How the Prince Makes Friends Chapter 140

“……”

“……”

A second wave of silence descended upon the bedroom. Evan wondered if he was dreaming and pinched his own cheek.

It hurt.

Rianus cautiously offered a theory.

“…Could it be that the feline beastkin has some kind of contagious trait we didn’t know about?”

“Myaaaow…”

Bella, who had been thoroughly scolded by Evan for whatever she had done and was now in cat form with both front paws raised, let out a timid meow.

“I’ve never heard of any beastkin race possessing such an ability. More importantly… we already confirmed that wasn’t the case, didn’t we?”

“…Right.”

Rianus looked a little dejected as he glanced at Cara, who was sitting nearby.

Immediately after Nihil had grown ears, Cara had clung to Bella, saying she wanted cat ears, too. But no ears had grown on Cara.

Noah, who still thought Nihil was a fairy, was at least not too shocked. He offered his own theory instead.

“Could he have been a feline beastkin from the beginning?”

“…But Sir Bella doesn’t have ears when she’s in human form…”

At that, Bella transformed into her human form, raised her hand, and spoke up.

“Young beastkin of many races often can’t hide their ears and tails!”

“Is that so?”

“Yes! I was like that when I was young, too!”

Bella seemed to realize that she was the cause of this whole situation, because she was practically bursting with enthusiasm.

“Haha… But what are we supposed to tell my dear friend?”

“……”

Carus’s question left Rianus speechless once again. They couldn’t exactly explain, We were playing pretend with someone who was asleep, then kissed him, and his hair changed color. After that, a cat rubbed against him, and he grew ears.

That sounded far too shameless.

…It was shameless, in fact, but he wanted to explain the situation in a slightly less shameless way.

“Will Neil be angry?”

“…You mean because we kissed someone who was asleep?”

“When you put it that way, I don’t think he’d be angry…”

If it were his dear friend, he would probably just say, “Okay,” and let it go. The problem was that his hair had changed color and he had grown ears.

If Nihil had been a feline beastkin all along, then they had exposed an identity he had deliberately concealed without his permission. If not, then something had happened to him. Neither possibility was a good sign.

“What if this has a bad effect on Neil? Can we change him back to normal?”

Just then, Nihil’s eyelids slowly lifted. Since everyone had been watching him, they immediately crowded around the bed.

Rianus flinched when he saw that the black eyes he was used to had turned cyan. But he quickly pretended nothing was wrong and called out to him.

“Neil.”

“…Rian.”

“Can you… hear me?”

“…Yeah.”

His response was a little slow, as though he hadn’t fully woken up yet. But when Rianus heard that he could hear, his face lit up with a radiant smile.

However, just as he was about to say how relieved he was—

“But… I can hear other things, too.”

“……”

“…I wonder why.”

Everyone except Cara flinched at those words.

Nihil shifted his eyes slightly and surveyed his surroundings. Wind spirits were darting back and forth right before his eyes. Their incessant chatter came along with them. He hadn’t opened his spiritual sight, so this could only mean that he had assimilated with them.

Nihil fiddled with the cyan hair that had replaced his usual white locks, then looked at the unfamiliar little girl in Carus’s arms. With spirits crowding around her, it was obvious at a glance that she was a compatible one.

“So it was you…”

The culprit.

“Huh? Cara didn’t do anything!”

“Haa…”

Nihil rubbed his face with a weary hand and let out an unusually overt sigh. The heads surrounding him all flinched.

“…I shouldn’t have fallen asleep…”

It was a kind of instinct. A survival instinct that made him assimilate with the things around him in order to stay alive.

‘It’s not as though they fed a child’s blood to someone who was sleeping…’

“The Princess of Winter became the Princess of Spring, and then she grew ca— Mmph!”

Cara had been cheerfully explaining when Carus clapped a hand over her mouth.

Nihil pressed a hand to his forehead. From the mention of a princess, it seemed he had been playing the role of a sleeping princess.

His body had fully recovered after a good night’s sleep, but the unexpected situation was giving him a headache.

