I Became the Illegitimate Son of a Duke's Estate (1)
I Became the Illegitimate Son of a Duke's Estate (1)
It was an unremarkable life: an ordinary young man who loved games, living a mundane existence crushed by work and weighed down by credit card debt.
The end of that life was just as unremarkable. The cause of death: freezing.
One winter night, after being dumped by a lover I'd dated for quite a long time, I was walking home dead drunk. I was mugged, knocked unconscious, and left behind to freeze to death.
And just like that, my first life came to an end.
When I opened my eyes again, I was wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a crib.
Right then, I heard a strange language I'd never heard before.
"Alex, you are the son of the Duke of Gracia."
Miraculously, I understood the words at once.
A beautiful woman spoke to me, a baby now, with a gentle smile.
She was a blonde woman dressed in an elegant, classic dress. She was my mother, and I was a newborn child.
The moment I heard her words, the word 'reincarnation' naturally came to mind.
Though it was hard to believe, I had definitely reincarnated. Three moons floated side by side outside the window, and this place could not possibly be Earth.
Time passed.
In any case, my new life seemed quite decent.
No, "decent" didn't even begin to cover it.
A luxurious, medieval-style room. Multiple maids.
And my mother's words that I was the son of a duke.
Without a doubt, I'd been reborn as the son of a grand noble.
Even as I fought off sleep, I was overjoyed, but...
As expected, things couldn't be all sunshine and rainbows.
Not long after I first opened my eyes, a handsome man came in and then left. He glanced at me, a mere baby, before taking my mother with him.
Judging by his demeanor, he was clearly my father, the Duke.
He didn't seem particularly pleased to see me.
As it turned out, my mother was a commoner, and I was an illegitimate son unrecognized by the family.
To make matters worse, there were two legal wives and two older brothers, making me an unwanted nuisance. I even caught a maid quietly clicking her tongue at me when my mother wasn't around.
The relationship between the Duke and my mother also seemed nothing like that of the married couples I knew. The situation didn't look good at all.
'Seriously, this is no time to celebrate being born into a noble family! What kind of outdated cliché is this, anyway?! If I'd been born as a duke's son, I should at least be the pampered youngest child or a badass eldest son hiding his power! Or at least give me a system window!'
No sparkling spirits were in sight, and even when I shouted "System Window," "Settings Window," or "status window," nothing appeared. There was no gift from God, and forget God—I hadn't even seen a measly angel.
I forced my sleepy eyes open, trying to find some kind of solution, but I couldn't think for more than a few minutes.
A newborn baby. Overcome by drowsiness, I simply fell back asleep.
Perhaps because they were grand nobility, my mother's room and mine were separate. Fed milk by my wet nurse, I spent my days filled with useless worries.
Then, one night.
I suddenly woke up.
A maid stood in the room, where the moonlight filtered in.
'Ah, it's Kanna. Is she on night duty tonight?'
She was one of the maids who helped my mother look after me.
'But why did I wake up? I'm not hungry, and my diaper isn't wet...'
I stared blankly at Kanna after waking so suddenly, and the maid looked back at me with a gloomy expression.
"You should have just stayed asleep. Why did you have to wake up..."
Muttering apologetically, she silently approached the side of the cradle.
Something was terribly wrong.
Startled, I opened my mouth, but before I could do anything, a large pillow came crashing down over my head.
The hands gripping it were Kanna's, and the pillow smothered my face before I could even burst into tears.
I was suffocating.
"I'm sorry. Young Lord, you were born too early."
Her voice echoed in my ears as my consciousness began to fade.
'No, what kind of crazy soap opera is this?! This is messed up! An assassination when I'm not even a few months old?! I haven't even gotten to do anything yet!'
I screamed frantically inside my head, but with the pillow pressed down over me, not even a whimper could escape my mouth.
My consciousness drifted further and further away.
Regrettably, salvation never came, not even at the very last moment.
My breathing stopped.
'Damn it, what an absurd reincarnation.'
With that hollow grumble, my second life came to an end, too.
Pitch-black darkness. A mind melting away. Death had arrived.
Finally, a bright light began to appear before my eyes.
Is this heaven?
...
How much time had passed?
Whoosh!
Light enveloped the darkness.
And then.
"Ugh!"
I opened my eyes once more.
A beautiful woman appeared before me.
"Alex, you are the son of the Duke of Gracia."
The woman I'd seen every day spoke to me again, wearing the exact same expression she'd had when I first saw her months ago.
And then.
Finally, letters floated before my eyes.
[You have died. Restarting from the Automatic Save Point.]
Staring at the Korean text floating before my eyes, I stopped crying at once.
After spending a few days in a daze, I had no choice but to accept it.
I wasn't dead. It was clear that after dying, I'd returned to the moment of my birth.
First reincarnation, and now regression.
Dying before I was even a few months old was absurd enough, but returning to the very beginning left me both glad and utterly dumbfounded.
[You have died. Restarting from the Automatic Save Point.]
The text that appeared in midair whenever I focused my mind made it clear that this regression wouldn't be a one-time occurrence.
'An Automatic Save Point...'
It was definitely a phrase I'd often seen in the single-player games I enjoyed in my past life.
The save-load mechanic where the player doesn't save manually, but the game saves automatically when they pass a certain location. If the player dies, they revive at that saved spot.
The phrase that appeared back then was precisely "Automatic Save Point."
'Since it's a point in time rather than a physical point, is it a specific moment instead of a location?'
I silently thanked whatever entity had brought me to this world.
As expected, I hadn't been thrown into a strange world without any safety net.
Still, coming back to life wasn't entirely a good thing.
'I have to find a way to avoid dying in the future.'
Even if I could revive, it would all be useless if I just kept dying over and over again.
