curved horns growing out of his forehead. His body has a pale blue glow to it, and the extremities of his form extend into tendrils of smoke.

Something tells me that this might just be a ghost of some kind. The apparition slightly turns his head to glance at me, only raising an eyebrow after taking in my appearance, whether he is surprised, or if the bulk of my monstrous form being hidden is helping me, I don't know. The elder simply looks back down at the grave.

"I do not think that we are familiar with one another… Are you a wandering spirit?"

"I–I supp–ppose that you could say th–h–h–hat" My voice is still corrupted, but at least my pitch no longer shifts constantly anymore, so I should be more understandable… The spectre doesn't seem too surprised by my strange pattern of speech, merely sighing–An action that I find to be most bizarre for something with no physical form, but I suppose that I do the same despite lacking lungs… Functioning lungs, if the two lumps I grew are what I think they are.

"I do not know what you seek, but you'll find nothing here. This is but a communal graveyard. It might look like a regular cemetery, but before all of those neat private graves, it was just a bunch of holes where countless corpses were thrown into without being identified… My family and I are buried deeper underneath this grave. Every day, I pray that I may be freed from eternal undeath and join them, alas… I must have been too great a sinner" Why is this fossil giving me a history class?

That's exactly why I shouldn't engage the elderly in conversation… They think everyone has time to listen to their uninteresting stories. Though listening to him lament about supposedly being a sinner, I take a closer look at him and tilt my head slightly. My beady purple dots stared him down. My beartrap jaw slightly parted, which was what happened when I tried to smile.

"S–Sin, huh? Are you su–re that you aren't still–still–still here for another reason? You said your entire–whole family was down here? They must have been kill–kill–killed, right? Did someone break into your home and slaughter everyone–all of them? Was it just a bunch of bandits? Robbers? Was your presence a d–d–disturbance to your superiors? Perhaps… Just maybe–be… You should be taking revenge instead–REVENGE–?" Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The old ghost glared at me with eyes that were not at all friendly.

"Nonsense, I am not like you""So you realise that I am a Vengeful Spirit, huh? W–Well, as one of that kind, I must–have the obligation to–inform you that the two of us–us are quite similar–There is a sense of kinship between us–us two, that must be why I ended up here first…"

"... My friend, I fear–worry that you have been sitting here like a fool-FOOL and have allowed your chance at revenge to slip by–by… In such a state, I am afraid that you'll never–never–never be reunited with your family. It's a bit of a shame, don't you think?" The old man seemed confused, and he looked at me again. This time, I was no longer standing over him, but crouched to meet him eye-to-eye.

"Was I truly a Vengeful Spirit like yourself, wouldn't I have been consumed by my need for revenge? Is that not how such beings are supposed to operate?"

"Do-Don't ask me. I am-am no expert…" His eyes focused on me for the first time since he began talking. Before, he had merely glanced vaguely in my direction, and only now did he seem to realise that, unlike him, I wasn't non-corporeal but had a physical body. He frowned.

"How can I possess an object like you? I can't do anything as a spirit" It seemed like just a little motivation was all he needed to be bent on taking revenge. My index finger crooked, beckoning him to come closer.

"I'll tell you a little something–secret""What is it?"

"It's very simple–very" He leaned forward, desiring to know more. And I bite down on his head. This must have come as a surprise to him, as getting touched by something solid as a ghostly being was a violation of the laws of nature, sort of. The violation of nature here was me in this case, being simultaneously a being bound to something tangible, but also a being that should, by nature, not be bound by the material world.

In any case, like primal instinct, I had been certain that I could grab and bite down on him from the moment I laid my eyes on him. I did not bite too hard, more so focusing on trapping his neck between my maw as I grabbed his arms and pinned them against the sides of his chest.

Letting this old, crusty ghost realise that he would never get to rejoin his family, feasting on this torrent of negative emotions before letting my teeth tear right through him, the apparition dissolves into a smoke-like substance that swiftly seeped into my bones of steel, invigorating me just like the cursed totem had. Aaah… Yes… That feels goooood… I need more of this… I can sense more restless spirits just standing around. And those negative emotions!

They felt so pure, like they had been bottled up for decades. Who knew that regret, fear, or anger got better as they aged like wine? This night in the graveyard was a delightful one for me, less so for the spirits I preyed upon, but it was their fault for being so damned gullible. They were all strangely jaded, barely even reacting, even when they got to see my monstrous face, but whenever I would start to try and motivate them just so that I could nip their hope in the bud…

Suddenly, all of their cynicism would wash away. Truly, it seemed like the job of exorcist was an easy one. You just needed to spout empty words at spirits, and they would just believe you at face value. Mmh… I think I ate them all, but I still feel something calling to me. My efficient clean-up of the restless ones led to the graveyard being cleared of a vast amount of the negative energy that had gathered.

It wasn't completely gone, but it truly appeared that the bulk of it was being constantly created by these few lads and gals who just couldn't find peace for whatever reason. I found them quite pathetic. Undeath was something many would kill for, viewing it as the ultimate way of 'living' for eternity, and yet, these clowns were doing nothing but wail day and night, while doing nothing of value. But anyway, where the hell is that thing calling to me? Is it another spirit? Is it an item?

Oh, I think it's an item, the pull is coming from below, my back and forths lead me to pinpoint the location of what I am looking for as being a grave. This one had a rather bulky gravestone. It was a boulder, as a matter of fact, that had just been smoothed a bit on the front.

'Here lies our son, gone too early' The engraving was simplistic, not telling much at all. I began digging with my bare hands. The night was still young, and my slender fingers made for excellent digging tools. No one was around to catch me in the act as I dug for three hours straight, completely eviscerating the grave before tearing open the cheap, wooden coffin. I have no idea how long this guy has been buried here, but his body is skeletal, and soil has seeped inside his coffin.

The only intact thing is a sword, a regular blade from what I can tell. Picking it up, I can immediately see that this is what has been calling to me… To put it in simple terms, I think it's haunted. It is charged with something similar to the spirits I ate just prior. Well, don't mind if I do! I completely ignore the hushed whispers that are emitted by the sword and simply chomp down on it, consuming the steel and whatever it was that had been trapped within it. Oh… That feels even better than the spirits…

There must have been a lot of people stuck inside here, huh? Any idea if I could replicate this myself, system? The conditions for the creation of such items are somewhat tricky and would require the intervention of a specialist I guess that means no… Rising out of the grave, I decide to push the boulder-gravestone directly into the hole before pushing the soil back in. I'll visit another one tomorrow… For now, I guess I'll find myself a corner to hide in. Where can a girl hide in a cemetery?