The Summoner's Rebirth: Awaken, Milady

Chapter 157: Adverse Reaction

Aria was stunned for a few seconds because she was trying to process the situation, but Lucas took her silence in his own way.

"You are silent now, huh? I bet you really haven't heard of anything. Are you regretting it? I don't even have the authority to expel you out of this house, so don't worry. Now that you've learned about the truth, before you waste your time and energy, just retract whatever plan you're trying to launch. It won't work." Lucas replied with a cold voice, as if he was jeering and looking down at Aria's words.

Aria pursed her lips, and realized her mistake. She was too naive. The System couldn't possibly half ass the stages it gave. Because of how surreal everything was, she didn't treat it as reality, but more like a fake simulator.

Aria took a deep breath before answering.

"..But I wasn't seeking for benefits. I was just trying to.. befriend someone like me." Aria said.

Instead of receiving a positive answer, the boy scoffed.

"Befriend.. Ha, so this is what I have come to? Do I look that pitiful, to the point that a maid would sympathize with me and befriend me? Do I seem that desperate?" Lucas asked. "Listen. I don't need friends. I don't need anybody to pity me. Just leave me alone, and go attend to my older brother or something. If you get close to him, then you will get benefits. But not me.. you won't get anything. I'm not joking, I am being completely serious!" Lucas spoke with a harsh tone.

Aria racked up her brains to try and figure out how she could retrieve this situation. She thought about Lucas, who was slowly getting fainter and fainter in her memories. His characteristics. His tendencies. It was here that she realized how few were the times he had spoken about his past.

Feeling anxious that Lucas' impression would worsen with each passing second, and she would never meet the resolution to this memory, never being able to create a change, Aria decided to spurt out the first idea that came to her mind.

As Lucas continued pressuring her with questions, Aria tore fabric from her clothes and cut her finger, drawing blood from the wound. She then used Lucas' fork as a writing instrument to carve letters. Using her blood as ink, she wrote down her message.

"I just admire your countenance. I think you are a very talented and intelligent person, and that you shouldn't be confined here, in this house. Your competency should be nurtured instead of being wasted like this. I think you have the capability to stretch your wings farther in the world. I think that you are a special one, a gifted person who just needs access to the right materials. Sincerely, Aria." Aria wrote the text in a language that was foreign from the country they were in right now.

Lucas was a brilliant orator, and he was also fluent in many languages. In truth, the languages were learned in a cramped period of time, because when he was still tied down to the Delmonte house, he didn't have the chance to touch many foreign literatures as he was forced to lock himself inside the room to protect his wellbeing.

It was rare that he could even step inside the library. His books were obtained one by one, throughout a long time span. He had to wait and orchestrate his plan to read, making sure that no one would discover his actions. He obtained the books not from the library, but rather from the shredder. He would sneak out to the shredder area and take only one book away so that no one would notice the disappearance.

It was rare in itself that books were thrown out because at that time, books were rather hard to produce and were expensive.

However, when he was seven, he finally came across a book written in a foreign language. The book had some translations and illustrations, and that was enough for Lucas' brain to process the content and decipher it within months, gaining him the ability to read and write in that language.

Although he wasn't completely able to speak it because of different pronunciation rules and such, the feat he achieved was already spectacular enough to dazzle most people. It would be near impossible to try to do what he did in months, when most couldn't even learn a language to his degree of comprehension in years.

This led to him craving for more and more foreign content, and sparked the desire to study all the different languages in the world as much as he could, making him a translator of many languages, one of the best in the whole wide world.

The language that Aria wrote in was the very thing he had learned from that book. Aria knew this because Lucas had told this story to her back in the days. It was one of the few things he told her about him.

Now that she was thrown into this situation, she regretted not asking him about the past more. She was never a curious person about someone's personal details, and focused more on herself and her aspirations. She did her responsibilities perfectly, but it still couldn't be ignored that her actions were not the best.

Aria slid the fabric through the door slip, and left the food outside as promised. She heard a small sound from inside, so she knew that the boy must've seen the fabric. She wondered if he was going to read it at all, but there was no way to force him at the same time.

She waited for a minute, then heard slow thumping noises with her sensitive hearing. It was the sound of the boy's footsteps. Then, there was a surprised gasp. Aria heaved a relieved breath, knowing that the boy must've recognized the content and was now reading it. With that, she didn't have anything else to do, and she couldn't just stay here forever to wait on him since she had to fulfill her identity's duties in order to maintain her position.

If not, before she was even able to tempt Lucas, she would be kicked out of the manor for not doing her job right.

Inside the room, Lucas brought the fabric stained with blood with amazement and sat down in the corner of his room. Reading the letter, he felt both weirded out and a bit happy. A mixture of emotions, a flurry of thoughts. His head was being filled with questions as this person named Aria praised him multiple times in the letter even though she had never met him up close.

Lucas recognized the writer's name as Aria. This must be the maid's name, he thought.

It was not the first time that a maid tried to pay attention to him. He hated it when they approached him because they felt pity, because he felt like he was being belittled when they did it. But somehow, this maid did seem to be different.

He wondered how the maid knew that he understood this language specifically out of the various ones out there, but he later shrugged it off as a coincidence, thinking that the maid only knew it because she had some relations to the origins or whatever.

Lucas still did not open his heart, obviously. He silently ate his food, but his appetite had disappeared and he wasn't in the mood to eat. He climbed up his bed and picked up the book that was written in the language Aria wrote in.

He read it. He had read each and every book inside his room more than a hundred times because of the lack of content he could access. He just wanted to continue reading, bury himself in words. It distracted him from the darkness he was trapped in, and made him feel a little bit more free than he was in reality.

In the end, he became drowsy and fell asleep while holding the book tight in his arms, muttering Aria's name. The maid that had left a lasting impression on him right off the bat because of her strangeness and peculiarity.

Outside, Aria was doing her chores as always. She just got scolded for ruining her clothes, but thankfully, Lucy was able to patch it up to an acceptable level.

Aria sighed with a frown, but those wrinkles slowly dissipated and morphed into a bright smile instead. It was indeed her mistake to have thought that the mirrored memory wouldn't be realistic.

She had overstepped her bounds today, but knowing Lucas' traits, she hoped for the best. The acts she just performed today should at least insert her figure into his memory. From there, she began trying to figure out what tricks could make him succumb.

It seemed like this mirrored world would be hard to take down.

Lucas Delmonte, one of her former colleague. How will she change this past memory? Will she make it worse, or better?

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