Majo no Tabitabi - Volume 8 - Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

The Curse of Immortality

When she and I met for the first time, she was already dead.

Now, that’s not some figurative expression—she was absolutely, positively, literally dead.

I’d encountered her corpse during my travels while on my way to my next destination. I had just casually remarked to myself, “Ah, it’s getting a bit tiresome flying by broom. Perhaps it’s time we took a short break,” and had brought my broom down under a single tree that was standing alone in an open field.

It was autumn, and a cool breeze was blowing slowly through the air.

I sat down in the shade of the tree and opened up my map of the region to look over my route as I rested.

“……”

But apparently, someone had gotten here before me. Someone else’s bags were already sitting under the tree.

But there was no sign of their owner.

The luggage looked like it probably belonged to a woman, and a pair of women’s shoes were sitting neatly just beside the largest bag.

“……”

What’s more, there was a letter sitting on top of the bag. I picked up the letter, which was practically begging me to read it, and broke the seal.

The message inside was simple.

Life brings nothing but despair. This is the end for me. Good-bye. If anyone finds my body, please fulfill my final wish. Throw it into the ocean.

—From the traveler, Little Matryoshka

It was a last will and testament.

“…Suicide?”

Could it be? In a place with such a nice view?

I had my head tilted in confusion when—

Directly overhead, the tree branches creaked.

Hey now, what in the world?

At that point, I hadn’t thought to question how unnatural it would have been for someone to leave their will in a place like this… Then I looked up.

“……”

And there I saw the figure of a girl about my age.

Her coral-colored hair was just long enough to touch her shoulders, and just like me, she was wearing a robe. She had probably been a mage.

Her eyes were a faded gold.

I couldn’t tell whether the dullness was something inherent, or if it was due to her current condition.

“……”

Her legs swayed gently in the breeze over my head.

She wasn’t riding on a broom. And she wasn’t sitting on a tree branch.

She had tied a rope to a thick branch, secured it around her neck, and hanged herself. She must have despaired of life, as the letter said. Being the one who found her body, I supposed she would have wanted me to throw her in the ocean.

She was, in the moment I first met her, already quite dead.

I had no words. I had unfortunately seen quite a few dead bodies in my time, but a death by hanging was still a first for me.

And so I’m ashamed to say this, but in that moment, my eyes were wide with shock, and I couldn’t get my brain to form a single thought.

I was completely dumbfounded. I was trembling a bit.

“Um…excuse me?”

So even when a raspy voice came from above me in the tree, I figured I was probably hearing things.

“You there, traveler… I’d like to ask something of you…”

I looked up with a start, and the moment I realized that the hanged girl was staring down at me, I let out a hysterical “Huh?!”

“This rope is getting rather uncomfortable. Could you perhaps help me down…?”

“…Huh?!”

That uninspired reaction was the best I could muster when a girl hanging by the neck suddenly asked me for help.

“…Um, you’re alive?”

I was the one who raised this fairly obvious question.

Even with the rope still tied around her neck, she nodded nimbly.

“Unfortunately yes, I’m alive, as you can see.”

……

Well, she can speak, so I guess she really is alive.

With a single slash, I cut the rope and rescued Matryoshka, or whatever her name was.

“Ah…I thought I was a goner…,” she said with a sigh. It was hard to tell if she was being serious or not. “Well, thank you for saving me. I’m Little Matryoshka.”

She bowed once to me. Her eyes still looked dim, but the girl in front of me was clearly living and breathing.

But in that case, what on earth had I witnessed earlier? I was certain that she had chosen to kill herself in despair, as her last will and testament had stated, but…

“So this is embarrassing, but I suffer from an affliction that prevents me from dying, even if I elect to self-terminate… For some reason, ever since about a hundred years ago, nothing can kill me, and I don’t age, either. It’s a real problem.” She told me this while laughing and playing with her hair, as if she was embarrassed.

She won’t die… No, she can’t die.

It wasn’t an easy story to believe, but the girl before my eyes made no attempt to offer any other explanation.

“……”

Wait, but…

Even supposing for a moment that that’s true…

“…So why did you choose to hang yourself in a place like this?” I asked reproachfully.

Did you really have to do it in the middle of an empty field? I mean, what were you planning to do if I hadn’t come along?

Matryoshka looked a bit embarrassed and averted her eyes. “Well…how should I put this…? Look, this place has great scenery, doesn’t it?”

“That’s true, I think the view is really great.”

“Isn’t it? So the thing is, well, since I’m immortal, I can’t really settle down anywhere, so I’m always traveling.”

“Uh-huh…”

I see… If you’ve been ageless and undying for a hundred years, it’d be easy to see why you’d have to keep moving.

“So for some reason, whenever I see beautiful scenery like this, I suddenly get the urge to die.”

“Oooo-kay…?”

Huh? What is she talking about?

“So before I knew it, I had the noose around my neck, you know?”

“That seems like an awfully trivial reason to kill yourself…”

“The desire to die just came over me, you know?”

“Do you…do things like this often?”

“No, no, of course not!” Matryoshka laughed. “I only manage to kill myself about once every three days.”

“Sounds pathological to me.”

“Of course, I fail a lot more often…maybe once an hour?”

“Yeah, there’s definitely something wrong with you.”

Disturbingly so.

I recoiled from Matryoshka.

“Oh, that’s right!” she said, as if something had suddenly occurred to her. With an expectant expression, as if she had hatched some bright idea, she continued, “Come to think of it, you…um—”

“Elaina. The Ashen Witch.”

“Right. Elaina, are you a merchant?” She glanced over at the luggage that was tied to my broom.

Today was unusual. I didn’t usually carry so much with me, so that must have given her the wrong idea.

I shook my head.

“I’m just a traveler.”

“Oh, a traveler! Just like me!”

“……” Well, that much was true, but I wasn’t too thrilled about being compared to her. “Yeah, so what about it?”

