Berserk of Gluttony (LN) - Volume 8 - Chapter 30

Chapter 30:

Sea of Souls

A VOICE CALLED MY NAME. It wasn’t a voice I’d ever heard before, but it was somehow nostalgic nonetheless, a certain melancholy echoing within me.

“Fate. Fate… Come on, sleepy head! Get up! You can’t stay in bed all day!”

I opened my eyes and found myself in the house where I’d grown up in a small village west of the merchant town of Tetra and past several mountain ranges. The barren land made it difficult to raise decent crops, but we at least managed to grow the medicinal herb miel, which provided us with enough income to make a modest living.

My body ached when I tried to get up. All the farming yesterday had really done a number on me.

“Ouch…” I muttered. “I feel so strange.”

It was like being wrapped in a cocoon; all my senses were dulled and cloudy. I felt as though I had forgotten something important. The impression stuck like a bit of food between my teeth.

“Fate! Are you out of bed yet?”

“I’m coming,” I replied.

I put on my clothes and opened the door to find my father and a woman I’d never seen before. She looked puzzled by the expression on my face.

“What are you doing? Your breakfast will get cold.”

“Oh, sorry, Mom.”

Mom? Wait, did I really just call her that? 

“What is going on with you today? Dean, say something!”

“Let him be. The boy’s still half asleep. Sit down, Fate.”

My father gestured to a chair, and I sat across from him at our well-worn table. As soon as I did so, all my previous doubts seemed to vanish.

“Let’s eat,” said my father. “It’s nothing fancy, but it’s a home-cooked meal.”

“Looks great,” I said.

The scent of fresh-baked rye bread wafted through the air, and though the herbal soup was a touch bitter, it complimented the bread wonderfully.

“Once you’ve finished, we’re going straight to work,” said my father. “I’ve been hunting so much that I’ve ­neglected the fields.”

“I can’t help but worry about you, doing all that hunting all the time,” my mother said.

“No need to fret. It’s my job. There’ve been more monsters around recently, and the village chief won’t stop yammering about it.”

“But you’re the only one who goes hunting!”

“That’s because I’m the only one who can.” My father hugged my mother. “I’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

“I suppose there’s Fate, too, right?” my mother said, looking at me.

“Me?” I asked.

Me? Hunt? Wait, what skill do I have again?

“Don’t tell me you forgot you inherited your father’s spear wielding skill. Are you still dreaming?”

“Oh, I did?”

“What are we going to do about you, son?” muttered my father, ruffling my hair.

Doubt nagged at me again. Was I forgetting something?

“All right, breakfast’s finished. Let’s get to work,” said my father.

“Come on, Fate,” added my mother.

The two of them left the house. I put a hand to the door to follow them but paused in the entrance. Something inside me wouldn’t let me go any farther. I heard my parents call out to me.

“Come on, Fate.”

“Hurry!”

Their voices were coming from right beside me even though I still stood at the door.

“I…” I started before trailing off.

Something wasn’t right. Why was my mother’s face so unclear? Why did it look like a veil covered it? Why didn’t I know my own mother’s face? My worries about where I was and what I was doing were magnified. But why? Things are going so well.

I was lost in a sea of incongruity. Then a toneless voice rang in my head. A voice I knew very well. A voice I had heard countless times. A voice I had even grown sick of. And yet, I couldn’t bring myself to hate it entirely. I didn’t know what it was saying yet, but I assumed it was just saying what it always said: Gluttony skill activated… 

Huh? Memories flooded me, clearer now. I remember. I remember! Where am I? The village I had once called home no longer existed. It had been razed to the ground during a gargoyle attack. It was gone, and it would never return to what it had once been.

The world around me audibly crumbled away as my memories returned. The house of my youth disappeared like sand on the wind, and beyond its walls lay a blood-­red world.

“Fate, keep it together! You’re going to be trapped here forever!”

Greed’s words shunted me back to reality. I must have fallen unconscious when I’d leaped through the Door to Distant Lands. 

Everything around me was red, like the world of Gluttony. The two worlds were like two sides of the same coin.

“You had me worried there for a moment.”

“How long was I out?”

“I have no idea. This place is different from the world we came from.”

“Are Myne and Eris okay?”

“Neither of them will go down without one hell of a fight. But you have more important things to worry about, like yourself. What happened?”

“I had a dream. It was about my youth, but it wasn’t a nightmare.”

