Chapter 76: Heart of the Withered Well
Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations
Editor: PlumSauce
There was a fairy tale called The Withered Well Princess.
Once upon a time, a king wanted to gain a mountain of gold and the most beautiful castle in the world. A demon told him that if he desired these, his daughter would be born as an evil witch. Even so, the king agreed. He obtained the gold mountain and the magnificent castle, and his queen gave birth to a daughter who would become a witch.
The king imprisoned the witch princess in a withered well and never paid attention to her again. Only the queen occasionally visited.
The princess cried, “Mother, take me up! I will make you a dress studded with diamonds and let you become the most beautiful woman in the world!”
At first, the queen felt pity, but hearing this frightened her. She ran away and never returned.
Like the demon trapped in Solomon’s bottle, the princess remained confined in the well for five hundred years. One day, a prince from a neighboring kingdom passed by and saw a beautiful girl crying at the bottom. He lowered a rope, intending to rescue her.
“If I pull you up,” he asked, “how will you repay me?”
Grateful, the princess replied, “I will give you a cart filled with treasures and be your faithful wife.”
The prince agreed. But as the rope reached halfway, he was startled. Before even lifting her, a cart full of gold and silver treasures appeared beside him.
“You are a witch!” he shouted. “I cannot save you!”
He cut the rope, and the princess fell back to the well bottom, crying. The prince took the treasures and left.
The princess spent another five hundred years in the well. One day, a traveling knight passing through discovered her.
“Beautiful maiden,” the knight said, “I can rescue you.”
The princess said, “I can give you a palace full of treasure, make you king, grant you immortality, and be your wife.”
The knight refused her promises. “I will rescue you and grant you freedom. I don’t want anything else.”
When the rope reached the well’s edge, he extended his hand to the princess. The princess grasped him firmly, and together they fell into the well.
“I let my father obtain the gold mountain, and he imprisoned me. I made my mother the most beautiful woman, and she abandoned me. I pledged loyalty to the prince, and he hated me. I offered you treasures, a kingdom, and eternal life, yet you wanted nothing. You must be the kindest person in the world. Stay in this well with me forever,” she said. (Note 1)
The tale ended as fairy tales always did: the princess lived happily ever after with the one she loved.
The story was almost lost to history. No literary master collected or beautified it. Only a few obscure local manuscripts preserved it. Perhaps because, unlike most folk tales, it contained no positive moral — only malice from start to finish.
“If I passed by that well, I’d throw a grenade in,” Carolyn concluded after listening to the story.
Fiddling with her magical detection compass, Liz said, “You could knock her out first, then I’ll use the Prison Cart to bring her back to the Association.”
The Withered Well Princess had been told by the muscular Witch Blood Descendant at the Association. The tale came from his family’s centuries-old handwritten manuscripts. Before being transferred to another branch, he invited his colleagues for French cuisine and shared stories of witches as they dined.
“Sounds like it really happened,” Carolyn laughed. “Why are we analyzing this so seriously?”
Three years had passed. Liz had switched from frameless glasses to dark green frames and had cut her hair short — once long enough to twist into a thick bun, now barely reaching the length to tie a modest braid. Carolyn was no longer the youngest hunter in West Bay City. She was said to have grown two centimeters taller (though colleagues joked it made no difference). Her golden hair and sweet smile were as radiant as ever.
They sat among the gnarled roots of an old tree, wrapped in sleeping bags, organizing their gear.
“Do you hear that?” Carolyn whispered. Both stopped, listening intently.
The forest was quiet, with only the occasional rustle of leaves in the wind.
Carolyn signaled with hand gestures. Liz shook her head: the alarm devices hadn’t been triggered or damaged.
They rose from their sleeping bags, back-to-back, silver sabres at their waists and guns at their fingertips, ready. Carolyn sensed a gaze. Though she saw nothing in the dark thicket, she felt eyes tracking her nearby.
A faint tremor passed through the air. Following a hunter’s instinct, Carolyn threw herself backward, pulling Liz down. An arrow sank deep into a tree trunk behind them.
A massive, troll-like figure leapt from the bushes.
Gunfire tore through the night. Not far away, John and Coraci heard it clearly. Discerning the direction, they rushed toward the source of the sound.
As they approached, John noticed something strange in the grass. He paused and crept forward slowly.
Carl lay on the ground, pinned by a long wooden stake, eyes open, perfectly still.
