Childbirth (1)
"This here is the mill, Saintess. And over there is the village chief's house. Do you feel like your memory's coming back a little now?"
"Mmm... I—I think so? A little?"
"Thank goodness. To think your memory is returning."
"......"
My memory had no intention of reviving. The owner of this obscene, depraved body had apparently died of shock back when her lower half got torn open, because there wasn't the slightest sign of anything returning.
I had even considered a theory like this. That maybe the Saintess named Yulia had actually slipped into my original male body instead. That whether it took a year or ten, the moment I somehow clawed my way back to my old body, I'd find it being puppeted by someone else entirely — that my life, which had been as good as guaranteed to be a success story, had been dumped straight into the gutter. I'd pictured that too.
Though by now, honestly, I didn't care what happened to my old life as long as I could just go back. The sooner, the better.
"Ah."
"Oh dear. Are you tired? Shall we rest a bit before continuing, Saintess?"
"Yes......"
Because this time bomb in my belly was ticking away like it might go off at any moment.
Going by the slight swell of my lower abdomen, I looked to be about eight weeks along, and yet the fetus was apparently already fully formed — it kept thudding kicks against me from the inside, leaving my stomach stinging with pain at all hours.
Being a dragon's whelp, it seemed to differ from a human fetus in quite a few respects.
The day this thing comes out, everything, absolutely everything, ends. The day a lizard's spawn crawls out of this womb said to have conceived God's child, all hell will break loose. And whatever happens after that — I didn't even want to imagine it.
This fucking godawful novel......
How did any of this make sense to begin with? A person getting pregnant with the offspring of a different species. No matter how I turned it over, my conclusion remained the same: this novel was clearly kindling shat out by a slack-jawed liberal-arts moron.
Of course, the more I sneered, the further my own standing sank — down to a pregnancy-optimized slut wallowing in the trash-fire kindling that some idiot humanities reject had crapped out with a string of lazy, convenience-driven plot contrivances.
The more I thought about it, the more the injustice stung, and I felt like tears would spill again at any moment.
"Rested enough, Saintess? Shall we head back now?"
"Just a moment. I need to use the restroom."
"Oh, of course. The public one is over there."
Leaving behind my acolyte, who had been diligently waiting on me since morning, I headed toward the back of the alley. My lie wouldn't hold much longer, but if anything that made it all the more urgent to understand this world properly — which was why I'd put the acolyte in charge of showing me around the village today.
But as I slowly made my way around every last corner of the village, I found myself utterly dumbfounded.
The place wore the mask of the Middle Ages on the outside, but underneath it was equipped with a level of civilization that rivaled the modern era. For starters, there was an abundance of rich, varied, inexplicably fresh ingredients — who knew through what distribution channels they even arrived — followed by clothing that looked stamped out by the thousands in some factory, and even modern interiors inside the houses.
And the crowning touch of it all:
"Ha. Flushing toilets in a medieval setting? Really?"
Clean, water-flushed toilets, installed as standard equipment everywhere. Which meant a full water and sewage system running underneath the village. I simply could not understand why people with such an advanced civilization were still living their lives plowing fields and herding sheep.
The author probably couldn't understand it either. Why would he? He'd never given the setting a single serious thought in his life.
"I'm going insane, for real......"
With infrastructure this good, at least I didn't have to wipe with straw, which was convenient. The problem was that there was nothing here I could actually do.
Even if I tried to put my modern knowledge to use, this world was not an opponent I could take on at anything like a high-schooler's level. From what I'd gathered, this place apparently had forces like divine power and mana, but aside from the recovery ability that activated automatically, I couldn't use any power whatsoever.
In other words, here I was nothing more — and nothing less — than a perpetual virginity regeneration machine in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Right. Abort it.
Abortion was the only answer.
It was a word that felt like it would crush me dead with guilt just for saying it out loud — but there was no other way. Ideally, I wanted to slip away where no one could find me, but this village seemed to be in the middle of nowhere, and there was no guarantee I'd reach the next one before I collapsed from exhaustion walking there alone.
