MHWDTS 11

Chapter 11

A faint blush spread across Shasha’s pale face. She tilted her head slightly, but Hagenti deliberately stiffened his neck and refused to look at her.

Ah….

This child seemed genuinely angry.

But what if trying to comfort him only made him angrier? Shasha hesitated, clenching and unclenching her tiny fists before finally gathering the courage to gently place a hand on his shoulder.

The instant she did, Hagenti burst into loud sobs as though a dam had broken.

“Does Shasha hate me? Am I not supposed to stay here? Why does everyone keep telling me to become twenty-seven again?”

The tense atmosphere softened, and for a fleeting moment Shasha felt as though someone had struck the back of her head hard.

Hate him?

She had never once imagined he might think such a thing.

After all, Hagenti had originally been twenty-seven years old. From anyone’s perspective, his current condition was abnormal, so she had naturally assumed that even he believed he should return to normal.

But thinking about it now… none of the adults in this mansion had ever considered Hagenti’s perspective.

To Shasha and Aiden, Hagenti had injured his head and reverted to the “memories” of a seven-year-old.

But from Hagenti’s own point of view, wasn’t he simply seven years old?

Perhaps he didn’t even understand the very concept of “returning to normal.”

Good heavens.

And yet they had been standing before him treating him like something abnormal while discussing “treatment methods”….

‘What have I done…?’

Shasha felt so ashamed and sorry toward him that if there were a mouse hole nearby, she wanted to crawl into it immediately.

Seven years old.

How unbearably young that age was.

She must have wounded him terribly. Perhaps he would carry the feeling of being rejected for the rest of his life.

「I don’t hate you.」

The moment she traced the words onto his shoulder with her finger, Hagenti—still sobbing with tears and mucus streaming down his face—lifted his head.

Shasha offered him a careful smile.

「I’ve never hated you, Hagenti.」

It wasn’t a lie.

Aside from the fairy companions she’d had as a foolish child, no one in her life had ever been this easy or enjoyable to be around.

And in that moment, Shasha realized something.

She liked this seven-year-old boy far more than she had thought.

When Shasha gently cupped his cheek and wiped away his tears, Hagenti sniffled before burrowing into her arms like a baby bird. Stroking the back of his hot neck, Shasha slowly wrote words across his back with her fingertips.

「I’m sorry. But Hagenti, you originally were twenty-seven years old. There are many things here that the twenty-seven-year-old Hagenti has to do. Don’t cry. Once you become an adult again, all the things that feel frightening and difficult now will disappear.」

And you and I will once again become worse than strangers.

It was sad, but also an unavoidable fate they would someday have to face. In fact, the mere fact that this bizarre accident had happened at all already made Shasha happier than she could express.

Softly patting the still-whining Hagenti, she was suddenly overcome by a strange impulse she herself couldn’t define—and leaned down to kiss his forehead.

Hagenti’s body trembled violently.

The ears poking out beneath his thick hair rapidly flushed pink.

Still hugging Shasha tightly around the waist, he slowly lifted his tear-stained face. His childish mind seemed to be working desperately through some complicated thought. After staring at Shasha for quite a while, he finally spoke in a voice tinged with secret anticipation.

“Then… if I stay in there for just five minutes and come back out, that’s enough?”

「If you hate it, you don’t have to go in.」

“No, I’ll do it. But only if Shasha promises to kiss me again afterward. Otherwise—”

Before he could even finish speaking, Shasha tilted her head and placed another light kiss against the same spot.

“Wah….”

Hagenti sighed dreamily with his mouth hanging open like a fool lost in bliss, then belatedly returned to reality and muttered in complaint.

“No, I meant later. What am I supposed to do if Shasha gives it to me first? Candy tastes better after homework than before homework.”

「I’ll do it again later.」

“R-really? That’s a promise?”

Shasha nodded and closed her eyes.

Hagenti removed the towel and hung it over the edge of the bathtub before cautiously dipping his feet into the icy water.

Ah, right.

They had forgotten warm-up exercises.

What if simply plunging in caused problems with his heart this time?

But by the time such worries struck Shasha in alarm, Hagenti had already adapted to the temperature and was blowing bubbles into the water with his nose submerged.