“If you don’t mind, how about you and I travel to our next destination together?”

“…Ehh…” I grimaced openly.

“It’ll be great, won’t it? Come on, it’s like I always say, no road to hell feels long with good company!”

“You’re awfully enthusiastic about dying, aren’t you…?”

And awfully enthusiastic about dragging me into it if you can… That’s even worse…

“Well, all jokes aside—”

Didn’t sound like a joke to me…

“I’m not very good at using magic right now, so I’ve got to ask you to come with me.”

Huh?

“You can’t use magic, so what?”

What are you getting at?

“For a while after I die, my body feels heavy and I can’t use magic too well, you see.”

“……”

Maybe the reason she chose this place to commit suicide was that she thought she could snag a passing mage who had grown weary of flying on her broom and decided to stretch her legs for a while… No, it couldn’t be something like that! That’s gotta be crazy talk, right? Right?

Though I also don’t have a good reason to turn her down… Besides, I’d hate to think about her killing herself again if I refuse, so…

“Sigh…well, all right, fine,” I replied with exasperation.

“Seriously? Hooray!” Matryoshka threw both hands up in celebration. The gesture made her seem, for a moment at least, like a girl her own age. I had to remind myself that she had been alive for a hundred years.

“All right, come on.” I readied my broom, while putting on an air of reluctance. “I’ve got a lot of luggage with me today, so you’ll have to sit on top of my bags. Is that all right?”

I had business to attend to, so at the moment there was a lot of stuff tied to my broom. If we were going to ride together, there was no other way than for her to ride on top of it all.

“That’s fine! I might not look like it, but I’m used to being treated like an object.”

As she spoke, she hopped up on top of my bags.

“Used to being treated like an object?”

“Yeah, I mean it’s happened a lot, actually. After I kill myself, people mistake me for a regular corpse and stuff me in a coffin.”

“……”

I wasn’t sure what to do with that information.

“Of course, it’s not like I just up and kill myself on a whim, you know? I do regret the follies of my younger days.”

“……”

Did you forget about how you just hanged yourself by the neck…?

“Come to think of it, I’ve never once killed myself with magic…”

Ignoring Matryoshka as she mumbled such ominous things to herself behind me, I launched my broom into the air. With all the extra weight, it struggled just to maintain walking speed. By the time we reached our destination, Matryoshka had already muttered twice, “…! I bet I would die if I fell from this height, right…?”

……

It took us two hours to get there.

When we finally reached the border, the guard there said, “Welcome! The Ashen Witch, Elaina, I assume? We’ve been expecting you!” as he looked over me and my luggage, then bowed once. On this occasion, the place that I was visiting—the Anroonie Republic—had already been informed that I was coming.

While I was visiting the neighboring country, I had been commissioned to transport some bags to Anroonie. In other words, the people of this country weren’t actually waiting for me. It would be more accurate to say that they had been awaiting the arrival of the luggage strapped to my broom.

“Oh, and that young lady would be…your traveling companion?”

Of course, he obviously had no idea who Matryoshka, the girl still sitting on top of the packages, was supposed to be. I had picked her up on the way, after all.

“Yes, she’s my companion.” I nodded.

“Yeah, I’m deadweight.” Matryoshka also nodded.

……

Are we sure this girl doesn’t have an affliction where she’ll die if she’s not constantly thinking about suicide…?

Well, even if she does contemplate suicide, in the end, she’s immortal, so she can’t die anyway. I really don’t get it.

“Understood! So that’s two of you, the witch and the deadweight, right? Welcome, welcome!”

But in the end, the guard must have wanted what was in the bags too badly to mind who was carrying them, and he quickly allowed entry for two people, one perfectly respectable witch…and Matryoshka, who was acting incredibly suspicious.

…Is this place crazy, too?

So then, since we had arrived in the Anroonie Republic, I was sure that meant our time traveling together was at an end, but Matryoshka kept following me, showing no sign of leaving my side even for a moment.

“What’s inside all these bags?”

“It’s medicine,” I answered. “Apparently, there’s some rare disease going around in this country, and they’ve been importing medicine from other places.”

“Rare disease?”

Matryoshka tilted her head in confusion and looked around at the city.

There were people coming and going down the streets. Frowning people, coughing as they went. People sitting in corners, staring up at the sky. People walking unsteadily, looking like they might fall down any moment… There were some normal, healthy-looking people among them as well, but with so many who looked unwell, it was as if a pall hung over the place.

“I think that the people walking around outside are the ones whose symptoms are still mild. Once it gets bad, they don’t seem to be able to go out anymore.”

“I see…” Matryoshka was grinning from ear to ear.

“Why do you seem a little bit excited…?”

“Oh, it’s just that I’ve never experienced death from disease.”

“…By the way, how long are you planning to keep following me?”

“Where are you going from here?”

“……” I looked away from her and pointed across the road. “I’m taking the medicine to city hall.”

“Then is it okay if I stay with you a little longer?”

Uhhh…

“…It’s fine, as long as you’re not thinking of doing anything reckless.”

“No worries. I was just hoping that I could get them to infect me with a little of that disease.”

“And you don’t think that counts as something reckless…?”

“Ah-ha-ha.” She laughed at me in my exasperation, then answered, “For me, fulfilling a death wish is an everyday thing.”

I wonder how many years she has spent committing suicide over and over again?

“What an awful way to spend your days…”

“Yes, I wish I could be freed from this curse, but…oh well.”

“……”

I tried to think about what meaning could possibly be contained in those words, but it didn’t require that much thought, so I simply answered, “…I’d like you to please stop attempting suicide in front of me, okay?”

“Come to think of it, don’t they say that a cat will find a place to hide when its time of death is near?”

“…Please also refrain from killing yourself immediately after parting with me.”

At city hall, a cat was meowing.

“Why is my natural enemy in a place like this…?”

It was in my nature to avoid cats, so the moment after I opened the door into the city hall, I raised my guard.