If I couldn't leave, then the only option was to make sure my lie was never, ever exposed.
I felt a little sorry for this innocent little life squirming inside me.
No. Innocent, my ass. It was guilty of giving me stress.
"Hoo...... hoo......"
I clenched my fist and raised it above me. It was such a small, pathetically feeble fist, but at the thought that this was about to strike my own belly, my breathing began to quicken.
I can do this. I've dished out worse and taken worse. A little punch to the gut is nothing.
"Ahhk."
Thud.
The fist, its speed plummeting at the last instant, landed softly against my stomach. Struck by that pathetic excuse for a blow, my legs gave out and I crumpled to the floor.
I'd thought a gut-punch was no big deal — but trying to deliver one myself, my hand shook so violently and the sweat came so fast that......
I really can't do this.
There has to be another way. There has to be a better path — I chanted it to myself like a mantra as I stepped out of the restroom and headed back toward the acolyte.
"Wh-what? Why......"
It was morning, warm sunlight streaming down through the curtains. I woke up in a foul, wretched mood, and the moment I threw back the blanket, panic seized me.
"Why does it look... even bigger?"
My belly had swollen further. It wasn't my imagination. Overnight, it had roughly doubled in size. Wasn't this the kind of belly you'd expect at sixteen weeks pregnant? Why, on day three of pregnancy, was my......
"It must be because the child is God's — the growth rate is extraordinary!"
"Or perhaps it's the doing of your divine power, Saintess!"
"Either way, it seems we'll get to meet the little one far sooner than expected. Heh heh heh."
I was screwed. There was no time. This wasn't whining — there genuinely wasn't any. Judging by how fast the belly was swelling, the due date was bound to arrive within a week at the very most.
I had to find a way — any way — within seven days.
"Sir acolyte, do you happen to know the carriage schedule that runs through this village?"
"A carriage schedule? Haha. There's no such thing. Who would ever drive a carriage all the way out to a backwater like this? A delivery comes once a month to bring the liquor, but other than that, hardly anything passes through here at all."
"Th-then when does the next liquor delivery come?"
"Hmm. It came last week, so I'd say about three weeks from now."
"......"
My plan to hide in a carriage and escape crumbled the instant I'd conceived it.
So next, I turned to the supernatural. If this woman Yulia was a Saintess with infinite healing, surely she might know some other magic as well — that was my thinking.
"Miss Anna, could you come here a moment?"
"What is it, Saintess?"
"Did I... ever use magic, or any strange powers, before I lost my memory?"
"Healing magic is your specialty, Saintess! You healed me once when I fell out of a tree and hurt myself."
"Ah — right, I do vaguely remember that. And besides healing magic?"
"I don't believe I've ever seen you use anything else?"
Another dud, as expected. If only I could use telekinesis or something, I'd have been planning to crush the thing inside my womb right then and there.
I figured that if I sat meditating diligently on my own, maybe some sudden awakening would strike — but it was useless. I kept agonizing over it endlessly afterward, and no clever solution ever surfaced. It was as if the world was forcing a single choice upon me, and only one. Every time that thought crossed my mind, my hands trembled and cold sweat ran down my neck — yet no matter how many times I went through it, I arrived at only one conclusion: I had no choice but to do it.
"Are you all right, Saintess? You look pale."
"I'm fine. I have some business to attend to."
"Oh! Then I'll step out for a while and come back at dinnertime to make supper. By the way — did you truly drop the fork under the bed at lunch? I searched and searched and couldn't find it anywhere."
"It probably slipped through a crack in the floor."
"I don't think the cracks are that big, though... Well, we can simply fetch a new fork. Oh dear — you must be in a hurry, and here I am holding you up. Off I go!"
"......"
I waved at the acolyte as she bustled out of the room, then pulled the fork out from under my pillow. Narrow-tipped — a fork specialized for piercing thin things.
