Chương 85: Eating Like A Queen

"Oh golly! She really is immune!"

"Papa! Did you just cast an instant death curse at her to test it?! That's why I hate you!"

"Sweetie… My casting just slipped into my old reliable. I didn't mean to do that! Why are you leaving? Sweetie?" Heltna took me further into the residence, away from her father, who did not budge in the least to try and stop her. What a weird dynamic. Starting a sentence with 'Papa' only to end it with 'I hate you' is quite the leap, but it must not be an uncommon occurrence, as her father seemed wholly unbothered.

Weirder, he did not seem to care at all about the tall knightess his daughter was bringing along with her. Did my immunity give me a pass? He did mention something just before about Heltna… Just what does this guy think his daughter intends to do with me?! I don't like being part of such assumptions! What assumptions? You know, about the fact that he thinks his daughter is not the sort to continue the bloodline? Yes?

Was that not about the fact that she is unmarried despite being a noble and already past marriageable age? I hear that nobles are betrothed together before either of the two parties has even popped out! So her being unmarried is rather peculiar… Is that really not what was implied? I do not see any other possible explanations Oh, you're so cute… All that knowledge and yet still so adorably clueless! Stay like that for as long as possible, alright? Sure…? Heltna took me through far too many hallways and staircases.

The manor had seemed large from the outside, but it seemed like it was actually far larger than I had imagined… I hadn't been inside noble residences before. I found it rather absurd just how high the ceiling was, and yet–There were still a whole lot of floors. No way that place isn't tempered with using that spatial distortion nonsense! With a ceiling that high, you could only have three floors at best, judging by what I saw outside! And even then, I am being very generous.

Making your interior space larger using space-or-whatever stuff couldn't be cheap, and it was being done on THIS scale? I have a hard time believing this is worth the price, even for nobles… Unless they can do it themselves, I guess. Some sort of distortion curse, perhaps? Is it within reach for me to eat? I was trying to think to distract myself, but I eventually fell onto the topic of gluttony. Food was everywhere! I could sense it all around me! Curses were omnipresent. Every single item was cursed.

In fact, I noticed with Heltna's father that he himself was cursed. The two knights had probably been carrying curses as well, but I had just been unable to tell because they were wrapped in more curses. If anything, the noble girl was the odd one out as she was not cursed directly, and her attire was free of curses as well. Even the maids and manservants we crossed on the way were cursed from head to toe! So many curses… You are thinking 'curse' a lot too… I can't help myself.

A girl is not herself when she is hungry, and I am famished. I feel like a starved lion with a piece of meat dangling just out of the reach of its cage… I know that I'll never be substantiated, no matter how many curses I feast upon, but this is not the point. My hunger is not about filling a belly. It is about what benefits the food can bring me, and in this case, if I ate every curse here…

I should definitely increase my raw talent in curse slinging and be able to actually use 'Cursed Metal' to an effective degree. And who knows, I remember being told that eating curses or spirit-related items could also yield other benefits in some cases. With so many snacks and pretty much all of them being of such high-quality… It should be pretty likely for me to get some good stuff, right?

Before I could daydream any further or think the word 'curse' one more time, Heltna finally arrived where she wanted to take me. Her bedroom… Which was also a laboratory of sorts. The fusion of the two concepts was quite odd. Especially the mixture of the very serious and dangerous-looking experiment tools and the very girly aesthetic of Heltna, it looked like some mad mage had established an experiment hall inside some random room they ran into. I see that she quite likes plushes…

I remember girls being more into dolls back in my day. You know, playing house and all of that business. What did you play with as a little girl? Well… I had dolls like any other girl, nice ones, since we were bourgeois, but I also dug a lot of holes… With my good old digging bar… Shame I didn't find it when I was back at my house back then, I loved that old rusty thing. Oh, and I also took naps in the flower beds. I smelled very nice afterwards.

"Miss Knightess, welcome to my room! Please don't mind the disorder over there… Could you sit over there, please?" Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Heltna seemed to have forgotten her little squabble with her father and was back to being all excited, and made me sit on a stool. She then proceeded to do what I suppose was a series of tests on me, all that I know is that I ate a lot of curses and that some of them were a bit different from usual.

As an expert gourmet on the matter, I had long noticed that curses had slightly different tastes from one another. I couldn't really explain said tastes with actually comprehensible words, but several factors seemed to affect that aspect of curses. The most notable one was when a curse had an elemental trait to it. And for some reason, I could just tell which element it was by taste from sheer instinct.

