*
“Then I’ll be going in now, Godfather.”
Yulian left the room,
and his godfather—Hendel Nichirit—looked out the window.
In the distance, he could see a small silhouette walking toward the annex.
To Hendel, that small figure looked perilously fragile.
After watching the boy’s retreating back for a while, Hendel opened his mouth.
“Head Butler. How long did it take to complete that medicine again?”
“Two years, Master.”
“Two years….”
Hendel unconsciously pressed a hand to his forehead.
The nights when fever-reducing potions had no effect and he had soaked his body in ice water.
The servants who lost sleep to the sound of his teeth chattering.
It had begun precisely after Baron Hendel returned from his inspection of the south.
“Two years… Had it been just a little later, I might have gone to join my friends.”
At Hendel’s words, the head butler’s hand trembled faintly.
The head butler remembered it clearly as well.
At the time, the Order’s healer had shaken his head.
In the corridors, people had even begun to whisper that perhaps it was time to start making a coffin.
It was at that moment, when everyone had braced themselves for the fall of the baronial house.
A nine-year-old child appeared carrying a pitch-black medicine bottle and opened the door to the sickroom.
“When the young master brought it himself, to be honest, I….”
“You must have been half in doubt. I was the same.”
Hendel gave a bitter smile.
He had been no different.
Even as he lay dying, he had thought, Surely a medicine made by a child won’t work.
At the time, he had not believed in Yulian.
He had only drunk it because he had nothing to lose.
And that choice brought about a miracle.
“…And yet, even after I recovered, that child asked for nothing.”
A business proposal?
That could not be called compensation.
To begin with, Hendel was also in a position to share in the profits, so it was nothing but beneficial to him; it could hardly be called repayment.
But Yulian, as if that alone were enough, never clung to him afterward as his lifesaver, nor did he ask for any reward.
Instead, the only condition the child spoke of was this.
[Please sell it to soldiers at half price.]
Remembering those words, Hendel let out a low sigh.
“Blood will tell, I suppose.”
Hendel thought of the friend and his wife who had passed away.
Those foolish friends who had said that the soldiers on the battlefield needed them, entrusted their young son to him, and headed for the front.
The couple who treated the soldiers never returned.
And their child, before even turning ten, had created a medicine for soldiers.
He had even reduced his own share to lower the price of the medicine.
Could this truly be a coincidence?
Could such a nature truly be a coincidence?
“What did that child see there, I wonder.”
Two years ago.
The child who had gone to recover his parents’ bodies seemed to have been shocked by the soldiers there.
And the child who returned from that place began staying up all night, keeping the lamps lit as he studied tree bark.
At first, Hendel had thought it mere childish impulse.
A nine-year-old who had not even learned the basics of alchemy was going to create a new medicine?
He had thought it was a kind of mourning ritual, something to soothe his grief.
He would give up once he was moderately satisfied, Hendel had thought, and assigned an alchemist to assist him.
But when the child did not stop after two weeks, a month, three months, Hendel gradually began to worry.
— [Tell me honestly. Does that child… have any talent for alchemy?]
At the time, Hendel sought advice from the alchemists he had assigned to Yulian.
But the answers he received were cold.
— [His talent is ordinary. No, to be frank, he is rather dull. He lacks intuition, you could say. Usually, talented children, when they fail, know how to think, “Ah, this isn’t it,” and change direction, but this child doesn’t seem very good at that.]
— [He’s the type who only turns back after confirming that it’s truly a dead end. To be honest, the experiments are at a child’s level, so the expenses aren’t large, but if a grown adult did this, he might have ruined his entire household.]
Hendel’s heart had grown heavy upon hearing those words.
He had no talent.
That meant the child’s efforts were very likely to be in vain.
As he watched those countless failures, Hendel had indirectly urged Yulian to give up.
The failed products spilled because the concentration was wrong.
The extracts that had to be discarded because of their stench.
Ten times, thirty times, seventy times.
Even the alchemists who had quietly cheered the child on eventually said they could no longer bear to watch and left his side.
Even so, Yulian did not give up.
Watching Yulian, Hendel had felt as though the boy were being chased by something.
As though treating the soldiers’ illness was his mission.
And in the end, the boy found the answer alone.
