The Crown Prince Who Raises Alt Characters

#Chapter 298 Cat Pago (11) - Ghost Countermeasures For the honor of little Sato-san, let it be said that he wasn't particularly engaging in any "ooh ah" type behavior with a beautiful ghost. If little Sato-san had heard such a misunderstanding, he would have truly, truly, truly gone crazy with frustration. That's how much little Sato-san was suffering. Night was a time of terror. Even though he endured with the lights on in his room in terror, listening to loud music through headphones and playing games to somehow avoid sleeping, the human body couldn't hold out against sleep for such a long time. The moment his eyes closed on their own and he drifted off to sleep, the scene that Sato encountered was always the same. He lies on a bed. Even though he had already moved to another house, even though he hadn't originally been lying down when he slept, he always lay on that same bed that was in his uncle's house. His body doesn't move. He can't turn his head, and no sound comes out. As if even the air in his lungs is blocked, let alone his throat. Even when he tries to look around with his eyes, the only things he can move, at most he can only examine the ceiling and the edge walls around it. However, that doesn't mean he doesn't know what's around him. No, rather he can know it tiresomely well. In the silence where even his own breathing can barely be felt, the only sound that can be heard is water. Drip, drip, drip. The sound of water droplets falling on the dry floor can be heard. Little by little, slowly, but definitely getting closer. His nose senses a fishy stench. The smell of fishy water. And the smell of blood that most people rarely have occasion to experience, which little Sato himself didn't know until recently. The sound of water draws closer. The fishy smell grows stronger. And then, 'it' begins to appear at the edge of his vision. A dress soaked in blood. A woman with a pallid white face where blue veins stand out prominently. Click. A new sound is added to the sound of water droplets. Little Sato-san knows the identity of that sound. The sound of pushing out or pulling back a box cutter blade. The clicking sound of the box cutter mixes together with the dripping sound of water. Thinking of the blade outside his field of vision, he feels an instinctive sense of danger knowing it's somewhere invisible right now. But his body doesn't move an inch. The woman looks at little Sato's face. A face drained of all blood from her entire body. Pale lips. Wet hair. And eyes full of resentment and rage. The woman's jaw joint opens. Like someone chilled to the bone, like someone forcibly moving joints that haven't moved in a long time, the woman's mouth opens with unnatural creaking movements. -Die. The woman's mouth moves at high speed. -Diediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediediedie. Like a broken record, like an improperly played audio file. Speech is uttered at speeds impossible for humans, and you can glimpse the woman's joints twisting and breaking with grinding sounds under her skin, unable to withstand it. Just as he tries to close his eyes at that horrible sight, the woman thrusts something in front of little Sato. Click. Click. Click. Click. A box cutter soaked in blood can be seen. Below it, a wrist with clear cut marks. And then, the woman's body disappears from Sato's field of vision. Instead, sensations increase. Something grabs Sato's hand and rolls up the clothing on his wrist. And then, something cold and sharp touches his wrist. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch! Again and again, again and again, the blade cuts across his wrist, cuts, and cuts again. He wants to scream, but no sound comes out. He wants to struggle, but his body still can't move even a finger. The woman's curse can be heard. The sound of water droplets can be heard. The sound of the box cutter can be heard. "Aaaaaaaaahhhhh!!" And then, he wakes up from sleep. Gasping, gasping. Sato breathed heavily. He reflexively grabs his wrist. There are no wounds. It's something he's already experienced and confirmed several times, but still, he couldn't bear the anxiety if he didn't check each time. That's how terrible that dream was. "Damn it, why is this happening to me...!! What did I ever do!!" Little Sato clutched his head. The ghost that had been haunting him since he entered his uncle's house. And the terrible nightmares that continued every night. While his uncle spent his own money visiting various religious and shamanic figures, little Sato wasn't just idling around either. He also investigated his uncle's house and found out information that the previous previous previous previous owner had become pessimistic about life, slit their wrists, and committed suicide in the bathroom. So he tried holding memorial services to pray for their soul's peace, offering tributes, and anyway tried everything he could do. But the result was the same. The woman was still tormenting little Sato, and now even followed him even though he had fled by moving. Now he really wanted to give up everything. When he fell into despair again, the doorbell rang. Ding-dong—. At the sudden doorbell sound, little Sato almost screamed. Because of the vivid sensations left by the nightmare just moments before, he even had the delusion that the bloody woman might be standing beyond the door. But what appeared on the intercom screen was a very realistic delivery driver in uniform. 《Is this the Sato residence? I have a delivery.》 At the voice from reality, little Sato barely came to his senses. Without opening the door, he spoke through the intercom. "Ah, just leave it in front of the door please." 《Yes, understood. It's quite heavy so please be careful when bringing it inside!》 