All living beings in hell

Chapter 108 Chapter 061:[-] - Knight Greta

Yang Oyster returned to the human world to travel, and I stayed in hell to continue working, and everything was proceeding in an orderly manner according to the order I liked.

The lotus lantern at the entrance was lit up, and the office welcomed No. 60 No. [-] customer.

The door was pushed open, and a knight in medieval armor pushed at the door and knelt on one knee: "Master, may I come in?"

"Come in...and I'm not your master."

The knight came to the wooden table with standard steps, sat down in a proper manner, and began to report his name before I asked: "Your Excellency, my name is Greta Luster (Greta Luster), I am from 16 A royal knight at the beginning of the century, who once served the Habsburg family. After the assassination failed, he came to hell, looking for the next master I need to serve."

I quickly recorded everything she said, and asked at the same time: "Greta, are you a female knight?"

The knight in front of her took off her steel helmet, and her long red wavy hair poured out.Greta's eyes are gray and blue, the bridge of her nose is covered with freckles due to long-term sun exposure, and her round baby face has an extremely determined expression.

"Yes sir, I am a woman. Is there any problem?"

"No problem. I'm surprised that there were not many female knights serving the royal family in the Middle Ages."

"So we are the best of the best."

"Okay Greta, what are you looking for me for today?"

"I'm looking for the next master who needs me to serve. I saw the notice on your side to receive guests, so I came to ask if you need a knight to serve?"

"Hmm..." I thought for a while, "I don't have any work for you right now, sorry."

"Is that so? That's a pity. I'm a good bodyguard."

"Why do you have to find a master to serve?"

"I am a knight. This is the mission of a knight. We are born to protect and serve our masters. When we are alive, we are also after death."

"Why did you want to be a knight in the first place?"

Greta's tone was very flat, with almost no emotional ups and downs, and her sentences were not continuous, as if she was jumping out one by one.

"My father was a knight, and so was my grandfather. Knighthood is a profession passed down from generation to generation in our family, and it is also an honor that needs to be shouldered."

"But now that you have said goodbye to that life experience, you can actually do whatever you want now. If you don't want to, you don't have to be a knight."

"I want to continue being a knight."

"okay."

I didn't say anything, got up and poured two cups of hot tea.One cup is held by oneself, and one cup is placed in front of Greta.

"Are you pouring me hot tea because I'm a woman?"

"Huh? No, if you don't like hot tea, I still have cold water."

Greta picked up the teacup and took a sip of tea: "Your Excellency, hot tea is very good."

"You seem to care a lot about being a woman?"

"This world is unfair to women, especially a knight like me. People don't say things like 'because he's a man, he can't do well' because of a male knight's mistakes on the battlefield. In contrast, as long as I have a little bit of imperfection, I will be criticized in various ways. In the end, the scolding will come down to 'a woman is a woman, she should cook and have children at home, and she doesn't even have the right to vote. Why should second-class citizens serve the royal family?'

Sir, it is not that I am overly sensitive.I have to be careful not to make mistakes.Any mistake may ruin the honor of the family on me, which I don't want to see. "

"Tell me how you got to hell, Greta."

Greta lowered her head slightly, she seemed a little hesitant.

"If you really don't want to say it, I won't force it." I explained.

"It's not a knight's habit to uncover your own scars and let outsiders inspect the situation. Please forgive me. If you insist on doing this, I will do it."

"It's all about your comfort level, don't force it." I reiterate this point.

"Why do you ask this question?" Greta raised her head, looking at me with gray-blue eyes.

"This is my job."

"So you don't want to understand my difficulties from a personal point of view, you are just asking about it for the sake of completing work, are you?"

I put down my tea cup and spread my hands: "There is nothing wrong with this understanding. As the writer who interviews the sentient beings in hell, I must try to be as neutral and realistic as possible when recording stories. Then in the process of maintaining neutrality, I also need to Establish your own emotional boundaries. This boundary includes empathy but not overly sympathetic, asking but not forcing the other party to accept.

