Demi-human Girls Completion Manual Chapter 1731 - 141: Burial_2

What’s more, from Elizabeth’s perspective it might feel like Fisher stabbed her a thousand times over, while barely a few cuts ever landed on him himself.

Then, looking at it from another angle—does Elizabeth alone feel this way?

What about the other women?

Rafael, Moli, Valentina...

No, it’s not that they don’t feel it. They just never told Fisher.

Fisher couldn’t help but recall how Rafael, when she learned that the one Moli adored was him, had cried in that restrained, cautious way; he thought of his mother‑in‑law Yaril’s humble pleading, thought of Moli’s muttered monologues back in the Demon Dynasty.

He had come back with Elizabeth, and even that wasn’t enough to satisfy her. Then what about Valentina, who had wanted to drag him away, yet watched with eyes wide open as he let go and left with Elizabeth?

Are these feelings things that don’t exist unless spoken aloud? Only once Elizabeth voiced them today could they finally be named and defined?

The fact that they never spoke of it was only because, in matters of love, they had never stood on equal footing with Fisher; it does not mean these feelings were never there.

Thinking carefully, hadn’t all of this already been set in stone the moment he committed the sin of greed? Or could later effort dissolve these feelings, let each one of them be fully content?

Right now he himself is still struggling bitterly against the Doomsday Prophecy, his strength insufficient; and those Gods who are likewise struggling amidst the Outer Gods’ Invasion of the Spirit Realm—are they enough?

Fisher suddenly wondered: if he possessed power like a God’s, or even something more unimaginably vast than Theirs—would any of this ever have happened?

Imagine: if the Prosthetic Eye Elizabeth bore were nothing more than the most ordinary Holy Object, if she were merely an Empress of secular royal authority and not an Envoy of Chaos; if, upon seeing Fisher, who now stood at Mythical Rank, her eyes fell on him—would her shattering and her fury be gentled in the least? Would they alter by so much as a hair’s breadth because of his power?

"..."

Fisher parted his lips, but when he gazed into her hollow, shattered eyes, it was as though he saw within them her soul—the soul that had always met his at eye level.

In that instant alone, he seemed to know the answer that corresponded, and no longer sought some answer from the unseen.

He accepted every accusation; only after all of it had washed over him did he finally speak,

"...Elizabeth, it’s not that I didn’t want to spend this honeymoon with you. I was only afraid for your safety, anxious that you were being dragged down by the Prosthetic Eye and by Chaos. Somehow, knowing now that you made this choice yourself, that you were not being controlled by the Prosthetic Eye or by Chaos—I actually feel a measure of relief..."

He let out a relieved, gentle smile, yet his gaze slipped bitterly away from hers. He did not refute a single word; he merely exhaled a long breath in silence,

"Whatever happens, as long as you’re safe, that’s enough."

Elizabeth looked at the Fisher before her, her lips trembling. The hand clenched in his collar loosened its grip without a sound, until it finally left his collar altogether. Following that motion, Fisher turned his gaze back to her, his eyes filled with a kind of sorrowful, regretful look as he said,

"But Elizabeth, there is one thing you got wrong. It’s not solely for the sake of the other women you mentioned that I want to resolve the Doomsday Prophecy. After leaving you—before I had met any one of them—in the moment I obtained that book titled the Demi-human Girls Completion Manual and saw the Doomsday Prophecy written within it, I had already embarked on the journey of trying to resolve it."

He stared straight at Elizabeth, his gaze both mournful and unwavering,

"Back then I was still just a Human; I knew nothing of the hardship, the terrors, and the fate concealed behind the Doomsday Prophecy. I set out on that journey simply because I felt that if a world like this one, where Sister Theresa who raised me, Mr. Helsen, Trandell, and you all existed—if such a world were to just perish like that, it would be far, far too great a pity..."

Elizabeth’s eyes trembled slightly. And yet in that moment—though Pandora’s Artificial Eye had no effect whatsoever on the Fisher before her—merely through the tacit understanding between their hearts she could sense that the words Fisher spoke now were nothing but the unvarnished truth.

"Elizabeth, I don’t know what kind of world it is that you speak of, a world where a new Order has been founded. I only feel that this world as it is now—with all of you in it, and with more people like you, so good, so worth my attachment, yet to be born—is a world that deserves to be saved. The education I received as a child, the love and warmth I experienced as I grew up—all of it drives me to protect those who gave me these things...

"On this point, I have never once wavered from beginning to end. But you have changed. In our younger days you, too, could feel this beauty, could see that beyond Nali there were so many living creatures both different from and similar to the Nali people still alive. I don’t know if you remember—you said you liked seeing me write articles for those demi-humans trafficked from the South Continent to Nali. You said that if we had the chance in the future, you wanted to go with me to the South Continent, to the Northern Realm, to travel along the restless eastern side of the continent...

"Yet now you can so offhandedly enact slaughter in the very places we once yearned to visit; you can so offhandedly place your faith in foreign Gods whose roots you do not know. That is why I say you’ve changed. But I also know you’ve only changed in this one respect. In loving me, in the matter of responsibility, you have never changed. You became like this only because you suffered torments I could never endure—the betrayals, the sins—these are things I have never personally, bodily experienced. I have no right to condemn you on that front...