Naruto: Cthulhu: Ch. 272

She received a negative answer, and the short, plump woman lowered her head in disappointment.

At that moment, the people nearby finally came over and noticed Naruto standing behind Masako.

"Masako, who is he?"

"Ah, he claims to be a ninja from Konoha. He says he's here on a mission."

As she spoke, the masked figure named Masako removed the black cloth covering her face. Beneath it was a woman with delicate features. To call her a girl would be a stretch, it was more accurate to say she was a young wife.

When the crowd heard of Naruto's identity as a ninja, they immediately crowded forward, asking if he was here to help them. Naruto didn't know how to respond.

"I don't even know what you're all talking about!"

"Can someone explain what's going on here?!"

The chatter gave Naruto a headache, and it was Masako who made the people quiet down for the moment.

"Please wait!"

"This ninja doesn't seem to understand the situation here."

"Let me explain things to him first."

Masako led Naruto into a fortress of yellow sand and began telling him about their circumstances.

"This city is located in the desert, the country of Rōran. You should know that much, right?"

Naruto nodded. Although the place was quite different from the sand-buried ruins he had seen before, there was no doubt this was also Rōran. What had caused such a huge difference between then and now, he did not know.

"Our country has always been ruled by the queen of Rōran, for example, the late Lady Sēramu, and the current queen, Lady Sāra."

Sāra.

Naruto remembered that was the name inscribed on the tombstone he had just seen.

"All of this goes back to six years ago."

"One day six years ago, a man named Anrokuzan came to Rōran as a guest. He provided us with a great deal of new technology, improving the lives of our people."

"Because of this, the late queen, Lady Sēramu, treated him as an honored guest. Before long, he was even made minister."

"Not long after that, Lady Sēramu suddenly passed away, and her daughter, Lady Sāra, inherited the throne."

"But this queen was nothing more than a puppet. She hardly dealt with any state affairs, leaving everything in Anrokuzan's hands. Most of her days were spent at the late queen's tomb, the very place where you just emerged from underground."

The "you" Masako referred to was, of course, Naruto.

"At first, we thought it was simply because the queen was too young, unable to recover from her mother's death, and that with time she would eventually take up her responsibilities."

"But unexpectedly, things only grew more... 'serious' a year later."

Here Masako's tone grew heavier, as if what she was about to say was very important.

"My husband once served as one of Lady Sāra's personal guards. According to him, one morning while eating breakfast, Lady Sāra suddenly collapsed."

"At that time, she fell into a completely unconscious state. The court physicians tried everything, but none of them could awaken her, not even Anrokuzan."

"Soon after, he announced Lady Sāra's condition to the people. He declared that if Lady Sāra did not awaken, he would become the new king of Rōran."

"Of course, we natives of Rōran could not accept an outsider as our king, so we truly wished for Lady Sāra to recover."

"The good news is that on the fifth day of her coma, Lady Sāra finally woke up."

"But the bad news was, she had completely forgotten who she was!"

"What I'm about to tell you I heard from my husband, the queen's guard. These are not fabrications, they truly happened to Lady Sāra."

"After waking, Lady Sāra remembered nothing of her identity as queen, nor anything of her past, as if she were suffering from amnesia."

"But for some reason, she tried to conceal her memory loss."

"Moreover, she began looking at those around her with a strange gaze. Even the muscles of her face would sometimes twist in unfamiliar ways."

At this point, Naruto interrupted: "Maybe it was just normal amnesia. If someone loses their memory, it makes sense they'd find everyone around them unfamiliar."

But Masako immediately shook her head.

"No, my husband said that look was not how a human regards strangers."

"It was more like how someone would observe a completely unknown creature. For Lady Sāra, what she wanted to understand wasn't the identities of those around her, but humanity itself, as if humans were an entirely new species to her."

"And it wasn't just her memory. When Lady Sāra awoke, even her language skills had become clumsy. Her speech was strange and stiff, as if she were only just learning to speak."

"Though within two days she was able to communicate with others, her pronunciation was still bizarre and rough, like someone learning a language purely from books."

"Two days after that, her body regained its strength, but she had to relearn how to use her hands and feet."

"She had completely forgotten how to use her own limbs. Is that something ordinary amnesia could cause?"

The use of hands and feet is almost engraved in human genetics, a newborn can instinctively grasp a parent's finger, even before anyone teaches them what 'grasping' is.

And that was what made it terrifying, Sāra's amnesia was so severe she had even lost such primal instincts.

"Later, according to my husband, once Lady Sāra realized she couldn't hide her severe memory loss, she admitted the truth herself."

"She told Anrokuzan she needed to relearn everything from the beginning. Anrokuzan agreed."

"But from what my husband observed, what she pursued was purely knowledge, history, language, science, art, everything except her own past."

"It was as if, once she acknowledged her amnesia, she completely accepted it. She no longer cared about her identity, devoting herself wholly to learning."

"From that day onward, Lady Sāra spent every day studying in the National Library."

What had happened to the newly crowned Sāra was already well known among the commoners of Rōran, but when Masako brought it up again, people still showed the same puzzled expressions one might have when hearing some bizarre, mysterious tale.

