I Became A Thief Who Steals Overpowered Skills - Chapter 40

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 40. First Tears

‘Thank you.’

Bianca parted her lips with difficulty, the words of gratitude emerging like a struggle.

Three years since she had recovered her Emotions.

Through Emotion, Bianca had come to know suffering, had come to know pain.

And only now did she understand that her entire past had been stained with anguish.

A cursed child born by killing her mother.

Because of this, Bianca had been cast out in Hadenharze, and in the end, was used as a pawn in a political marriage.

Everything she had endured at such a tender age was marred by pain.

‘When I had no Emotions, I didn’t know. But those experiences—they were truly agonizing. So in truth, I never cared about the family at all. A family that gave me only pain—it made no difference to me whether it fell or not.’

As she spoke, the corners of her mouth began to rise slowly.

‘But that day, what my sister said while hiding me—those words held me back.’

In that moment, blood spilled from Bianca’s lips.

Krash faltered, but she continued even as blood dripped steadily from her mouth.

As if there were no one else to tell this story to.

‘…That day, I couldn’t understand what my sister said. That she hated me and yet didn’t hate me. That what she hated was herself for hating me. That I was not someone who deserved to be hated.’

An incomprehensible expression of Emotion.

Just as a person cannot be defined by a single quality, neither can Emotion be defined by one alone.

Emotion is always rife with contradiction.

One can endlessly despise a person and yet, somewhere within, embrace that very person.

Emotion was something that could not be expressed as a singular thing.

‘Before I gained Emotion, I didn’t understand what those words meant. I didn’t know how difficult it is to divide Emotion into categories. My sister must have felt the same.’

Jenika had hated Bianca.

Yet she had hated herself for being unable to do anything but hate her.

Having lost her mother at such a young age, Bianca was the only outlet Jenika could use for her emotional anguish.

Even knowing that Bianca bore no fault, Jenika could not erase that vague hatred.

So she came to despise herself terribly.

And in the end, she confessed this truth to Bianca.

I hate you and yet I do not hate you.

What I hated was hating you.

You were not someone meant to be hated.

And she, caught in that contradiction, hid Bianca that day and died in her place.

‘Emotions were unmistakably painful for me.’

A world riddled with pain.

Yet it was not the ash-gray landscape she had seen when emotions were absent.

For all its pain, it was the first time it became the driving force that carried her forward through life.

Perhaps that was the burning of an emotion called vengeance.

‘And yet, more terrible than such pain was the Curse.’

Tears ran down the corner of her mouth.

‘Krash.’

Krash gazed at Bianca.

‘I am freer now than I was when I was cursed.’

Krash could not fully comprehend what Bianca was saying.

He had not lived the same life as she had.

Bianca’s Eye Doll Curse had long since vanished, devoured by Krash’s other Curse.

So he could not know what it meant to have no emotions.

‘That’s why I wonder. If I had only discovered emotions a little sooner, would I have talked more with Jenika? With you and Father, would I have grieved together over Mother’s death that I never even witnessed, and tried to move beyond that grief?’

Bianca had not known emotions.

So she had defined everything Jenika showed toward her as only hatred.

‘I’ll never know. I understand nothing of it. I was a doll with emotions locked away back then. And yet, the very fact that I can wonder “what if” now—that is a thought I can only have because I have emotions now.’

Within her crumbling smile.

‘But at least, in one thing.’

She slowly closed her eyes.

‘With you, perhaps… as your betrothed… I might have… gotten along… a little better…’

With those words, Bianca’s voice came to an end.

Along with the falling tears, Bianca’s eyes slowly closed.

Seeing this, Krash opened his mouth.

‘…Bianca.’

No answer came back.

It was the end of Bianca.

Tears slipped slowly down her closed eyes and froze against her iced legs.

Krash moved forward one step at a time.

Then he drew a dagger from his pocket.

Crack, crack—

Krash chipped away at the ice that bound her body with the blade.

The cold bit into his hands, drawing blood, but he didn’t flinch.

After breaking through the ice for some time, Bianca collapsed into Krash’s arms.

Krash carried her lifeless body and laid it on the bed in the room.

Silence hung heavy in the chamber.

Krash dropped to the floor before the bed and closed his eyes in quiet.

‘Damn it all.’

He felt anew just how rotten this cursed world truly was.

The Bianca in his memory was gone now.

In her place stood the Bianca before him—present and alive.

The one who could have thrived in that future she had imagined, the one who might yet realize it.

That Bianca from that day.

And so Krash had kept her near.

He owed her a life.

So he gave her what he had failed to give before.

As she had wished in her final words—to live together as betrothed should—Krash walked beside Bianca.

