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Chapter 43
Arileti shouted in a stuffed-up voice.
“Don’t make that guy our lord. Just stay neutral!”
“Mm, Arileti.”
“Do we really have to raise him to become Emperor? Can’t the young lord just become Emperor instead?”
“Oh dear, you can’t say things like that, Teacher. You’ll get your head cut off for treason.”
“Then I’ll just make sure your head doesn’t get cut off!”
I’ll raise you to be a Grand Sword Master!
“What is that supposed to be, hyung? You never said you were keeping something like that around!”
Rasiyan growled, unwilling to lose.
“Do you even know what that thing is? And what’s with that weird title, ‘Teacher’? Throw her out right now!”
“Who are you telling to throw me out? I’m not an object!”
Arileti snapped back fiercely, sticking her head out from Glen’s thigh.
Glen rubbed his sleepy eyes.
Rasiyan’s temper was famous enough to be known even outside the Imperial Palace, but this was the first time Arileti had shown such open hostility.
So this is Arileti’s anger—the one that’s so rare to witness…
He welcomed her many emotional expressions, of course… but if possible, he wished she would get angry during working hours, not at dawn.
Barely holding back a yawn, Glen gestured to Rasiyan.
Rasiyan smiled victoriously and ran over like a squirrel.
Glen lifted the two children up, one under each arm. He carried them into the room, dropped them onto the bed in a heap, and lay down between them.
“If you don’t want to sleep alone, then both of you sleep with me.”
“……!”
“Whoever wakes me up gets kicked out. Got it?”
The children who had been shouting fell silent at once, as if they had made a pact.
Glen had thought that if he left them together for a few days, they would grow attached.
He was wrong.
After secretly observing Arileti and Rasiyan for five days, their relationship was only getting worse.
Is it just hard for kids this age to get along?
Arileti was a gentle child. She slept well on her own, woke up on her own, didn’t have picky eating habits, and didn’t throw tantrums for no reason.
Her expressions were always calm, but her heart was soft and she had strong empathy. He had assumed she would get along easily with Rasiyan, who was only three or four years older.
“His Highness threw away three of my potions. The family head worked so hard pulling out all those mandrakes, and the doctor stayed up all night to make them.”
“You gave your potion to His Highness? You shouldn’t! That’s your medicine!”
“Even that crazy puppy needs mandrakes, so…”
On the first day, she had offered him two bottles, but he rejected both. At dawn that day, she tried to give him another one, but Rasiyan knocked it away and it shattered on the floor.
“Today I was going to give him just one last bottle, but he wouldn’t even look at it.”
“What did you say when you gave it to him?”
“I told him not to take his anger out like a child and to accept it nicely when someone offers something.”
“……”
“I told him the one being a burden to this territory isn’t me, it’s His Highness. That if it weren’t for him, Hezeit wouldn’t be in danger.”
Arileti, who had been speaking fiercely, suddenly shut her mouth and glanced at Glen nervously.
Not sure how she interpreted his expression, she added awkwardly,
“…His Highness called me a bug first…”
“……”
“He asked if I even deserved to be here. Said I was worse than an animal.”
Indeed, both of them had terrifying mouths.
From a distance, Rasiyan shouted,
“If you have any conscience, you’d leave on your own, you hypocrite! Want to talk about who’s the bigger burden? You think I don’t know who you are?”
“Fine! Let’s hear it! What do you know about me, Your Highness?”
Glen rubbed his forehead and finally stepped in.
“Alright, you little brats. Stop fighting.”
He picked Arileti up and placed her far from Rasiyan.
Her lips were trembling with frustration.
“You’re going to live together for a while. How can you keep fighting like this?”
“We’re not living together!”
“I said throw her out!”
With both sides shouting at him, Glen felt like his eardrums were about to burst.
Rasiyan grabbed the hem of Glen’s shirt and looked up at him. Both children’s eyes were glistening with tears.
“Anything else is fine, but not that one, hyuuung…”
“Tsk. Your Highness, you mustn’t use the phrase ‘throw someone away’ about a person.”
“She’s going to kill you, hyung. She’ll side with that cunning Albert and that stupid Lucius, and then Hezeit will—!”
Rasiyan suddenly broke into coughing. His lungs burned as if they were on fire.
“Hezeit will…”
Strangely, the pain clawing at his chest brought him back to his senses.
He couldn’t finish his sentence and struggled to breathe.
Suddenly, he realized he was saying ridiculous things.
The girl with the pink hair looked three or four years younger than him. Who would believe that this chirping five-year-old would grow into a notorious villainess?
Besides, he had heard from Sir Dunken. Until just last year, Hezeit had only been struggling to survive in poor conditions. But after that girl suddenly appeared, everything changed in astonishing ways.
And Rasiyan could see it himself.
Hezeit was livelier and more prosperous than in any of his past memories. Even the enormous dragon atop the snowy mountain, picking at its scales, had not existed before.
Glen quietly looked at him, waiting for an answer.
A wave of overwhelming sorrow surged up.
Rasiyan remembered both of his past lives. Altogether, they barely amounted to just over thirty years. He also remembered most of the fragments of the future that had once existed but then vanished.
From a certain point on, the futures had multiplied into hundreds and thousands of possibilities.
And in every changing, rewinding scene, there had been that woman—with deep pink hair and teal eyes.
In some scenes she appeared as a growing girl, in others as a grown woman. Every time, she was the hateful person who ruined Rasiyan’s prophecies.
No matter how many possible paths he faced, Rasiyan had always chosen what he believed was the best option. Not once had he succeeded.
He lost Glen. He lost his few supporters. He died a miserable death, scorned as a useless prince.
If he had simply been defeated, he might have accepted it as fate.
But Rasiyan revived.
In his second life, the “woman” still existed.
Unlike before, when she had been a strategist for the First Prince, in this new life she sided with the Second Prince, Lucius.
When Rasiyan realized he had regressed, he resolved to strike back this time—not for the throne, but to save Glen Hezeit.
For some reason, in that second life, her interference with his foresight became noticeably less frequent.
Thanks to that, he managed to secretly infiltrate the villa of the Pembroke Ducal House, the headquarters of the Second Prince’s faction where she was staying.
But when he finally gained the perfect chance to kill her, it was none other than Glen who let her go.
“I saw her in person. She was just a small, frail child. Like a skinny stick that hadn’t eaten properly.”
“So you just came back?”
“She had eyes that didn’t know the world.”
“……”
“Eyes that didn’t know love, or joy, or happiness. Just like yours.”
In the end, that sympathy led to his death.
No—that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t Glen’s fault. After that, it was Rasiyan himself who caused Glen’s death.
While trying to break through a trap set by the Second Prince’s side, his foresight failed again. After Glen and the knights of Hezeit were wiped out, Rasiyan fell into despair.
Following the instinct of a sage who must pass on his authority, he grabbed the first person he saw and transferred his power. He couldn’t even remember who it was.
Then he quietly took his own life in a corner of the Imperial Palace.
But damn it—when he opened his eyes, he had regressed again.
This time, he had returned to when he was nine years old. And of all moments, it was right after he had met Glen Hezeit.
If only he hadn’t met him, he wouldn’t have dragged Hezeit into this mess. What kind of cruel joke of fate was this?
And so his third life had begun, and once again Rasiyan was caught up in the struggle for the throne.
What am I supposed to do now?
