Chapter 113: Chapter 34
The sun had begun to bleed through the cracks in the shutters, casting long, skeletal shadows across the floorboards.
Haruka’s eyes were bloodshot, the rhythmic ticking of a wall clock sounding like a hamr against her skull.
Sleep deprivation was setting in, bringing with it the jagged edge of cognitive decline, yet her mind refused to disengage.
All night, she didn’t get a wink of sleep, spending every mont to understand her own self and co up with logical reason why the spirits have refused her.
She leaned her head back against the sofa, her breaths shallow.
"Is it survival?" she asked herself, stripping the question down to its barest components.
From a purely evolutionary standpoint, her attachnt to Seijirou was the ultimate survival strategy.
He provided resources, protection, and a position of power. In nature, a subordinate female aligns herself with the strongest mber of the pack to ensure her own longevity.
And so by that logic, her desire to gain spirit power to protect him was rely a defensive investnt.
But if that were true, the spirits—beings of pure intent—should have recognized that primal drive.
Survival is the most basic, honest motivation in the universe. If she were truly acting out of self-preservation, the contract should have stabilized.
"Then, my goal of protecting him to ensure my safety is invalid. After all, if my goal is survival, why does it feel like I would discard my life to ensure his?"
The realization hit her with the coldness of a surgical blade as she began to co up with various logical reasonings.
If Subject A (Haruka) protects Subject B (Seijirou) solely for her own survival, then Subject A should prioritize her own life if the risk to herself becos absolute.
But in reality, Haruka knew, with terrifying certainty, that if a blade were flying toward Seijirou, she would move to intercept it without calculating the cost to her own vitals.
This violated the fundantal law of self-preservation, therefore it was a glitch in her programming.
She was prioritizing the "asset" over the "self," which ant Seijirou was no longer just a tool for her survival.
He had beco the objective itself.
But why is that?
She gripped her knees, her knuckles slowly turning white.
"The spirits said I don’t know what to do with the power," she muttered, her voice raspy from disuse. "But if the goal is him... then the power is for him. Why is that insufficient?"
Almost imdiately, the possible answer surfaced through the haze of her exhaustion: Because "Him" is not "."
Perhaps the spirits weren’t looking for a guardian or a tool; they were looking for a person. By tethering her entire existence, her desires, and her very reason for breathing to Seijirou, she had effectively erased her own identity.
She was trying to sign a contract with a blank piece of paper. You cannot offer a soul to the spirits if you have already hollowed yourself out to make room for soone else.
Indeed, this is the most logical answer...but why does she feel like it is also not the correct one?
"Don’t forget. You must never forget."
The whisper returned, sharper now that her ntal defenses were weakened by fatigue.
It felt less like a mory and more like a directive—a hidden protocol.
What am I forgetting? she thought, a rare spark of frustration flickering in her eyes.
She rember every al, every study session, every command he has ever given her. She rember the temperature of the room when she gave him her body. She rember the exact trajectory of his blood when he was wounded.
So what could she be forgetting!?
...just then, a localized tremor of doubt shook her. She rembered everything about her life with him.
But what about the Haruka that existed before the "owner" arrived? What about the girl who lived in this house before it beca a relic?
Logic dictated that her current state was a result of conditioning.
But that persistent ache in her chest—that feeling of her heart shattering—suggested that her "illogical" feelings for Seijirou weren’t new.
They were a bridge to sothing she had intentionally deleted.
"I am a closed loop," she whispered, staring at her trembling hands. "I am trying to solve an equation while refusing to acknowledge one of the variables. And that variable... is ."
At that mont, she stood up, deciding to search around the old house if sothing could trigger her mory.
The kitchen, her parent’s room, the backyard, the bathroom....none.
"Then, my old room." With that, Haruka climbed the stairs and headed to her old room.
The dust motes danced in the pale morning light as she stepped into her old bedroom.
The space was a skeletal remains of a life she had discarded. No bed, no desk, no scent of herself—only the oppressive silence of a void.
She had basically brought everything of value to Seijirou’s house.
To her logical mind, a room was rely a container for a body, yet the hollow resonance of her footsteps felt like a physical weight.
She observed the room... still nothing. She couldn’t rember anything that she might’ve forgotten.
She sighed, and turned to leave... But then, she saw it.
