This wasn't directed at her. Mokou followed C.C.'s gaze, and the sight before her made her eyes fly wide. The little tree girl was standing perfectly fine beside the counter!
Hadn't she been taken away? Why was she back again?
A clone?
"Say, why did you suddenly decide to do this?" Sitting in the police car, Jiu Ming asked the little tree girl in puzzlement. He was curious why she had suddenly chosen to live by opening a shop.
"I don't know." The little tree girl shifted her petite body and leaned against Jiu Ming. "After that fusion, emotions I had never possessed arose within me."
"Huh?"
"Loneliness." The little tree girl tilted her head up at Jiu Ming. "I find it strange that such an emotion, which should not have appeared, would arise. After thinking it over, the most likely possibility is that I was influenced by you. Though you are not human, you possess the rich emotions of humans. It was precisely for this reason that this situation occurred."
"But you need not feel guilty. Even if abnormal emotions have arisen, they will not affect my subjective consciousness."
...Jiu Ming tugged at the corner of his mouth. He hadn't even said he felt guilty. But if, as she put it, his rich human emotions had influenced the little tree girl, then she should influence him too, right...? Yet he himself didn't seem to have changed at all. Was it because she was as "clean" as a blank sheet of paper that nothing had happened to him?
Tch. Putting it that way made him sound like some kind of filth.
"Contact with living beings feels very rich," Tree said. "You haven't changed in any way, have you?"
"Probably not?" Jiu Ming rubbed his arm. He simply couldn't detect any