A Terminal Life
It had been a week since I was driven out of the capital like an exile.
On a rainy day, in a charmingly shabby inn room, I lay writhing on the floor and moaning like a beast.
There was a bed, but I had no strength left to reach it.
"Fuck, this hurts like I'm gonna die."
I'd thought that was a rather poetic way of putting it—until the pain itself became so murderous that poetry stopped mattering.
Between the fingers clamped over my mouth, dark-red clots of blood poured out in endless surges.
The problem was that what I was coughing up wasn't ordinary blood.
Fragments of my shattered mana core were riding my bloodstream, rupturing organs as they went. I felt my mind about to snap.
Am I dying like this? After everything I've done—I'm just going to die?
At the moment my breath seemed ready to cut off for good, the survival instinct hammered into me by my family's brutal training barely managed to seize the fraying thread of consciousness.
I braced myself against the wall and sent an SOS to the innkeeper.
The old doctor the innkeeper fetched took one look at my pulse and began to tremble like a man who had seen a ghost.
Horror and pity flickered through the eyes that scanned every inch of my body.
"Is this... truly a human body?"
The doctor's voice cracked.
"The mana core has no shape left. Its fragments are crushing every organ in your body. The magical contamination is extreme."
"..."
"Young man, prepare yourself. Three months at most. Your body could give out tomorrow and it wouldn't be strange. That you're still breathing is a miracle."
Three months.
Roughly ninety days—that was the terminal sentence handed down to me.
With a face full of pity, the doctor pressed several bottles of painkillers and a medical report into my hands. The report described, with cruel precision, exactly how my organs had been destroyed and why I was dying.
I returned to the inn room and collapsed onto the bed.
Yet something was strange.
Tears, or a rage so fierce it could drive a man mad—those would have been normal. What I felt instead was not anxiety, but a strange, profound sense of liberation.
That enlightenment the saint Siddhartha once spoke of? Nirvana? This must be it.
"Ha... ha... ehehehehe..."
A dry laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
I no longer had to stake my life against magic beasts. I no longer had to spend nights hunting spies. My younger sister's scorn, the saintess's loathing, my fiancée's contemptuous gaze—none of it had to be endured any longer.
It felt as though the heavy iron chains my family had fastened around me were finally crumbling, powerless, before the absolute absolution that was death.
"Now I can just rest."
I meant it.
The moment every attachment to life vanished, my heart grew light as if by some miracle.
Even the resentment, even the hatred toward the family that had betrayed me and toward those women—all of it suddenly felt pointless.
To keep nursing hatred was a luxury my remaining terminal days could not afford.
From that day on I returned to the capital and began settling my affairs.
I opened my bag and took out, one by one, the things I had carried with me all this time.
The expensive sword ornament the Airen Ducal House had sent as a formality when I became engaged to Lise.
The Kyros signet ring the previous family head had tossed me—almost as an afterthought—when I had protected the house with my own hands.
The worn rosary the saintess had flung at me in open disgust while muttering a blessing.
Once, they had been fragments of lingering attachment: proof that I wanted to be acknowledged as a member of the family, that I wanted to stand at their side, that I had bled to protect them.
I dumped them carelessly onto the inn table and headed for the most famous pawnshop in the capital, the one known for clean, discreet dealings.
"Y-you're really going to sell these treasures for this price? They even bear the crest of House Kyros! We don't take this kind of merchandise. Do you take us for fools? Think you're the only con artist who's walked through that door, boy?"
"I don't need them. Take them. All I want is enough travel money to leave right now."
"Young man, just take them back with you. Don't make unnecessary trouble."
The crushing weight of my old attachments was treated as nothing but counterfeit.
And somehow that made me feel even better.
It confirmed my new conviction that everything I had done until now had been utterly meaningless.
In the end the only things left in my hands were the bloodstained terminal diagnosis and the bottles of painkillers.
I shoved them deep into my leather bag.
A place free of interference. A quiet southern frontier territory far beyond the Empire's gaze.
There I would take naps, wander the woods, and quietly disappear.
With my belongings packed, I left the inn room without a single glance back.
The innkeeper didn't even bother to say goodbye; he must have seen the state of the room I'd used.
I slipped unnoticed into the marquisate, dumped every last one of those tokens into the room that had once been mine, and left.
I also shoved the medical report under my old bed.
I simply couldn't stand the sight of them anymore.
They would throw everything into the trash when they cleaned the room anyway. Who had ever cared about me that much?
The sky after the rain was ridiculously blue, and my footsteps were lighter than they had ever been in my life.
The destination of my vacation—no, of my journey toward death—was an overwhelmingly blue expanse.
Heidegger, was it, who said one should experience death in advance? Well, I was experiencing it right now, so I figured I was already a few steps ahead of the old philosopher.