And their bond was different now, undeniably changed.

By her own measure, Krash believed they had grown quite close.

“At home, emotion was never something I needed.”

Bianca’s voice echoed softly through the room.

It was younger then, still tender and unguarded.

“But beside you, everything is different.”

Bianca had changed, standing at Krash’s side.

Beside him, she had discovered what emotion truly meant, and found a strange peace there.

No one hated her; there was someone who held her with warmth.

A home was something like this.

A place where you could sleep in peace, unafraid of tomorrow.

For Bianca, that place was nowhere else but beside Krash.

“Being next to you is so painful—knowing my face and heart won’t move, no matter what.”

When he smiled, she wanted to smile with him.

If he wept, she wanted to weep with him.

If he raged, she wanted to rage alongside him.

But she could not.

Her Curse would not grant her emotions.

“With anyone else, I thought it was better not to feel anything at all.”

Emotions brought only suffering; their absence was a kind of mercy.

“But with you, I want to feel.”

Only one person.

Before him, everything changed.

“With you, I want to rage and weep and laugh. For you.”

Yet even as she said it, her head shook with desperate urgency.

“But I don’t want you to lose your emotions. I don’t want to see you become like me. If you don’t smile, I don’t want to smile either.”

A contradiction wrapped in contradictions.

But there was no other way for Bianca to speak it.

So she held Krash’s hand and bowed her head slowly.

She knew all too well that her contradiction was an insoluble problem.

“Don’t worry.”

At his voice, Bianca’s shoulders flinched.

“A Curse weakens when its target isn’t the intended one. Even if you transfer your Curse to me, my emotions won’t fade. I’m an expert in Curses—you can trust me on that.”

He would never fall to something as simple as the Eye Doll Curse.

He had overcome far worse Curses than this, again and again, and learned to wield them himself.

At his words, Bianca slowly lifted her head.

Her expressionless face was agony—a thousand emotions struggling to break free, held back by will alone.

Let her be selfish.

He was the kind of man who accepted even that selfishness.

Then.

“Krash, please.”

In this moment.

At least in this moment.

Her blank expression shattered.

She wanted to smile and thank him for saving her.

She wanted to rage at him for getting hurt because of her.

She wanted to cry and apologize for what had happened because of her.

The Eye Doll.

It was unmistakably a Curse that erased Emotion.

Yet in truth, the Eye Doll’s Curse was less about erasing Emotion than suppressing it.

It was a Curse that pressed down Emotion until one could barely feel it at all.

So people believed Bianca had no Emotion.

But in this moment, her Emotion was.

Overflowing beyond what even the Eye Doll could suppress.

“Please give me back my Emotion.”

Bianca’s words came to an end.

Having heard every word, Krash lifted the hand that Bianca had grasped.

“You don’t even need to ask.”

Bianca appeared in Krash’s eyes.

A girl with white hair, always expressionless.

Despite her young age, her striking beauty only deepened the impact of that impassive face.

A memory surfaced.

The day he first met Bianca—even his twisted heart had thought how lovely she would be if she smiled.

Yet to the very end, Krash never saw her smile.

He only witnessed her meeting that end, drowning in profound sorrow.

‘What if, then? If I gain Emotion and experience it myself, wouldn’t I be able to understand what is more unbearable?’

He remembered Bianca—she who sought to gain Emotion to know what suffering truly meant.

But she was no longer here.

Only.

Now there was only Bianca, who sought to gain emotion in order to understand happiness.

That was the future she had changed through her Regression.

It was the future Krash could offer to her, now that she understood the paradox of emotion.

Krash’s black hood fell away, revealing Bianca’s Dial.

“I intended this from the beginning.”

[To become ‘the most precious person’ to Bianca.]

The final Dial.

[Condition Target]

[‘Krash Balheim’]

Click—

That Dial was already open.

Tap, tap—

In that moment, tears began streaming down Bianca’s cheeks.

Not from something in her eye, but tears born of sorrow.

They flowed without end, as if a floodgate had burst open.

Her face gradually crumpled into weeping.

She who had lived her entire life expressionless could not smile properly—it felt strange to her—yet one truth revealed itself.

“Sob, sob… Krash, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being me. Sorry, sorry. What do I do? What do I do?”

So that in some distant future, she would never need to cry.

So that all the tears she might shed in a lifetime could pour out today.

“Cry all the tears you never could before. Cry them all here.”

Bianca buried her face against Krash’s small form.

Krash quietly wrapped his arms around her, cradling her head.

That warmth was the most peaceful thing she had ever known.

The girl wept that day for the first time, as if being born into the world anew.

That cry—which should have been blessed by all at her birth—

Now resounded within the warmth of a single person.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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