What Am I Supposed to Do?
I am a shut-in.
These days I suppose I ought to call myself the female sort, but the habit itself has not changed in the slightest—not even now, after I was reborn. I became a woman.
It was not some rebirth that arrived out of nowhere. In my previous life my body had been so frail I was swallowing medicine nearly every day, and though I liked to think of myself as a proper man, I lost the partner and son I had lived with my entire life—the one that hung below my waist—and was born again.
When a second life was given to me, I was glad. At least I would not have to live the way I had before, shut up in a hospital room and nowhere else. Even so, I never once went outside.
They say a person is shaped by their surroundings. I grew up under my mother. Under a witch.
Beautiful and bewitching—and behind that loveliness, heretics among the mages, beings who practiced cruel experiments and magic. That was a witch.
Mother always told me the world outside was hell. Beyond our home there was nothing but people determined to hunt witches.
"Then... about when will I be able to go out?"
Mother brooded long and hard over my question. A witch was supposed to know everything, and yet it seemed there were things even she did not know.
"When our little Noir turns a hundred... no, around two hundred?"
She soothed me as she said it.
So a witch could live a very long time. Then I might as well enjoy all sorts of things while I'm at it. I've got years to spare anyway, don't I?
I had lived for hundreds of years, but receiving a proposal from my own disciple—that was a first.
What am I supposed to do?