Tap. Tap-tap.

“……?”

In the silence, a faint tapping sound rang out.

Nihil tilted his head, wondering what it was. Something fluffy and rope-like, colored cyan, was moving violently beside him, tapping against the bed.

“…What is this now…?”

“……”

“……”

“…A furry earthworm?”

At Nihil’s bewildered question, the thing that had been thrashing wildly across the bed began moving slowly from side to side. Wondering what sort of creature it was, Nihil grabbed it.

And then he realized.

It was attached to him.

“……”

Amid the heavy silence, Nihil carefully raised a hand and felt around his head. On either side, his fingers encountered something soft and triangular.

Seeing this, Bella darted her eyes around nervously before hurriedly transforming into a cat and slipping under the bed.

Nihil sat there blankly for a long while before finally muttering,

“…This is driving me insane.”

Then he slowly pulled the blanket over himself, covering his head, and lay back down. He hadn’t dreamed in a long time, but now he desperately hoped this was one.

“……”

“……”

Everyone exchanged uneasy glances at his unmistakable attempt to escape reality. Meanwhile, his tail continued swishing back and forth on its own, completely oblivious to the situation, until its owner grabbed it and pulled it under the blanket.

Evan felt an urge to grab the fluffy-looking tail, but restrained himself and quietly asked,

“…Are you all right?”

“……”

Nihil didn’t answer. Beneath the blanket, he was thinking about how to get out of this situation. Not just one person, but eight people had seen him like this. And to make matters worse, he hadn’t merely assimilated with one being, but two.

‘The only saving grace is that only my appearance has changed a little, and none of them seem particularly suspicious…’

But the moment they began questioning his existence, there was no telling how quickly things might turn.

In a situation like this, he had three options: reveal everything about himself and wait for their memories to be erased, leave and stay away until they completely forgot him, or pretend that this had nothing to do with his own power.

Having their memories completely erased would be ideal, but there was no guarantee that all eight of them would calmly accept it, the way the puppy had. And if even one person developed hostility toward him, that hostility would spread to the others.

The second option was out of the question because of Rianus. If Nihil left like this, the boy would burst into tears. Eventually, even those memories would be erased, but… he didn’t want that.

In the end, his only choice was to bluff.

After thinking for a moment, Nihil got up, still wrapped in the blanket.

“H-huh? Neil, where are you going?”

“…My room.”

Thinking he should at least restore his appearance, Nihil walked toward the door with the blanket over his head. Wind spirits had natural opposites, so he should be able to cancel out their influence and reverse the change.

As for the ears and tail, he could simply cut them off. They might leave scars, but once time passed and the assimilation naturally wore off, those would disappear as though they had never been there.

With that thought, he reached out from beneath the blanket and turned the doorknob. But Rianus came rushing over and grabbed him tightly.

“N-Neil, I’m sorry… I did something wrong. Don’t go.”

“Rian, I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to the room across the hall.”

“Waaah, I’m sorry I couldn’t protect your chastity…”

“Where did you even hear that…?”

Nihil secretly pressed a hand to his forehead. How had the conversation gotten so far off track?

Meanwhile, the little girl in Carus’s arms was shouting something along the lines of, “Cara did something wrong, so Cara will take responsibility!”

“No, Neil! Cara is still a baby, so I’ll take responsibility!”

Rianus hurriedly added this, sincerely apologizing because he feared Nihil, who liked children, might just follow Cara away.

This was already the second time, after the little group of children. It was becoming terribly difficult to keep his dear friend to himself. Why were there so many people in the world who wanted to steal his friend away?

However, from Nihil’s perspective, a seven-year-old and a five-year-old were both just little brats. He looked somewhat troubled.

“Rian, I’m not angry. I’ll be right back. This is… actually the effect of a magic tool.”

Nihil tried to soothe Rianus, who was clinging tightly to the blanket, while spouting whatever came to mind. As long as it sounded plausible, it would do.

“Huh? Is there something like that?”