There was no guarantee I'd keep reviving forever, and even if I did, a life where death repeated endlessly might await me.
If that were the case, the ability to revive wouldn't be a blessing, but a curse.
Yet finding a way not to die was no easy task.
The time of my death was just a few months after my birth. I couldn't even crawl, let alone speak.
'Hell difficulty right from the start...'
But I couldn't just let myself die again. Having to repeat this bleak baby life along with the horrific memory of death... I had to survive no matter what.
Fortunately, I knew who the culprit was.
Someone else was likely pulling the strings, but I knew who had carried it out, so I only had to get rid of her.
The maid who killed me was Kanna.
She was a rather unremarkable woman.
Among my mother's maids, she didn't stand out and seemed reasonably diligent.
Even through the eyes of someone who'd lived a past life, she didn't look like the type of woman who would recklessly murder someone.
'Well, I guess this era is different from my past life.'
By all appearances, this was a bloody, brutal medieval era. Even in a prosperous noble family, people were bound to be no different.
Fighting off the overwhelming drowsiness, I kept observing Kanna.
Because of this, my mother and the maids found it strange, calling me a baby who rarely cried and barely slept.
But I had no spare energy to care about their gazes.
The exact same amount of time passed once more.
My father, the Duke, occasionally came to look at me with an indifferent expression, and as I gradually slept less, I had more time to observe her.
As time passed, the maid Kanna's expression grew darker and darker.
'Why didn't I notice this before?'
Looking at her now, anyone could see at a glance how gloomy her face was.
The other maids even looked at her with worried expressions.
'She's trying to kill someone—and the Duke's son, no less—so there's no way her face would look normal. Is she not even thinking about the consequences?'
Even if she planned to disguise my death as natural by smothering me with a pillow, she wouldn't be entirely free of responsibility. If things went wrong, she might have to take the blame and die.
Yet when I looked at Kanna's darkening expression, I merely snorted. There was no reason to feel pity for a murderer.
"Ah! The young master smiled."
"He rarely smiles, so that's a relief."
"But doesn't his smile look a bit strange?"
"Tsk! Watch your mouth!"
The maids, chatting as they looked at my face, ended up getting scolded by the head maid.
It seemed I wasn't old enough to snort derisively just yet.
The moment of my death drew near.
At first, the maids took turns watching over me for a few hours each night, like a military night watch, but after a few months, only one maid stayed overnight.
Unless I cried, she would sit in a chair in the corner of the room and doze off.
The care was far laxer than before, but compared to my past life, it was still clearly excessive. Truly a grand noble family.
It seemed Kanna had been waiting for the moment she'd be left alone at night.
The night Kanna was left alone.
"Please head out."
"All right, keep up the good work."
"It's fine. The Young Lord is quiet, so it's not hard at all."
Kanna waved goodbye to the other maids as they left for the night.
Afterward, she cast a brief, apologetic look in my direction.
But I had no interest in her face.
A few hours later, when the night deepened, the exact same thing would happen again.
I couldn't let that happen.
Instead of waiting, I opened my mouth wide.
And burst into tears at the top of my lungs.
"Waaah!"
The cries of a baby who rarely wept echoed throughout the mansion.
Naturally, chaos ensued.
"What's going on?!"
"It's the Young Lord crying!"
The maids who'd just left the room rushed back in at once, and even my mother, who'd been resting in her room, came running in a single bound.
The maids who rushed in, along with my mother, asked Kanna what had happened, but Kanna, pale as a sheet, could only shake her head without saying a word.
"He just... suddenly started crying."
"He was such a well-behaved child. There's no way he would suddenly do that!"
My mother snapped at Kanna. She rarely got angry, so she must have been greatly startled.
But Kanna was actually telling the truth.
The head maid carefully cradled me as I cried.
"He must have had a bad dream or been startled when he woke up. He'll fall back asleep shortly."
No way. If I fall asleep, it's game over.
"Waaah!"
Once more, with all my strength!
I wailed until my face turned beet red.
The startled head maid almost dropped me.
"Summon the priest and the family doctor immediately!"
My mother shouted to the maids.
Huh? I get the doctor, but why a priest? Could it be...?
Anyway, while people ran hither and thither, I desperately kept up my crying.
It was exhausting. I was drained.
They say some babies cry all day long, but how is that even possible? It's insane.
But this was only the beginning. To survive, I had to endure.
I did not stop crying.
"Waaah, waah, huff, huff, cough, waaah!"
That night, I cried my way through the entire night.
The next morning.
I was sprawled out on the bed, panting for breath.
"There doesn't seem to be any particular illness. Aside from a swollen throat from crying too much, he is entirely healthy. The swelling will also go down soon."
The doctor's words reached my ears, but I was too distracted by something else to pay close attention.
A bright light dazzled my vision.
An old man dressed in a white robe had placed his finger on my tiny neck, and a brilliant light emanated from it.
I'd wondered when they mentioned summoning a priest, but I couldn't believe it was real. This place wasn't an ordinary medieval era like the Earth of my past life.
The clergymen here could use divine power.
If so...
There might also be magicians, or even knights who wielded sword aura.
Was this a good thing? I still couldn't tell whether it would be advantageous for me or not.
No, that wasn't what was important right now.
I'd safely made it through the night, but nothing had changed.
There was no new message saying the danger had passed, and Kanna was still standing over there, perfectly fine.
Instead, my mother approached Kanna and apologized to her.
"I was just too startled yesterday. Please don't take it to heart."
"It is fine, Madam."
Seeing Kanna completely unscathed, it was clear the crisis hadn't passed yet.
It was a pity, but I'd anticipated this kind of situation as well.
I wasn't finished yet, either.