“Blegh. The water tastes weird.”

Dummy. Why are you drinking it?

Laughing softly, Shasha wiped the redness around his irritated eyes.

Then suddenly, a thought occurred to her.

When Hagenti returned to his original memories, would that mean he gradually recovered while keeping his current memories intact?

Or would those memories simply be overwritten and erased like correcting mistakes on a page?

If he returned… would he remember everything that had happened between them?

No matter how much she asked herself, she couldn’t know the answer.

But one thing was certain.

The man Hagenti would become twenty years later was already predetermined. He would once again wound her in ways that could never be undone. And the future in which they eventually separated would not change.

Because of that, the reality she was living through right now suddenly became unbearably precious to Shasha.

More precisely—

This seven-year-old boy currently playing with her hair.

And so, to reveal the results plainly:

The treatment produced no dramatic effect.

This time Hagenti coughed continuously for three days and nights. Though everyone said he hadn’t suffered too severely considering he had submerged himself in ice water, his forehead still burned so hot with fever that Shasha ended up canceling all her plans one day just to remain by his bedside.

Perhaps because he had never expected much from his own crude “shock therapy” to begin with, Windsor didn’t so much as blink when informed that Hagenti remained unchanged. He merely gave the sensible response that he would soon try to devise a more “appropriate” method.

Every night before bed, Aiden questioned Hagenti to test his memories.

Some questions involved mathematics or common knowledge, but most concerned business matters that Shasha herself couldn’t understand.

So far, Hagenti had not given a single proper answer to any of the latter.

But with the former, he answered correctly almost every time.

The math problems grew gradually harder day by day. At first they had merely involved simple arithmetic, but now Hagenti was solving problems involving unknown variables.

Naturally, they were far beyond the level any normal seven-year-old could even comprehend.

Through this, Shasha and Aiden became convinced the doctor’s prediction had been correct: Hagenti’s memories truly were recovering slowly.

However, that seemed to apply only to foundational knowledge. In more complex fields requiring reasoning and higher thought, Hagenti still remained at the level of a seven-year-old.

Windsor guessed this phenomenon occurred because different areas of the brain processed different forms of knowledge.

In other words, different regions of Hagenti’s brain were recovering at different speeds.

Windsor continued with a long explanation involving the temporal lobe and frontal lobe and various other terms, but Shasha—completely ignorant about such subjects—could only nod meaninglessly without understanding any of it.

As it did every year, the rainy season arrived in late spring without fail.

Shasha didn’t particularly like rain.

Whenever it rained, the underground workshop filled with musty smells, and the books absorbed moisture until their pages wrinkled.

The fairies also became far more excited than usual. To them, raindrops were like giant toys falling from the sky, each nearly as large as their own bodies. Watching them perform endless antics in front of her while begging for attention was unbearably distracting.

‘How much will it rain this year…?’

Though it was only four in the afternoon, the sky had already darkened because heavy storm clouds covered the sun. Ignoring the fairies waving at her while riding the raindrops, Shasha firmly shut and latched the windows to keep rainwater from entering.

I should just rest today.

Even if she went downstairs to the basement, the sound of the rain would surely make concentrating impossible.

Meanwhile, this mansion was hardly friendly toward a seven-year-old child.

I’m hungry.

I’m bored.

Let’s play.

With those three phrases constantly on his lips, Hagenti had spent every waking moment following Shasha around unless he was asleep.

But recently, he had begun developing a bit of independence after discovering a new source of entertainment.

He had become completely engrossed in the crime novels Shasha had once bought to ease her loneliness during the early days of marriage. He devoured books endlessly while eating only three meals a day—

—whereas he originally ate five.

Since the novels had been written for adults, they certainly weren’t appropriate reading material for a seven-year-old.

Still, perhaps it was fine since the brain inside his skull technically belonged to an adult…?

To be honest, Shasha simply didn’t want to give up the precious freedom she had suddenly gained. So aside from sections containing excessively cruel content, she had practically shoved the entire series into his arms.

And at the same time, rumors of their divorce had begun spreading through society like an epidemic.