Resetting Lady - Chapter 35

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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The sensation of all reality before her eyes twisting was nauseating. Karen resented having her gun taken away. If the cause of her suffering was this man before her eyes, her own father, she would have fed him plenty of bullets. It didn’t matter if he was the only blood relative left in the world. Wasn’t he an enemy who must be killed beyond mere entertainment or curiosity? Wasn’t this a vicious act that made her entire life a lie? Covering up that deed with denial. Karen would not accept it.

“You killed Nancy.”

The Lord declared to Karen.

“And I am here before you now.”

He took Karen’s hand. She felt warmth. Relief spread through her. It was the same feeling as when she confirmed through Tom that the corpse had not disappeared. Yes, that’s right. A person was killed and a person died. Time flows from yesterday to today. If the world is stable and only she herself is insane. There could be no truth more stable than this.

“Why did you dispose of the body?”

Why did you steal the truth from me? Do you know what meaning that held for me? Tears came from her resentment. It was no different from taking away truth and reason from her and letting madness and irrationality dominate. That was not love or protection.

“If things get bigger, wouldn’t it be hard for you too? A child’s happiness is a parent’s happiness. Catherine and I only wish for your happiness.”

“If, if you wish for my happiness.”

Her voice caught. Karen disliked the middle-aged man before her eyes. His attitude of not speaking clearly, his behavior of silently cleaning up after her – it all made her feel disgustingly sick.

“You should have grabbed me and told me everything. That I was crazy.”

“What should I have done to satisfy you?”

“If I killed someone, you should have told me not to do such things. You should have locked me in prison. You should have held a trial and sentenced me to death.”

“How could your happiness be achieved inside a prison? You haven’t even started your life yet. You should live a life where you meet a man, get married, and have children.”

She was so dumbfounded she wanted to stamp her feet.

“If my madness is hereditary, it must have come from Father.”

The Lord shrugged his shoulders sheepishly at those words. And then his response was quite something to behold.

“You resemble your mother more than me.”

“…Do you know what you’re saying right now? Father and Mother ruined my life. I can’t even think for myself at the most basic level. Look at me now. I have nothing I can trust right now. This isn’t about whether to trust people or not, whether to love someone or not. You said you’d erase my memories and give me a stable life, but it’s no different from smashing my head with a hammer.”

Marriage, love – what kind of dreamy nonsense was this? How was it different from putting someone to sleep with drugs and saying, there, now it’s peaceful?

“Such things can’t be important to me right now.”

“They are important.”

The Lord declared.

“Very important, Karen.”

“Listen here, Lord.”

At this rate, wasn’t there no need to continue the conversation? Karen put strength into her captured hand. She dug in her nails. Red marks appeared on the Lord’s hand, but that was all.

“What are you doing?”

“…I should be angry. But even that doesn’t work properly, how absurd. Ha… Do as you please. I’ll continue killing people, so try to stop me if you want to stop me. If things go wrong, I’ll confess to Lord Raymond.”

“I won’t let you.”

“Then confine me. Try stopping me, binding my arms and legs, and finding another hypnotist to replace Nancy. This time I hope you’ll tell me a more beautiful story than the fantasy of falling into a book and dying over and over for 100 years. It would be interesting to wake up and find myself fallen into an emperor’s bedroom and become a consort, or fall into the distant past and change the world.”

Karen tried hard to be sarcastic. She would see her father’s grief. And she would not forgive herself. If she committed a crime, she would be punished. She had not started this without being prepared for that much. That was courtesy to her resolve, her life, and her struggle.

But the Lord focused on one word rather than her resolve.

“100 years?”

“Perhaps more than that, if it’s new memories, just erase them completely and make me an idiot.”

She felt like she would die from emptiness. She wanted to burn her entire body. Karen wanted to burn her father before her eyes to death. She wanted to tear him to pieces. But more violently than that, she found herself disgusting. Were her efforts, her years, her memories all meaningless? Were they merely illusions? Were they worthless? The conclusion of madness was truly convenient.

Just kill me instead.

“…100 years. Is that the time you have lived?”

That’s enough now. It’s long. She wanted to end everything. Karen thought of suicide methods for escaping reality. Should she hang herself, take poison, or shoot herself in the head with a gun?

Poison after all?

“I’m sorry I can’t give you a proper answer.”

“How about we all just hold hands and live a secluded life in a monastery instead of doing useless things?”

“Catherine told me not to interfere with your life as much as possible.”

“I don’t want to hear stories about a mother I don’t even remember.”

The Lord released Karen’s hand. He looked somewhat shocked by her words. It was all a den of mental patients. What a family that made her sigh involuntarily. But the Lord looked at Karen with a dejected face.

“Catherine loved you. Very much.”

