WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Haruto

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◈ The Dark Fantasy Doctor Was Mistaken for a Saint ◈

Chapter 3: Is This Possession or Reincarnation? (2)

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* * *

"Then I'll be going now, Godfather."

After Julian left the room, his godfather, Hendel Nihirit, looked out the window.

In the distance, a small figure was walking toward the annex.

To Hendel, that small figure looked terribly fragile.

As he watched the boy's retreating figure, Hendel spoke.

"Head Butler, how long did it take to complete that medicine again?"

"Two years, my lord."

"Two years..."

Hendel absently pressed a hand to his forehead.

The nights when fever-reducing potions did nothing, forcing him to soak in ice water.

The servants losing sleep to the sound of his teeth chattering.

It had begun immediately after Baron Hendel returned from his inspection of the south.

"Two years... Had it been any later, I might have joined my friends."

At Hendel's words, the head butler's hand trembled faintly.

They remembered it clearly as well.

At the time, the Church's healer had shaken their head.

There had even been talk in the corridors that it was time to start making a coffin.

Just when everyone had resigned themselves to the baronial house's ruin, a nine-year-old child appeared at the sickroom door with a black bottle of medicine in hand.

"When the young master brought it himself, honestly, I..."

"You had your doubts. So did I."

Hendel smiled bitterly.

He had been no different.

Even while dying, he had thought, Would medicine made by a child really work?

At the time, he had not believed in Julian.

He only drank it because he had nothing to lose.

And that choice created a miracle.

"...Yet even after I recovered, that child asked nothing of me."

A business proposal?

That could not be called repayment.

Hendel stood to profit as well, since he would receive a share of the earnings. He could hardly call it compensation.

But Julian seemed satisfied with that. He never kept bringing up having saved Hendel's life, nor did he seek any reward.

Instead, the child named only one condition.

[Please sell it to soldiers at half price.]

Remembering those words, Hendel let out a quiet sigh.

"Blood will tell, I suppose."

Hendel thought of his late friends, a married couple.

Those foolish friends who had left their young son in his care and headed to the front lines, saying that the soldiers on the battlefield needed them.

The couple who had treated soldiers never returned.

And their child, not even ten years old, had created medicine for soldiers.

He had even lowered the price by reducing the share that should have been his.

Could that really be a coincidence?

Could such a disposition be a coincidence?

"What did that child see there?"

Two years ago.

The child had seemed shocked as he watched the soldiers while recovering his parents' bodies.

After returning from that place, he began studying tree bark by lamplight through the night.

At first, Hendel had taken it for childish whimsy.

A nine-year-old who had not even learned the basics of alchemy was going to make a new medicine.

He thought it was a kind of mourning ritual, something to ease the child's grief.

Assuming Julian would give up once he was satisfied, Hendel assigned an alchemist to assist him.

But when the child did not stop after two weeks, one month, then three months, Hendel gradually began to worry.

[Be honest with me. Does that child... have talent for alchemy?]

At the time, Hendel sought advice from the alchemists assigned to Julian.

But their answers were cold.

[His talent is average. No, to be frank, he's rather slow. He lacks instinct. Normally, gifted children fail and think, "Ah, this isn't it," then change direction. But this child doesn't seem capable of that.]

[He's the type who only turns back after confirming that he's truly reached a dead end. Honestly, his experiments are at a child's level, so the costs aren't great. If a grown adult behaved like this, they might have been ruined.]

Hendel had felt heavyhearted after hearing that.

No talent.

It meant there was a strong possibility that the child's efforts would be wasted.

As he watched Julian fail over and over, Hendel indirectly suggested that he give up.

Failed batches that had been discarded because the concentration was wrong.

Extracts that had to be discarded because of their foul odor.

Ten times, thirty times, seventy times.

Even the alchemists who had quietly supported the child eventually said they could not watch any longer and left his side.

Even so, Julian did not give up.

Watching Julian, Hendel had the impression that the boy was being driven by something.

