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Chapter 05
“Bella-nim? Bella-nim!”
A familiar voice was shouting something earnestly right beside my ear.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that this was the affectionate nickname derived from ‘Bellatrix’—the name Lucifel had given me back in the bath.
The red-haired man was calling out to me with utter diligence.
I wanted to blink, but due to my fluttering eyelids, the eyes I had barely managed to open drifted shut once again.
Strangely, I couldn’t muster any strength. My entire body felt heavy and burning hot.
On top of that, my throat felt prickly and my stomach churned to the point of nausea.
To cap it all off, I was unimaginably hungry. Honestly, I couldn’t even tell whether I was actually hungry, or if my stomach was churning, or if my belly was just in pain.
My physical condition was an absolute, total mess.
I thought I had narrowly escaped a crisis of life and death, but what kind of mess is this now…
Moisture welled up in my eyes as a wave of self-pity washed over me.
Regardless of whether I was thirty years old or not, whenever someone falls sick, sorrow is bound to follow. On top of that, the current me wasn’t thirty; I was just a newborn infant.
My emotions were bouncing around like crazy, bringing me closer to an animal purely driven by instinct, so it was only natural for tears to stream down in sheer misery.
My narrowly opened field of vision was blurred. It didn’t seem to be entirely because of the tears. Even just lying there quietly breathing made me dizzy and exhausted.
And why was it so hot? It was scorching enough to make me wonder if my body had been dumped into boiling water.
I wanted to wail and demand someone fix this right away, but my cries wouldn’t come out as robustly as before.
I simply didn’t have the energy to cry like that.
“Hwiing…”
A thin, whining cry leaked out between my lips, but that was the extent of it.
I couldn’t even indulge in pessimistic thoughts like, Why on earth did I end up in this body and have to suffer through such brutal hardship?
My mind was consumed by a single, desperate thought: I just wanted someone to do something about this sick body of mine.
It hurt. It genuinely, insanely hurt.
I really didn’t want to die.
I recalled how my body from my past life had vanished like white powder. Therefore, I had no choice but to survive in this body.
Didn’t I lack even a body to return to anyway? My original body had clearly disappeared at that moment. For reasons unknown, I had definitely died back there.
Ah, no way…
It was a realization that dawned on me amidst the pain. Perhaps what I was experiencing wasn’t a simple possession, but actual reincarnation.
“Why is it like this?”
“Could it be that the air of the Demon Realm doesn’t agree with it?”
“Now of all times?”
“Because it has been asleep for a hundred days wrapped in Lucifel-sama’s aura.”
Ignoring the fact that the red-haired man, who used to treat me like a mere object or ‘this thing,’ was now treating me somewhat like a superior being, this was entirely new information.
No wonder my body felt a bit too big for a newborn. I had spent a whole hundred days sleeping my time away.
And the reason I seemed stubbornly, unnecessarily healthy until now must have been thanks to receiving Lucifel’s aura.
Scenes from my dream flickered vaguely in my mind.
Even if it were true, as the red-haired man claimed, that the Demon Realm’s air didn’t agree with me, I should have felt sick the moment I first opened my eyes.
My fever is blazing and my throat is burning… and my body is way too weak.
This was undoubtedly a combination of a cold contracted from falling asleep during the bath and the hunger from starving all day yesterday.
Since I had been asleep for a hundred days, technically speaking, I hadn’t eaten a single thing since birth.
I was currently suffering from a severe case of body aches and a cold. Plus, malnutrition.
Damn it, somebody save me!
“They say humans fall ill easily over trivial things, wouldn’t human infants be even worse?”
“Hmph. Truly a nuisance.”
Although annoyance was vividly written all over his face, Lucifel’s expression through my half-opened, blurred vision looked just a tiny bit panicked.
I must be hallucinating from the fever.
“Did infusing it with my aura all night not cure it?”
“…All night, you say?”
“Yes.”
The red-haired man let out a pained groan, “Phew.”
With a heavily flustered expression, he parted his lips several times before finally snapping them shut.
Sighing out of Lucifel’s line of sight, he soon offered his own speculative remark.
“Perhaps it is unable to digest such immense power.”
“Then are you saying I should take it back?”
“No, that’s not it. If it managed to hold on this long precisely because of Lucifel-sama’s aura, taking it back might kill it instantly.”
“…Then what do you suggest I do?”
“My apologies, I do not know either.”
The conclusion reached by the two men hovering above my head ultimately boiled down to: “Humans are incomprehensible.”
It was frustrating. It was so frustrating I thought I’d go crazy.
It’s a cold! It’s just a cold, you stupid demons!
Yet, all that escaped my lips were infant wails like “Hwiing” and “Hweeng.”
At that moment, a firm hand touched my forehead with a tap.
The cool sensation, as refreshing as a block of ice, felt so good that my fingers twitched of their own accord.
Even though I had been too weak to move a single finger, where on earth did I find the strength? I grabbed the hand as it tried to pull away from my forehead with all the might I could muster.
It must have been a miraculous burst of strength born from my overwhelming will to survive.
“…”
Silence descended heavily.
Unaware of what kind of expressions they were making, I simply thrashed around slightly to enjoy the cool sensation a bit longer.
