Chapter 182
──The girl's face was monstrously ugly.
Once, she had heard a skilled makeup artist sing-songedly proclaim that makeup could make or mar anyone's looks.
But no matter how skillfully she applied makeup, there were some things it could never fix—a fact the girl had known painfully well ever since she was old enough to remember.
The girl's face was ugly. One might even call it grotesque.
Even though she had never been beaten, her eyelids were always swollen enough to cover half her eyes; her skin was covered in disgusting, bumpy rashes; her nose was so flat it was hard to tell whether she even had one; and her lips were twisted and misshapen.
When the girl was just old enough to understand what was happening around her, she was abandoned in a red-light district in the southeastern part of the Empire.
There was no need to wonder why her parents had abandoned her. Who would want to keep a child with such a hideously monstrous face by their side?
Desperate to survive, the girl wandered the red-light district, begging adults to let her stay, promising she would do anything.
The person who took her in was the owner of a particular brothel. The owner allowed her to sleep in a storage shed as long as she worked there doing odd jobs.
From that day on, the girl worked as though her life depended on it. No matter how grueling the physical labor or how cold the water was in midwinter, she completed every task diligently without complaint.
Sometimes, when a prostitute at the brothel died of an epidemic, the girl was put in charge of disposing of the body, and in return she was given a small share of the dead woman's clothes and possessions.
One day, the girl was given the clothes and personal belongings of a dead prostitute, along with a book.
Wanting to read the book, the girl asked an old beggar who said he had once been a scholar to teach her how to read.
The book among the prostitute's effects was a popular entertainment novel.
A princess cursed by an evil witch and given an ugly face overcame a series of trials, broke the curse, and was ultimately united with a prince.
The girl saw herself in the cursed princess and read the book with rapt attention.
Someday, a prince would appear for her, too, and break her curse──Of course, she knew it was only a fantasy. Even so, that fantasy let her forget, if only for a little while, the pain of being regarded strangely by everyone around her.
No matter how much the people around her berated the princess in the story for being an ugly girl, she never gave in to despair. She remained kind and sincere to everyone. She never forgot her dignity as a princess and continued to conduct herself with elegance──and that was why the prince noticed her.
Wanting to be like her, the girl began gradually improving her bearing from that day onward.
No matter how exhausted she was, she kept her posture straight. Even when ordered to perform grueling work, she answered in a beautiful voice.
Whenever she saw a customer from the upper classes, she memorized the way they pronounced words and carried themselves, then imitated them.
Whenever she heard a popular song or saw a fashionable dance, she practiced it by copying what she had seen during her breaks.
The brothel's prostitutes made fun of her, but the girl was accustomed to being mocked, and their derision did not affect her in the slightest.
In the spring of the year the girl turned thirteen, the owner ordered her to take customers.
The brothel was fairly popular, and there were times when the women working there could not keep up with demand. At such times, the girl was ordered to entertain customers as a stopgap until one of the other prostitutes became available.
But this “entertaining” was different from the way the brothel's beautiful prostitutes poured drinks for customers and performed songs and dances.
In one of the vacant rooms, a male customer had his way with the girl for next to nothing. And she had a burlap sack over her head the entire time.
"Ah, ah, sir, I'm terribly sorry to have kept you waiting. If you'd like, why not use this girl to pass the time until your favorite girl is free? Of course, there's no charge. It's just a little service for one of our valued regulars. This girl's face is nothing to look at, but her body is young and beautiful. Go on, go on, use her however you please."
The owner brought in male customers like that and made the girl service them.
When the girl was ordered to entertain customers, she intended to please them with conversation and perform songs and dances, however clumsily──to entertain them just like the brothel's other prostitutes.
But none of the men wanted anything like that.
To the men, the girl with a sack over her head apparently looked little different from an object.
The girl was used as a plaything by the men, without being treated as a human being.
Without ever getting to display any of the education, singing, or dancing she had desperately worked to acquire.
＊ ＊ ＊
Why are you wearing a sack over your head?"
A customer asked the girl.
The girl wearing the burlap sack could not see the customer's face. Through the coarse weave, she could make out, at most, the faintest gradations of light and dark in the room.