I raised my heavy body, braced my belly with one hand, and moved to the restroom. In the mirror, Yulia's face was an absolute wreck. And the belly that had swollen to full-term in a matter of mere days — every time I looked at it, I felt like I'd start sobbing on the spot.
Desperately fighting back the tears, I rolled up the handkerchief hanging on the drying rack and clenched it between my teeth. Then I sat down on the toilet, panties pulled down, legs spread — and I was ready.
"Haah. Haa. Haauh......"
My hand, guiding the fork between my legs, was trembling violently. A tremor of an entirely different order from the attempt to punch my own gut gripped my wrist and shoved it outward, away from me. But my resolve, too, had changed completely since then.
If I don't do it, I die. No — worse than death might await me. That fear was dragging my wrist inward, toward myself. The hand clutching the fork was slick with sweat.
"I can do it. I can do it. Nngh — I can do it."
I can. I've survived worse things. I've endured far greater pain. This much is nothing. All I have to do is grit my teeth and bear it for a moment. I can do this.
No — I have to. I must.
With that single thought, I tensed my arm.
"Ah."
The instant a convulsion of agony rolled through me — so fierce that not even a scream escaped — came the sound of drops falling one by one into the toilet water. Then a patter, rapid and relentless. The sound of something striking the water's surface grew louder and louder, past all control.
"S-Saintess, if it isn't too presumptuous... might I press my ear against your belly?"
"......Do as you like."
I had failed. The cause was clear: my own lack of courage. This body apparently came equipped with some unbreakable will, since it refused to faint under almost any circumstances — which should have made the task simple: just push through to the end. But I got scared, and that was that. I botched it.
Goddamn coward, seriously.
I wanted to cry. In truth, I had cried plenty.
Every day my body grew harder to move; every three minutes or so I desperately needed to pee and kept trotting back and forth to the restroom; I'd find myself ravenous for food mere moments after finishing a meal, like something possessed — and each time I caught myself like that, the self-loathing crashed over me so hard that...... I think I always ended up sobbing my eyes out cradled in that acolyte's arms. Apparently the conditioning had been learned Pavlov-dog style, because now the mere sight of her face made my chest seize up.
Either her hormones or my tear ducts — one of the two was very, very badly broken.
As my outings dwindled, the acolyte had begun keeping watch at my side almost around the clock, nursing me, leaving no window whatsoever for another attempt at self-harm. Not that I figured a second try would turn out much differently than the first......
My spirit was already broken. In every way that mattered.
God knows how many times I prayed, every single day. That I'd wake up in the morning to find the space below me soaked in nothing but blood. But no matter how fervently I begged, no miscarriage ever came, and the spawn in my belly simply grew bigger and healthier by the day. It was as if the thing were siphoning every last drop of my life force.
"After such a sudden ordeal, it's no wonder you've been struggling of late. But please don't worry. Everything will be all right."
"Everything will be all right? And how would you know that, sir acolyte?"
"Where in this world is there anyone who has heaped up virtue like you have, Saintess? Virtue earned always returns to its keeper."
"......"
That virtue-laden Saintess wasn't anywhere to be found here, though. Wondering exactly how much virtue would be coming back to me, I decided to take stock of my life. But that didn't go well either.
I'd only been here a week, and yet my past life already looked hazy, as though a decade or more had passed since. And even rummaging through those dim memories, I couldn't find a single instance where I'd ever stacked up anything worth calling virtue — and I sank into gloom almost immediately.
The sensation of something bursting open deep inside me was a bonus.
"Saintess?"
"......"
"Saintess? Is something wrong? Your face has gone pale all of a sudden."
"......Ah."
Having experienced both a female body and pregnancy for the first time in either of my lives, I knew instinctively. So it's beginning now.
I felt the bed slowly growing damp beneath me, and as if something had clamped my throat shut, no words would come out at all.