'Can it really be reversed?'
A light of hope flickered in Kawabe Mayo's eyes.
'I can only say there's a possibility.'
Amamiya Rin gave a noncommittal answer.
Alchemy existed as a genuine force in this world. If Frankenstein could build a creature from cadaver parts, then he saw no reason why the Kawabe family's alchemy should only ever produce a skin-stripping result. That had to be either a side effect or a mistake somewhere in the process.
'Riki, be a good boy and stay here.'
Kawabe Mayo decided to trust Amamiya Rin. She stood up at once and left the living room.
Before long she returned, cradling a notebook whose leather cover had worn soft and dark with age.
'The original formula and notes my brother-in-law left behind went missing a few months ago. This is my sister's hand-copied version.'
Amamiya Rin took the notebook, opened to the yellowed interior pages, and let a flicker of surprise cross his eyes.
The ink was uneven in shade, streaked here and there with brownish medicine stains. The margins were crowded with small symbols — flame motifs, water-droplet motifs, diamond motifs — and the text itself was written in Latin.
[As directly transmitted by my master Paracelsus — the secret of immortality lies in the equilibrium of the Three Primes: Sulfur is the seed of vital fire, governing the flourishing of life's energy; Mercury is the source of humors, presiding over the circulation of all things; Salt is the matrix of the flesh, consolidating bone and sinew. Let any one fall out of balance and decay follows; hold all three in harmony and immortality is achieved. I have followed this path in my workings, and record the method as follows:]
'Paracelsus?'
Amamiya Rin blinked slightly. So the founding master of this family's alchemy tradition was, of all people, the Bean Dad?
He turned to the next page and read through the so-called formula for immortality.
[Sulfurous Essence: the sap of the poppy, collected at dawn from green pods, distilled with wine at a ratio of nine to one to yield three drops of pure essential oil — this is the floral sulfur bloom… Mercurial Fluid: liquid mercury, gathered on the night of the full moon using copper vessels, co-refined with sulfur at a ratio of two to one, from which mercuric chloride crystals are precipitated…]
The formula was staggeringly complex. Its ingredients spanned mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms; its procedures had to be timed to planetary positions and seasonal cycles; and it was written throughout in alchemical symbols and Latin, dense and obscure, shot through with mystical cant. Anyone else who picked this up would likely toss it aside after a few minutes.
Even Amamiya Rin's brow was creasing deeper with every page.
Setting aside everything else, the real problem was that a great many of the steps were described in maddeningly ambiguous terms. Critical ratios and reaction endpoints were left vague, and the numerical details in particular were the foggiest of all.
Kawabe Mayo's brother-in-law had added annotations — but following those annotations, the only thing one could ever produce was a substance that separated muscle from skin.
Amamiya Rin read through the notebook with focused attention. The living room was quiet, filled only with the soft rustle of turning pages and the distant murmur of the night wind through the window.
'Um… I truly am grateful for your help.'
Kawabe Mayo's voice broke the silence. Amamiya Rin looked up and found her expression carrying a trace of hesitation and genuine puzzlement.
Her hands were clasped tightly together — both nervous and sincerely confused.
'But… why are you going this far to help us?'
Kawabe Mayo couldn't understand it. They were complete strangers. Why was this man expending so much effort on her behalf?
'Why, you ask?'
Amamiya Rin tilted his head, thought for a moment, and answered Kawabe Mayo with a passage from the sutras.
'One who cultivates a loving heart sleeps in peace and wakes in peace, sees no evil dreams, and bears no hatred in the mind.'
Kawabe Mayo listened, momentarily stunned.
She didn't fully grasp the meaning, but she could feel the serenity and goodwill that flowed through the words.
Watching the calm line of Amamiya Rin's profile, she regarded him with a look of genuine reverence. The rigid tension in her shoulders eased just slightly, and a deep stillness settled over her heart — like warm water flowing through her chest. The fear and the crushing weight of the past several days seemed to quietly slip away.
