Chapter 3
*
“Then I’ll be taking my leave, Godfather.”
After Julian left the room,
his godfather—Hendel Nihirit—looked out the window.
A small silhouette could be seen walking toward the annex in the distance.
To Hendel, that tiny figure only seemed fragile.
As he watched the boy’s back, Hendel spoke.
“Head Butler. How long did it take for that medicine to be completed again?”
“Two years, Master.”
“Two years...”
Hendel absentmindedly touched his forehead.
The nights he had spent soaking himself in ice water because the fever-reducing potion wouldn’t work.
Servants kept awake by the sound of chattering teeth.
It had begun immediately after Baron Hendel returned from his southern inspection tour.
“Two years... If it had been even a little later, I might have gone to join my friends.”
At Hendel’s words, the head butler’s hand trembled slightly.
The head butler remembered it clearly as well.
At the time, the Order’s healer had shaken his head.
There had even been talk in the halls of starting to make a coffin.
It was the moment when everyone had braced themselves for the baron family’s collapse.
A nine-year-old child appeared with a jet-black potion bottle and opened the sickroom door.
“When the young master brought it himself, honestly, I...”
“You probably half-doubted it. So did I.”
Hendel gave a bitter smile.
He had been no different.
Even while he was dying, he’d been thinking, There’s no way a medicine made by a kid will work.
Back then, he didn’t trust Julian.
He’d only taken it thinking he had nothing to lose.
And that choice had worked a miracle.
“...And yet, even after I recovered, that child didn’t ask me for anything.”
A business proposal?
That wasn’t compensation.
After all, since Hendel himself was also on the receiving end of the profit split, it was nothing but a gain for him; it was hard to call that repayment.
But Julian acted as if that was enough, and afterward he never latched onto Hendel as his savior or asked for anything in return.
Instead, the child stated just one condition.
[Please sell it to soldiers at half price.]
Hendel let out a soft sigh at the memory.
“Blood will tell, I suppose.”
Hendel thought of his friends, the couple who had passed away.
Those foolish friends who had entrusted their young son to him and headed for the front, saying the soldiers needed them there.
The couple who treated soldiers on the battlefield never returned.
And their child, not even ten years old, had gone on to make medicine for soldiers.
He even lowered the price by cutting into his own share.
Was this really a coincidence?
Could that sort of character really be a coincidence?
“What did he see there, I wonder?”
Two years ago.
The child, while recovering his parents’ bodies, seemed to have been shocked by the soldiers there.
And after returning from there, he spent the whole night with the lights on, studying tree bark.
At first, Hendel thought it was the child’s youthful recklessness.
A nine-year-old who hadn’t even learned the basics of alchemy claiming he’d make a miracle medicine.
He thought it was some kind of mourning ritual to soothe his grief.
Thinking he’d quit once he was satisfied, Hendel assigned an alchemist to assist him.
But when the child still hadn’t stopped after two weeks, a month, and three months, Hendel gradually started to worry.
— [Be honest with me. Does that child... have talent for alchemy?]
At the time, Hendel had sought advice from the alchemists he’d assigned to Julian.
But the answers that came back were cold.
— [His talent is ordinary. No, to be honest, he’s a bit dull. He lacks a sense for it, I suppose. Normally, gifted children, when they fail, can say, ‘Ah, this isn’t it,’ and change direction, but this child doesn’t seem able to do that very well.]
— [He’s the type who only turns back after confirming it’s truly a dead end. Honestly, because these are experiments at a child’s level, the costs aren’t that high, but if a grown adult were doing this, it might have ruined him.]
Hendel’s heart grew heavy at those words.
No talent.
That meant the child’s efforts were likely to be for nothing.
As he watched those countless failures, Hendel had indirectly urged Julian to give up.
Failed batches spilled because the concentration was off.
Extracts that stank so badly they had to be discarded.
Ten times, thirty times, seventy times.
Even the alchemists who had quietly cheered the child on eventually left his side, saying they couldn’t bear to watch any longer.
And yet Julian never gave up.
Hendel had the impression that Julian looked as though he were being chased by something.
It was as if he treated curing the soldiers’ illnesses as his mission.
