The farther I walked down the flower-strewn path with support on either side, the more people began fastening the jeweled ornaments they were wearing onto my body. At first, I barely felt the weight, but as time passed, the number kept increasing, and in the end all I could think was that if someone hadn’t been holding me up like this, I would already be lying flat on the ground.
So even little ornaments like that got heavy when you wore enough of them. All sorts of metal bracelets dangled from my arms, and since there was no mirror, I had no way of knowing what or how much was hanging from my ears. By the time I came to my senses, there were already more than eight necklaces around my neck. Round jewels had also dug their way into my hair, on my forehead and across my head.
If they put all this on me, how are the owners of these accessories planning to find them later? Do none of the believers have accessories that look alike?
Feeling like a broken mannequin, I stayed still and let them hang things on me as they pleased, until my neck, arms, ears, and head all felt heavy. ……Metal weighs more than I thought. Just how strong are the thieves who rob jewelry stores?
When I half came back to my senses, I had already crossed more than half of the central building. The believers of the Infinite Church prayed as they looked at me. Some kept reciting dates and times, some repeated someone’s name over and over, and some walked alongside me the entire time.
Someone came up and sprinkled fragrant water over my bare feet and hands, while someone else brought smooth oil and rubbed it onto the backs of my hands, my forearms, my forehead, my chest, and the side of my neck. One person was scattering fine sand-like powder around me like throwing red beans, and when I saw it land on the black cloth, I realized it was gold dust. Why are you…… sprinkling that here?
I didn’t have the strength to stop them, so I walked on in a daze as they held me up. Then, far ahead, a group of people with distinctive appearances entered my sight.
The first one to catch my eye was a woman with wavy white hair falling all the way to her chest. When I met her before, I had been holding a gun, so I was too out of it to properly take in her appearance, but now that I looked, Elizabeth was a beauty like an immaculate porcelain doll. Up close, her skin looked like A4 paper. Only her lips were faintly red, and her model-like features, paired with white hair that didn’t suit her age, gave her an eerie beauty.
Looking closer, Elizabeth was wearing a black dress, and her entire body from head to toe was covered in jewels. An ominous feeling brushed down my back. Don’t tell me she’s going to put everything she’s wearing on me.
That “don’t tell me” caught me by the throat. Elizabeth looked at me with a proud expression, bowed deeply at the waist, then straightened. Then she began taking off the necklaces around her own neck one by one and placing them around mine.
Elizabeth was trying to hand over a long diamond necklace so bright it looked blinding even from afar. Perhaps the clasp was unusual, because it took twice as long as it had for other people to undo it and put it around my neck again. A necklace decorated with about ten blue sapphires, each the size of an index fingernail, covered the area beneath Elizabeth’s collarbones and the whole of her chest. She struggled to undo it, then hung it around my neck again. ……This necklace doesn’t look like something ordinary people can buy at a jewelry store.
Elizabeth took off the large teardrop diamond earrings that had been dangling from her ears and said, “Your ears are already quite full.” Then she pinned the diamond earring like a medal onto the left side of the black top draped over me. She did the same with the earring from the other side, attaching it to my chest. When I lowered my gaze, I saw that at some point, all kinds of earrings had been hung like brooches around my chest, sides, and shoulders.
Apparently, the believers of the Infinite Church hadn’t thought of piercing my ears on the spot and forcibly hanging earrings from them. Instead, they seemed to have made holes in the clothes I was wearing and attached them there. Then everything hanging from my ears must be clip-ons.
Elizabeth slipped her largest ruby ring over one of my fingers, which already had ten rings on it, layering it on top. Is it okay to wear multiple rings stacked like that? Aren’t you normally supposed to wear only one ring on each finger? Elizabeth seemed to have two or three rings on each finger.
When Elizabeth’s turn didn’t end quickly, a short-haired Black man who had been waiting behind her stepped forward. Then he raised the corner of his mouth at me and nodded slightly. He detached a hexagonal brooch set with gold and red jewels from the black suit he was wearing and pinned it to my chest, where the diamond earrings were already attached. At the roots of his hair, I could see streaks of white. He was probably white-haired but usually went around dyeing it black.
He pulled a thick ring set with gold and several small diamonds off his finger and tried to put it on my index finger, just as he had worn it on his own, but it looked like it would slip off loosely, so he put it on my thumb instead. As if that was the last of the ornaments he had, he placed a hand on my shoulder once, then stepped back, folded his arms, and watched me.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth had been struggling to remove a necklace with a complicated clasp from her own neck, and finally managed to undo one necklace set with several pink jewels.
Behind Elizabeth, a portly white man was waiting. He too was dressed in a black suit, his white hair neatly slicked back, and he looked at me as if appraising me. He slowly took off the ornate wristwatch on his left wrist. There were so many diamonds set into it that it looked closer to a bracelet than a watch. Is that really meant to be used for checking the time?