Since it wouldn’t budge no matter how hard I pulled, I dragged up the very last ounce of strength down to my toes.
Lower my fever! It’s nice and cool, so just lend it to me for a moment!
Unaware that my expression was naturally twisting into a fierce scowl from exerting so much effort, I groaned and grunted. Just as the meager strength I had been channeling was about to fade away completely…
With a tap, the hand obediently returned to my forehead.
Ah, so refreshing.
To think a person’s body temperature could feel this chillingly cold, I thought, before immediately following up with, Ah, right, he’s not a person.
Along with the cooling sensation, the fever-induced feeling of my body about to burst open eased up, even if just a tiny bit.
Since I couldn’t ask them to keep their hand on me any longer with this baby body of mine, I had no choice but to brute-force it with sheer physical contact.
Just by desperately clinging to and grasping that hand, my entire body went limp. Now was really not the time to be wasting stamina like this.
Our communication barrier was a truly serious problem.
Ah, I am so exhausted, so exhausted.
My body was still horribly sick, but at the same time, I figured these ignorant demons wouldn’t just leave me to die.
So, along with a vastly more comfortable sensation, I exhaled a sigh of relief.
Just as I was about to slip back into a deep sleep, Lucifel’s heavy voice dropped from above my head.
“Did this thing just throw a tantrum at me?”
Pardon?
Why on earth are you misunderstanding things like that, Demon King-nim?
I could feel a murderous aura floating around above my head.
At what exact point did you get that kind of misunderstanding?!
I had to force my consciousness to snap back awake from the brink of oblivion. Suppressing the incoming waves of sleepiness, I tried my absolute best to keep my mind as clear as possible.
Don’t tell me… it’s because I scowled a bit while exerting force earlier…
As if to prove my guess wasn’t wrong, the red-haired man spoke with utmost seriousness.
“It looked as though it threw a fit demanding that Lucifel-sama hand over his hand.”
His voice was so full of conviction that he seemed entirely certain his deduction was spot on.
That bastard—I swear I’m going to smack him at least once someday.
For some reason, the minor misunderstanding instantly hardened into absolute truth, and Lucifel let out a dry laugh.
“I should have known the moment it kicked me while it was still inside the belly. It certainly… knows how to throw a tantrum.”
Though I had been severely misunderstood, Lucifel didn’t seem to have any immediate plans to kill me.
Even so, this was hardly a pleasant situation.
While Lucifel hadn’t killed me, he must have been displeased, as he withdrew the hand he had placed on my forehead.
As the cool hand that had barely managed to suppress my fever vanished, the burning heat I had briefly forgotten surged back in full force.
At this rate, I was bound to suffer terribly.
No, at this rate, I might just straight-up die. Just as the two of them said, weren’t human infants extremely fragile?
Save me, please save me!
Complaining about it in my mind was utterly useless.
After all, those guys didn’t have the ability to read minds, nor could they properly read my desperate gaze.
Let alone having knowledge about babies—hell, they even lacked basic common sense about humans.
Therefore, if I wanted to live, I had no choice but to try myself.
I can do this, I can do it!
My throat was prickly and I genuinely didn’t have an ounce of energy left, but they say humans are a species beloved by the gods, capable of turning the impossible into the possible.
Let’s at least babble. Let’s make the impossible possible.
Still, since I’m the hero’s child, shouldn’t I have at least that level of genius aptitude? Besides, didn’t they say I even received the Demon King’s aura?
Even though I’m only a hundred days old!
My vision was blurred by the soaring fever, but I could definitely tell that two pairs of red eyes were floating in mid-air, looking down at me.
Though this was a body that had never even tasted its mother’s milk, I squeezed out every last ounce of strength I had, as if suckling for my life.
I can do this!
I’m gonna do it—babbling.
“U… U-ap-ap.”
It hurts! It hurts right now! It hurts, I’m telling you! It hurts!
I barely managed to spit out the words it hurts at a mere babbling level.
Considering how even wailing loudly had felt like a struggle, this was a babbling born from the absolute depths of my soul.
“Is it trying to speak right now?”
However, Lucifel failed to properly comprehend my soul-deep babbling.
Those red eyes tilted to the side.
He was definitely tilting his head and narrowing his brow right now, that much was certain.
At Lucifel’s words, the red-haired man swiftly chimed in with his own hypothesis.
“From what I heard, it sounded like it was saying ‘Papa’.”
Ha, that damn red-haired bastard.
I said it hurts, when on earth did I say papa?
However, I couldn’t protest that statement.
Having poured literally every last ounce of my strength into that attempt, I couldn’t do a thing against my eyes slipping shut once more.
If I was going to be reincarnated, they should have at least wiped my memories. Why on earth did I have to be born with all my memories intact into the body of a helpless baby, torturing me so?
What wrong did I do to deserve such a trial?
Perhaps due to the overwhelming surge of grief driven by pain and hunger, in my dream, I really did throw a tantrum on the ground in my thirty-year-old form, weeping bitterly.
Even when I wailed miserably, there was no one to help me, which made it feel all too similar to my past life—and thus infinitely more sorrowful.