Judging by his voice, he was probably still a relatively young man. His speech had a slight foreign accent, and he spoke in a feminine manner, as though trying to disguise it. He was a strange customer.
Surely this man was new to the establishment. A regular who had visited more than once would surely know about this brothel's “Sack Girl.”
"...My face is so ugly that I hide it like this."
"Hmm?"
Even through the sack, the girl could tell that the man was approaching her as she sat on the bed.
Just when she thought he would reach for her clothes, he instead grasped the edge of the sack. The girl hurriedly held it down.
"I wouldn't recommend looking just out of curiosity. It will upset you, and you won't feel like sleeping with me anymore."
"I don't mind, you know..."
The man whispered sweetly and gently stroked the girl's cheek through the sack.
"Shall we compare?"
Her vision suddenly opened up, and she felt the breeze against her cheeks. The man had removed the sack in an instant.
The man who had taken the sack from the girl had black hair, black eyes, and a flat-featured face. His features were so uncommon in this country that he had to be a foreigner.
The girl did not think his face was ugly at all. His features were clean-cut and cool.
...But in the next instant, the man's face began to change color as though his skin were peeling away.
His healthy skin reddened, turned dark, and began to blister and crumble. His lips peeled back, exposing his gums.
"Eek...!?"
When the girl instinctively backed away, the man covered his own face with both hands. Then he kneaded his face as though it were clay.
The skin warped and twisted over his skull, while the dark-red, ulcerated flesh became covered in healthy-colored skin.
Once he had molded the flesh to match the underlying bones... the face became that of a different man. The girl knew this man's face well. It belonged to the brothel's owner.
"A long time ago, I was falsely accused and incurred my sovereign's wrath. They poured boiling oil over my face, you see. I was so bitter about it that I taught myself how to remake my face... Pretty good, don't you think?"
As he spoke, the man kneaded his face again, returning it to the flat-featured face he had before.
The girl was captivated by the horrifying yet miraculous sight.
The man must have sensed how fascinated she was. He chuckled and ran a finger along the girl's cheek—this time directly, not through the sack—stroking her rash-covered skin.
"Shall I do the same for you?"
The girl's swollen lips trembled.
"...Can you?"
"When I use this technique on someone else, it only works once. If I use it again, I'll die of mana poisoning."
Saying this, the man held out his hand to the girl. It might have been the first time anyone had ever extended a hand to her like this.
The girl swallowed hard, then placed her hand over his.
The man smiled.
"Your pronunciation is lovely. And your posture is good, too... I just happened to be looking for a well-mannered attendant."
The man took the girl's hand and stood, then called the owner over. He took several gold coins from inside his clothes and pressed them into the owner's hand.
"I'll buy this girl out. You don't mind, do you?"
The owner was so surprised and delighted they nearly leaped for joy. Someone had paid gold coins for a girl who was not worth even a single copper coin. The owner rubbed their hands together, bobbing and bowing, and said, "Go ahead, go ahead, do whatever you like."
The man spoke as he walked.
"Oh, right, I never asked your name. I'm Euan. And you?"
It had been a long time since anyone had even asked her name.
After all, the men who slept with the Sack Girl were interested only in everything below her neck. Not her face, her name, or her education.
"...My name is Heidi."
"What a cute name. Nice to meet you, Heidi."
＊ ＊ ＊
After Euan performed body-manipulation magic on her, Heidi was reborn.
Her heavy-lidded eyes became sleek, her rash-covered skin smooth, her nose straight, and her lips shapely.
She was not the kind of stunning beauty who made everyone turn to look, but she had a cool, sharp face that still retained the innocent charm of a girl her age.
There was only one part of her remade face that bothered Heidi: her eyebrows. Those slightly thick brows alone remained unchanged, making their presence known above her eyes.
As Heidi reached for a razor to shave and shape them, Euan said:
"Oh, you're going to shave them? What a shame. They're cute just the way they are."
"..."
Heidi put down the razor.
Of course her current face was cute. It had been remade specifically so it would not look unsightly.
But this was the first time anyone had told her that a feature unchanged from before was cute.
"...Are they cute?"
"I thought so from the moment I took the sack off you. 'What cute eyebrows,' I thought."
"..."
Heidi silently stroked her eyebrows and gently put the razor away.