The Outer God Needs Warmth-Chapter 243: Unfortunately, I got attached to it (8)

The day after I turned someone into a Harvester and greeted the person inside, countless packages were delivered to my house as a "gift."

Most of them were clothes.

It’s strange, though. The trends will change in just six months, so what’s the point of giving me these...?

For the record, the clothes I wore were provided by the royal family, so I don’t think the intention was to mock me for wearing ragged clothes.

I’ll wear them if they’re given to me, but shouldn’t all the gratitude go to Hipion?

Or maybe this is all that was left after taking everything they could.

Anyway, Tiana Amphibia isn’t returning to her country, but instead, she plans to attend the academy here. From the conversation I overheard with her father, James Amphibia, she says it’s because it might become dangerous again if she returns to her country now.

By the way, the person who cursed along with the light inside her body has died.

He was a sorcerer by profession.

How did I know? Well, not all memories come to me when warmth enters like when we made the contract, but when warmth enters, memories also come with it.

So, the memory gained with the warmth of the sorcerer isn’t complete.

What I did manage to learn is that he was a sorcerer and made money by cursing people and tormenting them.

But a sorcerer doesn’t work alone.

The curse itself was cast by the sorcerer, but he was part of a group.

In other words, there’s a group of sorcerers.

Sorcery in this world doesn’t just happen instantly when you cast a spell; the process is complicated and takes time.

Because of this, sorcerers formed groups to benefit from the process, and the basic unit is a family.

A family.

Well, it would be difficult to create those insect-like things from the ground up each time.

So, they take requests from families and use sorcerers within the family as projectiles.

The sorcerer I learned about in the memory only knew how to cast spells. I couldn’t determine exactly how the family system worked.

If their style is to complete a request once received, then no matter how many people go back home, they would become endangered again.

Knowing that, Tiana Amphibia enrolls directly in the Royal Academy.

Hmm.

It’s quite strange.

The situation here is similar to that of the two families in this kingdom and the Maldobia Kingdom they live in.

In this country, Aurora, who regained her health during Harvest Time, is also eagerly preparing to enroll in the academy.

That means starting this semester, high-ranking people from various countries will be enrolling.

I’m curious to see how things will unfold.

By the way, when Kanna heard this news, she sighed deeply right away, and a few days later, when Polaris heard it, she lamented about wanting to survive.

The day school starts is steadily approaching.

This morning, Victoria was practically pushed onto the train by her parents.

Beatrice and Morris seem to be trying to fix the relationship between me and Victoria again.

But the words I overheard were a bit funny.

Though they seem suspicious and inhuman, they said the same thing.

It was all correct, and the right one is Victoria.

But what can I do? I’m disguised as a human, right? So it’s not strange for others to see me as a human.

Also, I never claimed I wasn’t human, so I didn’t lie.

Do you know?

Humans can empathize with objects by assigning them personalities.

If something talks and acts like a person, it’s much easier to empathize with it.

Of course, there are people who can’t empathize. It’s because they have congenital disabilities or low intelligence that prevents them from empathizing.

In reality, empathy is a very difficult skill.

First, you need to distinguish between others and yourself. A famous example is the mirror experiment. When an animal, one that perceives through sight, is placed in front of a mirror, its ability to recognize itself teaches us about its intelligence.

Then, you have to be able to calculate the future. At the very least, you need to recognize the fact that there’s cause and effect. Not many creatures can understand that jumping into muddy water will dirty their clothes and that the germs in ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) the mud could make them sick.

And then, you need to be able to see the world from another’s perspective. This is the hardest part. It requires imagination. If intelligence is low, it’s difficult to imagine. This is why humans were the only dominant species in the faded world of memories.

However, in other worlds, there are many creatures with higher intelligence than humans, probably because of magic.

Anyway, once you can do all of that, only then can you empathize.

An average person can do this. In other words, it means that the average human intelligence is quite high.

Because of this, humans can project a “self” onto objects and exchange emotions with them.

But this is where problems arise.

If something has a human form, it creates the necessary environment to understand any action.

And that’s where monsters like me can slip through the cracks.

There is a certain safety net in the form of the uncanny valley, which animals don’t experience.

But, if the appearance is flawless, that doesn’t work very well.

Haven’t you often heard that beauty reduces guilt?

Just like the difference between an ugly old man putting his hand on your shoulder and a beautiful woman doing the same.

Even if you’re not extraordinarily beautiful, if you have clear skin and symmetrical features, you don’t seem that ugly.

The clones that grow rapidly also come out with surprisingly clean appearances, and that’s the reason for that.

There’s very little twisting during growth, so they come out exactly as their genes intended.

This body is similar.

That’s why I act like a person. There’s no need to act maliciously. If I act slightly good, and slightly mischievous, and behave like a person, everyone will naturally think I am one.

They don’t think I’m doing anything terrible beneath that surface.

In fact, even though I’ve opened up everything I do, no one’s raised any problems, right?