"Since then, Lady Sāra has become obsessed with learning. And her learning speed is incredibly fast, at least four or five times that of an average adult, perhaps even more. She only needs to glance at the pages while flipping through a book to remember everything."

"But at the same time, Lady Sāra is utterly clueless about the most basic common sense of daily life, things even small children know."

"This dark, hidden feeling... it's almost as if some other soul has taken over Lady Sāra's body."

As Masako said this, a trace of disgust flashed in her eyes, something Naruto also noticed.

"During Lady Sāra's time of amnesia, Anrokuzan completely took control of the entire Rōran kingdom."

"Anrokuzan dismissed all the palace guards and created those puppet soldiers to serve as replacements."

"Later, he rounded up all the men in the country and took them away to some unknown place. They've never returned, including my husband."

"And my brother and father!"

"And my..."

The women all began talking at once. Masako leaned closer to Naruto and said, "Those puppet soldiers can't move beyond the range covered by those towers. That's why we moved our homes here."

"What we're hoping for now is that Lady Sāra can recover her memory, reclaim her authority as queen, and bring our men back."

"So every day, we send people to wait near the former queen's tomb. We thought maybe one day Lady Sāra might come, as she used to, to visit her mother's grave. That way, we'd have a chance to meet her."

"But in these four years since Lady Sāra's amnesia, she has never once visited the late queen's tomb. Not even once."

Masako's tone carried a sense of despair, because seeing the queen and voicing their plea was the only hope the women had of bringing their men home.

The strange part was that ever since Sāra's amnesia, she had never gone to see her mother's grave.

Even if she forgot her identity, after hearing people talk about it, curiosity should have at least driven her there once.

But Sāra never went.

As Masako's husband once said, once Sāra openly admitted her amnesia, she showed no interest at all in her own origins or past.

Normally, people who lose their memory do everything they can to rediscover themselves. But Sāra focused entirely on learning new knowledge.

That feeling...

"I got it!"

Naruto suddenly had a flash of inspiration. Everyone immediately fell silent and turned their eyes on him.

"That queen named Sāra must really love learning. She just pretended to have amnesia so she could escape the responsibilities of being queen, all for the sake of studying."

Naruto's bold guess left all the women stunned. None of them had ever thought of it that way.

"Is that really true?" asked the short, plump woman from earlier.

"Is studying really that much fun?" asked a child.

"But if that's the case, then we'll never be able to convince Lady Sāra, since her amnesia is an act."

"You can never wake someone who's only pretending to sleep." That was exactly Masako's worry.

But Naruto immediately stood up, wearing a confident expression, striking a cool pose. "Don't worry! I'll definitely convince the queen!"

---

Inside a vast library, a red-haired girl sat cross-legged in the center of the grand hall, surrounded by towering piles of books.

The crisscrossing stacks had emptied the library shelves entirely, forming heaps taller than half a person. From above, they looked like a carefully designed giant maze.

At the very center sat the girl, with several piles of books also at her feet.

Her upright posture made her seem like a puppet, emotionless, tireless. Her hands moved mechanically, flipping pages at incredible speed.

What was most shocking was her rhythm: she turned a page about once every three seconds, including the time it took to physically flip it.

That meant she could finish reading two full pages in under three seconds.

As the girl read tirelessly, the grand doors of the library slowly opened, and a slightly bloated figure stepped inside.

It was Anrokuzan. His scruffy beard made him look nothing like the man who had first arrived in Rōran six years earlier.

Floating at his sides were two puppet soldiers.

"Lady Sāra, I heard you wanted to see me?"

Though Sāra had lost her memory and Anrokuzan was the true ruler of Rōran, he still addressed her formally as queen.

But truth be told, Anrokuzan disliked seeing her. Every time he did, he felt a strange discomfort.

At first, he thought Sāra was just like her mother, Sēramu, an easy-to-fool simpleton who trusted outsiders too much.

But now, he couldn't make sense of her at all. Talking with Sāra felt like having an academic debate with a curious scholar from a faraway land.

Especially since she had shown such interest in puppet soldiers, chakra, and the Ryūmyaku, Anrokuzan wanted to avoid her even more.

It was as if, beneath Sāra's body, there was a soul that refused to obey the laws of this world.

"I've almost finished reading all the books in this country. Just these last ten or so, and I'll be done today."

"After that, I plan to travel the world, to see the vast lands beyond."

"In the book in front of you, there's a sheet of paper tucked in the front cover. On it is the amount of money I'll need for my travels. You will prepare those funds for me."

As she spoke, Sāra raised a hand and pointed at the book in front of Anrokuzan, though her eyes never left the pages in her hands.

Anrokuzan did not immediately pick up the book. Instead, he stared in shock at the sea of books before him.

Could it be true?

Had she really read them all?

This library contained more than forty thousand books!

No ordinary person could finish them in a lifetime, yet she had read them all in just four years?

How could that be possible?!

Although he had long known about Sāra's incredible learning ability since her amnesia, hearing her speak of her accomplishments still filled him with disbelief.

That kind of learning speed... It wasn't human.