“Ahem, so I defeated the demon king’s fragment hiding in the Elf Great Forest with the Fake Hero and saved Olgania, the child of the World Tree.”
Clap clap clap
Only Menelapie was clapping, but Shia shrugged her shoulders.
“How about that? I did well even without you guys, right?”
While Menelapie wore a proud expression as if saying, ‘Oh my, our Shia is doing great,’ Teresa’s face looked quite indifferent.
“Ah, ne-ne.”
“What’s with that tone? You don’t believe me, do you?”
“That’s not it, Shia. That Black Witch is just sulking like a spoiled cat because you’re not paying her any attention.”
“………”
When Teresa said nothing, Shia smiled wide and leaned closer to her.
The back seat of the self-driving vehicle borrowed from the Yeon Family wasn’t small, but it was close enough that Shia could comfortably reach out to the person next to her with a slight lean.
As a result, Teresa had to push away Shia’s beaming face with one hand.
“W-What the hell… it’s cramped. Stop it. Damn…”
“Hehe. Is Menelapie’s word true, Teresa?”
Surprised by Shia’s suddenly close face, Teresa stammered her response.
“That’s not it…”
Seeing her up close, it was definitely Teresa.
Although her face looked younger, she still bore a sharp nose and wide forehead. Even her eyes carried that mischievous, curse-laden glint.
It dawned on Shia that the Teresa in her memories had really returned to her.
Indeed, Teresa was still the same.
On the outside, she displayed signs of being pleased or jealous, but the moment you talked to her, she would react like a prickly cat. There was no doubt about that.
However, Shia was a Seongnyeo who could see through lies.
Recognizing that Teresa’s words were false was easier than anything else.
I mean, how long had they spent together in the previous world? It was no challenge to detect Teresa’s lies just by her tone without even using her abilities.
“Hehe, hehehehe~”
“Ugh. Stop cracking up.”
“Well, I can’t help it. I’m just happy to see you, Teresa. You’re happy, right?”
So soft.
Touching Teresa’s baby-like, soft cheeks lifted Shia’s spirits automatically.
The three of them had an unexpectedly smooth journey to Busan.
The vehicle was self-driving, so there was no need to drive, but the main reason was that the car borrowed from Yeonhwa was traveling on a road only accessible to VIPs, not the usual highways.
Thanks to that, there wasn’t even a single vehicle in sight since entering the VIP highway, let alone traffic congestion.
Of course, the VIP highway wasn’t some highway built in the sky. It was a sort of secret road that regular vehicles couldn’t pass through.
“Hehehe, yum yum yum.”
“Is it tasty?”
“Yep! Want to try one, Menelapie?”
And Shia had just swept up twenty hot bars and skewers of various kinds from a rest stop they had passed.
Eating so much food inside the vehicle borrowed from Yeonhwa might cause the car to smell like oil and meat, but with Shia’s purification beam, any kind of filthiness would be cleansed, so it wouldn’t be a significant issue.
Menelapie was smiling proudly at Shia, as if saying, “Good, good,” but…
“You better stop eating, you pig Seongnyeo! Did a beggar crawl inside your belly?!”
“Whah!”
Unlike Menelapie, Teresa wasn’t just a yes girl who accepted everything from Shia.
Menelapie adored whatever Shia did.
Even if she consumed over a hundred servings of meat, she would just coo at her, and even if Shia engaged in the antics usually referred to as ‘nonsense,’ to Menelapie, it was simply cute and beautiful.
But Teresa was different.
Shia and Menelapie might not know, but how long had Teresa endured such nonsense?
Hadn’t it been hundreds, thousands of years? For Teresa, who had been trained by nonsense for so long, Shia’s nonsense felt more like a resolve to fix her manners this time around rather than something that was simply cute or enjoyable.
“This pig girl has returned to her original world and still eats like a pig! We might as well change her name! Not Seongnyeo of the Dead, but Pig Seongnyeo!”
“But… the hot bars are delicious…”
“No, that’s an insult to pigs. Damn it, even pigs wouldn’t eat this much! Eat less! A hot bar doesn’t even contain anything malicious!”
“But I want to eat something delicious… I thought it would be nice to enjoy tasty food on a trip with Teresa and Menelapie…”
“Grr…”
For a moment, as Shia sulked and lowered her head, even Teresa, with her tough demeanor, couldn’t help but flinch.
“Teresa, Shia hasn’t done anything wrong, right?”
“Shut it! You two baby them so much that this pig Seongnyeo gobbles down a hundred servings on the daily!”
“Ah, but this time, Shia bought everything with her own money.”
“What? Shia did??”
Shia had made her own money?
At those words, Teresa’s eyes widened, and seeing Teresa’s reaction, Shia puffed her chest out triumphantly.
“Don’t lie, Menelapie. She never earned money for over sixty years while in the Royal Palace, did she?”
