Pen and Paper Translations

Talking with humans was a dreadful thing.

But Reinhild decided to endure this dreadful thing for Xion.

“Oh my, look who it is. You’re from Xion’s place, aren’t you?”

Who had coined and spread that half-hearted name, “Xion’s place”?

Reinhild wanted to object, but he held back to keep from exchanging even one extra word.

“Where is Xion?”

“Over there, at the edge of the village. It’s best not to go near. There are lots of fallen trees, it’s dangerous.”

He had no intention of going anyway.

Reinhild wandered among the humans loitering not at the village gate where Xion was, but elsewhere.

Most of the village humans had been mobilized to clear the blocked road, while those who remained each did their part—hauling away trees torn up by the roots and flung into the village, bailing water out of flooded houses, tidying the fouled streets.

Reinhild strolled unhurriedly among the busy humans.

Perhaps because there was so much work, the humans weren’t chatting as much as usual.

‘That’ll make it harder to gather information.’

So in the end, he’d have to speak to them directly. He hated that.

But if it was for Xion, he had to be able to endure things he disliked.

“I want to know about Xion.”

Reinhild went around, approaching this human and that human to speak.

For some reason, a few of them seemed wary of him.

They hadn’t been like that before, he thought.

He had no idea why they were behaving this way, but whatever attitude humans showed was none of Reinhild’s concern.

Thankfully, there were still a few friendly humans.

First, the human with the chronic flush.

He kept looking at Reinhild in an unpleasant way, but he answered better than anyone.

“Xion? He’s diligent and a good man. Haven’t really seen him working lately though…. Still, I hear he’s put away a fair bit. He’ll manage somehow, won’t he?”

It was a different opinion from those humans who had assured him Xion would have his field taken away.

Humans had a tendency not to deliver accurate information so much as to mix in their emotions and thoughts and speak as they pleased.

He would have to take that into account when organizing the information.

Next was the fisherman human who had sold fish when he and Xion came into town before.

He kept spouting nonsense, which was annoying, but it helped in its own way.

“Me, you know, I thought Xion would marry Rebecca. Rebecca liked Xion for such a long time. Maybe the reason Rebecca left the village this time was that she was shocked Xion got married? Hahaha.”

“Since Rebecca was young, had Xion been living in this village?”

“Only since Rebecca was young? Xion was born and raised here. He was around when I was young, too. Come to think of it, when Xion was little… Huh, that’s odd. I can’t remember anything at all about when Xion was little.”

“Your memory must be quite poor.”

“Good grief, even if you say that…. But I can’t refute it. I really can’t remember a thing!”

It confirmed his certainty that Xion had been brought in from outside by the hero’s party and planted in Root Village.

They’d roughly manipulated the villagers’ memories to make it seem like he was from here.

Changing the past wholesale would be impossible even by borrowing the Chief God’s power, and they wouldn’t have been able to forcibly implant memories that didn’t exist.

What humans remembered was just “Xion was born and raised here.”

What had happened when Xion was a child, what he looked like, they wouldn’t be able to remember at all.

Because such memories had never existed in the first place.

In fact, the ones who ended up helping most with information gathering were the humans who’d worried Xion might have his field taken.

Those three, who had huddled together whispering back then, were gathered in the same trio today, talking again.

They looked a little startled when Reinhild addressed them, but they soon answered kindly.

“We know you’re very sick, but you should still speak politely to your elders.”

“Elders?”

“People who were born before you.”

He had only asked back with the reasonable question of where any “elders” might be here, yet the human gave an utterly incomprehensible answer.

Even if you counted by who was born first, Reinhild had been born a few hundred years earlier. What were they trying to say?

Were they trying to introduce themselves as rude?

“So, about Xion?”

“Oh dear, look at us…. Right, we should tell you. Let’s see. When was Xion born again?”

“I don’t quite remember. When was it?”

“To be honest I feel terrible about this, but I even forgot the name of Xion’s father. When I was little, everyone was in such a tizzy calling him the most handsome man in the village, but now I can hardly remember.”

“Me too. All I remember is that he looked exactly like the Xion we have now.”

