Night, with the daytime lights extinguished. In the darkness, where not a single ray of light entered, only the faint night-lights illuminated the world. The pitch-black outlines in the prison corridor stood out as though someone had laid carbon paper over the world and shaded it with a pencil. In darkness so deep that an inattentive observer might fail to notice a wall directly ahead, a man moved with muffled footsteps.

He carried a large bundle, with grotesquely bent arms and legs poking through the gaps between its knots. Their angles were impossible for a normal human body, achievable only if the limbs were attached somewhere other than their proper places on a vertebrate skeleton.

Or if the arms and legs had been detached altogether.

Anyone watching him transport that dismembered body would have recognized someone trying to conceal a corpse. He ought to have been seized immediately and questioned about his crime, but the curtain of darkness concealed both him and his guilt. What cannot be seen is no crime. Under cover of night, without anyone interfering, he...

"Woof? What's that?"

"Shh. Azi. Go away for a bit. It's a surprise present."

"Woof? Present? Mine?"

"Not a chance."

Without any 'person' interfering, he hid the dismembered body in a secret pla—

"Woof!"

"Don't try to dig it out! Hey! That's not food! Yucky!"

He hid it. Anyway, that was what happened.

Another peaceful day. Having gathered the trainees, I stood before the blackboard. I reached for some chalk, found the box empty, and singled out the Regressor.

"We're out of chalk. Trainee Shei, could you get some from the cabinet at the back?"

"Do you have to make me do that?"

"You're close to it. Please."

"Tch. Fine, whatever. Since you're asking."

The Regressor swaggered toward the cabinet. I slowly counted her steps.

Now, one. Two. Three. Ta-da.

Just as I had planned, she flung the cabinet door open, and...

At that moment, a body with grotesquely bent limbs and twitching, bright-red muscles lurched out. Its face, tongue lolling as if dead, met the Regressor's eyes. Then it slowly began toppling toward her, along with its dismembered limbs.

A grotesque corpse appearing without warning or context. Anyone of ordinary courage would have fallen over in fright.

But the Regressor faced it impassively.

"Heaven-Reversing Realm."

As though something like this could not possibly startle her, she maintained a blank expression and pushed the falling corpse away with her hand...

'Aaaaaah—!'

Only her expression was blank.

Despite her composed exterior, the startled Regressor was screaming mentally. When the corpse's detached right arm wriggled, she shuddered and hurriedly shoved it back inside.

'That scared me...! What is this?! Why is something like this in the cabinet?!'

Inside, she was making an enormous fuss over the shock. Yet none of those feelings showed outwardly.

The Regressor's energy art, Heaven-Reversing Realm, engraved specific movements into her body, allowing her to react reflexively to any situation. It activated even when something unexpected terrified her. Though she was startled enough to make her heart pound, her thoroughly trained body maintained an unshakable mind—no, an unshakable body.

The Regressor glanced back at me and spoke in an even tone.

"There's a corpse in here. Hey. Know anything about it?"

'... H-how long has that corpse been here? Don't tell me it's been here ever since I first arrived? That's... a little creepy.'

What? She's pulling herself together already. Tch. I'd thought she'd be a little more frightened. So much for all the effort I'd put into my masterpiece of a jack-in-the-box.

Swallowing my disappointment, I answered with perfect composure, pretending to know nothing.

"Huh. How long has that been there?"

Azi perked up her ears and stood.

"Woof! I know! Yesterday..."

"Silence! How dare a beast interrupt when a human is speaking?!"

Having silenced the canine witness, I gestured casually.

"It seems someone hid this corpse in the cabinet. We'll have to investigate. Trainee Shei, could you bring it out for a moment?"

"This?"

"You're close to it. Please. You're not afraid of corpses, are you?"

"True enough."

The Regressor nonchalantly shouldered the corpse. From the outside, she looked as though she hadn't been startled at all. Well, even her thoughts were barely disturbed now.

They say the mind follows the body, don't they? Without that Heaven-Reversing Realm, she would have made a spectacle of herself. What a terrible shame.

"Here."

The Regressor laid out the undying one's dismembered body. I bent down and fitted the limbs together before her eyes. I tucked back the tongue I'd pulled out slightly last night for dramatic effect, and restored the right arm, whose fingers I'd tied up individually in case he resisted.

As the pieces came together and gradually assumed a human shape, the Regressor's gaze grew somber.

'It wasn't a corpse. A huge, muscular man, dark skin... It's definitely that undying one.'

Oh. Finally.

Scaring the Regressor wasn't my only reason for hiding the undying one in the cabinet. That was merely a secondary objective.

According to the Regressor's memories, this undying one apparently survived to the end in every previous run... Which made sense, given that he was undying.

In the previous run, the Regressor had met him while searching for information. After hearing a rough account of what had happened at Tantalus, she had infiltrated this place herself to obtain more precise information.

That was all I had managed to read so far. Her recollection had ended, leaving me no way of knowing what information the undying one had given her or what had happened in the previous run. It would have been nice to read all her memories from that run, but for some reason, I could only read previous runs through her active recollections.

So, if only to learn why I had died, I needed to bring the undying one before her eyes. That way, at least a small clue might crawl out of her head.

The Regressor asked in a more serious voice,

"Has this undying one been here the whole time?"

"Who knows?"

"That can't be. Wounds this bad would have bled. Tyrkanzyaka couldn't possibly have missed that."

The vampire answered her question herself.

"No. If he is one of those I have in mind, even I would not notice."