Of course, if humans knew what it meant to have warmth drained like by primitive Celestial Lords or Daegon, they would change their attitude.

But when will they find that out?

Hehe.

By then, the world will already be filled with Harvesters and their descendants.

By the way, I must have acted so human-like because, every three days, a maid, no, people, come to visit me while working at my lodgings.

“Ah, you came again! You can’t just leave this like it is!”

“Let’s organize this one by one. I noticed when I came last time that the wardrobe was empty.”

“I gave you a little hint when you came that day, and I’m glad you came.”

If you are reading this translation anywhere other than Novelight.net or SilkRoadTL, it has been stolen.

They all rush to the empty room where the clothes were piled up, and as they unfold each piece, one person asks me how to wash each fabric.

When I tell them, they look very pleased.

Hmm.

It’s strange, though. I barely talked to them a little during the break, but it’s odd.

I don’t know what my future will be like when I graduate from the Royal Academy.

So I don’t think they’re approaching me with any other intentions.

I’m not sure.

But it would be nice if we could get along.

Like a person, I told them to have dinner, then went outside to buy some things.

There’s a commercial district near the house.

So it was easy to buy stuff.

The food prices aren’t cheap, and about half of the shops are empty, but that’s because I’ve received a lot of money.

I don’t have any specific use for it.

So, while I’m at it, I might as well spend it.

And that night, I ate dinner at a noisy table.

Meanwhile, what’s going on in the fourth world?

“Start.”

Zeber orders.

“Observation experiment on the purple mutation process. Experiment number R008. Starting now.”

The assistant echoes his words and starts giving commands to the Chimera.

The Chimera manipulates the controls, and the machine descends, removing the steel blindfold.

Then, a trembling person stands before me. Beyond that, all I can see is steel. Now, it’s impossible for me to see inside the laboratory with my own eyes.

The entire area is filled with machinery, and everything connected to me is carried out by the hands of these machines.

I am trapped in the middle of a huge machine mass, as if I’m stuck inside a metal cage. And at regular intervals, the machine opens, and people are inserted.

Then, through metal needles embedded in their brains, a shock is transmitted.

And then I recite the contract.

People become Harvesters.

Their skin changes to porcelain and then shatters, revealing a completely white figure inside.

Right now, I’m observing the process of creating Harvesters, but until recently, I was the one being observed.

After the coward fled and burned to escape.

Zeber added more equipment and completely isolated me.

Then he began investigating my body.

He took off my skin, checked my organs, even pulled out one of my eyeballs and regenerated it, and attached an arm to my abdomen.

In the process, I also learned about my own body.

The body I entered tries to maintain an ideal state.

Any missing parts regenerate, and it strongly resists toxins or diseases. Of course, there are limits, and it consumes enormous amounts of calories for that.

I learned this from the Chimera Harvester, but when calculating the calories consumed by the cells taken from the body, it seems that the calories being injected right now would make it impossible to live due to the excessive consumption.

Somewhere, warmth is being drawn from, and Zeber suspects that it’s from me. But there’s one problem: he doesn’t know where the warmth is coming from.

Even if he pricks needles into every part of my body and draws blood, he doesn’t find any blood with a particularly high amount of calories.

To sustain the body, it sometimes undergoes impossible mutations. When nutrients were intentionally added into my abdomen, my body mutated to absorb them.

Normally, it would just pool inside the body and decay or cause inflammation, but in my case, it was absorbed.

Such maintenance processes are so strong that hormonal changes don’t occur properly. My body doesn’t change at all.

It’s as if it’s remembering its form and trying to maintain it, as Zeber evaluated. While it stubbornly maintains its shape, it’s strange that intense mutations occur when necessary.

Then, the next experiment was to see how far my body could go.

Originally, my body is identical to that of a Chimera. Since both creatures were cultivated the same way, biologically, they share the same body structure.

So, I tried attaching Chimera limbs to my body. It wasn’t the original body part but the abdomen.

And?

The arm in my abdomen slowly got sucked inside my body. According to Zeber, I digested it. And the arm regenerated up to the elbow. Unfortunately, it was soon cut off again.

Here’s what Zeber and I found out:

One. My body tries to maintain its original form.

Two. If necessary, it mutates to obtain the resources needed for survival.

Three. Cells consume 30 times the usual calories for that purpose.

On the note, it says there’s no such calorie intake, yet I’m still alive.

For reference, the 30 times figure was calculated when I took my cells and cultured them in a medium, then compared the nutrient depletion rate for regular cells and my own.

In short, it means regular cells consume enough nutrients for 30 days in a single day.

It’s not like a graphics card, but the performance has increased, and now it’s sucking up energy like crazy.

Anyway.

After these experiments on my body ended.

Zeber, while creating the Harvesters, continues to observe the mechanism.

I don’t really care what they do with my body. But I have one complaint.

The Harvesters they make.

It would be nice if they just released them instead of grinding them up in a machine...

But since they’re scared of me, I guess that’s not possible for now.

Cowards.