Sensing my apprehension, Matryoshka tilted her head in puzzlement. “Huh? What’s going on?”

A government official said, “Oh! We’ve been waiting for you, Madam Witch! Is that the promised medicine?” He prompted us to come inside, not paying much mind to my behavior.

I say he ushered us in, but it was more like he brought the medicine in.

“……”

Figuring that wherever we were going would be just beyond the entryway, I put on a prim face and allowed myself to be shuffled deeper into the building.

We were led to a reception room, where I took a seat across from the official and handed over the bags. “This is the medicine you requested.”

With a thud, I dropped a considerable quantity of medicine on the table.

“Let’s see what we’ve got here.” The official opened one parcel and held up one of the bottles packed with powdered drugs. When he shook the bottle gently, the powder inside made a dry rustling sound as it moved around.

“…By the way, Madam Witch, who is your companion?” The official’s interest shifted from the medicine to us.

I suppose he wanted to know that she was not going to cause any problems.

“This is…”

…just my traveling companion, I was about to say—

“I’m Little Matryoshka, that’s me-ow!”

—when I was interrupted.

“…!”

My nemesis, again…

There was Matryoshka, holding the detestable beast that had been encamped in front of the entryway. “Meow, meow,” she cooed as she played with the cat’s two front limbs. “Uh-oh, kitty punch!” she teased as she prodded my leg with its paw pads.

I felt a shiver. I felt a shudder.

“Seriously, what do you think you’re doing?” I gave her my best scowl. My expression was especially nasty because I was suppressing a sneeze.

“Well, it was so cute that I just—” Matryoshka blatantly ignored my angry face.

“Ha-ha-ha, he is cute, isn’t he?” The government official seemed to think that our exchange was joking between friends or something. Grinning broadly, he said, “There are many cat lovers in our country, you see, and I am definitely one of them.”

What was that? Is this place hell?

The girl by my side hadn’t seemed the type, but she said, “What a heavenly country this is!”

Perhaps I might have appreciated the cat more if just being near the thing didn’t send me into sneezing fits. I might have even wanted to pet it, but as things were, that was an impossibility.

“By the way, what do you think of the medicine?”

I returned to the matter at hand, trying not to look upset or irritated.

“Well…I can’t say whether it will be effective or not until we try it…”

“……”

I suppose not.

“But with only this small amount…even if it does work, it may not be enough to save us now…”

The official replaced the bottle of medicine on the table with a clunk.

“Unfortunately, there are already twice as many infected people as we could treat with this medicine. And that’s not even considering any future patients…”

“…Is it that bad?”

The official nodded sharply at me. “Yes, well…”

And then he started to tell me in bits and pieces about the situation.

The Anroonie Republic had no famous products to speak of, and its scenery was nothing special. In short, it was an entirely ordinary place—but there was one thing that its people were proud of. There was a single incredibly beautiful pond in Anroonie, in the exact center of the country.

“Meow, meow!”

This very beautiful body of water was well known in the country as Iris Pond, named after a witch who had once helped the city flourish. A statue of the witch had been erected in the pond, by which I mean that Iris herself had commissioned a statue in her own likeness. Just before her death, she had stood before the statue and left behind these words: “The water of this pond shall become a medicine to cure all illnesses. The water of this pond shall become holy water!”

“Meow, meow!”

Incidentally, the witch Iris apparently died a normal death, from normal illness.

So then, Iris Pond was supposed to be filled with holy water, but after the witch died, the water became cloudy. Though the waters had once been so beautiful and clear that you could see all the way to the bottom, now it was a murky purple color. Even the statue of the witch Iris seemed as if it were lamenting the current state of the pond and looked alarmingly close to collapsing.

No one knew why this was happening. But one thing had become clear. When the water clouded over, a rare disease spread through Anroonie. The pond had transformed into a toxic bog, and it was sealed off from the public. But many of the people had already drunk the poison. A majority of the population had contracted the illness.

It was a strange poison. It didn’t always result in death. There was no pain. But the people who drank it soon lost the ability to move their bodies.

Even now, a great number of people in this country were suffering, paralyzed by disease, the official said.

“Meow, meow!”

……

Before I knew it, there were tears rolling down my face.

“Are you crying for my homeland…? What a kind witch you are…”

The official started weeping, caught up in the emotion.

“No, this isn’t what you’re thinking…”

As I had been listening intently to the official’s story, Matryoshka had continued prodding my cheek or my arm with the cat’s paws to emphasize every important point. My allergies had gone into overdrive.

I was having a physical reaction to the cat, and the cat also seemed unhappy about the situation. Matryoshka aggravated the cat until it scratched my leg and arm. That was why I was crying.

I certainly wasn’t feeling sorry for the people here.

“Anyway, thank you for the medication. I don’t know yet whether it will be effective, but—now we have some hope against this strange disease.”

At any rate, with this exchange, my job here was finished, so I was ready to get moving, but…

“Meow, meow!”

Matryoshka, for whatever reason, was enamored with the cat and refused to leave city hall until she had meowed at it…

……

…for several more agonizing minutes.

“What an awful experience…”

By the time we left the city hall, my legs and arms were covered with fine scratches, and my entire body was throbbing with pain. What’s more, thanks to the cat, my eyes were still full of tears, my nose was running, and I couldn’t stop sneezing. It was the worst. I wanted to hurry up and find lodging so I could sleep.

I was in an incredibly bad mood, but beside me, Matryoshka was in such a good mood, she was humming a little tune.

“Do you dislike cats, Elaina?”

“Obviously, yes.”

“I thought maybe you liked them so much it brought you to tears…”

“My body rejects them so strongly it brings tears to my eyes.”

“……” After staring vacantly at me in my exasperation for a moment, Matryoshka said, “I see, I see, so it’s one of those cases—Elaina, you’re just like I used to be.”

“…? What do you mean?”

“Long ago, I also couldn’t stand cats. If I touched one, I would start to tear up.”