After confirming that the sound of footsteps was moving away. When he unlocked the door and peeked outside, there was indeed a fairly large and heavy cardboard box sitting there, just as the driver had said. "What did I order...?" It had only been a few days since he moved, and he hadn't had any mental capacity to do things like shopping while going through life-or-death situations every night. Perhaps his uncle had been deceived by some supposedly powerful shaman again and sent expensive exorcism charms or dharma paintings? Sato brought the box into the house with an unpleasant feeling. When he opened the desk drawer to cut the tape and unconsciously reached for the box cutter, the 'click' sound he had just heard in his dream overlapped like a hallucination, making him flinch in surprise and hurriedly switch to scissors instead. The moment he carefully cut the tape and opened the box flaps wide. "...Huh?" A dumbfounded sound leaked from little Sato's mouth. According to his expectations, it would be normal for bundles of charms with the smell of burning mugwort or scrolls with red writing to come out. But what filled the box was something about a thousand miles away from his expectations. "About How My Room's Earthbound Spirit Girl is Too Cute to Help Pass On" "A Yandere Evil Spirit Crawls into My Blanket Every Night" "It's Not an Exorcist but a Pure Love Story?" A feast of all kinds of books with colorful covers that honestly seemed to have more skin color than clothing color. That wasn't all. A beautiful girl bromide where the character's description is a ghost, but the body isn't transparent and only the clothing is semi-transparent. Inside a plastic box carefully wrapped in bubble wrap was a figure where the chest size and head size were similar. A hachishaku-oni dakimakura larger than Sato's height that had been in a compression pack and began to inflate on its own when the packaging was opened. "Wh-what is all this?!" Little Sato isn't completely without knowledge in this area either. He's never seriously delved into it, but reading a light novel or manga or two isn't that strange even for an ordinary student. But this wasn't at that level. These were clearly items that reeked of an expert(?), weren't they? Little Sato, who saw there were even plenty of eroge, adult books, and doujinshi right out in the open, was literally stunned. So, for about 5 seconds. On the 6th second, having regained his senses, he decided to check the contents with the boiling passion and curiosity befitting his young blood. He had to know what was wrong to decide how to handle it, didn't he! "Wow, the lower body itself is semi-transparent but still visible? What kind of guy came up with such a novel, ahem, shameless idea..." Ding-dong—. 《Sato-san. Are you there?》 "Aaaahhhhh!" This time Sato really fell flat. Compared to when the delivery driver came, he seemed about 3 times more surprised. Considering it was the reaction of an innocent young man who suddenly heard a woman's voice while looking at such things, there was some room for consideration, but at least in this situation, it was something he shouldn't have done. Bang! Bang! Crash! Because a high school girl who claims to be an introvert but whose boldness and violence are probably at the level of 1/3, no 1/2 of a tank, mercilessly destroyed the doorknob and charged in. For her, knowing that Sato was being tormented by a ghost, she had temporarily set aside social common sense in preparation for the worst crisis, but for Sato it was a disaster. "What's wrong!?" Popuri charged in. Sato and Popuri's gazes met. Seeing Sato with pages strangely full of skin color spread out, she said, "Oh, um... have a good time. Well then, I'll be going," and tried to leave just like that. Sato screamed. "No! It's not like that! I know what you're misunderstanding right now, but it's not that! I said it's not!!" After desperate negotiations, the two ended the trade by forgetting each other's memories. Sato, who became a young man with no interest in such lewd items in Popuri's memory, spoke. "...So those things, my uncle just scraped together stuff from home shopping with ghost or spirit keywords and sent them? For mental training?" Popuri, who became a high school girl who had absolutely never smashed someone else's doorknob with a baseball bat in Sato's memory, answered. "You know how when that ghost appears in dreams, people are mostly powerless and just suffer? But that's usually because that's how it needs to be for it to work as a ghost story, and depending on the person, there are often types who conversely destroy the ghost regardless of whether it appears or not. It's just that those don't make good stories, so if there's no element that appeals in a different direction from horror, they don't become known." For example, there's the story of a wife who defeated a female ghost that clung to her husband in dreams and poured out curses by repeatedly slapping the ghost's cheeks, Popuri explained. Sato, who had no way of knowing that Popuri herself had heard it from Pago and then searched for additional information, let out a light exclamation of "Oh." "The important thing is mental strength—but saying that sounds a bit too stuffy, so to put it differently, it's about changing your perception. After all, the ghost that Sato-san encounters can only act tough inside dreams, but outside it's like a corner trash that can't exert any influence, right?" "Is that... so?" This girl looks gentle on the outside but has quite a sharp tongue, Sato thought to himself. He also thought he shouldn't do anything to make her angry in the future. "But even so, thinking of that terrible ghost like the characters in these works is a bit..." "When you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares back at you. The thing that pops into your dreams is also influenced by yourself. If you just firmly establish the perception in Sato-san's mind, you can even conquer the ghost." No, that's easier said than done. Do people's hearts change that easily? Sato wanted to argue like that, but unfortunately Popuri seemed to have no intention of listening to his objections. "Anyway, read them. Read them again and again. Just stuff the related content into your head enough that it's imprinted all day long. The manager is going to cover your shifts until this is resolved anyway, right?" "Well, um, that's true." When you think about it, this whole mess happened after he stayed at the manager's house because of the manager's call, but this was why little Sato couldn't easily resent big Sato. Finding a new place to stay, paying for various charms and spiritual treatment costs, and even covering work shifts—honestly, hadn't he done everything a person could do? "Anyway, I've explained everything, so I'll be going now." "O-okay." Popuri left with light movements, and a cat jumped up and settled on her shoulder. "The broken door... I should at least put up a chain and call someone." What remained were these unnecessarily numerous various subculture items, or frankly speaking, otaku artifacts. In this absurd situation where he was told to read light novels, manga, and play eroge as ghost countermeasures, Sato felt like his current situation had become a little lighter. Right, since his uncle had bought them with good intentions, let's just do it lightly, lightly. Thinking that he couldn't possibly get absorbed in such frivolous things, Sato picked up a book. -It was one day before the manager received a text asking if he could get an advance on his nephew's salary.