The Viscount's Wastrel
Have you ever gambled?
115.
When American neuroscientists assigned a number to every pleasure a human being can feel in ordinary life, gambling, they say, scored 115. Strip away the 150 of the highest narcotic, and it is effectively the peak a person can reach by legal means.
They claim that mixing bodies with a woman scores a mere 55. More than double that? Was some dopamine firecracker going off inside the brain?
"I'll open the final river card."
The dealer, turned out smartly in a tailcoat, drew the top card of the deck and flipped it. Beside the four already spread, the fifth settled neatly into line.
The moment the last community card hit the felt, I lifted a corner of the checkered card in front of me.
Ten, jack, queen, king, ace. Numbers standing in perfect order.
A straight. And not just any straight — a mountain.
The instant those numbers passed through my eyes and lodged in my brain, a sharp pleasure crackled through my skull like a burst of electricity. If those American researchers had been scanning me with an imaging rig right then, they would have seen my midbrain glowing as red as a ripe apple.
My luck had been absolute shit these past few days, and every bet I placed had done nothing but fatten other men's pockets. Today, at last, Lady Luck seemed to have turned her head my way.
I stole a glance at the bearded fellow in the next seat. He was muttering curses and clamping a cigarette between his lips. That one was a bust, no question.
Next, the woman beside him. Good hand or bad, her face was hard to read, but it didn't look like anything high.
Last, I flicked a look at the man sitting one seat over. Whether he'd seen a few cards in his life or not, he held a poker face from start to finish, and there was no reading him.
Didn't matter. It was a mountain — the sixth-strongest hand in the rankings. No. A royal flush or a straight flush is something you might see once in a lifetime, if that, so in practice it was as good as fourth.
"All-in!"
Failing to push at a moment like this was something only a moron would do. Look at them. That pile of chips was reaching out its arms, begging to be taken home. The thought that every last one of them was about to be mine already had Lady Luck pounding on my heart like a drum.
"All-in? What's this — has our young master Servent caught something good this time?"
"Uncle, this round's mine, so don't get brave. Folding would be healthier."
"Haha. Fine. I'll die this round."
The bearded man blew out a long stream of smoke and, as if he hadn't a shred of regret, nudged his two cards a little way forward.
"Ma'am, are you in?"
"Mm... no. I'll fold too."
She checked her cards against the table several times over, then finally turned them facedown.
Good. One left.
"And you, the quiet one. You taking it?"
Quit the act. If you don't feel like counting money, hurry up and keel over.
"Scared? How about you just drop dead?"
"Call..."
This bastard? Fine. I wasn't the sort to get shaken by a bluff like that.
"Oh? Caught something good yourself, pal?"
I asked it with a grin, but he didn't answer.
Ha. From the look of him, he'd gotten trips at best.
"Then open, please."
The moment the dealer finished, I flipped the two cards in front of me as if I'd been waiting for it.
Behold. This beautiful parade of numbers.
"Oh! Isn't that a mountain?"
"Wow, young master, you caught a good one."
"Haha! Nothing more to see. I'll be taking this pot!"
I slid my eyes sideways. The expressionless bastard was still blank-faced. Putting on airs, of all things.
Clatter!
The moment I set my hand on the mountain of chips, the colorful heap collapsed in a rush. I scooped up a great handful and started to drag it in.
Thud!
The man who had worn that blank face the whole time seized my wrist.
"What, you want a tip?"
If he had something to say, he could use his mouth. Who grabs a man's arm? With my free hand I snatched a few chips at random and tossed them in front of him.
"You haven't seen my cards yet."
"..."
What kind of bullshit was that? Don't tell me he actually had a real hand.
"You see that? I've got a mountain. A mountain."
He was about to lose big, and it had scrambled his brains so badly he couldn't even read the numbers. But he turned his cards over slowly, as if telling me to confirm the hand with my own eyes.
And the moment they lay fully faceup, numbers and suits bared—
Someone nearby shouted something, but the world had gone mute, and I couldn't hear a thing.
Eeeeeee...
A tinnitus whine droned in my ears. Little by little the colors came back, and the sounds that had been stopped up began, one by one, to reach me.
"That's a flush!"
"Young master, what do we do? You lost this one!"
A flush, five hearts laid out in a neat row. The moment I saw it, my mouth fell open on its own.
That bastard, face utterly unbothered, set the few chips I had tossed him back down in front of me.
"This is the young master's tip."
Then he swept every chip on the table into his arms.
Clatter!
Right before my eyes, the chips that had been reaching out as if to ask why I was abandoning them were sucked into his embrace.
Today, too, Lady Luck had betrayed me.
It had already been two years since I possessed a body in another world. No omen, no narrative logic — I simply opened my eyes one day and found myself inside Ruel Servent, the youngest son of a viscount house.
At first I had no idea what was happening. Hear the words reincarnation or possession, and some people might think this:
So I'm finally the protagonist?
I thought something else entirely.
Why me, of all people?
I had been an ordinary citizen living each day in good faith, and I had never done anything that warranted being possessed. And then, out of nowhere, another world. It was absurd beyond words.
The one mercy was that this world was viciously peaceful. There was no demon king worthy of being called an enemy of mankind, and though several nations existed, they had kept such amicable relations that not a single war had broken out in decades. On top of that, a discipline called magitech — magic bound to science — had advanced far enough that trains ran, and even magi-carriages, close cousins to automobiles, rolled through the streets. Daily life was remarkably convenient.
