Yigret

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Chapter 1. The Heron Prince.

“Ouch.”

Whoops!

On the way back to the dorm, a minor accident occurred: a student who was precariously dragging a stack of lab beakers on a tray bumped into him and spilled everything.

There were shards of broken glass and oozing, smoldering liquid mixed everywhere.

“Oh my, are you okay, dear?”

“Ah…… u-umm..”

“Are you hurt anywhere?”

“N-no.”

Dragging the tray was a small girl about Judas’ size.

Her dark brown hair fell to her waist. She was taller than Judas, but she was a new student, barely ten years old.

The young girl looked back and forth between Judas and the broken beaker and began to sob.

“I’m sorry, dear, I was thinking about something else and didn’t look where I was going.”

Judas with an apologetic look and put a hand on the girl’s shoulder and comforted her.

Technically, it wasn’t his fault. She filled the tray with miscellaneous items and stacked well above the her height, and inevitably, she would bump into it as she ran, dragging it along with her.

Judas might not have been able to avoid it even if he’d tried, but he still felt like he’d hurt the little girl.

He glanced down at the shards of glass. He squatted down and reached out to clean them up, but the girl grabbed his hand.

“N-no. This……. I-It’s dangerous to just touch it…….”

Judas looked down again, and the glass shards were covered in an unidentifiable, smoldering liquid. Some had already melted.

As they paused, passing maids spotted them and came over to clean them up.

Staring at the stone floor being expertly swept and polished, Judas bowed his head regretfully at the girl.

“I’m very sorry.”

“N-No, no, again …… I just have to make it again.”

“It was a mixture of Mandra and Kethiops distilled water. Were you working on a poisonous medicine?”

Most of the liquids in the beaker were acidic or toxic.

Judas recognized them as ingredients commonly used in medicines, and when he asked, the girl looked at him with wide eyes.

“Do you know about …… medicines? But these were ingredients for healing food.”

Healing food, literally, food that helps heal.

Eaten to replenish rapidly declining stamina, or in the event of injury, poisoning, or dehydration, it can help speed recovery.

Unlike medicines that are applied to the affected area, it was meant to promote the body’s own recovery.

At the girl’s words, Judas scratched his cheek.

“Hmm, that seems a bit dangerous for a healing food ingredient.”

“I’m still researching it……….”

“Ah, but if you mix it with the seton, it’ll neutralize the poison, so it could be used to counteract it. The proportions are a little tricky, though.”

“Eh?”

The girl tilted her head up.

The number of healing foods that were effective in detoxification was quite small.

Especially in the poisonous family, they required the exact same poison, which made the research tricky.

Naturally, there was less information about them.

She wasn’t sure if what Judas had said was true, but it might give her a hint as to the combination of ingredients.

The girl’s eyes lit up with a desire to experiment.

“Seton? I’ll-I’ll try it!”

So eager was the student that she almost forgot the tray and ran, then she hurriedly turned back to drag it and she looked back at Judas.

“Hey, thanks!”

“…….”

Judas waved at her distant back as she hurried away.

She seemed timid, but also frantic. It seemed that getting the hint was more important than spilling the ingredients.

That said, she also seemed quite naïve to run after a stranger’s saying.

In true 10-year-old fashion, Judas scratched his head once, then resumed his walk.

The next day, Judas again didn’t fail to distort Baikal’s face with his cheerful greeting.

“Baikal, it’s a pleasant breeze today. Maybe we’ll get some spring rain.”

“…… What on..”

With an annoyed look on his face, Baikal glared at Judas, who was sitting next to him.

For some reason, he hadn’t had a single tardy or absent in the last ten days.

It wasn’t enough that he was consistently attending class. He was following Baikal like a duckling, following its mother and sitting next to him like this.

He couldn’t dictate where Judas sat, and it was even more unpleasant for him to move to a different seat.

Even though there was a group of people traveling with him, he didn’t want to sit in a group, so he made a mistake by taking a seat.

Eventually, Judas’ blunt approach led to Baikal’s semi-gave-up response.

“What rain? There are no clouds in the sky.”

“Hehe, they say even if there are no clouds, they’ll come back in no time.”

And in that peculiar old man way that he’s come to recognize since he started talking.

Baikal narrowed his eyes and looked at Judas.

“What is it with you lately?”

“Huh?”

“To me, I mean, just going all over the place, and nobody’s happy about it. Why do you have any regrets now?”

Despite the sarcasm, Judas steepled his chin and thought about it, then smiled and nodded.

“I do. That’s right, regrets.”

“…….”

Baikal was again at a loss for words at the sight of such an unabashed admission of wrongdoing.

The changed Heron Prince was strange, to say the least.