“……”

“But after I spent a whole day cuddling them, I was fine! Now I’m like this! I don’t have any problems at all, no matter how much I touch them!” Matryoshka crooned, waving her hands around.

What a carefree girl.

“…Well, you haven’t been scratched to ribbons, have you?”

She didn’t have a single wound on her arms or legs. Apparently, I was the only one the cat had disliked. Little jerk.

“Oh no, I got scratched plenty, too!” Not making any effort to conceal her good mood, Matryoshka kept on walking ahead of me as she made this inscrutable statement.

“You say that, but the only thing covering your body is cat hair. I don’t see any scratches anywhere.”

When I said that, she whirled around. “That’s because when Little Matryoshka gets hurt, it heals right away.”

“……”

“Elaina, being immortal and ageless means that I come back to life when I die, but it also means that I heal immediately if I get injured. That’s why I’m like this…” She waved her hands at me again. “For a long, long time, I haven’t known injury or illness. I think that the instant any abnormality occurs in my body, it takes it upon itself to return to its original state. Even if I get infected with the disease, my body will probably purge it right away. I also don’t age. Same thing happens if I get hurt.”

As she spoke, Matryoshka pulled a knife out of her pocket and held it against her fingertip. “Watch.”

When she pressed the edge into her skin, red blood from her finger pooled along the blade.

However, the blood stopped immediately after she’d pulled the knife away, and it didn’t flow anymore, or even trickle out.

“So you can see what a pain it is to have an immortal body.”

“But your blood doesn’t disappear when your wounds heal?”

“That’s right. Even though the wound closed up, there’s still blood, which is so strange.” She looked around restlessly, then asked, with a tilt of her head, “By the way, do you have a handkerchief or something? It feels dirty to have blood on me, so I want to wipe it off.”

“…Why did you cut your finger even though you don’t have a handkerchief?”

With a sigh, I wiped her fingertip off with my handkerchief. Sure enough, once it was wiped clean of the blood, there wasn’t a single scratch on her finger, just as if it had never been cut by the knife in the first place.

“Thanks, sorry. I’ll buy you a replacement, so please forgive me, heh-heh.” Matryoshka laughed.

“……”

In the end, it seemed like she was just using that as an excuse to stay with me longer, but oh well.

“…Sure, it’s fine.”

While I was at it, I used the handkerchief on the wounds I’d gotten from the cat, too.

Before we continued our tour of the town, I tossed the handkerchief, stained with our blood, into a nearby trash can.

A bloody handkerchief is just trash, after all.

So then, the result of all this was that I had to throw away my handkerchief, and as she said before, Matryoshka was going to buy me a new one, so we set out to look in the many shops and boutiques around town. But partway through our shopping, I gave in to an urge and made a suggestion.

“Honestly, it would make me happier to have you buy me a book rather than a handkerchief…”

“Huh? A book? Okay then. Which one do you want?”

“All right, this one.”

The bookstore we were in had an autobiography of the witch Iris, so I got Matryoshka to buy me that one.

And then we headed together to a café.

At the café, Matryoshka sat across from me and was staring at the autobiography of the witch Iris that I was holding in my hand. “What are you going to do with a book like that?” she asked.

“I thought I might learn something about this witch Iris.”

Since the medication I’d brought was obviously not going to be enough to solve this epidemic, I was sure that tomorrow I was going to receive a request, either to go somewhere else to retrieve more medicine, or to figure out some other way to help with the crisis. So I figured I ought to go ahead and learn a bit about the source of all the trouble—Iris Pond. This book ought to contain a few clues.

“You’re taking this seriously.” Matryoshka rested her chin on her hands and stared at me with a foolish look on her face.

“Matryoshka, you’ve lived for a hundred years. You’ve never visited a country plagued by a disease like this?”

“I haven’t, no,” she answered bluntly. “After all, I may have lived a hundred years, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m so much better than young people like you living now, Elaina.”

“……”

“For a hundred years, you see, I…pretty much just wasted time.”

“……”

“So if you’re hoping I can lend you some wisdom or insight, you’d better think again, Elaina. It’s pointless to expect much of anything from me.”

“…You certainly don’t think very highly of yourself.”

“Why would I? It’s not like I’ve done anything other than live a long time.” Her tone was flippant, but no matter how cheerfully she behaved, when I first met her, she had been hanging by her neck… She probably didn’t have the slightest expectations for herself, either.

“……”

I was still silent. In order to avert my eyes from the girl putting herself down, I turned my attention to my book.

There were all sorts of things written in the autobiography, from Iris’s early upbringing to her many achievements into the present day. It went on and on. It even mentioned Iris imbuing the pond with magical medicine when she said, “The water of this pond shall become a medicine to cure all illnesses. The water of this pond shall become holy water!”

The appendix precisely outlined the ingredients that went into the medicine in the pond.

……

“Um, it looks like the spell Iris used on the pond is written in here…”

Matryoshka narrowed her eyes intently. “…Why would something like that be written in an ordinary book that anyone can purchase?”

She makes a good point.

I was intrigued and read the recipe thoroughly.

“…Well, it seems she made the recipe public because she wanted them to replenish the pond if its medicine ever stopped working.”

“Like a secret recipe soup or something, right?”

But if you simply publish instructions to make a medication that works against all diseases, how will you ever make any money? I mean, I suppose the moment she turned all the pond water into medicine, she made the cure worthless…

But now it’s become a poison pond. It’s like the opposite; instead of curing all illness, it only spreads disease. And the statue that was erected there in her lifetime seems to be dissolving into the pond and becoming one of the ingredients. How awful it would be to drink something that had dissolved bits of statue in it…

“Ah!” As I was studying the list of ingredients for the medication, I noticed one thing. “There’s a mistake in how this is mixed!”

“A mistake?” Matryoshka repeated my words and tilted her head quizzically.

I nodded. “It uses ingredients that are dangerous when combined.”

“What happens if you mix them?”