Before John could be surprised, several more gunshots rang from deeper in the forest. He murmured reassurances to Carl and swiftly pulled out the stake. Carl struggled to lift his head, his breath like fragile threads.
“Don’t worry about me… Carolyn…” he gasped.
“Carolyn?” John moved closer, straining to hear. “You found her?”
“She’s in danger…” Carl looked toward the direction where the monster had vanished.
The bloodkin intern insisted he was fine, didn’t need anyone to watch over him, and told them to hurry to support Carolyn. He hadn’t even asked who the stranger accompanying John was.
Liz knew the attacker wasn’t a “creature.” Holy exorcism spells or light-based ancient magic were useless against it; silver sabres couldn’t touch it, and hypnosis or confusion spells had no effect.
Only constructs — golems, artificial beings — fit those traits. Yet this one could speak. Its attacks were agile. When bullets grazed it, it grunted, and it even snickered when Carolyn missed. It was practically alive, not just a construct.
Though Liz had no idea who had created this space or who had designed this monster, she understood one thing: the enemy was intelligent, unlike anything she had seen in books or had faced before.
She tried to speak to it, but the monster laughed loudly. Unabashed, it said, “I’m here specifically to kill the two of you.”
“Kill us?” Liz began preparing a shield spell. If that failed, she could only try to block it and escape. “What did we do?”
“Nothing,” the monster replied, unexpectedly casual. “Because you are Lizbeth and Carolyn.”
Carolyn dropped her silver-core pistol and switched to a regular one. She realized silver bullets had little effect; steel-core bullets worked better. In fact, a machete might be more effective than a gun. The creature could be hit by bullets, yet gunshot wounds didn’t slow it down. Carolyn figured that only by severing a leg could they truly stop it.
But the creature was too strong. Close combat was a bad idea. While she swapped magazines, it seized the opportunity to pounce. Liz threw a line of powder and cast a spell, erecting a semi-transparent barrier between them and the monster. The two of them took this chance to retreat.
Surprisingly, the monster didn’t try to break the barrier in a panic like most enemies. It seemed to recognize this kind of spell. It knew the barrier had a limit to its width and probed the transparent wall to find its edge.
As soon as it went around the wall, it accelerated, chasing them. In the darkness of the forest, its massive body moved with the speed of a leopard.
Suddenly, explosions rang out. Metal shards struck it from the side, igniting sparks that spread to its fur and skin.
The attack came from coins inscribed with combustion runes. If humans were caught in flames like that, panic would take over, and death would be inevitable. But the monster didn’t run. It didn’t drop and roll to put out the fire. It only faltered slightly, barely affected by the fire.
Carolyn didn’t hesitate. She tossed her gun, drew her machete, and attacked the monster’s legs.
At the same moment, a shadow leapt from the bushes, also striking the monster.
The two of them worked in perfect coordination. Carolyn severed one of the monster’s shin bones, then sprang back nimbly. The other person quickly twisted the monster’s wrist, disarming its curved blade and crossbow. The monster collapsed.
John approached Carolyn. “So hot… I should have worn gloves,” he said, patting his palms as the flames on the monster gradually died down.
Liz wasn’t surprised to see John; after all, they had sent him the feather charm. What surprised her was the combustion rune. “John…did you do that?” she asked, knowing he didn’t normally cast these kinds of spells.
“No,” John replied, just as Coraci emerged from the shadows. “It was a…Ranger.”
Coraci was worried that Liz or Carolyn would recognize his voice, so he only nodded and smiled politely in greeting.
He mentally praised Liz’s new glasses — they suited her better than the old ones — and noticed Carolyn seemed taller. Somehow, she had grown even after turning twenty. After a three-year separation, he wanted to hug both of them. They were his friends, former comrades in life-and-death battles. But he couldn’t reveal himself to anyone besides John.
Carolyn’s instincts were keen, animal-like. “I thought I just saw Coraci…oh, I mean, a former colleague. You don’t look alike. The shadows tricked me,” she said, speaking to the real Coraci.
John noticed Coraci didn’t want to talk. He leaned closer to the two girls. “I ran into him in the forest. He’s…a little unusual.”
“Many Rangers are,” Carolyn said. “Lone, aloof, quiet.”
Coraci examined the monster’s burned skin and fur. It was something between life and non-life. In layman’s terms, it was a construct, a golem — but not exactly. It was a creation of the sandbox world, so it was definitely different from true golems.
