Afterword
(Excerpted from The Book of Rudeus, Vol. 26)
RIGHT, SO UP UNTIL NOW I’ve just been scribbling things down in this diary. Now that I’ve filled over twenty-five books and made a bit of a name for myself, I’ve had this strange idea. Maybe, just maybe, someone might read this.
I wrote it all in Japanese, so theoretically, no one in this world should be able to read it. Still, someone with too much free time might decode it, and after I die, someone else who came from the same world as me might read it.
…I’d feel pretty bad if someone actually put all the effort into decoding these when there’s nothing all that important written in them. But I mean, that’s just what diaries are like, right?
Whatever purpose someone decodes it for, it won’t go out into the world until after I’m dead. I’d like to record for later generations that Dragon God Orsted wasn’t a bad person.
And then there’s that other thing…
Okay, so as I’ve written a few times in these diaries, I’m not originally from this world. I died in another world and was reborn here. I’ve decided not to write my name from my previous life. If the person reading this knew the person I was in my old world, they might get the wrong idea. Still, I might have a previous life, but aside from that I’m not actually special. If you’ve decoded this diary and are reading it, you’ll know that I lived an ordinary life in this world. I didn’t choose to be reborn, and in the end, I never found out what caused it. No big deal.
I just lived the best life I could—so that if I died the next day, I’d have no regrets. That’s what’s important.
You may scoff at that, whoever it is who’s reading this diary. Maybe you’re thinking, “He was just lucky with where he was born,” or, “Easy for this guy to say when he was blessed with talent.” Or maybe you’ve seen my portrait, so you put it down to my pretty face…
I mean, as I wrote in here the other day, Chris told me her classmates said things like that. They said she had an unfair advantage because she’d been born into good circumstances, and they hadn’t. She said she felt really uncomfortable about it. To be honest, my own upbringing was pretty cushy. Paul, my father, was a scumbag when it came to women, but he wasn’t a bad person. If he were a real scumbag, then he would’ve lied about cheating even though there was damning evidence, then played dumb, then lashed out like he was the victim… If I cheated, then tried to pull something like that, Eris would beat me up, Sylphie would hate me, and Roxy would have nothing but contempt. I’d end up losing everything.
Jeez, that’s a scary thought.
I couldn’t have asked for a better mother than Zenith. She was young when her mind failed, but when you consider what it’s usually like to care for a bedridden person by comparison, it wasn’t so bad. I did end up pretty much entirely handing her off to Lilia and Sylphie, but compared to my previous life, where I wasn’t able to do anything for my parents, I think I did all right by her. The point is, I was born to parents who loved me. I can’t say we wanted for nothing, but at the very least we didn’t have any debt, and my parents weren’t fighting over money every day. That was kinda lucky.
I also had a talent for magic. I had a leg up from the knowledge from my past life and a vast pool of mana from the Laplace aspect. It’s thanks to both that I was able to excel in unvoiced magic. Even if you searched the world over you’d have a hard time finding anyone who can shoot a Stone Cannon harder or faster than me. While I’d like to chalk it up to my own hard work, I’m pretty sure it was the gifts I was born with. Just luck, really.
So far as my looks go, I reckon I’m better off now than I was, but for all that…I still haven’t had many women take an interest in me just for my face. On the flip side, I have been treated unfairly because people didn’t like my face before. Soldat, for example, said he didn’t like the look of me. He might have been talking about my expression, though. Expressions are important, too.
Most people aren’t repelled by my face, at any rate. More luck.
I don’t doubt it’s that good luck that gave me the motivation to try hard. Still, I wonder. What if I’d been even better off? How would I have turned out if, say, I’d been born an Asuran aristocrat, never wanting for money or women or anything else? I know I’m a bit of a perv, and there’ve been times when that perviness motivated me to work hard. Not having those sorts of things for all those years is what allowed me to appreciate them.
If it’d been easy for me to get with women, if I’d had women throwing themselves at me, and all without having to lift a finger, would I have seen the value in it? I wonder if I wouldn’t have just gotten bored early on and stopped making any effort to make women like me.
The same goes for magic. I’ve worked my ass off practicing magic every single day. My training looks tedious from the outside, but it’s because I kept going with it that I can now wield magic with a high level of precision. What if the first time I picked up a magic textbook I’d been able to cast not just Beginner-tier, but Advanced-tier—or even God-tier magic? Would I have gone on training hard after that?