The Curse of Aging (2)
Unlike the memories of his previous life, which remained crystal clear even after ten years, everything about him now was distinctly different—his appearance, the language he spoke, his occupation, his age, even his race.
Yet some things remained the same.
The same gender as in his past life. Cooking skills that had grown far beyond the realm of a mere hobby. The ability to fall into a deep sleep no matter how uncomfortable the spot, and so on.
Above all, that deep sleep was most welcome of all.
Whatever else it was, this reality fell short of his previous life in every way—no, it was outright wretched. At least while he slept, he could forget the pain on every front.
Nine-tenths of Karem’s life after reincarnation had been steeped in suffering. Of course it was painful.
The era he had lived in before was the most prosperous age in all of human history. And he had been born into one of the richest nations of that era, where the daily life of the middle class was more luxurious than the extravagance of nobles and power-holders from any age before the modern one.
That everyday life had plummeted into the abyss in an instant. An ordinary citizen of a democratic nation had been reborn as a serf.
It would have been better if he had simply forgotten his previous life.
But the ordinary, almost boringly familiar days of his past existence, compared to the indifference and rejection of a serf village full of people who were no better than gene-donors utterly unqualified to be parents, had been nothing short of heaven.
At least the villagers would step in if they saw domestic violence—though the reason being “we can’t afford to lose workers” left him speechless.
Rejection remained constant either way, so in that loathsome serf life he had never eaten properly or slept properly, and whenever he found the chance he had forced down every sort of trash he would never have looked twice at before—solely to survive.
Then a miraculous chance to escape had arrived. A hand of salvation.
Meeting Catherine and Gordon had felt like that hand of salvation. The exclusive-chef offer Catherine made afterward had been salvation itself.
Seeing someone who could not even manage a proper meal on her own, and who made such a generous proposal to a complete stranger, Karem had thought: at the very least, he did not want to watch this person suffer over food.
After hardship comes fortune, they said.
Once he accepted the exclusive offer, life had been so good that he felt guilty toward the two parents left behind in his previous life. That was the only way he could put it.
Of course there were still things that fell short of his past life. But would he ever have been able to enjoy a life like this back then?
Though many things were missing, the lavish ingredients he could never have dreamed of in his previous life, and the virtually unlimited support, were here.
He had thought it over twice, three times, countless times. His head shook firmly of its own accord. No matter how prosperous his past life had been, the towering barrier of money had been impossible to surmount.
In this life, after fleeing the village, no one stood in his way.
He could experiment freely whenever he longed for the flavors of his previous life, cook every sort of dish, freely watch the joy on the faces of those he served, and on top of that he had accumulated wealth he had never possessed even before (however unintentionally) and a home of his own.
It was only a rented room in the Magic Tower, but it was his home all the same. What’s more, all the tiresome kitchen cleanup and room tidying were handled by someone else.
So as long as he simply endured Catherine’s unguarded, beautiful figure that somehow always managed to stir up worldly desires—
—Good heavens! How on earth did you arrive at that conclusion?!
What? Who are you? And… formal speech?
—I was watching with great interest and you just make my blood boil. And you call yourself a reincarnator? You mean to say you don’t even know the feelings you hold for your master?
…Pardon? Reincarnator? No, wait, that—
—Forget the reincarnator part! What’s with the “pardon”?! This is the kind of thing that makes both master and servant blow their lids, Tutatis you—!
—You shrew! What happened to the god who promised to watch over him with warm eyes?!
—L-let go of me! I even threw him a sacred relic to block it, and he goes and gets himself cursed anyway—my blood pressure—wait. Actually… this might not be so bad after all…?
Karem, who had been drifting in a sea that felt both cold and warm at once, cradled in a cozy weightlessness where he could not see an inch ahead, was jolted wide awake by the sudden storm of a thoroughly sacred marital quarrel.
—What this shrew is saying is that you already know exactly what your feelings for the master you serve really are.
—That’s what I’ve been saying. Exactly!
At those words Karem could only gape.
The fact declared by these two sudden, somehow familiar and holy voices left him utterly flustered. Still, he was not so dense that he failed to understand what they meant after catching the keywords dropped in between.
