Mushoku Tensei (LN) - Volume 23 - Chapter 1.1

Chapter 1:

The Green-Haired Baby

Sylphiette

I HAD A DREAM once. It was around the time that Rudy went to the King Dragon Realm. In my dream, there was a child crying. A group of dark shadows surrounded her. They ganged up on the child and threw pitch-black lumps of something at her. The child desperately tried to run away, but the shadows would always follow.

The child ran toward a light. As she approached the light, it tossed balls of light at the shadows, and they dispersed. The light then gently enveloped the child as she drifted off to sleep.

When I first had that dream, I thought it was about the past. A dream about the old days when the village kids would bully me. I believed I was dreaming about it after all this time as a sign of how much I loved Rudy. That was all I thought of as I lay back down and wriggled happily, like a little girl.

Several months later, around the time when Rudy was off in the Demon Continent, I had another dream just like it. This time, it went differently.

The green-haired child was here. But instead of having my face, the child now had Rudy’s. The green-haired child with Rudy’s face was being chased by dark shadows. There was no light where the child was headed. I panicked and dashed up to the child, desperate to protect him from the shadows. Without my magic, I could only try and swat the shadows away with my bare hands. The shadows were tenacious. They refused to stay away. I could feel the child shuddering in my arms.

After this dream, I worried that some harm might have come to Rudy. Maybe he’d been injured or captured. No, of course not. He had Eris and Roxy with him…

I thought long and hard about what to do to help, and in the end, I returned home that very day. It calmed my worries about my husband…but new worries sprung up in their place.

My tummy had grown round and big. What if that dream was about the child inside it?

I was fretting over nothing, I quickly told myself. There was no way that Rudy wouldn’t protect our child. There had to be a light awaiting them. I convinced myself that the pregnancy nerves were just getting to me. I put the dream out of my mind.

Eventually, Rudy returned from the Demon Continent. I asked about a name for the baby. It had now been six months since he told me he’d “think one up.” I could have waited for it until after I gave birth, but I said I wanted to know in advance in case he left soon on another trip.

“I’m sorry. I still haven’t thought about the name.”

That moment, the thought of that dream flitted across my mind. The vision of that child surrounded by dark shadows with nobody to help him. Then, a worse one: Did Rudy love this child?

Of course he did. I was sure of it. That night, however, I had the dream again. The shadows gathered around the child, who was far beyond my reach. I ran as fast as I could to help…but I didn’t make it. When I reached the child, I found that the shadows had gone…and that the child was dead.

I woke up drenched in sweat. Just a dream. It was just pregnancy nerves. I wanted to believe that, but my mind kept racing. If the baby inherited my green hair…they’d almost certainly face discrimination because of it. The same way I had. While the most I ever had to deal with were neighborhood bullies, there was no guarantee that my child would be so fortunate. Something far, far worse could be waiting for them.

I knew Rudy would protect them whether they had green hair or not. Eris would do the same, and so would Roxy. My head told me they would, but my heart still worried.

It didn’t take long to realize why.

I knew about the Laplace Factor. I knew why the color of my hair was green, and why Rudy had gotten a bit uneasy over the subject a while back.

What if the child I gave birth to turned out to be Laplace?

I wondered, What would Rudy do? It wasn’t his priority now, but he was gathering forces to do battle with Laplace in eighty years. If my child really were Laplace, then, given what Rudy had done so far… Well, I couldn’t help but wonder.

I believed in Rudy. I wouldn’t doubt him for a second. But…what would he do? What would I want him to do? My mind spun over these thoughts for so long that I didn’t get another wink of sleep that night.

I comforted myself with the fact that there was no way to know if the child’s hair would be green. If their hair turned out to be any other color, we’d be fine.

It was green.