I Don’t Want to be an Ojakgyo (61)

Shuraina was proud of herself for choosing pain for someone she cared about but also hated herself in equal measure.

Shuraina didn’t want to admit it, but she had liked Swan ever since she had seen him. She worried for him and cared for him quite a lot. Maybe it was because he was the first friend she had made aside from Hestia.

The light from the magic circle began to surround Swan. The unstable magic in his injuries began to shift from his body and placed themselves onto Shuraina.

Swanhaden felt his natural healing magic returning and felt the pain completely disappear. But Swanhaden’s expression wasn’t relieved or happy. On the contrary, he watched the magic unfold, absolutely horrified. His pupils shrank and his face crumpled. He wanted to curse like a sailor, but he couldn’t speak.

“You……!”

Shuraina took on all of the injuries that Swan’s erratic magic had held. In her hand was a self-regulating device that she had created for magic. Shuraina had tried to take on Swanhaden’s unstable magic to tame it in her body to try and pass it back to him.

Just like it had for Swanhaden, Shuraina’s body began to burst open with injuries. Her skin began to tear, and her bones broke. Shuraina began to throw up blood. The cursing was an added bonus.

“How have you, until now………”

You really aren’t human. I was crazy for trying to take this in as well. Shuraina held onto her fading consciousness and spit blood onto the floor.

“You crazy asshole, what are you doing?! Give it back. You’re going to die!”

Swanhaden hugged Shuraina tighter as more injuries began to appear. His empty, expressionless face was overtaken by emotion. Shock, despair, horror, and other new, unfamiliar emotions swirled within him as tears fell from his eyes.

He was getting better, but Shuraina’s body was becoming a bloody mess.

Swan felt like he was going to go insane. He wanted to stop the injuries from appearing but nothing worked.

“I was the only one that was supposed to be miserable……..Why did you?!”

He yelled at Shuraina, but she had already lost consciousness.

Swanhaden continued to talk to her as he held onto her shoulder with shaking hands, but Shuraina just stayed down. His heart pounded frantically in his chest.

“You, why did you……… why……….”

Swanhaden’s sight blurred with tears. Shuraina’s form grew hazy. He tried to wipe off Shuraina’s blood with his blankets, but the blood didn’t stop. Swan wrapped her body with his blanket and barely focused to try and heal her. The white blanket turned red with blood.

“Why isn’t it working?!”

Rushed, Swanhaden poured everything that he could into his healing magic as he held her in his arms, but Shuraina’s condition continued to worsen. He looked down at Shuraina, who was unconscious in his arms. He hadn’t ever been this nervous when he was beaten to an inch before he died or even when he healed someone who had been decapitated.

But now, Swan was deathly afraid.

Her warm body grew colder. She probably wouldn’t have died immediately because the circle had also transferred some of his healing magic with the magic she had siphoned, but Swanhaden felt like she was going to die any imnute.

It was impossible to heal Shuraina because she had taken the erratic, tangled magic from him. If he knew what kind of spell that Shuraina had used, then maybe he could have figured out how to reverse it, but her magic was a tangled mess of normal magic and white magic.

This was the first time he had ever felt this powerless. Pain, heavier than the one he felt when his own body ached, pressed down on him. Swanhaden had never thought he would ever want to use his ‘heal’, something that he had despised, so badly. Especially for someone else. He wanted to heal her so badly that he felt like he was going to lose his mind.

Swanhaden tried to figure out something, anything, as he held Shuraina, body shaking in fear. He had to do something before she became dyed in blood.

Swanhaden thought of a single person who could treat her.

“……….the duke.”

If it was the Blanche duke, he would be able to take on the magic that she had taken into herself and fix her.

The moment Swan thought of his father, the duke, he tried to take her to the room.

But Swanhaden didn’t have any strength to remove the chains that held his two legs back. Desperate, Swan used the remaining magic in his body to break his ankles to slip out of the chains. Thankfully, his natural healing abilities had improved significantly so his broken bones soon healed into place.

Swanhaden held her as he ran to the duke’s bedroom. It was late, but he wasn’t in the bedroom. Swan frowned as he hurried to his office.

Swanhaden had never had a conversation with his father. He had only seen his father when they visited the West family estate, so they only knew each others’ faces. They were technically family, but they were strangers more than anything.

The ones who trained the heir were other members of the duke’s estate, not the duke themselves. Because there were people who were designated to educate the heir, there were no opportunities for the duke and the heir to meet.

Throughout the Blanche family line, the Blanche family heads would physically torment the heirs as scapegoats for the torture that they had experienced in their lifetime, sowing the seed of hatred into the future line. The current duke, however, didn’t do that, which meant that there were even less opportunities for them to meet.

Historically, he only time that fathers and sons met face to face to speak was when the heir received the title and planned on murdering their father.