In other words…
I love Catherine? Lady Atanitas?
Honestly, it did not feel real.
He had never had much to do with women in his previous life either, and in this one it had only been a year since he first properly interacted with someone he could call a woman.
He simply wanted to prepare meals and snacks and interesting new foods for Lady Atanitas, then watch her delight and her eyes sparkle right beside her. That was all.
Of course, that did not mean the unguarded moments he sometimes saw were—please—
Hm?
Ah.
Oh.
You idiot?
—Looks like you’ve finally realized it.
The thoroughly holy female voice, thick with the satisfaction of having a stuck sweet potato finally cleared from her throat, left Karem speechless all over again.
So… oh. Oh?
“Wait, for real?!”
Karem shot upright like a leaping salmon.
Beyond the transparent ceiling lay a gloomy sky. A transparent ceiling. Unfamiliar, yet one he knew. The greenhouse ceiling.
The fresh sensation of grass against his back. Only then could Karem, body throbbing, look around him.
He was lying in the grass at the very center of the greenhouse.
Some distance to his left, Corvus had been approaching and now stood still. Beneath his legs Olivier gripped his staff and let out a sigh of relief.
Suddenly a soft touch settled firmly against his chest.
He turned his head and found Catherine’s hand resting on his solar plexus.
“W-wait, Lady Atanitas? I think you’re a bit too close.”
“Quiet. You nearly died just a moment ago.”
Catherine’s expressionless, serious murmur carried a deep worry and relief he had never seen before. Though she seemed oddly unable to meet his eyes.
Under that strange pressure Karem stayed still with his upper body propped up. Satisfied, Catherine looked him over carefully.
“Does it hurt like it did the first time you entered the greenhouse?”
“No. Right now it’s just… the joints aching a bit…”
“That’s the leftover pain from your bones growing.”
“No—before that, how much time has passed?”
“Not even a full hour since you came in.”
“Then why can’t you look me in the eye?”
“W-who said I can’t. Ahem.”
“Uh, Lady Atanitas? You’re still doing it right now.”
At that, Catherine, hand still on him, started to lift her head and snap back—only to open and close her mouth uselessly before whipping her face away.
…Oh. This is kind of fun. So this is what it feels like.
“Porororong~♪”
Just then, accompanied by the sound of birdsong and chiming bells, something poked his cheek. It was a metal mirror as clear as silver-plated glass. Karem took it.
“Hm?”
The mirror reflected a young man he had never seen before. Roughly under twenty, with dark-brown hair and a faintly exotic cast.
To put it bluntly, the first thing that struck him was an exotic look that seemed to blend East and West in just the right measure.
He was not jaw-droppingly handsome. More the kind of face that made even a man go “huh, not bad,” the sort that never grew tiresome.
That young man in the mirror tilted and turned his head whenever Karem did.
The answer was obvious, yet it still felt unreal, so he twisted his expression this way and that in the glass—until a green hand snatched the mirror away in a flash.
“Hey, what the sudden—”
“Porororong?”
“…Excuse me, who are you?”
Karem tilted his head. The woman who had taken the mirror smiled like a mime and copied his every move.
What stood out most was that she was dyed a tender light green from head to toe, like a spring seedling just sprouted. At a glance she was clearly no ordinary being.
Definitely not a monster, yet not a normal person either. Above all, tiny flowers bloomed all through her shoulder-length hair and a pair of cotyledons grew from her crown—so she was definitely not human.
She also did not seem entirely sane.
Karem tilted his head again. Some fairy-like race in the vein of Mary, maybe?
“Ah, you know her too, Karem.”
“Pardon? Me? This is the first time I’ve seen her.”
“She came from the seed you handed over.”
“Seed? Ah, the one I brought from Fungusby?”
“Yes. She emerged from a flower bud, so I suppose one could say she bloomed.”
While Karem merely blinked at the unexpected answer, Corvus had already drawn near and was gently scratching the green woman’s head—buried in his feathers—with a wing-claw.