Seated on her coffin instead of a chair again today, the vampire regarded the body and its severed limbs indifferently.

"One of the earthfolk from somewhere on the plains."

"Earthfolk?"

"We are both immortal, so we call them earthfolk to distinguish them from us. They call us blood fiends. Our relations are rather distant. They consider us cursed, and we cannot take their blood."

The vampire raised her hand. Her coffin cracked open, and crimson blood crept out through the gap toward the undying one, looking ready to swallow him whole.

Yet the instant it touched his body, the blood rapidly lost its power. The red liquid turned pitch-black, then crumbled like sand and fell to the floor.

"Their flesh and blood resemble Mother Earth. They gained immortality by offering their people as human sacrifices. Their flesh is sand, their blood mud. Their bodies are so utterly impure and filthy that only they can harbor them. Thus, even outside their bodies, their blood is unaffected by my blood manipulation."

The vampire frowned slightly and shook her hand. Apart from the portion that had crumbled like sand, the blood returned to her side. She flicked it away as though she had touched filth.

The Regressor nodded.

"... All right. So nobody knows how long this undying one has been here."

Hearing the Regressor's muttering, Azi straightened up and spoke.

"Woof, I know! Yesterday...!"

"Silence, I say! How dare a double-digit IQ speak in the triple-digit club! Even a schoolhouse dog listens quietly for three years, yet a mere prison guard dog dares open her mouth?! You're ten years too early!"

"... Grrrr."

I think Azi's affection for me just dropped a little. It would take a good hour of brushing her fur later just to recover it.

Still, keeping her mouth shut came first right now. The Regressor soon lost interest in us.

'What nonsense is he pulling with Azi now...? Whatever. It's not as though his bizarre behavior is anything new.'

This was why one's everyday conduct mattered. Even when I did something crazy, people let it pass without much suspicion. All my efforts to behave eccentrically had paid off after all.

'More importantly, the undying one comes first. He looks critically injured. Can he even open his eyes? It might be different on the surface, but here in the bottomless pit, cut off from the earth's veins, he'll have trouble recovering on his own.'

The Regressor cast a doubtful look at the undying one. Though the undying readily regenerated even from fatal injuries, there was no means of restoring them in the bottomless pit.

'Perhaps with Mother Earth's grace... if he ate a great deal of crops. But who knows how long that would take. Should I use a potion? If that changes things from the past, though, my information could become useless instead.'

So that was why he ate entire pots of bean mush that an ordinary human could never swallow. It was to regenerate his wounds.

I'd originally intended to show him to her and leave it at that. Hmm. Given the circumstances, why not try waking him up?

All right, decision made. I waved the Regressor away.

"Trainee Shei, lover of men, why don't you stop leering lustfully at a man's body and return to your seat?"

The Regressor, who had been deep in thought, suddenly staggered. Barely recovering her balance before she fell, she shouted at me.

"W-what are you talking about all of a sudden?!"

"He may be unconscious, but allowing a man who likes men to keep gazing at him so passionately seems, well, a little inappropriate."

"What passionate gaze?! I'm straight!"

"Huh? What? You like women? Then what was all that about washing Azi yourself the other day? Were you scrubbing away your own dirty desires rather than the dirt on her skin?"

"No! Of course not!"

"Right, of course not. Because you like men."

"That...!"

As the Regressor, trapped in her own contradictions, could only blush without managing a reply, the vampire tapped the desk with her parasol.

"Enough."

Then she opened her parasol a little to hide her face. A slightly embarrassed voice emerged from behind it.

"I shall vouch for him. When I watched as you instructed the other day, Shei merely seemed troubled while washing the King of Dogs, without showing any particular awareness of her body. His claim that he likes men is probably true as well... Oh, my."

"Wait, Tyrkanzyaka!"

"It is all right, Shei."

Apparently unable to meet her eyes, the vampire kept everything but her mouth concealed and defended the Regressor with an inexplicably warm smile.

"I have thought it over carefully. Your inclinations are part of who you are, are they not? Though you have forsaken the heavenly order of harmony between yin and yang, I too am a monster who defies heaven. We are both beings the Holy See cannot tolerate. I realized I had no right to blame you."

"I'm not like that...!"

"I do not mind. I understand."

The vampire's smile, having decided to accept her completely, was so genuinely kind that even the foul-mouthed Regressor could find no reply.

With no way out, the Regressor flushed bright red and pressed her lips shut.

'Maybe I should just tell them I'm a woman...! No! I can't. Saying I'm a woman now would feel like admitting defeat!'

Her pride had developed in a very strange direction. She considered revealing a truth when cornered, as though fleeing, to be defeat.

From my perspective, reading all her thoughts, it was rather funny.

Well, she didn't know I used mind reading. I could just keep reading her thoughts and teasing her like this.

'Besides, I used the Mask of Agartha I obtained in the treasure hall to ensure that everyone's first impression of me is male. The only way to break that suggestion is to take off my clothes... But I wouldn't do that even if I had to kill someone!'

I'd wondered why nobody saw through such a shoddy male disguise. So it was another inexplicable treasure. The world really was full of strange wonders.

Wait. What? Even if she had to kill someone? Not even if it killed her? Kill whom?

I hurriedly stepped in to settle things.

"All right, all right. That's enough of that! Now, let's revive this undying one who's suffered such an unfortunate accident!"

... Right. Enough teasing. Having mercifully provided the Regressor an escape route, I pointed at the undying one lying there with all his limbs torn off.