Amamiya Rin lifted his barley tea, took a small sip, and glanced up at the clock on the wall.
Nine o'clock. Riki's mother still hadn't come home?
At that same moment, a few hundred meters from the Kawabe household, on a quiet backstreet.
The streetlamps had been neglected for years. Their light was a dim, sickly amber that barely illuminated a small circle of pavement beneath each post, leaving the spaces beyond drowning in impenetrable darkness.
The night wind sent fallen leaves and scraps of paper skittering in spirals across the ground, rustling and whispering, like something unseen murmuring in the dark.
Occasionally a late-returning pedestrian would hurry by, shoulders hunched against the cold, the crack of their heels on the pavement abnormally sharp in the silence — before being swallowed up by the darkness again.
A woman in a long black coat and a wide-brimmed black sun hat had wrapped her head and face completely, blending nearly seamlessly into the night around her.
She was cutting through the alley, and just as she rounded the corner, a figure materialized at the far edge of a streetlamp's glow.
It was a woman in a dark coat, a scarf wound high around her neck and covering the lower half of her face. All that was visible was a curtain of long hair falling loose over her shoulders.
As the two were about to pass each other, the woman in the sun hat suddenly stopped. In the same instant, the woman in the scarf stopped too.
They faced each other in eerie silence on the deserted street, with only the whispering of wind through fallen leaves between them.
'Am I pretty?'
Without any preamble, the scarfed woman spoke. Her voice came out muffled, smothered by the layers of fabric.
The woman in the sun hat paused, as though she hadn't anticipated being asked that.
She tilted her head slightly to one side and let out a laugh that carried a faint, unsettling edge — a soft, humorless 'heh heh.' 'Your face is completely hidden. How would I know? Though I can say with confidence that no matter how ugly or pretty you are, you couldn't possibly be as beautiful as me.'
'Well then… what about now?'
The scarfed woman raised her hand and pulled the thick scarf away.
The dim amber light of the streetlamp fell across her newly exposed face.
A grotesque split ran from the corner of her mouth all the way to her ear, as though someone had taken hold of her cheek with both hands and simply torn it apart. Along the edges of the wound, skin and flesh had curled back, and the pale white of her cheekbone and teeth glinted faintly through the gap.
That terrible wound made her face look impossibly vast and monstrous. Any man who had approached her with anticipation would have likely screamed and fled on the spot.
'Now… am I pretty?'
She stretched that hideous split into something resembling a grin and asked again, her voice carrying a faint, warped edge of expectation.
But the shriek or the breakdown she was expecting never came.
'Ugly. Though it aligns with my aesthetic — it's still only half-baked.'
The woman in the hat showed no fear whatsoever. Her reply was blunt and utterly unapologetic.
Hearing that answer, the slit-mouthed woman was surprised by the reaction — though not entirely shocked. She bared her manic, jagged grin, reached her right hand into her coat, and produced an enormous pair of scissors.
At that moment, the woman across from her fired back with a question that the slit-mouthed woman hadn't seen coming at all.
'Do you think I'm pretty?'
The slit-mouthed woman froze. Those eyes, which had been brimming with malice, flickered with a moment of confusion.
She had never encountered a response like this. The strangest reaction she'd ever gotten before was from a pervert who had grabbed and kissed her — which had startled even her. She'd waited until her wits returned and then snipped his head off.
And in the instant that the slit-mouthed woman drifted into that memory, the woman in the hat wrenched her coat open at the front, exposing her beautiful form to the slit-mouthed woman's eyes.
At the sight of that bare, unapologetic body, the slit-mouthed woman's pupils contracted sharply. She stumbled back an involuntary step, drew a sharp breath through her teeth, her mouth twitching, her eyes flooding with raw, undisguised horror.
____
👻🔥Whant more?: Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Oshi No Ko: Co-starring with Kana Arima
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