“Do I need to know that right now? Father erased my memories so I can’t even be moved by such love. What exactly do you want? Will you continue helping with my murders like you’ve done so far? That would be interesting. Very good. That’s what I wanted. While you’re at it, please kill that Verdick right away. Isella is a bonus. It would be wonderful if Lord Raymond died too. Of course you’ll do that for me, right?”

“Karen.”

“Why won’t you do it? What exactly do you want to do and how?”

Karen glared at the Lord. It was frustrating. What she knew was too little and the Lord only hid things. And yet he looked at her like that now. Who was judging whom?

“…Now even I am getting tired.”

“I’ll express my sympathy.”

“Don’t speak about Catherine in that way. Catherine did that for your happiness. But…”

Tears flowed from the Lord’s eyes.

“I, I’m tired now.”

“…”

And the Lord covered his eyes with his hand.

“Catherine really loved you. And she was the same as you.”

“I suppose my madness was inherited from Mother.”

“Don’t mock Catherine. She, your mother…”

The Lord had difficulty continuing his answer. Emotion welled up in him. He caught his breath for a moment, then continued speaking.

“She used to say the same things as you. That this world… was like a book to her. And that she was actually older than she appeared.”

Karen stopped breathing.

“And, you too… would live like her, she said.”

“Catherine, so Mother experienced the same symptoms as me?”

“Yes.”

“…Can you be certain?”

At Karen’s suspicious question, the Lord showed his displeasure without filter.

“Those were my wife’s words. How could I doubt them?”

Surely my father isn’t an idiot.

Karen had unfilial thoughts inwardly. If it had been like any other life she had experienced, she wouldn’t have emerged even after death – mother Catherine who never appeared, and father who caused conflicts through incompetence. They had always been of that level of importance.

But those words just now, the words that she wasn’t the only one. They were words that could never be ignored.

“I don’t know what I should say to be accurate. And in the end, won’t you doubt everything? In that case, rather… She was right. I should have made you forget everything and start over from the beginning.”

“Lady Catherine.”

“Mother.”

She had to make an effort to hold back what felt like unspeakable words toward the Lord who corrected her words even in this situation. Was the Lord this kind of person?

“Yes, my mother.”

She glanced sideways at the portrait. How wonderful it would be if the person in this place was Catherine instead of the Lord. She sighed involuntarily. Why was it the Lord, a third party, who was alive? If those words were true, wasn’t her dead mother the only person in this world who could understand her?

“Do you have evidence that she lived the same… repeated life as me?”

“In the end, you’re being suspicious.”

“…”

“Aren’t you that evidence?”

How wonderful it would be if I could believe as innocently as you. But Karen found it difficult to calm her pounding heart.

“She said that anyone else might doubt, but you couldn’t.”

“Is that the end of it?”

“It wouldn’t be a phenomenon that needs explanation. I wouldn’t be able to do it either.”

In the end, those words were right. It was painful to try to understand something that couldn’t happen.

Karen herself was that evidence. Knowing it directly, having lived on repeating pages, how could she doubt this? If she were to figure out the principles of the world she was living in through reason, she wouldn’t reach it even after agonizing and researching for ten thousand years, let alone a hundred. Karen pressed her forehead against her clasped hands. Her head was hot.

“Those words are right.”

Whatever answer she heard, it would be difficult for her to accept.

Even if her father suddenly claimed to be a god himself and tore the sky to bring down lightning in an absurd development, Karen wouldn’t be shocked thinking a god had descended, but would first worry whether the medicine she took last night had hallucinogenic components. The years had made her that way. During those years, only suspicion had been her friend.

“That’s right.”

“…If it could be solved with logic…”

If it could have been. Karen calmed her ragged breathing.

“Why did you hide it? If you had told me… wouldn’t I have been more, much more… comfortable?”

For an immeasurably long time, days of only chewing on thoughts inside the bookshelf had continued.

If she had known that there was one more person who experienced the same problem as her, if there had been one hope, those years wouldn’t have been so painful. But the Lord denied the hypothesis.

“When you were already ten years old, you heard about it and couldn’t bear it. You said a predetermined life had no meaning.”

“Then you should have left me as an ignorant child from the beginning…”

“Isn’t this the result of that?”

Once again, silence descended upon the room.

“If Mother was like that too, was my maternal grandmother the same? Is this something that has been passed down through generations?”

“I wouldn’t know that much.”

“…I see.”

The couple hadn’t even shared that level of conversation with each other? It was frustrating that she couldn’t get the answers she wanted. At least it was some comfort that the Lord also looked anxious, just like her. If he had been leisurely observing her, nothing could have been more infuriating than that.

But now that they both realized their discomfort, the conversation didn’t flow well. They knew different stories, yet both tried to voice their own complaints, so the rhythm of their conversation was off. A conversation that had been severed for 100 years was strange. Awkward. Painful.

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