It’d felt so real. My mother was still alive. My father was fine. And I wasn’t the bearer of Gluttony. It was plain, boring even, but that was by no means a bad thing.

“This world is interfering with you in some way. It may be showing you those kinds of dreams on purpose.”

“All the souls, you mean?”

“It was brought about by all of those who make up this place, I’d say. As a bearer of Gluttony, you’re especially sensitive to them.”

It was almost as if Greed was talking about people. Did that mean that the lights floating around us were…?

I reached out and touched one of them. Someone’s memories flashed through my mind. They were just fragments, and I couldn’t understand them completely, but they were the memories of a warrior. I saw his last moments: He’d fought against and was eventually killed and eaten by monsters. I even felt his pain all the way down to my bones.

“Ugh…”

“Didn’t get very lucky that time,” muttered Greed. “That ain’t a good way to go.”

“Everything floating around here… They’re all human souls?”

“No, not just that. Look at that one.”

This soul was bigger than the one I had just touched. Gah! This one isn’t even human!

Overwhelming hatred flowed through me. These were the memories of a monster, its thoughts focused purely on hatred for humans and a desire to devour whatever it found. The monster had strayed from its pack, leaving its turf to attack and eat humans. It traveled alone, wandering for reasons that were unclear. The monster was eventually surrounded by warriors and slain by a holy knight. But the monster’s hatred never wavered for a moment, right up until its last breath. Even after the memories had ended, vestiges of that hatred lingered within me, making me feel ill. 

The monster’s desires had been instinctual. Monsters carried an inherent hatred of humans and an urge to devour them. This one in particular was more driven by these feelings than others.

“How was it?”

“It was the worst.”

“That’s how the vast majority of monsters think, how they feel. Even after thousands of years, their hatred for ­humans has never waned. They have drowned in the emotion. There’s no reason behind it anymore. And peace cannot be found for those who have lost all reason.”

“Is that why humans fight monsters?”

“If that was how things were always meant to be, and if that were how the world itself had been constructed, what would you do?”

“But that’s ridiculous. What reason could there possibly be for having us kill one another?”

“What you see here in his world are the results of that.”

I looked around. This place was overwhelmingly enormous and nothing but red as far as the eye could see. It was literally the size of a whole other world. But what purpose was there to all these countless souls gathering to construct this place?

“As the bearer of Gluttony,” Greed said, reading my mind, “you should already know the answer to your question.”

The sword then fell silent, waiting for my response.

I thought about the souls I had just touched, and the itch I had felt in my Gluttony as I did so.

“Is that even possible? All these souls, they…”

“Yes. They carry stats and skills.”

It was exactly like the world of Gluttony, though on a completely different scale. But why do this?

“Fate, have you ever tended fields before?”

“Of course I have.”

As a young boy, I had raised herbs and a small amount of vegetables. I plowed the hard earth, planted seeds, and gave them water and fertilizer. Not all of them grew. Some crops withered due to bad weather. Others rotted. The work took perseverance. And sometimes, no matter how hard you worked, it was all for nothing.

“What if you could plant skills in order to harvest stats?”

“Greed…”

“And what if this was the place where harvested souls were stored?”

Warriors and monsters fought using their skills. They leveled up, their stats growing through the process. And now Greed was telling me that battles of life and death were the same as farming produce?!

All living things eventually died, whether through battle, age, illness, or unforeseen accidents. The list of ways to go was endless. Skills and gathered stats formed the vessels we called souls, and this was where they gathered after death. As they continued to be stored here, the world grew.

“By attempting to open the Door to Distant Lands, a small number of souls flowed in reverse, which resulted in resurrections of those who were once dead.”

“You mean…”

“Now that the Door is open, the flow will attempt to return to what it always was. And as long as the Door remains open, it’ll occur at a frightening pace.”

Greed was right. A change had occurred in this world, and the souls were now moving slowly, as if drawn to something.

“Let’s move. If we follow them, we’ll find Libra and Roxy.”

“Then let’s go.”

I clenched Greed tightly and trudged toward the place where the souls were gathering. 

I’d heard Gluttony’s voice earlier. Why had it spoken? Why had it called out just as I was about to be trapped in this place? It never usually spoke to me unless my Gluttony skill actually activated. I had traveled to Gluttony’s depths, and even now that voice was a mystery to me. Where in the world had it come from?