It was as though he considered curing soldiers' illnesses to be his mission.

And in the end, the boy found the answer alone.

He saved Hendel's life after Hendel returned from his southern inspection.

It might have seemed like a coincidence to others, but to Hendel, this miracle never did.

"Head Butler, when I think about it, I didn't give up for seven years."

Seven years.

Whenever the anniversary of his friends' deaths came around, Hendel took leave and headed south.

He searched through the territory of magical beasts, dug through collapsed ruins, and combed through rosters of the unrecovered dead.

"Until I found those friends... I had no intention of stopping, no matter what others said."

"..."

"Yet I told that child to give up."

Self-mockery touched Hendel's lips.

"Looking back, it is shameful. I called my own stubbornness conviction while dismissing the child's stubbornness as childish folly."

The fingers resting against the windowsill unconsciously scraped at the grain of the wood.

"Perhaps... I was tired."

Looking back, Hendel had slowly been wearing down in those days.

Every year, he returned empty-handed from the south.

The pitying looks.

The suggestions that he should let go now.

All those realities had piled up until, at some point, Hendel had become sensitive to things that could not be achieved no matter how hard one tried.

Was that why the sight of a talentless child staying up all night and failing again and again seemed to overlap with his own image, struggling in the southern swamp?

"As you know, I do not believe in gods."

"..."

"Of course gods exist. Otherwise, there would be no way to explain the miracle that is divine magic. But if those beings truly cared for humanity... they should not have taken seven years."

Those so-called gods could not possibly have been unaware of how many people the couple had saved in the Empire, or how devout they had been.

They were worthy of receiving an oracle.

In Hendel's eyes, the couple had been people worth saving.

"Even if the gods had not prevented their deaths, they should not have left them in that swamp for seven years."

Yet the treatment the couple received had been miserable.

"That is why, even while I hovered at death's door, I did not pray to the gods. Nor did I believe in an afterlife."

"My lord..."

"But you see."

Julian's figure was no longer visible from the window.

Yet Hendel continued staring in that direction.

"...My friends' child 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 cared for soldiers,

if Hendel had not spent seven years trying to find his friends' bodies,

if Hendel had not brought that child into that demon-infested land,

if either of them had given up as others had told them to during any part of that process,

could he still be alive now?

"I still do not believe in an afterlife. But... this time, I think it was a gift just like those friends."

The head butler could not answer.

They merely wiped at the corner of their eyes with the back of a hand.

Pretending not to notice, Hendel turned his gaze to the documents on his desk.

Outside the window, lights came on in the warehouse by the annex.

It seemed the ten-year-old child had begun researching something again that night.

Hendel could only quietly support the child's efforts in his heart.

Talent had become an unimportant word to him.

* * *

Meanwhile, at that very moment, Julian...

'Come to think of it, is this possession or reincarnation?'

The moment he arrived at the annex, he found himself wrestling with a difficult question he had recently encountered.

It was a problem he had put off for years while devoting himself to developing quinine.

A question about his identity that he had never managed to reach a conclusion on.

'Hm... I definitely have memories from when I was a baby.'

He remembered suffering a brief fever one week before his first birthday.

As the fever subsided, memories of his previous life began to grow clear.

That was the part troubling Julian.

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 developed after roughly twelve months.

Infantile amnesia.

According to this theory, long-term memory itself could not form before myelination of the hippocampus was complete.

Which meant that even if this was reincarnation, it was possible that he could not remember anything before twelve months because his brain had been underdeveloped...

'So am I possessed or reincarnated?'

Julian rubbed his chin as he thought.

Of course, whether it was possession or reincarnation changed nothing.

But since he had happened to start thinking about it, Julian wanted to find an answer out of sheer stubbornness.

'Damn it. I should've somehow read at least the first sentence.'

For several days after that, the lights in Julian's room did not go out until late at night.

As an added bonus, the head butler's eyes grew moist whenever they saw it.

Author's Note

Some of the content has been revised.

If the comments differ from the text, that is probably why.

Footnotes:

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