“Yes. The flower bud that had been growing on the ground like some sort of egg grew larger and larger, and while you were away on that trip with the Chief Magical Advisor, she was sleeping inside it.”
“At first she was only this big,” Corvus added, bringing his other wing down near his own leg.
“She seemed to recognize me as a parent from the first moment and followed me well, so I named her Flora.”
The green woman watched this with a vacant expression, then grinned shyly and stretched her own arm down to place her hand against her leg, copying Corvus.
“She seems… pretty airheaded.”
“She may look that way, but she is the one who saved your life.”
“Huh? Her?”
Olivier stared at the green woman with open curiosity that said he still did not fully understand.
“Your body, afflicted by the Curse of Aging, had its effects slowed by some unknown factor and the sacred relic, but they could not be completely suppressed.”
“The one who acted then was her—Flora.”
Thinking she was being called, Flora approached Catherine with a bright smile—only for Catherine to wave her off. Flora tilted her head, returned to her place, and buried herself in Corvus’s feathers again.
“While the curse was doubly suppressed and delayed, she gathered life force from the forest of the greenhouse and poured it into your body.”
“Uh, so I’m fine now?”
“Aside from the fact that the Curse of Aging aged you a bit, yes.”
“…So that face I just saw in the mirror is me—right? Unless it was a magic mirror.”
The slightly British-looking features that seemed both like and unlike his face from his previous life left Karem thoroughly confused.
Olivier tapped him on the head with his staff.
“Well. Be glad you didn’t die.”
“My joints are still throbbing, but—”
“You’re lucky that’s all it is. Still, for a body that grew so suddenly, you’ve adapted remarkably fast.”
“The little one’s always been precocious.”
Catherine dismissed Olivier’s curiosity in a single sentence and glanced sidelong at Karem.
Their eyes nearly met.
She simply could not hold his gaze.
Deliberately looking away from Karem’s face, Catherine composed her expression. Honestly, the grown Karem’s face was not the sort that stole one’s soul.
She had reached the realm of the sage and achieved agelessness. Aside from Olivier, no one in Coldon was older than she. Whether she wanted to or not, she had seen the faces of countless handsome men and beautiful women.
And she herself could proudly claim to be a beauty.
So why is that face so hard to look at?
The appearance of Karem, who had entered early young manhood under the Curse of Aging, was—even to her eyes—hovering right on the edge of being called handsome: not quite clear-cut enough to declare him a beauty, yet impossible to call unattractive. A likable face.
Plenty of people are better-looking than that face right now.
Yet she still found it hard to look straight at him. She had seen any number of people called handsome over the years. If one were simply talking looks, Godwin, eldest son of the Felwinter family, was handsomer.
Perhaps it was the most striking feature that had appeared on the grown Karem’s face. Softness rarely seen among ordinary Europa folk coexisted with sharpness, and those features had gathered distinctly in his face.
Catherine withdrew the hand that was starting to flush red. Then she cleared her throat toward Karem.
“First you’ll need something to wear.”
“Pardon? Uh. Ah.”
In the meantime Karem had been thanking Flora—and filming a little comedy sketch as Flora, having no idea what gratitude meant, simply copied him—and only then grasped his situation more objectively.
When he moved his arms, the cloth that had been clothes slid off in a heap.
Having sat up, the thick fabric had slipped down and piled in layers over the cloth covering his lower half. On his lower body he felt only a scrap of cloth and the fresh sensation of grass.
Right.
He was naked.
His barely exposed feet began to flush red, the color racing up his legs, body, arms, and head until he felt ready to explode.
And everyone around him was watching.
“…Lady Atanitas?”
“…Cover yourself with some cloth first! I’ll bring clothes!”
“Thank you. Uh, you don’t really have to go yourself—”
“Go myself? What do you think I keep a house elf for—to leave her idle?”
“Mm. Yes.”
Making the person he had only just realized he liked go fetch him clothes… Even Karem, who had known nothing of love, clearly understood that this was, well, fucked up.
Catherine sprang to her feet and swayed for a moment.
“H-hachoo! Ahem, excuse me a moment.”
And with that sneeze and cough she headed out of the greenhouse before anyone could say a word, urgency in every step.