And in the end, the boy found the answer on his own.
By saving Hendel’s life after returning from his inspection tour of the south.
No one else might have thought so, but to Hendel, this miracle never felt like a coincidence.
“Head Butler. Thinking about it, I didn’t give up for seven years either.”
Seven years.
Every year on the anniversary of his friends’ deaths, Hendel took leave and headed south.
He scoured demonic beast territory, dug through collapsed ruins, and went through the lists of those who never returned.
“Until I found those friends... I had no intention of ever stopping. No matter what anyone around me said.”
“...”
“And yet I told that child to give up.”
A self-mocking smile appeared at the corner of Hendel’s mouth.
“Looking back, it’s shameful. I treated my own stubbornness as conviction, while I called the child’s stubbornness recklessness.”
The fingers braced against the window frame unconsciously scraped at the wood grain.
“Maybe... I was the one who’d been worn down.”
Looking back, that version of Hendel had been slowly wearing down.
Returning south empty-handed year after year.
Sympathetic looks.
‘It’s time to let it go already.’
All those realities piled up and piled up, and before long Hendel had become sensitive to things that simply wouldn’t work no matter how hard you tried.
Was that why?
The sight of a talentless child staying up all night and failing over and over had overlapped with his own image, thrashing about in the southern swamps.
“As you know, I don’t believe in God.”
“...”
“Of course, God exists. Otherwise there’d be no way to explain the miracle that is divine magic. But if those so-called gods truly cared about humans... seven years was too long.”
There was no way those gods didn’t know how many people they had saved in the Empire, or how devout they were.
They were worthy of an oracle.
To Hendel, the couple were exactly that sort of people.
“The gods may not have been able to stop their deaths, at the very least, but they should never have left them in that swamp for seven years.”
But the treatment the couple received had been pitiful.
“So even while I was on the brink of death, I never prayed to the gods. Likewise, I didn’t believe in an afterlife.”
“Master...”
“And yet.”
From where Hendel stood looking out the window, Julian’s back was already out of sight.
But he kept staring in that direction.
“...The child of those friends saved me, with what he saw in the land where his parents died.”
Hendel thought.
If that child had not carried on the will of his parents, who had devoted themselves to the soldiers,
if Hendel had not spent seven years trying to find his friends’ bodies,
if Hendel had not taken that child to that hellish place,
if, through it all, either one of them had given up as those around them said they should,
would he really still be alive now?
“I still don’t believe in the afterlife. But... this time, I think it was a gift worthy of those friends of mine.”
The head butler couldn’t answer.
He could only wipe the corners of his eyes with the back of his hand.
Hendel pretended not to notice the head butler and shifted his gaze to the documents on the desk.
Outside, a light had come on in the warehouse by the annex.
It seemed the eleven-year-old child had started researching something again tonight.
Hendel could only quietly cheer on the child’s efforts in his heart.
Talent was now a word that didn’t matter to him.
***
Meanwhile, at that very moment, Julian...
‘Come to think of it, is this possession or reincarnation?’
As soon as he arrived at the annex, he was wrestling with the problem he’d recently run into.
A task he’d put off for years while he was absorbed in quinine development.
A question about his own identity that he still hadn’t once been able to settle.
‘Hmm... I definitely do have memories from when I was a baby, though.’
He remembered having a fever about a week before his first birthday.
As the fever subsided, his memories of his past life began to come into focus.
That was the part Julian was agonizing over.
The standard for reincarnation is having memories from the moment you’re born.
But as far as he knew, medically speaking, the ability to form memories only began around twelve months.
Infantile amnesia.
According to this theory, long-term memory itself can’t form until myelination of the hippocampus is complete.
That meant that even if he were reincarnated, before twelve months his brain might still be too underdeveloped to remember anything...
‘Then am I possessed or reincarnated?’
Julian rubbed his chin, thinking.
Of course, whether it was possession or reincarnation didn’t change anything.
But once he’d stumbled into this question, he wanted to find the answer even if only out of sheer stubbornness.
‘Damn it. I should’ve at least been able to read the first sentence.’
For several days after that, the lights in Julian’s room stayed on late into the night.
Watching it, the head butler’s eyes even grew misty.