A sliver of weathered parchnt, trapped in the narrow crevice between the floorboard and the baseboard, preserved only because it had been forgotten.
She furrowed her brows. A paper?
She knelt, her movents stiff from exhaustion, and retrieved the paper as she smoothed it out to observe it, and almost imdiately, her pupils dilated.
It was a drawing—crude by professional standards, but executed with an obsessive level of detail that spoke of a child’s fixated mind.
In the center stood a man. He had no face, yet his posture—the slight tilt of the head, the way he stood with a quiet, immovable gravity—was unmistakable.
Beside him was a girl, her hand tucked into his, wearing a veil that shimred even in the fading graphite.
Almost imdiately, the mories hit her, flooding her mind.
She rembered back in middle school, she was plagued with nightmares so terrifying that she couldn’t even sleep peacefully.
But, throughout those nightmares, there would be this one man who would always save her, who would even bend reality to turn back the ti to ensure she wasn’t hard.
This dreams were so frequent she had developed an unhealthy crush for that imaginary man and had drawn this as a proof of that budding feeling.
But...
"I categorized that as a pathology," she whispered, her voice trembling. "A coping chanism for an adolescent mind seeking security."
Due to that, she had went to therapy and chose to forget those dreams entirely.
But as her thumb brushed the faded lines of the man’s coat, she realized that a "coping chanism" shouldn’t have carry a specific resonance that vibrates in the marrow of one’s bones years later.
This image brought her so much familiarity she felt like those dreams weren’t even dreams, but forgotten mories.
And that sa familiarity is what she feels towards Kageyama Seijirou.
Haruka’s analytical mind began to re-process every interaction she had ever had with Kageyama Seijirou through this new lens.
She ran a recursive scan of her own history, looking for the anomalies she had previously ignored:
Why had she felt a sense of "hocoming" rather than fear when she first entered Seijirou’s house?
Why had she accepted the status of a "slave" without a single spark of rebellion?
She knew it wasn’t because she was broken, so perhaps it was because, on a subconscious level, she had already decided that being near him was the only position that made sense in the universe.
She had given him her body not as a transaction for power, but as an attempt to bridge a gap she didn’t even know existed.
It was a desperate, instinctive effort to reconnect a severed circuit.
"Don’t forget. You must never forget."
The voice returned, no longer a whisper, but a resonant command that harmonized with the ache in her chest.
"... that’s right, how could I forget?" She whispered, grasping her chest.
Truthfully, she still couldn’t rember what she had forgotten, but perhaps, in the distant past, or in another world, she had always have this feeling towards the man that is Kageyama Seijirou.
She wondered just what did that man do to make her feel this way?
What did that man do to make her long for him so much even though she couldn’t rember anything about him?
What did that man do for her heart to ache like this when she saw him getting hurt?
What did that man do for her that she would even disregard her own life to make sure he is okay?
She doesn’t know, and she might never know.
But now, she felt like she was a soul that had been searching for its anchor across the boundaries of mory, perhaps even across the boundaries of ti and space.
The "illogical" pain she felt when he bled wasn’t a glitch in her own system, it was the truth of her heart.
The reason why she finds it natural to offer her body, to remain by his side isn’t because of so sense of survival, but because her heart has been calibrated to his frequency long before they were born into this reality.
She clutched the drawing to her chest, the sharp edges of the paper digging into her skin.
The exhaustion was gone, replaced by a terrifying, crystalline clarity.
"I don’t need a reason to use the power," she said, her voice dropping to a low, steady tone. "The power is simply the tool I require to ensure that the center of my universe does not stop beating."
Haruka stood up straight.Her movents were no longer stiff like before, now they were fluid, predatory, and possessed by a singular, focused intent.
She walked out of the bedroom, leaving the ghosts of her past behind.
When she re-entered the living room, the atmosphere seed to thicken, the air grew heavy with the sudden, violent surge of her presence.
She didn’t need to perform the ritual again; she simply stood in the center of the room and projected the truth of her soul into the vacuum.
She wasn’t a blank page anymore.
She was a woman who had rembered that she was a guardian, a lover, and a weapon—all for one man.
"I am ready," she told the empty air, her eyes burning with a cold, divine fire. "Negotiations are over. I demand the contract."
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