“The real Gaia is a noble girl. The daughter of a count, and someone who was destined to marry a very rich imperial prince. However, I had an obsession… I was obsessed with taking care of others. Whether those others were plants, animals, or people… They were all things I couldn’t avoid,” Gaia began, then lowered her gaze.

“The first thing I took care of was a strawberry bush in my back garden. It belonged to one of the maids who took care of me. One day, that maid had to leave, since she had gotten pregnant. I promised that I would take care of her strawberry bush, so I did.”

“However, I very quickly realized I wasn’t that good at taking care of things… A strawberry bush was perhaps the easiest thing to take care of, and yet, because of my interference, it had wilted within just a few weeks. Honestly, I thought I was just an idiot, so I read a few books, but then I realized I might be cursed instead.”

Rael, who heard this from the side, just sighed at her words. “You thought you were cursed because you couldn’t take care of something properly?”

Gaia rolled her eyes. “No, it’s because I did everything like in the book. It was just that, for some godforsaken reason, everything I touched continued to wilt and die. I honestly wasn’t sure what to do, so for a few years, I stopped taking care of plants.”

There was a brief silence for a moment, until she once again continued.

“A dog, two cats, a gazelle, and five snakes. I’ve had plenty of pets, but none of them lasted for longer than a week. Every single one either died from poisoning or just disappeared.”

By now, Rael had figured out there was some sort of pattern in all of this. More importantly, it seemed like she had some sort of stalker, and judging by how she started this whole story, Rael had a rough idea of who the stalker might be.

“Had any siblings?”

“None,” she said. “I did have a stepmother though, as my own mother passed away shortly after I was born. The stepmother… She wanted power, but she also knew that, as the only child of the count, I was supposed to be his successor.”

Then, she nodded once more. “So yes… I thought she was responsible for all those deaths, so my naive self confronted her… Turns out, she wasn’t responsible, and despite how mean she looked, she was actually a good person.”

“Then…?”

“Then I realized it was actually my father. He wanted to raise someone without attachments, someone who could do the right thing no matter the circumstance, since as it stood, I was supposed to take over, rule for a bit and become powerful, then marry an imperial prince,” Gaia explained, leaning back slightly.

“Alas, that didn’t stop me from forming attachments, and that was also around the time I started to learn magic. I wasn’t that good back then, but I was able to use some form of Telekinesis and a bit of Healing Magic.”

The story from then on was pretty repetitive. She trained, got attached, and tried to see just how long she could go about caring for someone before her father found out and killed them.

After tens of tries, she actually maintained a pet for three years. It was a black cat, and even then, the reason it died was because, while she was in the city, the cat jumped on a noble, and before she could do anything, it was ripped in half.

But this was also the same moment where, in her sulking phase and emotional outburst, she ran into an alley and found several dozen kids eating scraps from the garbage.

And then, the story she had roughly told him happened. She grew to care for them through the loss of her cat, and because of some circumstances, she fed them, healed them, and nourished them back to health. She had also gone ahead and invested in all of the orphanages around town with her own money.

Yet her father caught wind of that. Around that time, she hadn’t realized what she had done. After all, she was still a naive teenager. But life had two sides to the same coin…

So while she thought she was helping, what she was actually doing was feeding information to a group of spies. Obviously, she didn’t know that at the time, and so, when all of those kids disappeared and all her father did was call her an idiot, she finally broke out in a frenzy.

She destroyed her entire estate, killed her father and stepmother, then ran away. Only much later did she find out that the kids were spies, and that was why she continued to blame herself. After all, no one was inherently evil. If she had known, she could’ve prevented their deaths.

And so, in the heart of all her issues, the only thing Rael could see was eternal guilt.

But…

He also promised he wouldn’t offer any solutions. So instead of all the heartbreak, Rael just gave her a moment of silence, as she didn’t go that much into her life aside from what happened in that specific moment.

“So now, your focus is to make sure kids don’t make bad choices?” Rael mused.

Gaia thought over it for a moment, then nodded. “That’s the gist of it. Everyone’s pure. It’s only the bad people that spread impurity. I guess that’s why, when I met my master, he was so confident in handing Yggdrasil over to me.”

“Mm… I do have to ask though, after all that you did, were you a wanted fugitive?” Rael asked.

She shook her head. “I faked my death and hid the corpse of one of the orphans that I found, the one that resembled me most. To everyone, it was as though someone had come and massacred my whole family. But only I knew the truth.”

Hmm…

Well damn.

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