Possession or Reincarnation?
"I shall take my leave now, Godfather."
After Julian left the room, his godfather, Hendel Nihilite, gazed out the window. In the distance, he saw a small silhouette walking toward the annex. To Hendel, that tiny figure looked incredibly fragile.
Watching the boy's retreating back, Hendel spoke.
"Butler. How long did it take for that medicine to be completed?"
"It took two years, my Lord."
"Two years..."
Hendel absentmindedly pressed a hand to his forehead. The nights he had soaked in ice water because fever-reducing potions did nothing. The servants who had lost sleep to the sound of his teeth chattering. It had all begun right after Baron Hendel returned from his inspection of the south.
"Two years... If it had been even a little later, I would have joined my friends in the grave."
At Hendel's words, the butler's hands trembled slightly. The butler remembered it vividly as well. The Church's healer had shaken his head back then. Whispers about preparing a coffin had already begun drifting through the hallways. It was a moment when everyone was bracing themselves for the downfall of the Baronial house.
Then, a nine-year-old child had appeared, holding a pitch-black medicine bottle, and pushed open the door to the sickroom.
"When the young master brought it himself, to be honest, I..."
"You had your doubts. As did I."
Hendel gave a bitter smile. He had been no different. Even on his deathbed, he had thought, There's no way a medicine made by a child will work. At the time, he hadn't believed in Julian. He had only drunk it because he had nothing left to lose. And that choice had brought about a miracle.
"...Yet, even after I recovered, that child asked for nothing."
A business proposal? That could hardly be called a reward. In the first place, Hendel was also receiving a share of the profits, meaning he only stood to gain; it could not be considered a repayment. But as if that were enough, Julian never clung to him as his savior, nor did he expect any compensation. Instead, the child had set only one condition.
Hendel sighed softly as he recalled those words.
"I suppose blood really does tell."
Hendel thought of his late friends, the deceased couple. Those foolish friends who had left their young son in his care and headed to the front lines, claiming the soldiers on the battlefield needed them. The couple, who spent their lives treating soldiers, never returned. And their child, before even turning ten, had created a medicine for those very soldiers. He had even lowered the price of the medicine by cutting into his own share.
Could this truly be a coincidence? Could such a noble character be a mere fluke?
"What did he see out there?"
Two years ago. The child, while recovering his parents' bodies, had seemed deeply shaken by the sight of the soldiers there. And upon his return, he had kept his lights burning through the night, researching tree bark. At first, Hendel had dismissed it as childish whim. A nine-year-old who hadn't even learned the basics of alchemy, creating a new medicine? He had assumed it was merely a form of mourning to cope with his grief. Believing the boy would give up once he was reasonably satisfied, Hendel had assigned an alchemist to assist him. But when the child did not stop after two weeks, a month, then three months, Hendel had begun to worry.
Hendel's heart had grown heavy upon hearing those words. No talent. That meant the child's efforts were highly likely to end in vain. As he watched countless failures pile up, Hendel had gently urged Julian to give up. Ruined batches poured away due to incorrect concentrations. Foul-smelling extracts that had to be discarded. Ten times, thirty times, seventy times. Even the alchemists who had quietly cheered the boy on eventually left his side, unable to watch any longer.
Yet Julian did not give up. Looking at Julian, Hendel had received the distinct impression that the boy was being chased by something. It was as if curing the soldiers' illnesses was his absolute, inescapable mission. And in the end, the boy had found the answer all on his own. By saving the life of Hendel, who had just returned from his southern inspection. To anyone else, it might have seemed like a stroke of luck, but to Hendel, this miracle felt like anything but a coincidence.
"Butler. Come to think of it, I didn't give up for seven years."
Seven years. Every year, on the anniversary of his friends' deaths, Hendel took a leave of absence and headed south. He searched the territories of the magic beasts, dug through collapsed ruins, and combed through the registries of those who had never returned.
"Until I found them... I had absolutely no intention of stopping. No matter what anyone said."
"..."
"And yet, I told that child to give up."
A self-deprecating smile touched Hendel's lips.
"Looking back, it is shameful. I regarded my own stubbornness as conviction, while dismissing the child's stubbornness as mere childish folly."
His fingers, resting on the windowsill, absentmindedly traced the grain of the wood.
"Perhaps... I was simply exhausted."
Looking back, the Hendel of those days was slowly grinding down to nothing. The annual journeys south that always ended empty-handed. The pitying looks. The well-meaning advice to 'let them go now.' All those harsh realities had piled up, and at some point, Hendel had become hypersensitive to 'things that couldn't be achieved no matter how hard one tried.' Was that why? The sight of a talentless child staying up all night, failing over and over, had overlapped perfectly with his own reflection, floundering in the southern swamps.
"As you know, I do not believe in the gods."
"..."
"Of course, they exist. There is no other way to explain the miracle of holy magic. But if those so-called gods truly cared for humanity... they shouldn't have taken seven years."
The gods couldn't possibly have been ignorant of how many people that couple had saved in the Empire, or how devout they had been. They were people who deserved a divine revelation. In Hendel's eyes, they were worthy of at least that much.
"Even if the gods chose not to prevent their deaths, they should not have abandoned them in that swamp for seven long years."
But the treatment the couple received was miserable.
"That is why, even as I hovered on the brink of death, I did not offer a single prayer to the gods. Nor did I believe in an afterlife."
"My Lord..."
"And yet..."
Julian's figure was already long gone from Hendel's view. But he continued to stare in that direction.
"...their child saved me. Using what he saw in the very land where his parents died."
Hendel thought to himself. If that child had not carried on his parents' devotion to the soldiers, if Hendel had not spent seven years trying to find his friends' bodies, if Hendel had not taken the boy to that Magic Realm, and if, in the midst of all this, even one of them had given up as everyone else suggested—would he still be alive today?
"I still do not believe in an afterlife. But... this time, it feels like a gift truly fitting of those two."
The butler could not find the words to reply. He merely wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Hendel pretended not to notice and turned his gaze back to the documents on his desk. Outside the window, a light flickered on in the annex warehouse. It seemed the eleven-year-old child was beginning his research again tonight. Hendel could only offer his silent support for the child's endeavors. "Talent" was no longer a word that mattered to him.
Meanwhile, at that exact moment, Julian was...
Come to think of it, is this possession or reincarnation?
The moment he arrived at the annex, he began wrestling with a dilemma he had recently encountered. A homework assignment he had postponed for years while pouring all his energy into developing Quinine. It was a question regarding his very identity, one he had never managed to resolve.
Hmm... I definitely have memories from when I was a baby.
He remembered suffering from a brief fever a week before his first birthday. As the fever subsided, his memories of his past life had begun to crystallize. That was the exact point Julian was hung up on. The standard for reincarnation was possessing memories from the moment of birth. However, as far as his medical knowledge went, the capacity for memory only develops around twelve months of age.
Infantile amnesia.
According to this theory, long-term memories cannot be formed before the myelination of the hippocampus is complete. Which meant that even in the case of reincarnation, a baby's underdeveloped brain would prevent them from remembering anything before twelve months...
So, am I possessed or reincarnated?
Julian rubbed his chin, lost in thought. Of course, whether it was possession or reincarnation changed absolutely nothing. But having stumbled into this train of thought, Julian's stubbornness demanded he find an answer.
Damn it. I should have at least read the first sentence of the novel.
For the next few days, the light in Julian's room did not go out until late into the night. The butler's eyes welling with tears as he watched from afar was merely a bonus.