“…Yeah. When we went to Sharton, I noticed you kept covering one of your eyes, so I tried making one as an experiment. But it didn’t activate, so I thought it had failed. I never expected it to activate while I was asleep.”

“Oh, I see!”

“I don’t remember much since I was asleep… Could you tell me what triggered it?”

“Uh… Huh? Th-that…”

As Nihil asked as though he knew nothing, the room outside the blanket fell silent. It seemed Cara had tried to speak again, but all that came out was a muffled “Mmph!”

“I-I-I don’t really know. S-sorry…”

“……”

How can she be so bad at lying?

Nihil decided to pretend he hadn’t noticed.

“I see. But since this was a one-time-use tool, I’ll have to make another one. Um… I used your magic stone without asking, though. I’m sorry.”

“No, no! You can use as many as you want. If you need more, I’ll try to get some. The Magic Tower manages magic stones, so I probably can’t get very many, though…”

“Hmm… Rian, there’s something I need to tell you. No one can find out that I can make magic tools…”

With that, Nihil lifted the blanket and cautiously peeked out. Then he lowered his eyebrows and cast his eyes downward.

“If people find out that an outsider to the Magic Tower has made a magic tool like this, they’ll drag me off to the Tower…”

“……!”

“And then… I won’t be able to stay with you anymore…”

“!!!!”

“Anyway, I’ll go and undo the magic tool’s effect. I don’t know if… it’ll work, though.”

After saying that, Nihil pulled the blanket back over his head and left the bedroom without waiting for an answer. The moment he closed the door, he could hear Rianus enthusiastically telling everyone to keep their mouths shut.

He even called Frederick out from where he had been hiding deep in the shadows and gave him a speech about keeping the secret.

But apparently, he couldn’t think of a suitable threat. He kept stammering, “If you don’t keep the secret… if you don’t…!” before his voice turned tearful and he finally pleaded, “Please keep the secret…”

‘That should do it.’

It didn’t matter whether they actually kept the secret. It was enough to make them believe that the situation was caused by a magic tool malfunctioning, rather than by Nihil’s own power.

‘Though I’ll have to show them that I really can make magic tools.’

Nihil sighed inwardly at the growing pile of work. He went straight to his room, took the magic stone installed in the bathroom, and headed back out. As soon as he did, the spirits began complaining.

(Wait? Wait? You can’t use that!)

(No! No magic!)

(I want to make a contract with him.)

(I called dibs on him first!)

“……”

To cancel out the wind, he first needed to change the magic stone’s attribute to fire.

(You can’t do that, you idiot!)

One of the spirits tugged at his hair. More spirits darted past his eyes.

Nihil kept his gaze fixed on the magic stone. It wasn’t easy to pretend not to see what he could see, or not to hear what he could hear.

Now that he had assimilated with a compatible one, the spirits wouldn’t attack him even if he spoke to them. But instead, they would undoubtedly pester him to play with them.

He erased the formula engraved on the magic stone, carved runes symbolizing the sun and fire, and waited for its attribute to change from nothingness to fire.

The spirits continued voicing their complaints, but he ignored them and gradually absorbed the fire-attribute mana. Or rather, accepted it would be a more accurate description than absorbed. Assimilation was a natural phenomenon for him, after all.

Soon, heat surged through his body before gradually subsiding. When he opened his eyes, he saw that his hair had returned to its original white.

“Phew…”

Nihil brushed his hair back. Suppressing the assimilation had left him exhausted, but he had no time to rest. He still had to deal with his ears and tail.

Will it hurt a lot?

At the thought, his tail curled timidly between his legs, as though frightened.

He frowned, displeased that it was expressing his emotions for him. In response, the tail whipped through the air as though expressing that very irritation.

“How annoying.”

Deciding that he should get rid of the tail before the ears, Nihil grabbed the fluffy thing that was thrashing wildly through the air. Just as he was about to bring his dagger down—

Bang!

“Wildcat, are you done yet—”

“……!”

“……”

Silence fell.