The current Blanche duke, Yulinelle Blanche, was dozing off in his office as he worked on paperwork.

The Blanche duke was technically middle-aged, but his healing abilities slowed down aging to make him look like a handsome young man.

He had long, silver hair pulled into a relaxed braid that rested on his shoulder. He was as beautiful as Swanhaden, but he looked more gentle and had the look of a scholar. And on his body, just like Swan’s, were small scars on his body that he couldn’t heal when he was younger.

The Blanche family focused mostly on healing magic, so it was rare for those in the family to take up arms as well. Unlike Swan, Yulinelle only focused on white magic.

Yulinelle Blanche dozed off slightly before waking up and getting back to work.

But when the door burst open and a bloody boy and girl entered the room, he couldn’t help but take his focus off of work.

“……..?”

His son, who he had never talked with, burst into his room, sobbing. He had never thought that he would meet his son like this, so Yulinelle was a bit flustered.

Swanhaden hugged a bloody, orange-haired child in his arms and cried.

“Duke! Fix her! Save her!”
“You, how…..”
“I’ll take the title, I won’t run anymore! Please!”

Yulinelle looked at Swanhaden and frowned. He briefly thought about what was happening right now before approaching the girl who needed immediate help.

It was already shocking that Swanhaden had come up here to begin with, but he even held a bloodied girl in his arms.

Moreover, the child in his arms was one that was extremely familiar to him. They were the child of the West family, the family that he often visited because of his work.

“………..why is she here?”

He couldn’t really process the situation very well, but he understood that the orange-haired girl shouldn’t have been here.

Yulinelle took Shuraina from Swanhaden, who was shaking in fear. Then, he laid Shuraina on the sofa.

Yulinelle began to heal Shuraina without a fuss. He was shocked at her strange magic.

A magic circle, mixed with both normal magic and white magic, was atop of Shuraina. It was meant to control white magic and strengthen the abilities of the natural healing magic as well. The way that the magic circle had been modified was both strange and new. He was shocked.

Yulinelle unraveled the circle that Shuraina had used on herself and checked the magic within the circle. Swanhaden’s erratic magic had grown still. Yulinelle returned Swanhaden’s now still magic back to him. It was now stable. Swanhaden was able to absorb the magic without any issues.

Once he had finished his treatment, Yulinelle noticed that he had exhausted his strength. He wanted to finish the remaining paperwork more than he wanted to learn about why the West child was her and why she was a bloody mess.

“I’ll have to erase her memory……..”

Yulinelle muttered as he looked at Shuraina.

That small West child knew too many secrets. Of course, Yulinelle didn’t care about the downfall of his family, so it didn’t matter if Shuraina went around blabbing secrets, but he didn’t want more work. He was already working overtime, but if anything got out…it meant more overtime. More work. What a mess.

Yulinelle threw the question at Swanhaden, who was carefully wiping blood off of Shuraina’s body.

“Do you want to erase her memory? It’s okay if you want to leave the good times. Just erase the parts about healing.”

It was the first conversation that the father-son duo had had.

Without even listening to Swanhaden’s response, Yulinelle sat back at his desk and began to work on his paperwork.

Swanhaden hugged Shuraina before looking at her face. Her eyes remained closed, as if she had no idea what she had done earlier. When he scanned her body, it seemed that all of her injuries had healed and she only needed to rest to replenish her magic.

Erase her memory……..did he really have to do it, in the end?

Swanhaden thought of the time that Shuraina had thrown up at the sight of him. She was an innocent girl who wasn’t used to this kind of life. Moreover, she had gotten severely hurt and almost died because of him. He was sure that she would be sick of him.

Swan thought about leaving the fun memories that they shared behind before shaking his head.

“……..I’m not going to leave any good memories.”

Swanhaden decided that he would erase her memories himself.

He wasn’t too familiar with mind magic, but Swanhaden put his hand on Shuraina’s head and poured his magic into her head.

Her mindscape opened in front of him eyes.

Everyone’s mindscapes were similar with some slight differences. Memories floated in water, shaped like small lamps. The water was both deep and shallow, completely unfathomable. The lamps held individual memories, and the colors of the lamps also depended on the emotions that they felt within it.

Swanhaden searched for all of the memories that they shared and shoved them under the water, letting the fire die out. He frowned as he erased the memories, one by one. He wanted to stop, he wanted to leave the good times behind, but he continued to erase the memories.

In the middle of his memory search, Swanhaden accidentally erased the memory of the latest interaction Shuraina had with the pink-shaped blob. Swanhaden briefly worried about the memory he had accidentally erased before shrugging and moving on.

The Blanche family was also capable of healing mental scars, so Swanhaden checked if there was anything that ailed her emotionally or mentally.

Then, he saw a dark, wine-colored memory lamp high up in the sky.