Chapter 139
In the next round, he decided to confine Cynthia to his mansion from the very start.
Cynthia the maid came to trust and follow Duke Wincastle thoroughly and quickly, so keeping her locked up was easier than expected.
When he accused her of being a thief and confined her to a room on the pretense of needing to keep an eye on her, she was frightened at first, but once she got used to it, she would cling to him every day for the six hours he visited her room, acting very familiar.
Segleninde found this odd, but not unpleasant. In previous rounds, whenever he pretended to be an ally, she would get friendly and joke around, but this time, Cynthia was even more affectionate than before.
At one point, the head maid remarked that she seemed like a girl who found her first love.
Love. He considered it the most meaningless emotion of all. An illusion, a contradiction born from the flawed systems of the body, nothing more. Cynthia was experiencing that herself. It was truly a pity.
But, as always, the end came.
On the day of the banquet, Maid Cynthia realized that a massacre had taken place, and the head maid, who had become like a sister to her, ultimately betrayed Segleninde and helped her leave the room. That’s when Cynthia learned the whole truth.
While Segleninde was unaware, Cynthia had been rescuing people and gathering them as allies to escape together. He gave chase relentlessly and caught her, confining her once more.
The head maid died by his hand at that time, too. She would be resurrected in the next round anyway, so he didn’t care whether his closest subordinate lived or died. Yet Cynthia, mourning the death of someone who had been like a sister—who wasn’t even truly human—desperately resisted the man she had once secretly liked.
“I absolutely refuse to live with you like this! Your mansion is just too dark and creepy! How could anyone live here, you crazy bastard!”
And so, once again, she succeeded in escaping.
In the middle of it, one of her allies, whom he thought he’d wiped out, barely survived and managed to free her from the room and open the mansion door.
From that round on, Segleninde decided to change his approach.
* * *
Maybe he should treat Cynthia just a little more kindly. The way humans do.
He changed the mood of the mansion. He spruced up the bleak gardens and transformed what used to be bizarre torture rooms and laboratories at the ends of the second floor into charming Spring Flower Garden and Moon Flower Garden. He even created more creatures to tend to those places.
He hired humans for Cynthia’s sake, but the creatures mistook them for food and ate them, so it was pointless. Still, Segleninde did his best in his own way to liven up the mansion.
He wanted Cynthia to stay here as long as possible this time.
Now, whenever Cynthia was absent, he spent his days in listless lethargy. He stopped pretending to be a nobleman and spent years in seclusion, waiting for another chance to summon Cynthia to this world.
He couldn’t call Cynthia whenever he wanted. The right timing had to be arranged, and it took a lot of preparation, like weaving a new fate and body for her.
He resolved to give her the best fate he could and make her a happy woman. That way, it would be easier for her to come to his mansion, and to prevent her soul from being pushed back into the real world, she needed to blend into this world as much as possible.
He would make the body as identical to her soul as possible—exactly as he saw her. He could change her hair or eye color as much as he wanted, but since she had such outstanding beauty, it would be a shame for even him to alter it on a whim.
Even while making all these preparations, he thought about Cynthia often.
Every moment without her felt dull and empty. Before, that was normal, but ever since meeting her, he felt as if she had become a part of his very roots, an indispensable presence.
So, this time, he decided he would make sure Cynthia could stay by his side for as long as possible.
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