Best of all, I liked the station I had landed in.
The Servent Viscounty. Not some colossal great house, but nobility all the same. And thanks to an older brother who was both capable and kind, there was no blood-soaked scramble for the throne among siblings, and I was freed from a noble's duties besides. A golden spoon of a life.
Set it beside the one I'd left — an orphan with no family to his name, staring every day at the words glowing on a monitor, You are not a fit for our company..., and pouring liquor down his throat — and this wasn't merely a god-tier spoon. No. It was a god-tier life.
Isn't this a complete jackpot?
Pleasure without responsibility. What a beautiful phrase. From that day on, I reformed my heart completely.
I ate, I played, and I enjoyed a happy life waited on by maid sisters who would not have looked out of place on a prime-time music broadcast.
...For about half a year.
Even a life that close to wine, flesh, and idle luxury had exactly one problem. This other world was boring as hell.
I had lived by devouring every medium there was — web novels, webtoons, games, livestreams, short-form video — and my brain was already pickled so deep in dopamine it wouldn't spoil for a hundred years. There was very little here for a man like me to enjoy.
Novels so dull and pedantic you couldn't tell pure literature from genre fiction. Plays whose scripts might as well have been written by no one, with not a scrap of genre in them, opening on patriotic fervor and closing on patriotic fervor. Board games that were basically chess.
The amusements of another world came down to those three things. So my reaching for gambling was, in a sense, only natural.
I had been staring blankly up at the sky with nothing to do, same as any other day, when the young gardener of the house told me he knew a good place and dragged me off — straight to a gambling den.
At first I truly meant only to give the roulette wheel a light spin. And now that same man had been unable to quit the dopamine bursting from his pituitary every time a card turned, and for two years already had been walking into the den the moment money appeared, as casually as stepping in and out of his own house.
"Fuck, a flush shows up there? How does that make any sense?"
"From the look of you, you lost again today."
"Ah, Brother."
I lifted my head. A tall man of six feet, black hair swept back without a single strand out of place, was smiling gently. Rhon Servent, eldest son of the house, had run into me in the lobby — broke again, as ever — and welcomed me as if he were glad of it.
"No, Brother, listen."
Climbing the stairs beside him, I told him about the last hand, the one that had hauled me through heaven and hell like a roller coaster.
"For once I hit a straight dead on. A mountain, even."
"Did you?"
"Then some guy I'd never seen just slaps down a flush."
"Haha. Our little brother must have lost good and proper."
"Isn't this a total scam? A mountain and a flush in the same hand, are you kidding me."
There wasn't a speck of nobility in a wastrel little brother who did nothing but gamble, and Rhon listened to the whole story as if it delighted him. This angel of a brother was, no matter how I looked at it, a bonus perk granted to the man who had possessed his way into this world.
"That bastard was definitely in league with the house."
"Wasn't it simply bad luck?"
"No. My gut is telling me straight. I ought to stomp every last one of those bastards."
"Yes, little brother. Think on that later. First, go see Father."
"Father?"
Strange. Father had already given up on his wastrel youngest, or so it seemed — he didn't say a word to me even at meals — and now he was asking for me.
"He said to send you the moment you returned."
"Did something happen?"
"I couldn't say. He didn't tell me."
Ominous.
"Brother, can't you come with me?"
"Mm... I'm sorry, little brother. I've still got work left."
"Damn it..."
Wastrel or not, I wasn't thoughtless enough to cling to a brother who was working hard. I heaved a sigh deep enough to sink the floor, parted from Rhon, and climbed the stairs alone until I stood before Father's office on the third floor.
Gulp. A dry swallow went down my throat.
What on earth was he planning to say? Feeling as if I were about to face something unknown, I knocked on the closed door.
"Father, it's Ruel."
"Come in."
A deep, weighty voice came from beyond the door.
Creak.
I opened it slowly and stepped inside. A middle-aged man in his forties sat at the desk, turning over papers.
Head of the Servent Viscounty, and father of the Ruel Servent whose body I had possessed.
Alberic Servent.
Like Rhon, he wore his black hair combed neatly back. He lifted his gaze from the documents and looked at me with red eyes.
"Come forward."
Step by step, I approached the desk. When I reached him, Alberic looked me up and down.
"You went to the gambling house again today."
"Yes, well..."
"Hah... How long do you mean to live like this."
I dropped my head like a man with honey in his mouth and stared at the blameless floor. On this point, I had nothing to say for myself. Some strange man had sat down inside the body of a perfectly normal son and done nothing but gamble, and to a family that had no way of knowing why, it could only be maddening.
But what was I supposed to do? I wanted to savor this golden-spoon life for as long as it lasted, with no idea when it might end.
"After you suffered that great accident and woke, I took it for a passing eccentricity and have endured until now."
The Ruel I had possessed, I was told, had fallen from a cliff and lain unconscious for more than a week. Most likely I had flowed into a body that was already dead.
"But my waiting has reached its limit."
Thud!
Alberic flung an ornately decorated document from the desk down in front of me.
"What is this?"
"...Pardon?"
For two years my healing life in another world had gone on without a single problem, milking the sweetest deal imaginable. For the first time, a crack ran through it.