By saving the life of Hendel, who had returned from inspecting the south.
Others might not know, but to Hendel, this miracle did not feel like a coincidence at all.
“Head Butler. Come to think of it, I did not give up for seven years.”
Seven years.
Every year, on the anniversary of his friends’ death, Hendel took leave and headed south.
He searched the territories of the magical beasts, dug through collapsed ruins, and combed through the rolls of those whose bodies had never returned.
“Until I found those friends… I had absolutely no intention of stopping. No matter what those around me said.”
“….”
“And yet I told that child to give up.”
Self-mockery settled around Hendel’s lips.
“Looking back, it is shameful. I considered my own stubbornness conviction, while I thought the child’s stubbornness childishness.”
His fingers, resting against the window frame, unconsciously scratched at the grain of the wood.
“Perhaps… I was simply exhausted.”
Looking back, Hendel of those days had been slowly wearing away.
The journeys south from which he returned empty-handed each year.
The gazes tinged with pity.
The advice to “let them go now.”
All those realities piled up, and at some point, Hendel had become sensitive to “things that could not be done no matter how hard one tried.”
Was that why?
Why the sight of a talentless child staying up nights and failing again and again overlapped with his own figure, floundering in the southern swamps?
“As you know, I do not believe in gods.”
“….”
“Of course, gods exist. There would be no way to explain the miracle of divine magic otherwise. But if those beings called gods truly cared for humans… it should not have taken seven years.”
Surely the gods could not have been unaware of how many people that couple had saved in the Empire, or how devout they had been.
They were people who deserved to receive an oracle.
In Hendel’s eyes, the couple were people worth that much.
“Even if the gods did not prevent their deaths, at the very least, they should not have left them abandoned in that swamp for seven years.”
But the treatment the couple received had been miserable.
“That is why, even while I hovered between life and death, I did not pray to the gods. Likewise, I did not believe in any afterlife.”
“Master….”
“But you see.”
In Hendel’s eyes as he looked out the window, Yulian’s back was no longer visible.
Even so, he continued to gaze in that direction.
“…That friends’ child saved me. With something he saw on the land where his parents died.”
Hendel thought.
If that child had not carried on the will of the parents who had cared for soldiers,
if Hendel had not struggled for seven years to find the bodies of his friends,
if Hendel had not taken that child to that demonic land,
if, at any point in all of this, either of them had given up as those around them had advised,
could he truly still be alive now?
“I still do not believe in an afterlife. But… this time, I cannot help but think it was a gift very much like those friends.”
The head butler could not answer.
He merely wiped the corners of his eyes with the back of his hand.
Hendel pretended not to see him and shifted his gaze to the documents on the desk.
Outside the window, a light was coming on in the warehouse by the annex.
It seemed the eleven-year-old child had begun researching something again tonight.
In his heart, Hendel quietly cheered on the child’s efforts.
Talent was now a word that no longer mattered to him.
***
Meanwhile, at that time, Yulian was…
‘Now that I think about it, is this possession or reincarnation?’
As soon as he arrived at the annex, he was grappling with the difficult problem he had recently encountered.
It was homework he had put off for years because he had been clinging to the development of quinine.
A concern about his own identity, one he had still never once reached a conclusion on.
‘Tsk… I definitely had memories from when I was a baby.’
He remembered briefly suffering from a fever one week before his first birthday.
As the fever subsided, the memories of his previous life began to grow clear.
That was the part Yulian was troubled over.
The standard for reincarnation was having memories from the moment one was born.
But as far as he knew, medically speaking, the ability to form memories began around twelve months of age.
Infantile amnesia.
According to this theory, before myelination of the hippocampus was complete, long-term memories themselves could not be formed.
In other words, even if it was reincarnation, there was a possibility that before twelve months, his brain had simply been too underdeveloped to remember…
‘Then am I possessed or reincarnated?’
Yulian rubbed his chin as he pondered.
Of course, whether it was possession or reincarnation would not change anything.
But once he had happened to start thinking about it, Yulian wanted to find the answer out of sheer stubbornness.
‘Damn it. I should’ve at least read the first sentence somehow.’
For several days after that, the light in Yulian’s room did not go out until late into the night.
As an added bonus, the head butler’s eyes grew moist as he watched it.