The Sin System: My Wife is Envy

Chapter 49: Vampire

She spoke first.

"You are not from this world."

I said nothing for a moment.

"What makes you say that," I said.

"Two hundred years of solitude gives a great deal of time to observe," she said. "The way you talked to the cave. The things you said. The references that belonged to nowhere in this world. The way you moved when you first started training, like someone rebuilding something from memory rather than starting fresh."

She paused.

"And the blood. The way it tasted."

I looked at her.

She looked approximately eighteen. Possibly nineteen. The kind of age that sat on a face so naturally you stopped questioning it after the first few seconds, except that the face itself had an absolute stillness that had nothing to do with youth.

Her hands were in her lap. She had been sitting in that chair for however long I had been unconscious and showed no signs of having found it inconvenient.

"Blood has a quality," she said. "Everything about a person is in their blood. Where they come from. What they carry. What they are made of. Yours tasted like somewhere else entirely."

I did not say anything to that.

"I have a question."

"What?"

"Do humans normally give blood to strangers?"

"...No."

"I thought not."

"...Why?"

"You gave yours to me."

"..."

"It means something where I come from."

"...What?"

"I’ll tell you later."

She waited. It appeared to suit her.

"Since you have been talking to me for three months without knowing who you were talking to," she said, "it seems fair that I introduce myself properly."

She stood from the chair.

"My name is Anastasia." She held my gaze without effort. "Progenitor of the Vampire bloodline."

I looked at her for a moment.

"Progenitor."

"The first," she said. "The rest came from me, eventually, over a very long time. Two hundred years sealed in a cave changes the scope of what that means. I imagine there is very little left of what I built. There rarely is, after that length of time."

She said it the way she said most things. Flat. Precise.

"Itsuki Amagi," I said. "Current heir to House Amagi. Formerly known as the wasted heir."

"I know," she said. "I heard everything you said in the cave."

"Everything."

"Everything," she confirmed. She sat back down. "The system. The higher beings. The girl who follows you. The duel. The girl with the cold hands who fixes broken mirrors from the wrong side." A pause. "The twelve-year-old administrator who appeared in a maid costume."

I looked at the ceiling briefly.

"The cave carried sound better than I realized," I said.

"Sound, mana, intention. I had nothing else to do with my attention for two centuries."

She told me about the seal.

The daemons that built it had done so during the first great incursion, two hundred and twelve years ago. They could not kill her. They had tried. Whatever they sent, she consumed it, learned it, turned it back at them. So they built the seal around her while she was still, and left, and waited for the stone to do what they could not.

Cowards, she said.

The cave was a lock. The seal fed on ambient mana from the stone, just enough to hold.

"Then you started bleeding into the floor," she said.

"Twenty-one days," I said.

"Twenty-one days. Blood from outside this world carries a mana signature the seal could not process. Every day it fed on something it was not built for. Every day it weakened."

"The daemon," I said.

"A remnant of the seal, pushed outward as the structure failed. When containment breaks it releases pressure in whatever direction is available." She looked at me directly. "I am sorry you were in its path."

"You could have warned me."

"I did not know which morning you would go east. And I could not speak outside the domain."

I thought about that.

"Fair," I said.

She was quiet for a moment.

"Where do you come from," she said.

I opened my mouth.

The system panel opened without me asking.

[Host. Disclosure of point of origin to individuals native to or residing in this world is restricted under the terms of the binding contract. This applies regardless of circumstance or relationship.]

I closed my mouth.

Anastasia watched me do both.

"The system stopped you," she said.

"Yes."

"You were going to tell me."

"I was considering it."

She looked at me.

"Interesting," she said.

I did not respond to that.

She stood again.

"You had been sealed in a cave for two hundred years," I said. "You had heard me talking to a wall for three months."

"I knew you better than most people who have been in the same room as you. And two hundred years is a long time to be alone. I had time to consider what I was waiting for."

"You were not waiting for me specifically. You could not have known I was coming."

"No. But when you arrived I knew what you were."

"And what am I?"

She held the question for a moment.

"Someone who talks to empty caves," she said. "Someone who trains before dawn because he has a reason to, not because someone told him to. Someone who is trying to go back to his sister." She paused.

"And someone who told a cave, on the sixty-third morning, that he would keep coming back. Because he had decided it was the right thing to do."

I did not say anything.

"I had spent two hundred years waiting for the right thing," she said.

The wind outside had picked up. I could hear it through the glass.

"I did not know you could hear me," I said.

"I know," she said. "That is why I believed it."

She sat back down in the chair beside the bed.

Outside the window, the forest was moving in the morning wind. The birds had come back. The daemon was gone. The domain was gone. The seal that had been holding something back for two hundred years was gone.

She was sitting in the chair beside my bed looking at me like she had nowhere else to be.

"I am going to need some time to remember how to be a person," she said.

"That makes two of us," I said.

She looked at me.

"Yes," she said.

***

There was a knock at the door.

"Come in."

A servant stepped inside and bowed.

"Young Master. A message from the Royal Transit Office."

Itsuki accepted the sealed letter, broke the wax, and read.

Due to increased daemon activity along the northern route, all academy-bound transport from Thorne Hold has been delayed. Departure has been rescheduled for three days from now.

He folded the letter.

"The academy?" Anastasia asked.

"Delayed."

"Is that... bad?"

He shook his head.

"No."

He looked toward the forest beyond the window.

"It just means I have three more mornings."