"Looking for anything in particular?"
Ainz was wearing a helmet, so no one could actually see his face, yet somehow he still gave off the unmistakable impression of someone staring in complete confusion.
He looked over the different-colored potions and assorted oddities arranged across the mobile stall and couldn't help wondering whether this guy might actually be another player who had come here to unload his inventory.
For some reason, the whole scene reminded him of visiting a player marketplace back in the game and finding someone trying to sell a pile of junk.
"Are you... a player?"
After thinking it over for quite a while, Ainz finally decided to ask directly. He was currently using a false identity anyway. His true appearance was concealed, even his class had been disguised, and if the other person tried using any detection abilities on him, he would notice and could respond accordingly.
"No. I'm a traveler. I've been to many places, so I've collected all kinds of things along the way. I also know how to make a few things myself, which is where most of this came from."
Caelus picked up one of the potions from the stall.
"For example, this one can restore normal emotions in people whose feelings have been impaired or suppressed.
"You won't find it for sale anywhere else. It's something I developed myself. If it doesn't work, I'll compensate you."
Ainz immediately started complaining in his head.
Now he sounded even more like some shady merchant selling unlicensed miracle cures.
What next? If someone actually came back asking for a refund, would he vanish without a trace?
At this point, Ainz's personality had not yet been heavily distorted by his racial transformation. He still retained much of the dry, sarcastic inner monologue he'd had as a human.
Even after such a drastic change in species, he was still the same person underneath. A lifetime of habits and personality did not disappear overnight.
Still grumbling internally, Ainz picked up the potion with an impassive expression and used an appraisal ability on it.
Then he froze.
[Emotion Restoration Potion: Removes the forced emotional suppression caused by racial traits.]
If Ainz still had pupils, they would have constricted.
More accurately, something inside him seemed to drop.
"Who exactly are you?"
Ainz's voice became guarded.
Caelus answered calmly.
"I already told you. I'm a traveler. I happened to arrive in this world, and this world happened to give me a job. I'm supposed to remove anomalies that don't belong here and correct the changes they caused. And you already know very well that you don't belong to this world."
Ainz almost activated an item and teleported straight back to Nazarick.
The sudden panic rose sharply, only to be crushed at once by the forced emotional suppression of his undead race.
His voice turned low.
"Are you here to eliminate us?"
"Depends."
Caelus looked at him.
"I'm still learning about you. According to a friend of mine, most of the beings in the Great Tomb of Nazarick are monsters with intense hostility toward humans. Is that accurate?"
"...Based on the settings my friends gave them, yes."
A True Vampire.
High-level demons.
Dark elves.
A succubus.
Most of Nazarick's inhabitants belonged to races and alignments that leaned heavily toward darkness, cruelty, or outright evil.
"I see. Are they important to you?"
"They're treasures my friends left behind."
Ainz answered without hesitation.
"They carry the memories of all the time we spent together in that game. To me, they're almost like the children my friends left in my care. I can't abandon them."
"And now that you've found yourself in an unfamiliar world, what do you intend to do?"
"...I don't know."
Ainz fell silent for a moment.
"I want to see whether there are other players here. I also want to find out whether any of my old friends might have logged in one last time before the shutdown and ended up here too.
"And even if none of them did, I still want to preserve the guild we all built together. Even if I'm the only one left."
"Mm."
Caelus studied him.
"But the beings in your guild don't seem particularly friendly toward humans. Some of them appear outright inclined to torment or persecute them. You were once human yourself. How do you feel about that?"
The world Ainz had come from had been a dystopian society where human life was treated cheaply. He had grown up with very little meaningful education about ethics or morality, and the society around him had been so indifferent to suffering that the lower classes were effectively treated as disposable resources.
With that kind of upbringing, he had never developed many of the moral assumptions an ordinary person might take for granted.
After speaking with him for a while longer, Caelus eventually said, "I'm sorry, but there's a good chance we'll end up as enemies."
Ainz said nothing.
"I'm not pretending to be some righteous hero," Caelus continued. "But my friends, my wife, and even my students are people who genuinely care about fairness and justice.
"I understand those things too. More importantly, I recognize that I should respect them because I still consider myself human.
"You, on the other hand, have already begun to see yourself as Ainz Ooal Gown. You've abandoned your old human identity and chosen to accept yourself as an undead ruler instead.
"But I'm not going to dress this up with some grand moral justification. If we become enemies, the reason is simple.
"Our positions are incompatible."
Caelus placed the potion down in front of him.
"Consider this a gift. The next time we meet, we may be standing on opposite sides."
The scenery around Ainz suddenly rippled like the surface of water.
By the time he regained his bearings, the strange stall and the equally strange traveler were gone.
Narberal, who had seemed almost frozen in place moments earlier, suddenly came back to herself and stepped closer.
"Lord Ainz, is something wrong?"
"Just now..."
Ainz had been about to explain that he'd spoken with a mysterious traveler.
Then the words stopped.
The memories, which had been perfectly clear only a moment ago, suddenly blurred.
Before the unease in his mind could even fully form, those memories faded completely.
He could no longer recall the conversation.
Ainz looked down at the potion still in his hand.
The appraisal remained visible.
[Emotion Restoration Potion: Removes the forced emotional suppression caused by racial traits.]
In the end, he placed the potion into his storage without drinking it.
He decided that he needed the forced emotional suppression.
With it, he could remain calm under pressure and think through difficult situations without being overwhelmed. The ability was inconvenient at times, but overall, the benefits seemed greater than the drawbacks.
More importantly, he believed it would help him lead the Great Tomb of Nazarick more effectively and prevent him from making serious mistakes in the future.
That decision also marked something deeper.
He had fully accepted his new identity as something no longer human.
And in doing so, he willingly gave up much of what humans considered essential to their emotional lives.
In the end, that meant he had discarded his final chance.
If Ainz had chosen to drink the potion and reclaim his human emotions, Caelus would have considered helping him leave this world. After all, it was this particular world that rejected Nazarick's presence, not the universe itself. Caelus could have helped him find somewhere else to live and begin a new story.
But Ainz had made his choice.
He had chosen to move from being toward absence, abandoning parts of himself rather than preserving them.
To Caelus, that was unquestionably the wrong direction.
Just like the angel he had once encountered who wanted to perfect humanity by stripping away everything imperfect, Caelus believed there was a fundamental difference between creating something from nothing and reducing something real until nothing remained.
And to someone who had always walked the former path, the latter was the gravest kind of mistake.
(To be continued.)
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◇ You can read the ahead chapter on Pat if you're interested: p-atreon.c-om/Blownleaves (Just remove the hyphen to access normally.)