In the past, a dismissive or sarcastic remark would have turned him pale and unable to move.

It would have been less ridiculous if he had run away, but even that seemed to be too much for him, and he remained stuck in the same place for a long time, like a wrecking ball.

Then he would get very sick and not leave the room for a while. When he did come out, he would sit in a corner by himself, unable to make eye contact with Baikal or the other students.

He was as silent as a shadow, as if he were not there.

He was then, and how is he now?

“I realized I shouldn’t have given up, so I’m going to live it this time.”

Looking into the golden eyes of gentle strength, Baikal thought.

‘He’s different. He’s not the same Heron prince.’

The changing curve was steep.

It was almost as if he was about to die.

He wasn’t able to tell if it was desperation or mere whim that was driving Judas.

Since that conversation, Baikal’s edgy demeanor has softened by a bit.

He didn’t look down on Judas as much as he had before, but he didn’t treat him as cordially or acknowledge him as the First prince of the Empire.

Still, Judas was pleased with this small change.

After a lifetime of being a sage, if there was one thing he was clumsy and unskilled at, it was interpersonal relationships.

When he’d given up on living among people and turned his back on them to run off into nature with the spirits, it had been exhausting and difficult.

No matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t able to establish a relationship that he could call ‘family’ or ‘friends’.

This was an uneasy challenge for him as an ‘Yigret’ who was not used to human relationships.

But what he had failed to do all his life was not going to be so easy.

Yigret!

Chuaak.

Judas looked up from the water dripping from his hair.

A bucket of water for cleaning art brushes hung at an angle from the windowsill of the classroom where art class ended.

The bucket, which must have been intentionally aimed at Judas, was now empty and dripping.

The water wasn’t hygienically dirty, but the paint mixed with the muddy wash-water and stained Judas’s uniform.

It was like being struck by lightning out of nowhere. It was obviously intentional, but it was hard to tell, since the perpetrator of the spill was nowhere to be seen.

The students who witnessed this exchanged glances with each other before turning their backs and walking past Judas.

“…….”

Judas’s eyes widened in bitterness at the inaudible sneer.

With a small sigh, he pulled off his soaked jacket and slung it over his arm. He could see other students milling about.

Without further delay, Judas turned and walked back to his quarters.

Why didn’t you ask me to stop it?

“…….”

Yigret!

“Calm down.”

Judas smiled softly in response to Yuni’s uplifting call.

Spirits can’t use their power unless the contractor wants them to. This was true even if the contractor was in grave danger.

Nature was not supposed to intervene of its own volition. It was not given the authority to act on its own without the contractor’s wishes.

If they did, they would be trounced. Even a spirit king could not escape that rule.

That was why Yuni could only stare, even if the rage filled her head.

The wind, sensing her mood, raged wildly. Judas’s hands, gently grasping the fluttering hem of his clothes, were stained with paint.

“There’s no point in trying to scare them …….”

What’s the matter with the people? What’s so precious and important? I’m much more afraid of you getting hurt.

“Oh, no. Yuni.”

I know what your wishes are, but Yigret.

Tap tap-

Another cold drop of water fell on my already wet forehead.

As he lifted his head to see that the clear sky, the sky was filled with dark clouds.

It was just as he’d said in the morning: starting with that one drop, more and more raindrops began to fall from the sky.

I don’t want you to suffer…….

It was a downpour. It was a green spring rain, like the tears of a spirit.

As if the baptism of paint wasn’t enough, Judas, who had been soaked to the skin in a downpour, had to spend the rest of the night in a feverish cold.

His already fragile body was quickly unbalanced by even a brief chill.

Nevertheless, in the morning, Judas dressed in a spare set of uniforms and headed to the schoolhouse.

Yuni flew around him nervously as he nearly fell several times along the way.

Really! I told you to rest today, Yigret.

“Ah, don’t fuss over it. It’s just a common cold. Compared to the aches of yester-weeks, it’s but a minor inconvenience, you see.”

You were dying then-

Yuni left his side with a worried sigh. Having already suffered through decades of his stubbornness, the spirit had given up trying to persuade him, knowing it was futile.

The walk to the building that housed the economics classroom was usually breathtaking, but today it was almost vertigo-inducing.

Somehow, he made it to the classroom, but his body felt weak.

Thud

Baikal closed the book he was reading when he spotted Judas sitting next to him like leaning against him.

============================ Ending credit

Transl. By shir104

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to add my two cents,

Actually, Judas (Yigret) is op, with the help of the Spirit King.

But he is a fairly tender-hearted type, so he must have once been poorly mixed into society and fallen(?).

The people who tried to use him at the time were a problem, but Egret himself had also some problems. lol