Greta, I don't take your plight personally, I'm not your friend.I'm just doing my job, but I will record everything you said truthfully and bring it back to the world. "

"Oh, it's so sad. People who want to really know my past can't be friends with me. Your job is easy to be misunderstood by others, and you should have a lot of enemies."

"These are all things I need to consider. Your role today is my guest, and the guest also has the freedom to choose to leave a story according to my workflow, or leave directly. You choose."

Without saying a word, Greta tucked the helmet under her arm, turned and walked to the door of the office, and stopped.

"It seems that Your Excellency will really not force me."

"Well, don't say anything against your will."

She didn't turn around, as if she was still struggling with something.

"What are you hesitating for? Afraid that the wound will be laughed at after I see it?"

"I'm not afraid of your ridicule, sir," Greta turned her head slowly. "If you talk about ridicule, any ridicule I have received in hell is not as terrible as the doubts I heard in the world. I have experienced It’s been a catastrophe. I just don’t understand one thing, and I want to ask Your Excellency.”

"Sit down and talk slowly?"

Greta took a deep breath, walked slowly back to the wooden chair and sat down: "I don't understand why your Excellency asks the guests to open the wound over and over again. Doesn't this process only increase the pain?"

"Maybe some ghosts think it's good to say it, and the pain is also partly shared in the sharing."

"Pain... can it really be shared?"

"You can try it if you want."

Greta thought for a while: "You are an emotional person."

"You are sensual too, and your sensibility is sealed behind armor."

"I don't want to be an emotional person. Sensibility will only get me in trouble. They always say 'women are just too emotional to decapitate their opponents on the battlefield.'"

"The opposite of sensibility is complete reason, even rational to the point of coldness."

"What do you want to explain?"

"Sensibility is not a bad thing. The more emotional a person is, the more ruthless he is. Human nature itself always needs to be complemented by opposites."

Greta paused for a moment without speaking.She picked up the teacup in front of her and took a sip of tea.

"Your Excellency, why is this world so unfair? Why do women have to suffer so much discrimination, so much unfair treatment, and so much training?"

"What have you learned from these discriminations, injustices and trials?"

"I want to arm myself and arm myself thoroughly. Only by being stronger and more perfect than men can I not be ridiculed by the world and be worthy of the glory of the family."

"Why do you have to compare with men? Why do you have to compare?"

"It will prove that I am a better knight and it will prove that women can be knights too."

"are you tired?"

Greta hesitated, but still admitted: "A little bit."

"Even after suffering so much, even after death, you still choose to continue your knight career?"

"Yes, the glory of the family needs to be passed on."

"From the beginning of the 16th century to the present, your family has changed many generations. After your death, you should also be separated from your former family. Why are you still entangled in the honor of the family? What you care about may not be the honor of the family, but Is it something else?"

Greta's eyes widened slightly, as if trying to hide her bewilderment.She made a "hmm" tone and took another deep breath: "I want to prove that I am no worse than a man."

"Prove it to whom?"

Greta bit her lower lip and said in a small voice, "To, to my father."

I didn't speak, but gave her a gesture to encourage her to continue talking.

"I used to have two older brothers who would have inherited the honor of the family and became knights. Unfortunately, both older brothers got malaria when they were teenagers and died early. When they left, one was 18 years old and the other was 13 years old. 7 years old. My mother was too sad the next year and followed suit.

Since then, my father has pinned all his hopes on me, hoping that I can inherit the family honor.But no matter how I train, my father will say, 'If the big brother is still alive, he must run faster than you.If the second brother is still there, he must be more agile than you. '

No matter what I do, he doesn't seem satisfied.He wants me to be a man.

No, no, he wants me to surpass a man and become another kind of god-like perfection. "

"and then?"

"I trained hard and graduated from the Royal Knights Training Corps with the highest grades in the empire. I won the favor of the Habsburg family. Miss Nicola asked me to be her personal knight. I feel very happy to serve such a royal family." Happy. I started to thank my father for all the torture he did to me."

"Then how did you end up in hell?"

"I killed my father." Grace's tone was flat, and no waves could be heard.

