Mushoku Tensei (LN) - Volume 26 - Chapter 5.2

Story 2:

Thirty-Four Years Old

I WOKE UP. I had the feeling I’d had a strange dream. Like, a happy dream. Sylphie and Roxy were there. Eris wasn’t, but there was a child who looked just like her. The dream was hazy, but I remembered it perfectly. In the dream, I died. Somehow, I knew that I’d never wake up again after that dream. But I didn’t feel bad. It was actually my second time dying, and it was far better than the first. 

“Huh?” I realized a girl was holding my hand and standing stock-still. She had blue hair tied back in a single ponytail. She held my hand in her right and a bracelet in her left, and had a look on her face like a deer in headlights.

“…I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. She must have been taught to apologize when she did something wrong.

“Did you want it?”

“…No. My big sister said there was a super amazing crest hidden under your bracelet, Dad.”

“Did she now?”

There was no hidden crest. I wasn’t the chosen one, after all.

But looking past the girl holding the bracelet, I saw a brush resting on the bedside table. That definitely hadn’t been there before I fell asleep.

“Were you going to draw it?”

“…I’m sorry.”

She was driven enough to try and turn a lie into reality. Should I praise her, or scold her? Okay, no, this was a scolding situation. It’s a father’s responsibility to educate his daughter, so… Yeah.

“Lara, you mustn’t tell lies. Go say sorry to your sister.”

“Okay…” 

I patted her on the head, and she left the room, dejected. After she left, I caught sight of a big ball of white fur. Leo must have been keeping watch outside the door. I was about to put the bracelet back on, but then the brush caught my eye. I used it to paint the Migurd crest on my arm, then got out of bed.

“Oof, that’s a nasty headache… I drank too much.”

I cradled my head in my hands. Maybe it was the party the previous night, or maybe it was the dream I’d just had, but it hurt like hell.

***

Ten years had passed since the battle in the Biheiril Kingdom. This year, I would be thirty-four. These ten years had been peaceful thanks to the absence of the Man-God. After that battle, it really had just stopped. I hadn’t seen so much of a pixel of him for a few years now. Not that I had let my guard down! While constantly on the lookout for suspicious attacks, I went on preparing to confront Laplace, just as I had before. Things went much more smoothly without the Man-God sticking his nose in. 

In the first five years, I finished calling in on all the nations of the world. Some of them were nonstarters, but by and large, they all pledged to work with us to prepare for the coming war with Laplace.

Now, I was working on research and teaching unvoiced magic at the Magic University in the Asuran Kingdom while also leading the militaries of the world to develop counter-strategies to Laplace’s most likely moves. 

For that work, I put away the name Rudeus and started to work under the name “Silent Sevenstar.” The theory Nanahoshi had once put forward might be accurate or it might not be, but she’d said, “I want you to make my name a clue, just in case a friend from our old world ever comes here.” I took her words to heart and spread her name around. I was also giving her quite a reputation, but so what? No harm, no foul. For the time being, awareness was the priority, and a person from another world would surely understand the meaning behind what I’d tried to do in her name.

Lately, I’d been researching mana recovery to improve Orsted’s mana recovery rate. I’d managed to create a ­potion that restored mana, but for some reason it didn’t work on Orsted. Possibly human mana and dragon mana was different? It might have been something else. I was going to press on with the research a little longer, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I was going down a dead end. The potion had been a smash hit in its own way, so it hadn’t been entirely for nothing. There were lots of other things I still needed to do, besides. I couldn’t rest yet. 

My children had grown up. Lucie was seventeen. Lara was fifteen, and Arus was thirteen. Sieg was…eleven, I think? They were all thriving. We’d also had two more children: Lily Greyrat, with Roxy, and Christina Greyrat, with Eris. Both girls. With six children, we were a big family. When Lucie turned seven we had a family meeting to roughly decide our education policy for her: things like sending her to the magic university from the age of seven, then scheduling her coming-of-age ceremony for after graduation, and then having her attend the national university in Asura for three years. My personal philosophy was that it was better not to drive your children too hard. Still, I thought we ought to decide where they’d be educated and provide some guideposts for the path they ought to take.