“That may be true…”
“Hehe, believe it or not, I’m a popular star around here!”
“What does that even mean, you nerd?”
“Well… I guess it’s like being a super popular bard or actor in the Empire?”
“What? You became a bard?”
Having only just arrived on Earth, Shia wasn’t sure how to explain broadcasts and genre Hunter galleries to Teresa, so she began to explain using the closest words she could muster.
Sure, Shia had a good voice and sang well…
But she also couldn’t remember the lyrics and needed to write them down on paper all the time.
That kind of person is an actor? A bard?
“Speak sensibly. Hey, Menelapie. Is this pig Seongnyeo telling the truth?”
“Hehehe, yes. It’s called broadcasting. I have also tried broadcasting with Shia. Soon, you will be able to experience it too.”
In fact, Shia was currently the Gallery Master of the genre Hunter Gallery, used by millions of users and netrunners worldwide.
Naturally, each broadcast came with tremendous donations and support, and the prices for the monsters Shia caught during her Hunter broadcasts were by no means small.
“Hmm, I see.”
Saying that, Teresa devoured the hot bars and skewers piled up in the vehicle like a shadow.
“Ahhh! My hot bar!!!”
“Don’t act like I threw it away! I may not know much about Earth’s culture or common sense, but is it etiquette to stuff your face like a pig while seated in a vehicle?!”
In the world where Shia, Menelapie, and Teresa had been, eating anything inside a vehicle was indeed considered the behavior of an uncivilized person.
“Hiiih…”
“By the way, Teresa, your shadow has shrunk a lot, hasn’t it? In the past, it would have engulfed this entire area.”
“Oh, that makes sense.”
Teresa shrugged as if it were nothing special.
“I’m unable to use magic right now.”
“What… what?”
“Uh… what?”
At those words, both Shia and Menelapie’s faces stiffened as they looked at Teresa.
No, it wasn’t just a stiffening; it felt as if time momentarily stopped in shock.
The strongest Black Witch in the history of the Empire couldn’t use magic?
“Te-Teresa…! What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, I must have said something misleading. To be precise, I can only use what I already have.”
“Teresa! Please explain more precisely. To my eyes, you seem completely fine…!?”
“Hey damn it. Are you saying it seems fine when I have the same body size as you two and have shrunk into this whimpering state?”
“But your soul seems to be okay…”
With a deep sigh, Teresa spoke.
Yeah, her soul should be fine.
“Haah… I guess I was a bit unclear.”
“That doesn’t make sense! If you can’t use magic, then how did you create the fake Demon King’s castle and that evil Vegan Mawang…”
“Shut up. I’ll explain it all to you now.”
With her body deeply buried in the back seat, Teresa crossed her legs.
While her slender ankles swayed gracefully, it was a beautiful sight—but right now, Shia and Menelapie were too focused on Teresa’s alarming inability to use magic for any of it to catch their eye.
“I mentioned that crossing dimensions is extremely dangerous, right?”
“…Yes.”
“In Menelapie’s case, she succeeded in a miraculous gamble through her own body and a low probability. But a gamble is a gamble for a reason. If it failed, I wouldn’t just miss out on meeting you; my body and soul would have been disintegrated to atomic levels and become a dimension drifter.”
“……….”
Both Menelapie and Shia didn’t know much about magic theory or the process of crossing dimensions, but they inherently felt that if Teresa said it was hard, it was truly unbearably hard.
And from Teresa’s perspective, who had experienced countless events, crossing dimensions like this was entirely new for her. After countless times and sacrifices, she managed to come to Earth, where Shia lived.
“I tried every ridiculous method possible to raise the chances.”
“You didn’t use humans as offerings, did you…?”
“I’m not going to do things you dislike.”
Teresa spoke in a low voice, seemingly sincere.
Of course, if this had been the old Teresa… having gone through so many failures and countless deaths, she might have sacrificed innocents by the dozen as offerings for a dimensional spell due to her reincarnated indifference towards life.
But not now.
Those days were far behind.
“Anyway, the method I chose was to separate my body and soul.”
“Uh… what do you mean?”
“If I wanted to fall into the exact world during the time when Shia exists, the more related the medium is to Shia, the higher the chances.”
“And then?”
“Through all my experiments and attempts, I’ve concluded that that foolish Menelapie using her body as a medium had the highest probability. But even so, no matter how well I calculated the chances, it was only about 20% at best.”
Menelapie was evidently just astonishingly lucky.
She probably wouldn’t even find it difficult to win at lotteries or gacha games.
“So instead of using the body as a medium, I separated my body and soul as insurance against potential failures… and that’s this body now.”
“Petite Teresa?”
“Don’t call me petite, it sounds so lame!”
“So, right now, that means… your body used as a medium has failed?”
