Subaru felt like he was floating disembodied in a sea of darkness. His senses were blurred like glass in snowy weather, and his mind was disfigured in a bunch of unsolvable unknowns. His intellect was so depleted that it had deviated from language, reducing his existence to that of a being moved by instinct. He had discovered the hard way that this book wasn't made for normal people.
However, a searing and uninterrupted force began to awaken him from that inhuman nightmare. A colossal pressure, enough to break mountains and divide seas, constantly slammed into his body as if it wanted to tear him into a thousand pieces. However, such destruction never took place.
"...d ...na..."
Subaru felt so weak that he didn't even remember where he was, but his thoughts were finally managing to materialize into words.
"ECHIDNA!"
And he finally managed to open his eyes when a horrible sound made his brain twitch. He was abruptly awakened from his own fantasy and found himself face-to-face with a woman as young as him and with a childish expression.
"WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS MEAN?!" she roared. “I STOP PAYING ATTENTION FOR A MOMENT AND YOU ALMOST KILLED YOURSELF! YOU KNOW HOW THAT BOOK WORKS BETTER THAN ANYONE, DON'T YOU?! IF YOU KNOW THAT USING IT TOO MUCH FRIES YOUR HEAD, DON'T BE AN IDIOT AND DON'T DO IT! I THOUGHT YOU DID NOT EVEN LIKE USING IT! "
That verbal gibberish seemed very familiar to Subaru, but he was too busy to be surprised by it. Something else, something much more internal and intimate, had captured all of his attention. Specifically, everything he had remembered when hearing the name "Echidna."
‘I’m Echidna’
‘I'm the being known as the Witch of Greed’
‘I was the bearer of the Authority of Avarice until my death’
"I died four hundred years ago because of Satella."
‘I'm much prettier than said bitch’
'My tea is made from bodily fluids'
All these ideas and many more had been embedded within Subaru in the form of a variety of memories that were as real as his own. Those memories were much clearer and more revealing than mere dreams, and they entered his consciousness like one more passage, as if they had always been there.
It was then that he discovered this book was the Book of Wisdom, a legendary object of the witch of greed that was able to answer any question by extracting information from the memory of the world. It had reacted to his doubt about his new form by revealing all sorts of intimate details about Echidna.
So intimate that when he closed his eyes he was able to see himself taking an unhappy young man as a ward, creating an adorable spirit with innocent features and interacting with the girl who was still screaming before him, among many other things.
By sheer chance, and most likely as a result of remembering the Witch of Envy, Subaru remembered the half-elf that he had recently abandoned. And as he did so, he thought:
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