A Tale of One Deviant (Book One)

Chapter 157: The Trial of Earl de Libellule

     I lifted my hand off of the servant I'd touched, trying to see what memories they held next.

     But while searching for the memories of that event, the one in which all the servants were rounded up inside save for the head servants...I could not find them.

     "I see," my eyes narrowed, looking at the bespectacled young man. "So it was you."

     Probably, no one had noticed in the flurry as the holy knights gathered up the servants, but a certain "head servant" was not outside with the few others there, or inside with the majority.

     I couldn't say I was surprised. At that point, everyone was suspect. Especially after seeing the memories of a few other servants known for spilling the tea, it wasn't hard for me to guess that it was him, for how he'd treated Magaris. In fact, it was kind of even obvious when staring at his face while frowning up at the ceiling with a kind of dead look in his eyes. Everyone in the manor was still frozen in place, save for the guards that I left alone because it would be bad if something happened and they needed to respond, so I could get a good look at the man that traded the peace of those around him for a reward that would never come.

     "Everyone knows the Church is built on falsities. They'd never have given you what you wanted."

     Of course he didn't respond. He couldn't hear me either, fainted and frozen as if he was a living statue. So I floated on to the next servant, and the next, and the next, until for sure Magaris was done and I was still delaying. But I learned a lot while looking at their memories, trying to piece everything together. I even went back outside to find Brownie, and found one of my most major shocks there, before capturing Sherfire back in the spell after our awkward goodbye earlier, and finding more there too.

     Dang...interpersonal relations are so tangly.

     It was a good thing I wasn't particularly close with a lot of people. Everyone I visited, from those I went to see on the Larjulias continent, to those in Zueltina, to those in Chardrent, or Venx, or heck, sometimes even Newone whenever I didn't find a pro-slavery idiot - all of those people were acquaintances that I visited, rubbed shoulders with when necessary, or just had lighthearted moments with when the time allowed.

     If I was as involved in my relations as people there were, always in the same circles and dealing the same drama, I'd have gone mad.

     So not being alone, but not being too involved. That seems like a healthy balance. And, there are escape routes, too.

     It was why I was sighing over the whole separation thing with "my family." If I'd just never gotten as close to them as I had, I wouldn't have been struggling so much to move on, then. If I'd just been a normal isekai protagonist, going off to be a prodigy and then adventure the world, then I wouldn't have had to worry about my background characters at my place of origin missing me because they would either say, "We understand," and wave me off, or want me gone for being as strange as I was...just as they did then.

     I see. So this is just an isekai with extra steps.

     And even then, I couldn't just separate completely. I had to look after my siblings, having set them down the path that I had. I wasn't sure how the earl would react to finding out that he had not just one Demon child, but three, so I had to be prepared to act for the worst.

     I had a nagging feeling that there was something I was forgetting while finishing up my memory searching, and the thought was almost upon me when thinking about my siblings being part Demon and our Demon-summoning father, but that was utterly disrupted when I lifted my hand off the latest maid I'd touched.