“Something terrible.”

“More specifically…?”

“I think you’ll get a pretty good idea if you take a look around.”

The witch Iris had probably been thinking of the future of her country and wanted to leave behind a fountain that could cure all illness. But she had made a fatal mistake and created a toxic swamp instead. I couldn’t think of a more wretched outcome.

I slammed the book closed with a sigh.

…Well, now I understand the source of the problem, but that doesn’t do anything to help the people who are suffering from sickness.

After taking a short rest at the café, we bought some bread from a roadside stall and rudely ate it while walking.

We didn’t have any particular destination in mind, or anything we especially wanted to do, but we walked around for a while, and before we realized it, we had arrived at Iris Pond.

Perhaps her story had been on our minds.

“My, my,” Matryoshka marveled as she munched on her bread.

“What have we here?” I munched away on my bread beside her.

Before us was the pond, an eerie purple color just like in the government official’s story. A fence had been erected around the pond so that no one could get in, complete with a sign that stated, ENTRY PROHIBITED.

“This looks baaad.” Matryoshka kept chewing.

Just as we had heard, in the exact center of the pond stood a lone statue, the one apparently erected by the witch Iris.

“Sure does,” I said, chewing away. “Even supposing the medicine does work, I don’t think this water will ever be drinkable again.”

The ragged statue was missing its arms, its legs were dissolving, its face was slowly crumbling, and overall, it looked like wax that had begun to melt and lose its shape. It wouldn’t be long before the statue had completely dissolved.

“Everything comes to an end, Elaina. That’s true for this bread, and for Iris the witch’s statue, and for this pond. Even Iris’s life was the same. The end comes for everything, no matter what it is or what shape it’s in.”

Matryoshka stood next to me and popped the last bite of bread into her mouth as she added, “…Except for Little Matryoshka.”

I didn’t feel like heading back to a café after eating, so I decided to find lodgings and stay in the room.

There were many inns in this country, but since I had my hard-won payment for transporting the medication, I decided on something a little extravagant. I decided to stay in the most expensive room in the most expensive hotel in the city.

I have a tendency to go to extremes. If I have money, I’ll use it up, and if not, I’ll revert to a simple lifestyle. Since I lead such an unstable life, of course I don’t really save up any money.

“What a huge room…! Amazing! What is this place?!”

By the way, there was an extra person staying with me this time around. To use her word, I had taken on some deadweight.

The suite had several rooms inside, typical for something of this price, including a bedroom, a bathroom, and a living room. It was less like a hotel room and more like a small apartment.

After running around and looking at everything, Matryoshka asked, “But is it really okay? Elaina, you’re paying for my stay.”

“It’s fine, I really don’t mind.”

“Little Matryoshka doesn’t mind camping outdoors or whatever.”

“I wanted to talk with you a bit more. There are some questions I’d like to ask you.”

Besides, it would be awkward to have an acquaintance choose homelessness to save on hotel charges.

“Questions?” She tilted her head from where she lay on the sofa.

Let’s get straight to the point.

“Why did you become ageless and immortal?”

“Hmm…” She turned around to face me and answered, “So it is bothering you?”

“Yeah, well—” It’s not that I wanted the secret for myself. But I didn’t understand how she was able to live without dying. Most importantly, I wasn’t able to comprehend why she was attempting suicide on a daily basis.

“It’s kind of a long story, is that all right?”

And then, little by little, she began recounting the tale.

Matryoshka had been born about a hundred years earlier, but even she didn’t really know the reason why she had become immortal.

The place where she was born was a small, remote village, but it was a commonplace, totally ordinary village, and she was raised there without wanting for anything.

She came from a family of mages, so as a matter of course, she learned magic and used it as anyone would and lived a normal life.

She never considered herself special or different.

She was sure that she would simply grow up and get married normally, have children normally, then grow old and die normally.

So she studied magic normally and chose to live her life as a normal mage.

However…

“…Matryoshka, you stay young no matter how much time passes.”

“You don’t change at all, do you…?”

She had just turned twenty when her father and mother said these things with smiles on their faces. Her outward appearance hadn’t changed in the slightest since she was about sixteen years old. However, there were plenty of people who maintained a youthful appearance even into their twenties, so she had figured she just had a baby face.

However, even as she turned twenty-five, and then thirty, she didn’t age visually at all. Her appearance was permanently stuck at sixteen. Not a single thing changed.

All the people around transitioned into adulthood. But she was forever in between, appearing to be neither an adult nor a child, watching as the country and the people around her changed with the years.

When she turned forty, her parents passed away.

But as always, she still looked sixteen years old.

“…Matryoshka, you stay young no matter how much time passes.”

“You don’t change at all, do you…?”

Just before their deaths, her parents looked her over and told her this again. But all the goodwill had left their words. She could tell that, in their eyes, she had become something alien.

And it wasn’t just her parents. The people in her village began to look at her differently, too.

“That’s Matryoshka over there.”

“I hear she’s forty years old, but she still looks so young.”

“She hasn’t changed at all in years…”

“I’m jealous… I wonder how she maintains her youth…”

Over time, other people had stopped seeing her as a fellow human. She could see that in their eyes.

“No question about it, she must be sapping the life energy from everyone around her.”

People even began coming up with wild accusations.

Nobody wanted to get close to her. She had already stopped being treated as human.

“…This is bad.”

When she noticed how the people in her village were looking at her, she fled her hometown.

After that, she traveled through all sorts of places.

At first, she was traveling to find a cure for her condition. She was on a journey to find someone who could fix her body and make her age normally. But to skip right to the conclusion, as was clear from looking at her present self, she hadn’t run across anyone capable of curing immortality.

And not only that, in the countries she visited, the minute that it became clear that she was immortal, people would inevitably try to use her for their own ends.

“I want you to let me study you, so that I can cure your immortality.”

In one country, a mage conducted all sorts of experiments on her in the name of academic research. It started with drawing some of her blood, then cutting off her arm, then breaking her leg. Then the mage tried drinking her blood.