“Haah. Well, since my original body has completely vanished from observation range, I guess that means it was a failure. I don’t even want to imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t separated my body and soul. If I were lucky, my body could have just landed somewhere on Earth…”
Well, let’s just consider the body lost.
Adding that remark, Teresa shrugged.
“Well, I was long-winded, but to sum it up, I don’t have the mana core that was originally in my body, nor can I generate new mana. As for the puppet or threads and the fake Demon King’s castle, those are merely tangible items I made before, so I can at least pull them out and use them. But I hardly have any mana left, so I can’t use the disease or forbidden magic that I would normally know how to do…”
“…….”
As they listened to Teresa, both Menelapie and Shia’s faces darkened.
They had been merely happy to reunite with Teresa, but it seemed like they could now feel a fragment of the torment and despair Teresa had endured.
They had been chuckling about how Teresa looked younger and cuter, not knowing that she had come all this way even at the cost of separating her soul from her body, purely to meet Shia.
Naturally, Shia couldn’t help but feel guilt and sorrow towards Teresa.
“Because of me…”
“Hey, don’t make that face. Losing my body isn’t such a big deal. It would be nice to find it, but my soul is intact, so in a few years, I might be able to return to normal.”
“………”
“As long as I’m alive, right?”
Who was comforting whom…?
And really, I’m fine.
I’ve already paid the price.
I just need you, Shia.
○○○○○
With that, the three of them arrived at the Hunter Association’s exclusive hotel in Busan. In the hotel yard, Yoonjeong, who had received a message, was waiting for Shia.
“Mom~!”
“Come here, quickly.”
As soon as the car door opened, Shia, much taller and bigger than Yoonjeong, leaped into her mother’s arms like a child.
Fortunately, since Yoonjeong was a D-grade Hunter, she had enough strength to manage to lift Shia.
“Madam, I am quite late. I hope you have been well.”
“Ms. Menelapie too…”
No matter how much she had been Shia’s mother in her previous life, it seemed difficult for Yoonjeong to speak casually to someone as upright and noble as Menelapie.
“Hehe, it’s alright, Madam. You can speak comfortably.”
“Oh, um… then thank you, Menelapie, for all your hard work… I heard there was quite a lot of work in the National Assembly…”
“No, it wasn’t so much work as it was a process of educating a foolish child.”
“Is it done now?”
“Yes, we have nearly wrapped up the significant issues, so there is nothing for you to worry about, Madam. But there is someone I need to introduce.”
“Someone to introduce?”
“Shia?”
“Oh, let me gather my thoughts.”
At those words, Shia opened the back door of the car and looked back at Yoonjeong.
Could it be a new returnee?
Would it be someone like the Emperor or one of his close aides coming to see Shia, just like Menelapie?
While pondering various thoughts, Yoonjeong’s gaze fell upon a purple-haired girl.
Dressed in a rather revealing purple evening dress, the girl exuded elegance and a noble atmosphere, so there was no thought of it looking vulgar.
As if a medieval noble lady were being escorted by knights, the purple-haired girl took Shia’s hand and stepped out of the car slowly. Soon, the girl with violet hair turned her much darker purple eyes towards Yoonjeong.
Her eyes curved into crescent shapes, and a friendly smile spread across her face towards Yoonjeong. At the same time, Teresa placed one hand on her chest and gracefully bowed her waist.
“Greetings, Grandma.”
“……….Eht?”
“Yes?”
“The girl here is Teresa Kaitlyn. I can’t express how relieved I am to see you in good health, Grandma.”
But Yoonjeong didn’t catch anything Teresa had just said.
What did that girl just say…?
Did she just call me Grandma…?
Grandma…?
She called me Grandma?!
While Yoonjeong briefly lost her senses, Shia and Menelapie’s eyes began to twitch violently.
‘What the hell is she saying?!’
‘No, what on earth is this witch talking about…!’
And as Teresa called Yoonjeong ‘Grandma,’ Yoonjeong decided to sort out the situation for a moment.
The purple-haired girl just called her ‘Grandma.’
Grandma.
If so, that girl must be her granddaughter.
And the definition of a granddaughter?
A term that means ‘the child of your child.’
In simpler terms…
That purple-haired girl is Shia’s daughter…?
“….Hey, Shia…”
“Uh, yeah? I don’t know what you’re thinking, Mom, but that’s not it! It’s not what you’re thinking…!”
Slap!
“Hey! You toxic little thorn! Who the hell is the father this time?!”
“Waaaah! It hurts, Mom!”
“Oh, that’s a misunderstanding, Mother-in-law…! Shia definitely didn’t…!”
“Then who is it?! Menelapie, is it you?!”
“Ah, no…!”
And with a fierce slap on Shia’s back, Menelapie’s face turned to shock, while Teresa’s face wore a thick smile.
‘Ah, this is hilarious.’