It was Ariel’s express wish that I send my children to the Asuran National University. I owed her a massive debt. If she’d said, “Give one to me as a husband so that we can be joined as blood relatives!” I would have refused—duh—but a little thing like asking me to send my kids to her university? I could hardly refuse that. I wanted to gradually pay down my debt to her. 

Ariel, by the by, had a baby of her own after the Biheiril Kingdom Battle. She hadn’t married the father so as not to give him too much power. Apparently, she kept a sizable harem of men. Ariel had five children now, but it wasn’t clear who had fathered four of them…or so Luke had told me, pale-faced and cradling his head in his hands. At the time, I’d wondered how he’d worked out who one of them was. Now that I think of it, it’s possible the one he knew was Luke himself.

Ariel was reportedly scheming to pair up one of my children with one of those five. I didn’t much like the idea of my children being used as political pawns, but once they were of age, if they were both okay with the match, I’d permit it.

My children were still young, but I knew that with each passing year, they’d grow up. Lucie in particular was already a proper adult with a mind of her own. Not that the grown-ups around her had matured all that much; I honestly couldn’t tell if I’d changed. Whenever I thought I’d improved some bad trait, another one would crop up. Sometimes the bad traits I’d fixed relapsed, too. It felt like I was just making the same ­mistakes over and over as the years ticked away. The only real visible sign of my growth was how my face aged with the passing years. I’d even gotten a few laugh lines. Sylphie told me, “I like that about you as well,” but it made me feel sort of guilty when she still looked young. You could tell she was aging, but the changes were slight considering we were the same age. That meant she’d be thirty-four this year, but she still looked around twenty. Her skin glowed with youth and even though she’d had two children, her butt was still tight, and she felt as good to hold as ever.

The only thing was, on the inside, she’d totally turned into…uh, a mom, so she’d started to nag me a lot. Roxy never changed. She looked the same and acted pretty much the same too. She’d get mad if I told her that, but I meant it as praise. She was still my master, as always, so whenever I did something wrong she corrected me. Her clumsiness never lessened over the years, but she always picked herself up again. Failure is a wonderful teacher, as they say.

Going by looks, Eris had changed the most. Like me, she looked her age. Only, maybe because she didn’t skip a day of training, she looked way younger than me. She still had the skin of a woman in her late twenties. Having a second child seemed to have mellowed her out a bit, but she still pounced on me from time to time. She’d hardly changed at all on the inside—the opposite of Sylphie—but I did feel like she’d gotten less violent since she’d started teaching sword fighting to the kids. She’d learned to grin and bear it when her temper flared. She still punched me if I touched her butt or her breasts without permission, but that was only natural. 

Lilia and Zenith looked older. They were both still healthy, but Lilia, maybe because her leg had always given her trouble, had started getting back pain and stiff shoulders. Healing magic would make it go away, but give it three months, and it would come back. A perfect cure seemed like it would be challenging to develop.

Everyone else was aging well alongside us. Zanoba and Cliff were old dudes now, both busy with their jobs and their families. They were there for one another when they got into binds.

Norn and Aisha had both gotten married and moved out. Their partners were both a little…complicated, as people, but then, I’d had a good talk with both of them and been convinced they were worthy, so it wasn’t my place to comment on it now.

I was really turning thirty-four years old. It was an age that had some significance for me.

***

Around midday on that day, I went out. On the outskirts of town, on top of a small hill, there stood rows of rounded stones. It was a graveyard.

“Hello. I really appreciate all this.” At the entrance, I said a word of thanks to the grave keeper, as I always did. Over the past ten years, the number of graves here had increased. People come into the world and leave it, but gravestones don’t thin out much. In other graveyards, sometimes gravestones can be torn down when a whole family dies or something, but this graveyard was for nobles. Unless the line ended, the gravestones would remain—especially since the Ranoa Kingdom and the Magic City of Sharia were growing ever more powerful. As their might swelled, so did the number of nobles, and the number of gravestones soared with them.

I stopped in front of one grave.