That was how Matryoshka discovered that any injuries she suffered, no matter how grave, healed immediately.

Each and every one of the mages who approached Matryoshka said they wanted to heal her, but what they actually wanted was to take her immortality for themselves.

Unfortunately for them, even if they stole Matryoshka’s blood, not one of them managed to become immortal.

“Oh…! That must be the power of a god! It’s only fitting that you should rule over our country…!” Sometimes people would be enthralled by her undying nature and would try to make her the head of their country.

“Why don’t you become infected? Could it be, the plague is in you…?” Since being immortal also meant that Matryoshka didn’t fall ill, some people saw that, and in countries where sickness was spreading, rumors would spread as well that she was the carrier.

She passed through many different countries, but no matter where she went, being immortal meant that she could never stay long.

Once her immortality became public knowledge, she would be a target for bad people who wanted to use her, and if she tried to stay long, the people would begin to find the ageless girl creepy.

Eventually, she gave up on settling anywhere, and she decided to travel and leave everything to chance.

She grew to hate living and even threw herself into a river in an attempt to die. But as expected, she couldn’t die, no matter what happened. The day after she had jumped into the river, she awoke as normal at the bottom of the cliff. She tried slitting her wrists, and hanging herself, but in the end, she was always called back to this world.

With no desire to live, yet unable to die, she continued to wander.

In the sixty years since she’d begun her travels, Matryoshka had rarely used magic. Even most of the spells that she had studied so extensively were entirely forgotten by now.

“Elaina, I lost my will to live a long time ago.”

“……”

“I’ve got nothing. I’ve lived a long time, and I have nothing to show for it. Even if there are a lot of people suffering from disease, I’ve lived for a hundred years, but I don’t have any knowledge that can cure them. I’ve spent a pointless hundred years alive and still lag behind you, a girl who hasn’t been alive for even two decades. That’s why I want to end it already, but I can’t even do that…,” Matryoshka murmured from the sofa.

She ought to have been able to learn something in her desperation. She ought to have been able to become a wiser and more powerful witch than any other. She had had an excess of time. If she had wanted to, she ought to have been able to do anything she desired.

But I suppose she hadn’t been able to muster up the motivation.

Humans try so hard only because they know that there is an end after all.

And so she hadn’t been able to muster the effort. There hadn’t been anyone for her to compete against. No one had ever been able to understand her, and at the same time, she hadn’t been able to understand other people, either.

“I just hate everything already.” She laughed in a self-deprecating tone. “Little Matryoshka has no reason to live, Elaina.”

No matter how cheerful she might have acted, she couldn’t drown out the anxiety smoldering deep in her chest.

It seemed like an extremely unhappy way to live.

However—

“I can’t possibly imagine that, in a hundred years, you haven’t learned anything at all.” I just shook my head at her. “I also can’t imagine that you have no reason to live.”

“……”

Matryoshka looked at me silently.

Her eyes were filled with insecurity.

“…All right then, what can I do, Elaina?” she inquired of me in a whining tone.

So I answered her, clearly and concisely.

“You can die.”

I suggested something that she knew how to do perfectly well already.

“You just told me that you have no reason to live, but—you do have a reason to die.”

The next morning, Matryoshka and I visited city hall again.

The cat came up to us and meowed, just as it had the day before. But in sharp contrast to our previous meeting, the government official greeted us with an extremely tired appearance.

“…Ah, Madam Witch. Welcome… I was just thinking of summoning you…”

The official’s face looked as if he had seen the end of the world.

“Is it all right if I hold this cat?” Matryoshka asked abruptly.

“Ha-ha-ha…go ahead… Hold him as much as you like…”

The official had completely lost his spirit. Just by looking at him, it was immediately clear what had happened during the day while we were heedlessly sightseeing around town.

“…This way, please.”

He showed us, two humans and one cat, into the reception room.

“…Thanks.”

I had come to city hall to find out if the medicine I’d brought was working. But there was no need to ask. The answer was obvious.

Because on the table of the reception room sat a huge quantity of as-yet-unused medicine.

“It’s truly unfortunate, but…this medication hasn’t shown any effect on the rare illness running rampant through our republic…”

“I see.”

“Apparently it’s a rather troublesome disease… It doesn’t seem possible to clear it up with only normal medicine. We had such high hopes, but…”

“……”

The official let out an exaggerated sigh, then asked me, “Miss Witch…what can we do…? If this continues, we will lose many citizens…”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. I am not a witch who specializes in disease, so it wasn’t easy for me to answer his hopeful inquiry.

“If the medicine doesn’t do anything, then I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.”

So I shook my head and answered honestly.

“Oh no…”

Right now, there were probably many people suffering from this disease. It would be a terrible tragedy to lose so many.

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we can’t come up with some solution for the problem of this illness,” I said.

I had come here because I thought I might be able to make a breakthrough and help the situation. If I really thought it was impossible, I would have snuck out and escaped the city right away.

“…!” The official leaned forward eagerly. “C-can you really help?!”

“Sure, yeah.”

“But how…?”

I didn’t answer.

Instead, I took the cat that Matryoshka had been holding into my lap.

Since I had gone to the trouble of staying, I had decided to try out something here that I had always wanted to do at least once.

As I played with the cat’s two front paws, I said, “You can look forward to finding out once we go to the pond, meow!”

“……” The government official was silent.

“……” I was silent, too.

“……” Matryoshka looked at me with a serious face.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“…Um, I just got carried away.”

Seriously, what am I doing?

I felt like crying, but the tears didn’t come out.

Neither did any sneezes.

Iris Pond was just as it had been the day before: filled with purple sludge. It was absolutely filthy. It looked like drinking from it would kill you instantly.

Standing before the pond, I realized something that I hadn’t noticed the day before. There was a rotten, muddy stench hanging thickly in the air around the water.