Mud golems, iron golems, flesh golems — even Zoltán’s type of silent golem — had no independent thought, no ability to communicate. This one was different.
It sneered with contempt, a hopeless smile on its face. “You…have rescued Carl. I’ve failed.”
“Who are you?” John asked. “What do you want with Carl? Why attack them?”
The construct didn’t answer. Carolyn scanned the area. “Carl? That idiot came too?”
“I want to kill them,” the construct said. Its shin bone had been severed, its arm joint twisted backward. It couldn’t stand. “I want him to stay.”
“Logic?” Carolyn muttered, stepping forward to kick its head. Liz yanked her back.
John pressed, “You mean Carl? Why attack Carl?”
The construct’s back trembled as it smiled with effort. “Long, long ago, I loved someone…though I can’t remember who… It was too long ago…”
The human girls didn’t understand him. Even Coraci wondered if the construct’s language or logic had broken. Yet it kept talking. “I only remember: those who gave me life tortured me; those who cared for me hated me. Everyone despised me… I want to be with someone who doesn’t hate me. I loved him, I didn’t trust him, I wanted to be with him forever. I hurt him…”
“Hey,” Carolyn whispered to Liz, “people who overuse ‘I’ in every sentence are usually…unstable. Count how many times he says ‘I’ in one sentence.”
“Are you going to lecture on mental stability?” Liz frowned at her.
The construct twitched, continuing. “Later he died… No, he disappeared. I couldn’t find him again… He vanished completely. I can’t count how many days have passed… I have no idea how many years… I don’t remember him.”
“Who? Your creator?” John asked.
The construct neither confirmed nor denied. It breathed heavily; a tremor rolled in its throat. “Now… I want to be with Carl. He’s a bloodkin, long-lived, kind to me. He…won’t disappear.”
John whispered to Coraci, “Do you understand what he means?”
Coraci shook his head. The construct’s words were fragmented; he couldn’t make sense of what had happened in the past.
Still, a vague hypothesis formed in Coraci’s mind. According to the people from Engrity, this space had once been a Simulated Sandbox before becoming a Physical Sandbox. Time in the Simulated Sandbox flowed differently from the real world. How many years — decades, centuries, maybe even millennia — had the construct existed in here?
After the space became a Physical Sandbox, the construct might have lost memories, or perhaps simply gone insane from the endless passage of time. Whatever the cause, one thing was clear: it had lived all alone in a world that never changed.
“What do we do now?” Liz asked, opening her lantern. Carolyn busied herself gathering scattered spell implements and firearms.
John responded, “Go help Carl. He was nailed with a wooden stake and isn’t in great shape. I met some people from Engrity… you know, the company that developed this space. I’ll go find them and let them decide what to do with the construct.”
He looked at Coraci. “Mr. Ranger, can you stay here and keep watch over the construct for now?”
Coraci nodded and turned his back to Liz and Carolyn before revealing a faint smile. He remembered three years ago, he had always been the one answering these questions. Now John could take over that role.
Before leaving, John tossed the girls a blood pack — a spare he had brought along.. He realized he should have left it with Carl earlier but had forgotten in the chaos.
“I’ll be back soon,” John whispered to Coraci and vanished into the forest.
The horizon had begun to pale. Another morning approached in the false world.
Coraci stood before the fallen construct, extending his hand and staring at his nails that had never grown. He didn’t know what he had become. Human body and fragments of devil, flesh sealed with a soul… in a sense, he himself was also a construct.
He vaguely understood the construct’s thinking: to face everyone’s hatred, to endure endless dawns and dusks, all it needed was another being beside it — one who wouldn’t die, wouldn’t disappear. Whether that being loved or hated it didn’t matter; it wouldn’t be alone.
In a daze, Coraci noticed the flow of the construct’s flow of power shifting. Others couldn’t see it, but his Eyes of Truth revealed its strength and weakness. He quickly stepped back, clutching another coin inscribed with combustion runes.
He discovered the construct’s twisted arm had returned to its original position.
Author’s Note:
The fairy tale The Withered Well Princess I mentioned doesn’t actually exist. I invented it, borrowing the theme from The Fisherman and the Genie: a genie trapped for five hundred years in a bottle, retrieved by a fisherman, tricked back into the bottle, and thrown back into the sea.
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