Chapter 463: A lifetime of Insanity
=Oh how novel! I think this is the first time we’ve gotten the run down on the circumstances of another Earth straight from the source.=
=That one came from the same Earth as our current lord, I do believe this candy maker is from a completely new Earth altogether.=
=Indeed.=
<...>
=…=
=Very likely, but I would like to believe we found out about this particular world first.=
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Zhen Liu watched with silence as he waited for Elsa to continue telling what was sure to be a tale of woe and heartbreak.
A small part of him couldn’t help but think she was blowing smoke when she mentioned a “tyrant literally fueled by hatred and pain”, but the desire core he just extracted from her seem to pulsate in response to this statement.
Whomever this guy was, it was enough to make the [desire of motherhood] to become an intrinsic part of her soul.
The silence stretched on for what felt like hours, when it was only a few minutes, as Elsa tried to find the right words to continue her story.
It was astounding how someone could go from mysterious to flustered as soon as one’s past gets brought into question.
[Milord,] Nepherage interjected mentally, [perhaps you should give the woman a bone as they say and drop the matter?]
‘Well…’
“No, no, it’s fine,” Elsa replied said in a restrained voice, “just…trying to recenter my emotions for this.”
“Of course.”
Elsa took a few deep breaths before finally regaling Zhen Liu the circumstances of her, her desire and this candy shop’s existence.
“I suppose the best place to start would be my own life,” Elsa began, “it started normal, like many others, but then…”
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Elsa Reinhart’s life, up until she found her shop, could best be described as…turbulent.
She was born at the dawn of the Esper era, just in time to see it evolve from unusual occurrence to a facet of society that could determine one’s future.
At least in the country she was born in.
For the first ten years of her life, Elsa lived in relative peace.
She was born to a middle class family, so while they weren’t exactly wanting, they weren’t able to satisfy every single minute desire either. In essence, a very normal and mundane life.
But at the age of eleven, Elsa manifested her psychic abilities. Namely, telepathy and clairvoyance.
At this point in time, anyone who had even an inkling of psychic abilities had to be sent to specialized state run academies in order to “home their abilities for the betterment of humanity”. In reality, these academies were thinly veiled military recruitment programs, granted, they only recruited espers with unusual and/or very powerful abilities to the military programs, everyone else was given civil service type degrees.
Unfortunately for Elsa, she had qualified for the former.
Telepathy, or the ability to read the thoughts of another, wasn’t exactly rare but the ability to read more than one person’s thoughts at a time was definitely rare. Elsa had the ability to read to up to ten people at once.
Clairvoyance was also equally common, but the effective range was what made it more or less valuable.
The average Esper with clairvoyance could find anything they needed in a five hundred square feet sized space, basically an apartment. Elsa could do so in about two thousand.
As such, Elsa was immediately recruited to become a member of the ESP intelligence division shortly after graduation from the academy…just in time for the First Esper War to happen.
“For the glory of the nation! Long live the grand czar!”
To say the First Esper War was devastating would be an understatement.
Explosives, trench warfare and chemical weapons were bad enough, but throwing in soldiers able to throw boulders like pebbles with their minds, spies that could hear the thoughts of everyone in a given room and assassins able to kill their targets by having their targets kill themselves and that is a mess that could only be described with the term “apocalyptic”.
Elsa had the unfortunate privilege of being in the middle of all of this as the war played out, being an intelligence officer after all.
Her main duty was used to probe memories of captured enemies and wounded allies to get a better understanding of how to assault enemy bases, a perfect job for someone who had both telepathy and clairvoyance.
But the funny thing about psychich abilities is that they get stronger the more they are used, like muscles in a body, and Elsa had to use her abilities a lot.
At first, it wasn’t anything to bad, phantom aches and a bleeding heart for someone.
But over time, her telepathy and clairvoyance started to focus less on quantity and more on…quality.
When she read the mind of an enemy POW who lost their leg to a landmine, she could feel the exact moment it blew off and felt the burning sharpnel embedded itself in her leg stumps. But her leg was still there.
When she interrogated a man who had survived a flamethrower assault, she could feel her skin and fat burn into charcoal and cinder as the unending heat made her senses hazy. But her skin was still smooth and flawless.
When she had to read the memories of a dying young soldier, the last of his unit no less, she felt the pain in his heart of having to say goodbye to his friends and soon, the family he was supposed to have back home.
To say she hated this war was an understatement.
To say she was she was happy the war had ended, even with her country’s defeat, was simply fact.
“I have died over a thousand different deaths during this war…I don’t want to die anymore.”
Elsa was shortly discharged after the war ended, honorably of course, and she proceeded to take her retirement pension to find some modicum of peace, in which, she found via the art of making and selling candy.
There was something simple yet wholesome about the joys she felt when someone ate her candies, and if it was up to her, she would bask in this feeling for the rest of her life.
But life had…other plans.
After the devastating loss her homeland had faced, there was economic and political turmoil that could best be described as absolutely insane.
Several neighboring countries had undergone violent revolutions that lead to the creation of radical new forms of government, and a particularly ambitious man in her home country had done the same.
The man had initially ran on the premise on restoring the nation’s lost glory, a notion that picked up a lot of steam to the point they helped him become the defecto dictator of the land.
Elsa had long forgotten this man’s name, but she always remembered the man being simply known as “The Tyrant” and frankly speaking, it was an appropriate title.
Her initial thoughts on the man was that he was an ambitious upstart that wouldn’t affect her life anymore than the previous king had. She would soon find out just how wrong that statement was.
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The Tyrant had initially been an Esper soldier, a veteran of the First Esper War, but had been injured during one of the battles near the tail end of the war.
As such, he was sent home early and had the “privilege” of being comfortable as he saw his homeland’s leaders sell out the people for the simple notion of “peace”.
Saying he hated this peace was an understatement.
For years, during this peace, the Tyrant stewed in his hatred for the nations that defeated them, for the leaders that abandoned the people and, oddly enough, his fellow espers.
During the course of the war, he saw how the espers of other nations had trounced his own time and time again. There were a few victories here and there on his side to be sure but they were far and few in between.
He tried to figured out how this could be, for years and years, until he came to a conclusion.
His homeland’s methodology of training espers was fine, even the best in the world even…it was the quality of the espers that was the problem.
“We cultivated pigs to give us meat. We cultivated wheat to give us grain. As such, I will cultivate the espers of our people! At least seventy percent of espers today are unneeded, their abilities too weak and meaningless to pass on. It’s the remaining thirty percent that needed to be preserved, enhanced and multiplied that will ensure our glorious future. Of course, we’ll need resources to do such things…”
As such, the Tyrant used this one “simple” desire to launch the Second Esper War, a war that some scholars would call, the “Optimization War”.
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=…=
=Yes, but he didn’t try and he definitely did.=
=Yes. He did.=
=It is…and it’s a little gross.=