“Ew…the smell is nauseating. How awful…,” Matryoshka said, frowning.

“It sure is. It’s really rotten, huh.”

“……” She looked at me and fell silent. Her eyes seemed to be wondering, Are we seriously going through with the thing you said yesterday?

“……” I also looked at her silently. With my eyes, I aimed to communicate, Of course. We’ve come too far to complain now.

“…Huh? Maybe you’re thinking that I don’t have to do it after all?”

“I’m not thinking that at all. Now, please get on with it.”

“Eh, but…”

“Do it.”

“I don’t want to… I’m scared.”

Before long, the official, who was watching our exchange from behind us, spoke up and asked, “Um…is everything all right?” but I totally ignored him.

“If you don’t do it, we can’t make any headway.”

“You say that, but… Look at it, it’s super dirty!”

“It sure is.”

“If I drink from it, I’ll die!”

“You sure will.”

“…Do I really have to drink it?”

“You sure do.”

I nodded decisively. “We went over this yesterday, didn’t we?”

“……”

She continued protesting, “Umm, but…,” and, “Doing something like that is a little…,” and, “I don’t wanna…” She obviously wasn’t a fan of my plan and kept trying to come up with an excuse to back out.

I gave her a pat on the back and said, “You’ll be fine, so drink up.”

It still took about ten minutes after that for her to resolve herself to the task, though.

“I understand! Fine, yes, I understand! I should just go, should I! I should go!” With a complicated look on her face, Matryoshka headed toward the pond. “All right, here I go! Grrrah!” She jumped in.

“Oh.”

I wondered this when I first met her, too, but why is she so positive when she’s doing something negative?

The day before, I had asked her to please drink some of the pond water.

“…Um, Miss Witch, what is she doing…?” The official’s eyes were wide.

“…She jumped into the pond, didn’t she?”

She had sent up a splash of purple filth.

“…Um, I think she’ll die if she jumps in there.”

“I think so, too.”

“You asked her to jump into the pond and die…?”

“No, I asked her to drink some of the pond water.”

“Um, Madam Witch, drinking that water will certainly kill her…”

“…To tell you the truth, she has a death wish.”

“Um…a death wish…?” The official’s gaze was focused on the pond. “…But, Madam Witch, she’s clearly asking for help…”

Right in the center of the rippling water’s surface, Matryoshka was struggling to stay afloat. She was even crying and appealing to us for help. “Ah, I’m dying! Oh no…death…stench! Waaah…!”

“…Looks that way.”

“We don’t need to help her?”

“Let’s wait a bit longer.”

“But, Madam Witch…”

“Yes?”

“…She’s already gone under…”

“She sure has.”

Looking at the purple pond, we realized that Matryoshka was nowhere to be seen. Instead of a person, I could only see bubbles.

“…Um, I’m pretty sure that if we don’t hurry up and get her out, it’ll be too late.”

“No, let’s wait a bit longer.”

“But, Madam Witch…”

“Yes?”

“Something just floated to the surface. Is that…?”

When I looked, somebody was bobbing facedown in the pond.

“So she died, huh?”

“She really died, didn’t she?”

“All right, I’ll go get her.”

It seemed like it had been long enough, so I pulled out my wand, and with a levitation spell, I hauled Matryoshka over to us. Her arms and legs dangled loosely as she floated through the air, and I laid her on the ground. She had certainly done her best to gulp down as much water as she could.

After coming out of the pond, Matryoshka’s sodden corpse dried right before our eyes, and before long, the luster returned to her skin. In just a few seconds, her body, which had been befouled by the purple water, reverted to its original state.

And then…

“…I thought I was a goner!”

As expected, she’d returned to life. It was hard to tell whether she was joking or serious.

Pointing at the resurrected girl, I turned to the government official and said simply, “Your wonder drug is ready.”

The night before, I had made one request of Matryoshka.

“The first step is that when I give the signal, I want you to drink the pond water. Then this will all be over.”

It had become clear as soon as I saw the state of the pond that the medicine I brought probably wasn’t going to be effective, so as a backup plan, I went ahead and made this proposal to her.

“Huh? No way! Little Matryoshka will die, won’t she?”

Of course, she rejected the plan.

“But this is something that only you can do!”

“…What do you mean?”

“You’ve got a special power. So special, in fact, that your immortality is really only a side effect.”

“…?” Matryoshka didn’t quite seem to get it and just tilted her head quizzically. “I have a power more special than immortality?”

Let me show you.

“Take a look at this.” I waved my arms in the air. “Check out my arms and my face.”

“……”

She fixed her eyes on me and stared hard. Her intense gaze scrutinized me, and she brought her face in close, but she didn’t seem to understand anything.

“…It’s just normal you, Elaina…,” she said uncertainly.

“That’s right.” I nodded. “It’s just normal me.” And then I said, “Just normal me, with none of the wounds that I ought to have on my face and arms.”

In the afternoon, when we had visited city hall, I had gotten scratched up by the cat on my face and arms, but there wasn’t a single trace of those injuries left. Not anywhere.

My skin was just as neat and clean as if I had never been marred in the first place.

Meaning…

“My wounds have healed. Of course, I didn’t use magic or anything to heal myself, and I wouldn’t have had the energy to do so anyway. And I don’t think I did anything special to treat the scratches, either.”

“…So what are you trying to say?”

“Your blood healed my wounds.”

Earlier in the afternoon, after she had wiped her blood on my handkerchief, I had applied it to the scratches on my arm.

That was when a mysterious phenomenon had taken place. The scratches that I was sure I had on the backs of my hands disappeared. As if they had never been there at all.

Bewildered by this mysterious phenomenon, next I tried wiping my face with the handkerchief soiled with Matryoshka’s blood, and when I did, the wounds on my cheeks also disappeared. In other words, her blood could magically heal injuries.