Heltna probably tested if some curses would work if they had an especially strong element attached to them as well. I was quite surprised by the ease with which she could cast curses like these. Didn't this imply that she had an affinity for all of these elements? At her young age, it couldn't just be a great understanding of how elemental stuff worked. I guess that's a noble for you, they're just made different. Nobles are characterised not just by their status or wealth.

They are actually mostly about lineage and bloodline. I frankly did not know much about it, but from what I understood, nobles went out of their way to 'improve' and 'purify' their bloodlines, ensuring that offspring of theirs would have high chances of carrying good talent and the family's unique traits. Of course, it wasn't foolproof, but it was still something that apparently worked out in the majority of cases.

That was why I had never thought about being a noble myself, but instead marrying into a noble family. The bastards had literally modified themselves across generations for who knows how long to be better than others. The work was respectable, but it made rising to their levels abundantly difficult. With talented nobles aplenty, doing something noteworthy enough for the crown to give out the title was difficult.

Even my otherworldly charms couldn't pierce through that–Well, maybe they could have, but no royal-blooded man ever showed up anywhere near me, so I don't know. In any case, Heltna fed me a whole lot of elementally attuned curses before deciding to switch things up, and she instead began casting what I felt were curses I would qualify as multiple-course meals, ranging from three-course to fifty-course. I called them such because they weren't rapidly devoured like the rest.

Not that they were challenging or threatening, it was just longer than normal. I assumed that these were curses supposed to stand the test of time. Or rather, the actual kind of curse a peasant would think about when they heard the term. The sort that sticks to someone, bringing misfortune constantly, passing down to your children, or curses that stick to a place forever unless specifically cleansed.

It was technically just a guess on my part, but I felt that my guesses when it came to this were especially accurate for some reason. I could just feel the nature of my food.

"Interesting… They aren't immediately gone like the rest, but they are completely harmless and falling apart bit by bit… I can't control them at all either. It's like they're no longer considered mine at all. How fascinating!"

"This is different from simple immunity. It is like you're actually absorbing the curses! Or maybe absorbing the energy they are made from? Are you perhaps immune to regular spells as well?" She gave me paper to write upon, and not fancying getting thrown a wind blade in the face, I responded that I was not immune to anything besides curses.

"Mmh… So absorbing the curses themselves then? That's a bit weird, I can't sense any change within you, or anything that has to do with curses for that matter… Just an innate immunity that works weirdly, perhaps?" Heltna threw curses at me and theorised out loud until the sun disappeared over the horizon. Somehow, all that spell casting did not seem to take any strain on her. Damned privileged nobles with their endless mana pools!

She lodged me inside a room right next to hers, which did not feature any workshop filled with cursed items, much to my disappointment, but looking on the bright side, it had been a surprising amount of time since I had gotten free access to such a nice bed that was not inside my own head. It was actually a bit weird to lie on a soft mattress whilst being one hundred per cent steel. I sank into the softness like a rock in a cup of water. That would look a bit weird if someone entered the room right now…

Though they would probably be more put off by the fact that I was lying in bed in full armour rather than the fact that my weight was clearly way higher than what it should be, unless my armour was awfully heavy. Regardless of that, I waited for the middle of the night before looking around the room. Nara, can you tell me if there is anything off? I don't want to get spotted.

As far as I am aware, you are not being observed I found it a bit hard to believe that the strange woman who had been suddenly brought into a noble manor would not be under surveillance one way or another… Or perhaps the security measures start once I try to exit the room? Regardless, I had to do this to get anywhere with my heist plan… I turned into my 'Base Form', allowing me to summon my cute little ghosts.

I had taken them back within me, as I found it hard to believe that a noble manor wouldn't have some form of barriers that either targeted ghosts specifically, or at least were capable of blocking unwanted guests regardless of whether they were corporeal or not. And since nothing was happening to me whatsoever, I knew that there was nothing that targeted ghosts once within the residence. I was half Vengeful Spirit after all. My little sisters were likewise perfectly fine.

"A–A–Alright, Girls. You need–eed to stay hidden in here for this li–little robbery. Ophelie, how many plushes do you–you have right now?"

"I have ten, Big Sis!"

"T–Ten? Very go–good… Do give me o–one right now" Just as I held out my hand, I heard someone knock on my door.

"Miss Silent Knightess?" Why the hell is he showing up in the middle of the night?! I grabbed the plush that appeared out of thin air in Ophelie's hand and promptly pulled them back into the mindscape just to be certain, if it was anyone else, I would have an amount of confidence that they could just hide, but Heltna's father? That guy seemed like an accomplished curse slinger–Thus spell caster–And a half.

He would probably find them easily if he actually used his energy sense, and he might already know something is up! Just in case, I made sure that my little sisters couldn't see or hear anything about what was happening outside the mindscape…