On the rounded stone was written Paul Greyrat. It was much more worn than it had been when it was first built. Using the gear I’d brought, I tidied the area around the grave and polished the stone. After that, I put out some alcohol as an offering, then put my hands together.

I hadn’t come here for a long time. Long ago, any time anything had happened I’d come to report it, but lately, my visits had grown less frequent. We still came once a year with the whole family…but that wasn’t the same, somehow. That annual visit, it seemed to me, was more of a custom than a visit to see Paul. There wasn’t enough gratitude in it.

“Hey, Dad. Everyone’s doing great.”

With this first announcement out of the way, I went on to give him a rundown of recent events. I did this every year, but you know, just in case.

“I’ll be thirty-four this year.” 

Thirty-four was the age I’d been when I died in my previous life. Without even thinking about it, I’d gotten that old. For some reason, it felt like getting to thirty-four had taken longer in this world than in the last one. Probably because I’d had more on my plate. That, and I’d traveled way more.

“But even though I’m turning thirty-four, I had a dream where I die at seventy-four.”

Where had that dream come from? Maybe it was just that: a dream. Or maybe the Man-God had been showing me my future—the Man-God sealed away, and me meeting my death in contentment. It had happened the moment that Lara slipped my bracelet off, so the Man-God could have intervened then.

“If that really was the future…”

If the dream had been shown to me by the Man-God, then maybe it had shown the fruits of all the work I’d put in up to now. We had won the Battle of the Biheiril Kingdom. It had really been the last battle—after that, the Man-God no longer had any way to defeat me and Orsted, and so he had given up. Ten years had gone by with no interference from him. There’d been nothing at all.

It might be that he was skulking around in the shadows, but just like Geese and Badigadi had said, I hadn’t heard a peep out of him. Sometimes, I even found myself forgetting what I was doing all this for.

“That means I can stop trying so hard. Right?”

If the Man-God really had given up, if my work was really at an end, then I could cut back to about half the work I was doing now and live a more laid-back life. I could spend one whole day in every three or so on devoting myself to baby-making with my wives, or teaching all sorts of things to my children… A quiet life like that didn’t sound so bad.

“Just kidding,” I said, laughing. What an idea! Even if the Man-God had given up on me, so what? It wasn’t like I hated my job now. I wasn’t suffering. I was getting things ready to lead Orsted to victory in the battle to come. It was a blast. Yeah, there were hard times, and painful times besides, but never enough that I wanted to run away from it. There were things I had to take care of, tasks I wanted to do, new challenges to try. For all I knew, making me feel like everything was okay now was the Man-God’s plot.

“I’m going to keep on giving it my all, Dad.” 

I’d just keep on going as I always had. It had been a dream, I decided. A dream born out of hope, showing me what I wanted to see.

“Please watch over me,” I said, just like I said every time. Then, I put my hands together once more.

The fact I existed had to mean there was a world after death. Only, that didn’t necessarily mean Paul was here in this grave. He’d be off enjoying himself somewhere else. There might not be any reason at all to come here. 

I was okay with that. This was a ritual. From today, I was going to go on trying my best, and pledging that in front of Paul’s grave mattered to me. 

“Oh, and Geese…” Geese’s grave was next to Paul’s. I laid an offering on it, then put my hands together. I wasn’t sure what Geese thought about this, but then, it wasn’t like the guy had wholeheartedly wanted to destroy me or anything.

“If you don’t like how things worked out, you can tell me about it in forty years… Though I might live longer than that. Or I might die sooner.”

I didn’t want to gloss over Geese’s death, but a lot of my feelings over that time had faded in the past ten years. What I remembered now was his smile. He’d always been wearing that stupid grin and talking about jinxes. Imagining it now, I could only think of it as a good memory. No one I loved had died because of Geese. I had no reason to hold a grudge.

Now that he was gone, I could at least visit his grave.

“Right, I’ll be back soon. Probably with the family, next time.”

I stood up. I wasn’t going to change anything just because of a weird dream. I was going to do what I wanted to, and what I had to. That was all.

And with that, I set off back to the house where my family was waiting.