“Your blood will probably be effective against the illness,” I said. “After I wiped myself with the handkerchief that had your blood on it, two strange things happened. The first was that, as I just showed you, my wounds disappeared on their own. The second—my body’s strong allergic reaction whenever I touch cats—has also completely gone away.”

Before I knew it, both the crying and the sneezing were completely cured. It was as if I had never been allergic in the first place.

“I think it’s likely that your blood holds the power to cure any ailment that you have personally experienced.”

Surely Matryoshka had also been allergic to cats when she was young, just like me. But she had told me that as she forced herself to spend time with cats, her body had completely stopped reacting.

That wasn’t simply because her body had gotten used to cats. Just as any wounds healed spontaneously, her body had cured even that predisposition.

“So this means, to put it a different way, that within your body lies the power to cure any type of deadly illness.”

My instruction to her to drink the pond water was, in short, a way to make use of that power. As long as we had her blood, we would be able to cure any and all diseases that she had personally experienced.

“So it’s not true that you’re not good for anything.”

Sure, she might have lived for a hundred years, and spent sixty of them wandering aimlessly. But…

Precisely because of that, it seemed to me that she could do anything.

“If you wanted to, you could cure any and all diseases. You could become a panacea, a medicine effective against all illness.”

She could become the very thing that Iris Pond had been meant to be.

Once Matryoshka had come back to life, we collected some of her blood and made our cure-all. As we had predicted, when we gave them a little bit of her blood, the people of the city immediately began to recover from their illness.

“Incredible…! How on earth did you do that…?! To me, it just looked like she had thrown herself into the pond, but…” The government official, watching us work from the sidelines, was surprised by the miraculous medicine that we’d suddenly produced.

“……”

“……”

I mean, she did actually just throw herself into the pond, but…

In the end, the people were completely cured, thanks to the medicine that Matryoshka made.

“Wow…how on earth can I ever show my appreciation…?! Thank you…! Thank you so much…!”

Thanks to Matryoshka’s efforts, the mysterious disease had vanished from the city.

The people showered her with their gratitude.

“Thank you so much!”

“This isn’t much, but…as thanks.”

“Please accept this token!”

She received endless thanks and even gifts and money from the people.

“H-huh…this much? No, I can’t…heh-heh…”

She was bewildered but had a huge smile on her face.

…Though not a bit of that money is flowing in my direction…

In any case, we had cured the illness that arose from the pond, but we hadn’t fixed the pond itself. Even now, poison was seeping into the water.

“By the way, that statue is corrupting the magic medicine,” I told the city official. “It would be best to remove it right away so that the disease won’t be any further danger,” I recommended.

“Seriously?”

“There’s poison leaching out of that statue. If you don’t remove it, the pond will never go back to normal.”

“But…if we take the statue out, our country will lose its only landmark…”

“How about a statue of Matryoshka? There’s no question that she’s the one who saved the country this time, after all.”

“…!” The official’s eyes lit up. “That’s…a great idea!”

“Isn’t it?”

“I’ll go commission a sculptor right away.”

“While we’re at it, I’ll need you to pay the fee for rights to the usage of her likeness…”

“…How much?”

“Roughly this much should do it…”

……

When it came down to it, Matryoshka had been the one to cure the disease caused by the poison pond, but there was no harm in adding to my own income.

Once the matter had come to a conclusion, we had less and less reason to stay in the city, so we were about to take our leave.

“Elaina. Thank you very much.” Matryoshka bowed deeply. “It’s been many years since I’ve been thanked by people…” When she raised her face again, I was surprised to see her smiling broadly.

No, no…

“I’m the one who should be thanking you,” I said.

After all, I made bank…

“Oh? What for?”

She noticed my devious expression and looked back at me in confusion.

“It’s nothing.” I shook my head, driving away my wicked thoughts, and changed the subject. “Matryoshka, here, take this.”

“…?” Tilting her head in bafflement, she accepted a memo sheet from me. “…What’s this?”

“An address.”

“Huh?” Matryoshka’s face flushed.

……

“It’s not mine.”

“What? Oh, I see… You surprised me…”

You’re the one who surprised me… It’s not as if I would suddenly hand you my own address after all this… Anyway, I’m a traveler, so I don’t even have a fixed address.

“That memo has the address of someone who lives in a nearby country. She’s an extremely long-lived old woman. Long ago, she was an extraordinarily brilliant mage, so it’s likely that she has a little bit of knowledge about your immortality. Even if you’ve found a purpose for your immortal body right now, traveling around forever helping people will probably be difficult, so…you might want to visit her when things get tough.”

“……When you say extremely long-lived, how long do you mean?”

“About four times as long as you.”

“Four times…?”

“She’s four hundred years old.”

“……” Matryoshka let out a sigh as she stared at the paper. “…The world is a big place. There’s someone who has lived four times as long as me, and there’s someone who’s way smarter than me even though she hasn’t lived one-fifth as long as me…”

Uh-oh, did I accidentally give her an inferiority complex?

“That’s nothing to get depressed about.” I snorted impertinently like the young person that I was. “Did you know? In this world, there is also a dragon who has lived four hundred years but spent most of that time asleep.”

“…Meaning what?”

“Meaning that the world is even bigger than you think.”

Of course, the world is much larger than even I have ever imagined and overflowing with things that I still don’t understand.

That’s why I can’t stop traveling.

“Best of luck to you, Matryoshka,” I said with a smile. “I’m sure that you’ll find a cure for your condition someday.”

To borrow her words from earlier, everything comes to an end. The bread did, and the statue of the witch Iris did, and so did the pond. Even the witch Iris’s life ended. No matter what it might be, everything comes to an end someday.

Even those suffering from immortality.

“All right then—I’ll try a little harder,” Matryoshka said, smiling back at me.

Humans try so hard only because they know that there is an end after all.

And then we passed through the gate and went our separate ways.

“So then, good-bye, Elaina.” Matryoshka waved.

“Yeah, see you again sometime.” I waved back and got on my broom.

The story of our time together came to a quiet end.