"One of the hidden training of the knight order is to train assassins, and how to deal with a living person quietly is a compulsory course for us."

"Greta, you've been lying."

Greta's voice suddenly became louder, as if to prove herself: "Your Excellency! Everything I said is true!"

"You said at the beginning that you wanted to continue to be a knight in order to inherit the glory of the family. But you have been dead for hundreds of years, and it is not known whether your family still exists. What glory needs to be passed on? Your father proved himself, and your father was killed by yourself, haven't you already proved your strength? All the motives you said are contradictory everywhere, aren't you lying?"

Greta stood up excitedly, covering her chest with one hand: "I swear with my heart, sir, there is absolutely no falsehood in what I have said."

"It's not about whether you swear or not. It's about the strange logic of everything you said."

"Your Excellency, I may not quite understand what my heart is thinking."

"Then what's on your mind right now?"

"I'm afraid your Excellency will laugh at you."

"Go ahead."

Greta's eyes dimmed, and her hand was still on her chest: "I have also thought about what your Excellency said. I think, alas. I am a poor person."

"How do you say that?"

"As you said, the motives I have been holding on to are keeping me in hell, and the source of these motives has disappeared. What am I holding on to?"

Greta lowered her right hand from her heart.She took off a pair of metal chain mail gloves, revealing a pair of thick hands, the back of the wrist was scarred by years of war.

"If you had a new opportunity to go back to the world, what would you choose to do?"

"I still want to be a woman, Your Excellency," Greta stroked her scar back and forth, "I love the feeling of being a woman, and I like the feeling of being a woman. I have tried to compete with men. What the heck, maybe I'll try to do something else."

"Like what?"

"I haven't figured it out yet. There's always going to be oppression from a patriarchal society, right?"

"If you are reincarnated in 2022 to be a woman on earth, yes, the oppression of the patriarchal society is still there. The good thing is that more and more women are speaking out for themselves, and they are brave enough to explore the life they want to live. These societies are also more accepting and open to a variety of genders and sexual orientations."

"If you don't compete with men, being a woman shouldn't be so tiring."

"If you put aside your gender, it's actually about you, what kind of life you want to live as a person, isn't it?"

Greta blinked and asked me, "What kind of life do I want to live?"

"Yes, aside from family honor, knighthood, and competition between men and women. What kind of life do you want to live? What kind of life does your heart want to live?"

"I...Your Excellency, I haven't considered this issue yet. But if I return to the human world, I hope to do more things for women..."

"for example?"

"For example, we can set up some knight orders exclusively for women, so that they can also get good military and physical training in it."

"You can think again about the life you want to live."

Greta drank the hot tea in the teacup: "Your Excellency said yes, I'll think about it again. For now, let's not think about effectiveness."

"very good."

Greta took off her sword and put it on the ground in front of my wooden table, and put down her helmet beside the sword.

"Thank you for your advice, I don't have any extra money, only this sword and helmet have some value, so I will give it to you."

"Actually, no, this is my job."

Greta said seriously: "Your Excellency, please accept, this is my heart."

"Oh, well, thank you very much."

"May the Lord bless you." She put her right hand on her heart again habitually, and nodded solemnly.

"Goodbye." I said.

"Goodbye, Your Excellency." Greta left the office with standard steps.

After Greta left, I picked up the sword and helmet she left behind to check.The iron bar of the saber is slender, and I don't know how hard it has been cut before, and the blade is covered with large and small gaps.The brass handle is wrapped with layers of animal leather, which is very grainy but delicate.

There is a rose engraved on the side of the helmet, which should have been engraved by Greta herself. It is not very fine, but it has been worn smooth after long-term wearing.The part of the rose flower is not big, and the stems and leaves are full of spikes.There are two roses in total, entangled together.The unopened one is as thorny as thorns, while the fully bloomed one has a smooth stalk and doesn't even have a single extra leaf.

I admired the sword and the helmet for a while, imagining the tenderness and injustice of this female knight who served the noble lady.After pondering for a while, he put the sword helmet into the small room behind the bookshelf.

(End of this chapter)