Chapter 678: The Consequence of Caring

Clementine kept stirring the stew with a large wooden spoon. She looked at it nervously, and then glanced over at her father, "Are you sure that this is good?"

"Of course it is. You gave it a try earlier too, didn't you?" the Demon replied, pushing all of the peels and other scraps together into a small pile, being on clean-up duty while Clementine kept on cooking. The girl still didn't seem convinced though, "Yeah, but... how do I know if it was actually good, or if I just have a bad taste?"

Eiro stopped for a moment and thought about it, "Well, I guess there's no real way to know that. But I told you, right? It's good. If you can't trust in your own ability, at least trust my tastebuds."

Clementine slowly nodded her head, "Alright, if you say so."

For a few moments, Eiro chose to leave Clementine alone in the kitchen. Of course, he could still tell everything that was going on in there, so it wasn't like he really left her on her own. If anything happened, he could still be there to take care of it immediately. But he just wanted to quickly get rid of the food scraps, since they were cluttering the kitchen counters.

The Demon carried the scraps in a large bowl down the hallway. There was a door leading into the gardens right here, and Eiro quickly made his way there all the whilst preparing the scraps properly. He pushed his magic into them, using necromancy to make everything rot as quickly as it could, making the whole thing turn into a disgusting, sludgy mass. This would make it easy for the flowers to absorb all their nutrients. Of course, while it wasn't necessarily the best idea to always throw any rotten food into these fields, Eiro controlled the rot as well as he could to make sure that everything was in perfect condition for these flowers.

With a smile, the Demon poured the sludge into the field, using earth magic to make the ground swallow and distribute it evenly. These flowers were a particular kind that he wanted to raise at a natural speed when compared to the ones that he just used magic to grow. Whenever he did that, no matter how much he wanted to avoid it, the plants sometimes lost certain qualities, or gained others that he might not want them to have. And while this was all something that he could predict well enough, as these changes were simply influenced by his mana, for certain matters it wasn't particularly preferable. After he realized that using his magic would not be the best outcome for every single thing, he had started thinking more about these plants. For one, he wanted to know what else could influence the different qualities that could be found in plants, and was raising a number of different herbs and flowers in order to test some things.

Once he grew all of these in a dozen or so different circumstances and time frames, then he should be able to come up with a few theories and figure out some patterns behind this. Not only would this be helpful for himself in potentially even strengthening his nature magic, but he would be able to write some botanical theses on the process. While he could just write some things up randomly and publish them, he still wanted to do things the way they should be done in situations like this.

After he was done here, Eiro stepped back into the manor and walked back toward the Kitchen, where Clementine was just standing, having stopped stirring. Eiro hadn't noticed anything wrong, though the girl was just standing there, quietly staring into the pot.

"Is everything alright?" Eiro asked, and Clementine slowly shrugged in response, "I guess so."

"...Are you sure?"

"I..." Clementine replied, trying to think of a response, before letting out a groan of frustration, "I don't know, I think so? But maybe not, I just..."

"Hey, just take it slow. You don't have to say anything if you don't know what to say," Eiro reassured Clementine, who just shook her head, "It's not that, just... I think cooking is fun."

The Demon raised his brow, "Isn't that a good thing?"

"Of course it is... the cooking is really fun, I really do want to do this again. I want to get the skill, and level it up, and maybe show off to Rudy at some point, but... the idea of having to eat what I cook just makes me sick to my stomach," she replied, scratching her arm nervously, "Just trying it earlier made me... feel sick. It touched my tongue, and I started to feel hungry. Like, really, really hungry, this sort of hunger that's like when you haven't eaten in a few days, the kind that makes you want to just throw up, even though there's nothing to throw up in the first place. Do you get what I mean?"

Eiro nodded.

"And I just... Dad, just why do I feel this way? Why am I like this? I want to eat, I want to enjoy this, I want to be able to just... be okay, but..." tears formed in Clementine's eyes that she slowly started to wipe away, "I don't enjoy anything at all anymore. Sammy loves singing, Felix loves art. Rudy just seems to love doing everything he can do with his hands.. and you always seem so happy when it comes to your plants... I'm scared that if I care about something like that, if I get careless, then everything is just going to be messed up. That if I don't keep suffering like this, that my skill is going to just... not stop anymore."

"There's... something else to my skill that you don't know about..." Clementine replied, and Eiro stopped. Just completely, altogether, he stopped, "What do you mean? What don't I know about your skill?"

Eiro frowned lightly, "What do you mean? 'Not stop'?" he asked. At first, he thought that this was simply more of Clementine's fear that resulted in her self-destructive habits, but it seemed to be more than just that. During her last sentence, her leg twitched lightly, right at her left, outer thigh. It was one of the few places on Clementine's body that had slight damage to them and some scarring. For anyone else, this would be a scar that would never go away, but Clementine's compatibility with healing was so great that it would be gone within a few years. Eiro thought that maybe this came from some immense wound that she 'ate' before he met her, but he felt like maybe there was more to this.

"There's... something else to my skill that you don't know about..." Clementine replied, and Eiro stopped. Just completely, altogether, he stopped, "What do you mean? What don't I know about your skill?"

"...When I was younger, in my old village... before I was bought and picked up by that priest, I... well, they used me to heal everyone. Every injury was put onto me. They were basically overfeeding my skill, and it was just... happy. It was satisfied. Even though I was in pain every day, I just felt so happy, because I finally didn't feel that 'hunger' anymore," Clementine explained, "But then, winter came around... there were less hunts, and everyone was stuck in their homes because of how much it snowed. So, there wasn't much for me to do. And the hunger came back... it was worse, so, so much worse... and because it couldn't eat anything anymore, it started to eat me..."

Eiro's eyes widened, "It ate you? As in, it physically ate you?"

The girl nodded, "Yeah... I mean, I think so at least. Most of it was from my leg, I think because that's where the last wound it ate was, but the wound just came back one day. And would just grow and grow, until I was missing so much of my leg that they thought I would die. Then the priest came, and he was injured. And then I healed him, the skill settled down again, and you know the rest." Eiro ground his teeth, trying to hide his anger. He still didn't know why the kids were given such skills. Why a skill like this was created in the first place. The moment that he figured out a way, Eiro was going to take the skill from her, and make sure that it could never hurt Clementine ever again. But for now, that wasn't his priority.

"But what does this have to do with you being happy? You can still enjoy things, your skill won't be doing that again. It never will do that again, not if I can do something about it," Eiro started, and Clementine immediately replied, barely giving him a chance to even take a breath, "Well, what if you can't do something about it? Life will never be 'good' all the time. I feed the skill, it's happy for a while, but then it wants more, and more, and more. Everything else is the same too, right? I don't want to start caring about something, if it's just going to make me feel horrible in the end anyway."

Eiro looked at his daughter with a sad frown, "Honey, that's not how that works. Yeah, things aren't always going to go well. Yeah, you're going to get annoyed at and feel frustrated about things you care about, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't care about anything. And if you're worried that your skill will go out of control if you slip up again, then that's something we can figure out together."

"..." Clementine looked at the large pot, which was bubbling away next to the two, "Can I... just go? Do I have to finish this up?"

The Demon looked at his daughter and slowly shook his head, "You can leave. I'll finish this up, and then I'll come to you, alright? Just go rest for now."

Clementine nodded and walked toward the door, silently leaving, as Eiro stepped in front of the pot. He had hoped that this would help Clementine, and while he still believed that there was some worth to all this, Eiro realized that this wasn't just that easy. His daughter was much more broken than he had even realized, and 'cooking' wouldn't be the glue to fix her back up. At least not on its own.