My Possession Became a Ghost Story - Chapter 249
—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————
No. That’s not Gabriel. She said it was a puppet show. That was just a doll Lea created to mock me. The real Gabriel is in my arms, isn’t he?
Reminding myself of the warmth in my embrace, I hugged Gabriel even tighter. The slowly beating heartbeat calmed my excited breathing.
“As I said, I don’t have the power to create life. I can make a body similar enough like this, but….”
Lea playfully grabbed the doll’s head and shook it. The doll only blinked its blue eyes and moved its head as Lea manipulated it. I understood what Lea was trying to say. That was merely a doll, it could never become alive.
Lea released Gabriel and reached out into the air. The raven on her shoulder flew to Lea’s hand and thrust its head forward. Lea acted as if she would pet it, then firmly grabbed the raven’s nape. The raven struggled and flapped its wings frantically.
“Then what about the soul to dwell within it?”
With its throat seized, it was forced to speak, producing a completely cracked and scratched sound. And without hesitation, Lea brutally snapped the raven’s neck. The bird went limp. I couldn’t help but frown at the cruel scene.
When the raven fell silent, stillness settled around us.
In Lea’s grasp, the dead bird gradually distorted and compressed. Its legs broke, its body folded, and finally it became very small. About the size of a tiny bead.
With her left hand, now perfectly regenerated, Lea grabbed the doll’s throat. Recalling how she had just snapped the raven’s neck, all the hair on my body stood on end.
Lea fed the black bead to the doll and made it swallow. The doll’s eyes that swallowed the bead gleamed with life.
Life had been breathed into it. To be precise, Lea had put the raven’s soul into the doll’s body.
When Lea gestured, the doll’s form instantly changed back into a raven. The raven flapped its wings again as if asking what had happened.
It was the most disturbing puppet show imaginable.
“So what does what you just showed me have to do with me?”
The raven chattered again, conveying Lea’s words.
“Now that you’ve seen it, you’ll understand. It was the same when I made you. I filled Amaranth’s beautiful shell with my flesh. But there was no suitable soul to put inside. So I had no choice but to bring a soul from outside, not one of Rahel’s creations.”
A soul from outside? …This is strange. To my ears, those words sound like she’s talking about me.
“That’s right. It’s you.”
But you just said when you made Evangeline? I possessed her much later. It was after Evangeline had already died.
Lea watched me fall into confusion as if amused, then added:
“You are Evangeline.”
It was the final confirmation.
“…Me?”
“Yes. You.”
Did I understand correctly? So I didn’t possess her, but Evangeline was me from the beginning?
“Don’t you believe it?”
How could I easily believe that? I thought it was a possession story, but it was actually amnesia? It’s practically genre fraud.
I would have preferred it to be a joke, but Lea showed no sign of trying to persuade me. Her nonchalant attitude, as if simply stating facts, made her words feel even more truthful.
That I am Evangeline….
It didn’t feel real. How could it feel real when I have no memories? Besides, nothing would really change. After realizing this world wasn’t just a simple book, I had stopped distinguishing between Evangeline and myself. At some point, I just started treating it as my own body.
But think about it. Kanna shouts “Miss Evangeline!” and Pudding calls me “Lady Evangeline.” Most importantly….
“Lady Evangeline.”
There was someone who used to always politely call me Lady Rohanson, but then noticed when I opened my heart and started calling me that.
“Whatever you are is fine.”
Despite my warning, there was someone who fearlessly approached and ultimately told me it didn’t matter whether I was human, demon, or anything else. When someone calls me like that, how could I not be swayed?
Come to think of it, it’s even more infuriating. After luring me in like that, after promising not to get hurt, you’re trying to abandon me?
I had even briefly considered telling Gabriel my real name…? Huh? Wait, did I just think “real name”…? Suddenly, a sense of wrongness pierced through my entire body.
‘What is my name?’
I couldn’t remember what my name was before the possession. Does it make sense to forget your own name? It was strange that I only noticed this now.
It was completely erased, so much so that I wasn’t even conscious of it. This felt similar to how I lacked awareness of being Evangeline. So it seemed like someone had intentionally tampered with it.
I looked at the being I suspected was the culprit.
“My memory loss….”
“That’s right. I had a hand in it. To be precise, you didn’t lose your memories, you regained them.”
“Regained them…?”
I mulled over Lea’s words. Lea placed her hand, which had been cut off and cleanly regrown, on my head. Her kind smile as she stroked me reminded me of looking at Amaranth, making my stomach churn for some reason.
“Amaranth wanted a child who would love her. Ducklings imprint on the first thing they see when they hatch from their eggs, don’t they? So I made you a blank slate and bestowed a blessing upon you. To be able to love only one person. So that only Amaranth would be special to you.”
I had seen a similar passage in Amaranth’s diary. She said a being who would love her had been born. I didn’t know it meant this.
I couldn’t understand it, but I could accept it. You can’t just command someone to suddenly love someone and expect to control their emotions at will. So she must have intervened. By erasing my memories and manipulating my mind so that only Amaranth would seem special, turning that into love. What an inhuman way of thinking.
“That influence still remains in you, so you know it well.”
Ha. It was so absurd I almost let out a bitter laugh. There were more than a few things I could guess.
My defining this world, which I had never even read the original of, as simply inside a book. My treating people who were perfectly alive and breathing as mere printed characters—all of it was surely due to that influence Lea mentioned.
“After Amaranth died, you lost your purpose for living and eventually hanged yourself from a branch of the beautiful cherry blossom tree that Amaranth had cherished in life.”
Evangeline died seven years after Amaranth’s death. So did she spend those seven years drowning in endless depression, living powerlessly?
I swatted away Lea’s hand that was still on my head. Lea easily withdrew and straightened up. Even though she wore a gentle smile, it felt unpleasant.
More than her cutting off her own arm without hesitation or lacking eyeballs, the sense of alienation came from her inability to properly understand human emotions.
“Thus, your life, having already met death once, is no longer of value to me.”
We had come a long way to reach this point. Now I understood what Lea meant when she said I had a flaw. It was a world where taking one’s own life was a sin. No matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t be the flawless sacrifice mentioned in the spell book.
Ah. I almost failed from the very attempt to summon Lea. I was trying to offer my life to summon Lea, after all.
If not for Lea’s whim, instead of saving Gabriel, I would have nearly ended up in the newspapers, romanticized as a tragic love story of following one’s lover in death.
The bizarre sight of ravens crashing their heads against the window and dying was actually for me. No, wait. I shouldn’t mistake that sinister malice for good intentions.
The raven hummed a tune. Though it could mimic human voices, it couldn’t quite manage songs, so it was just cawing with musical notes, but it looked like it was thoroughly enjoying this situation and couldn’t contain itself.
As expected, Lea hadn’t appeared to help me but purely out of her own interest. Isn’t she treating me like her toy? She was probably just curious about how her byproduct would turn out. Just like a child flipping a turtle over and watching it struggle.
But one unresolved question remained.
I glanced sideways at Lea.
‘So why did Lea revive Evangeline—me—in the first place?’
—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————