“One time I fell into the well, and he ran right over and saved me. He was really dashing. I wanted to hurry up and confess when I grew up, but by the time I was getting married, Xion was the one being born.”

“Xion’s mother was from outside the village, wasn’t she? There was such an uproar because she left without marrying after having the child.”

“That’s right. After that, raising Xion alone… goodness, how she struggled.”

“Now that I think of it, Xion was a bit sickly when he was little. Around when the boy turned three? He got so terribly ill that after that they didn’t even bring him out of the house.”

“That’s right, that’s right. The first time Xion came out of the house was at his father’s funeral, wasn’t it?”

“Right! That was when Xion had just become an adult, and he looked exactly the same as his father, just as he was, and I nearly screamed thinking a dead man had come back to life.”

Listening, something felt off.

‘Xion’s father?’

If they had manipulated the past to make it look like he blended naturally into the village, then the appearance of this human called “father” was indeed strange.

That they couldn’t remember his name was also surely because he was a fabricated person.

But then why did they remember incidents connected to him?

If the human called Xion’s father existed only within the false memories, they shouldn’t have been able to remember him saving someone who fell in the well.

If he had been a real human, it made no sense that all three of these humans couldn’t remember his name.

‘Don’t tell me…’

Xion’s father, someone who had existed, but had been forgotten from memory.

Xion, who had never shown his face to anyone until he came of age.

Put together with the fact that right after the death of the one called his father, Xion began to appear before people. There was only one hypothesis that came to mind.

‘Is Xion not human?’

If Xion belonged to a species with a longer lifespan than humans, this situation made sense.

What Xion had hidden from the village humans wasn’t that he was rich.

The real secret was that he had lived here across multiple generations without aging or dying.

While other humans aged at a very fast pace, died, and passed everything on to the next generation, Xion would have remained unchanged.

So before others could question why he never aged, Xion created a fictitious son named “Xion.”

Using the excuse that the son was sick, he waited for time to pass, and when the time came, he appeared in the world again under the name “Xion.”

While subtly manipulating the villagers’ memories.

‘Nothing else fits.’

Reinhild’s mouth fell open in an enormous moment of realization.

‘Xion wasn’t human!’

This was huge news. That Xion’s lifespan was long meant, practically speaking, that they could be together for a much longer time.

Reinhild couldn’t stop grinning from ear to ear.

That Xion wasn’t human and that they could be together long… He didn’t know which of the two was better didn’t matter; either way, it was good.

He didn’t care what species Xion was. He had wanted to be with Xion when he was human; what did it matter if Xion was some other species?

The reason the hero’s party had chosen Xion was probably that they had noticed he was special.

Perhaps they had noticed that Xion, who wasn’t human, wanted to blend among humans, and used that to threaten him.

‘If Xion isn’t human, it’ll be even easier to persuade him of the Demon King’s greatness.’

If he were human, it would be hard to convince him that the Demon King was better than the hero, but if he were another species, the story became much easier.

Now, if he could just find what the hero had hidden in the basement, everything would be solved.

“So when are you moving?”

“Moving?”

One of the humans, who had been quietly watching the delighted Reinhild, suddenly asked.

Reinhild, who had no plans to move, wore a puzzled expression.

“Xion bought Mr. Philip’s house this time, didn’t he? Since his house collapsed, wasn’t he planning to move in closer to the center of the village?”

Who was Philip?

“Right, right. Rebecca’s house was in a perfect spot. It’d be just right if Xion’s place moved over there.”

From the sound of it, this “Philip’s house” seemed to mean Rebecca’s house.

He had thought it was “Billip” all this time.

Well, human names were of no consequence.

“It rained so much I worried that house might be soggy too, so I was going to wipe down the entryway, but the door was shut tight. So there aren’t any plans to move?”

“Yeah, we’re curious. Go ask Xion.”

The humans peppered Reinhild with questions, urging him on.

Whatever they said, Reinhild had lost all interest in them.

Because he’d obtained the information he truly needed.

‘So that’s where!’

The place Xion had moved what was in the basement.

It was clear that what the hero had tried to hide was in Rebecca’s house.