He approached with the watch, fiddled with my wrist here and there, then fastened it on. There were already three similar watches on my wrist. He took a tie pin decorated with silver and several bright yellow jewels from his tie, pinned it onto the black cloth draped over me, and said,
“I’m not particularly pleased, but.”
What is he talking about? Is he saying that while looking at me? You think I’m pleased with the state I’m in?
“You’ll have to do well, considering you stole our chance.”
What the hell does that mean? As I stared blankly at his face, the man tapped my back with his hand and walked past me.
Elizabeth stopped undoing a bracelet and glared at the man as he passed. The clasp of the pale green jewel bracelet, which I guessed was emerald, seemed extremely stiff. After rolling it around with her fingers and struggling to get it off, she gave me an awkward smile and said,
“Not everything I’m wearing belongs to me, you see.”
Unlike these three just now, the jewels and ornaments the believers had handed me while I walked here had all looked fairly used. Whether because they had been used for quite a long time, their designs looked old or their colors had faded, but the jewels Elizabeth wore were dazzlingly bright and seemed well maintained. Their colors, the thickness of the gems, their size and heft were clearly different. The red gem set into the brooch the man had given me earlier was several times larger and more brilliant than the gems hanging from most necklaces.
On top of that, if even the largest jewels worn or handed over by the other believers of the Infinite Church were about the size of a molar, the ones these people had been wearing were almost the size of a thumb. In particular, the diamond necklace Elizabeth had been wearing before handing it over, the blue jeweled necklace she had just given me, and the pale green bracelet she was now trying to take off were all incomparable in size and weight to the others.
How much would something like this even cost? Wouldn’t it be enough to buy a house with ease? “Please wait just a moment.” Elizabeth fastened the pale green bracelet around my wrist, then grabbed the next bracelet.
Perhaps one of the men supporting me and a female believer who had been following my steps decided they couldn’t just keep watching Elizabeth anymore, because they attached themselves to her wrist and the back of her neck to help. Elizabeth winked at me and whispered soothingly to me, as I barely stood upright with their support.
“All of this belongs to you.”
I had never felt so ungrateful.
If I had this many large, solid jeweled ornaments hanging from my body, I felt as if even someone without material desire should have some urge to gulp down at least one of them. But all I could think was that they were heavy. Was it because of my aversion to the slaughter that had just happened? Or was it because my household had once been torn apart by a cult?
Countless delicacies from land and sea, gold and treasure heavy enough to cover my entire body, people who remained bound to the past and obeyed my orders without change even as the years passed, a space filled with flowers blooming regardless of the season, and even a rare ability to return to the past.
To someone, this might be luxury.
Even if I had to wear rags and roll miserably through the dirt, fighting devil-like beings every second while on the verge of starving to death, I wanted to leave this place with nothing.
I wrung every last bit of strength from my dantian and barely managed to open my mouth to Elizabeth. Send me home. I endured it. Swallowing those words made my throat feel as if it were tearing apart. With almost no stamina left, I gasped for breath, then asked,
“Why are you hanging jewels on me?”
“Because each jewel has endured its own time, and because it can hold a wish.”
To me, someone who thought of jewels as pretty, expensive rocks, the answer I had just heard sounded truly cultish. Of course, Elizabeth really was a cultist. It felt like a purely cult-religious statement without even the faintest hint of science.
As I silently held out my wrist and stayed still, Elizabeth placed the bracelet she had undone onto my wrist and said,
“Just as absolute time does not exist anywhere in this world, everyone’s time flows differently for each person.”
Urgh. Elizabeth’s words made me feel as if I had been stabbed with a knife. Physics is cheating. Was this the theory of relativity?
After Elizabeth finally put more than eight bracelets on my arm, she now began removing rings from her slender hands. She had more than ten rings on her fingers, but seeing as the designs and gems varied so wildly, the rings, like the bracelets, probably weren’t all hers either. Well, who would buy that many rings?
Perhaps Elizabeth had never usually worn this many rings at once either, because she tried to pull them off all at once, but when they didn’t come off easily, she began taking them off one by one. Then, when one ring fell from her palm, the man supporting me at the side picked it up and handed it to Elizabeth.
I sighed and cupped both my palms together. This was ridiculous. In their heads, there must be some reason I had to wear them. Seeing that, Beth smiled at me and placed the three rings she had just pulled from her index finger into the bowl of my hands. Then, as she struggled to remove the rings from her remaining fingers, she asked,
“Was the living creature offered as the price of the miracle a great white shark?”
What?
“Great white sharks cannot be raised in the aquariums or tanks of the First Undersea Base, so confirmation was somewhat delayed. The Greenland sharks were safe.”