“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Just leave me alone for a bit.”
“So you won’t be administering any punishment, Your Grace?”
“Huh? Yup, nothing. You’re off the hook. Just don’t let anyone into my room for the rest of today, all right?”
Craig furrowed his brow in confusion at “my” blatantly abnormal behavior, but he wasn’t about to poke the hornets’ nest. He bowed his head again in a show of obedience.
“Very well, Your Grace. My deepest thanks for your magnanimous treatment. But will you not see a physician?”
“I’ll see one tomorrow. Sorry, but can you let everyone else know too?”
I was practically pleading now, and Craig finally got the message that I wanted him out.
“As you wish, Your Grace.”
He stood and gave another bow. I watched his retreating back as he left the room, and the moment he shut the door behind him, I flopped back onto the bed.
God, that was stressful... I kind of half-assed it, though. Are things gonna be okay? Wait, what do I even mean by “okay”? Nothing about any of this is okay! What the hell’s going on?
As I lay on my back, wondering if maybe I’d woken up into yet another dream, I clutched at my head and groaned. But no matter how long I tried, I didn’t wake up. I nervously pinched my cheek, but it just hurt like normal. There was no escaping it—this was all real.
Guess I’ve just gotta accept it. This is definitely the world of Sig the Rebel, and I’m a character in the novel—the evil Duke Heinreid.
Why’d I have to be him, of all people, though? It wasn’t like I wanted to be the hero, but at this point, even some nameless Villager A would’ve been a way better pick. Heinreid was just that despicable. Like I’d witnessed in this morning’s dream, he was a depraved sadist who loved the suffering of others more than anything else in the world. There wasn’t even any real reason he’d ended up so twisted—he’d just fallen onto the path of evil for the sake of his own pleasure.
Even back when I’d read the novel, I’d hated his damn guts! Every single time his name had shown up, yet another sickening incident had played out on the page, and I’d waited with bated breath for someone to finally kill the bastard! At the end of the novel, Heinreid shut himself away in his manor as Craig led a revolt against him. An angry mob set the building on fire, and it burned to the ground with Heinreid inside. After seeing the actual Duke Heinreid’s memories, even that felt like a kinder death than he deserved.
The actual Duke Heinreid...
That was when a doubt arose in my mind.
Wait... Did I really only “become” Heinreid just now?
One way or another, Heinreid’s original consciousness was completely gone. In terms of my perceptual experience, I’d gone from my accident straight into a nightmare, and when I’d woken up, I’d found myself in Heinreid’s body. But on further thought, there were actually two possibilities.
Maybe, just like I’d thought, I had taken over Heinreid’s body immediately after I’d died.
Or maybe...after my death, I’d been reborn as Heinreid, and I’d only just regained my memories of my past life.
The first option didn’t actually improve my circumstances at all. But if I’d been reborn as the duke, then the one who’d perpetrated all those vile acts was none other than me. It sounded absurd; I didn’t want to believe it. But as the facts stood, I still had all of this body’s original memories, and while I’d been dreaming, even our emotions had gotten synchronized. If that was true...
All the atrocities from the dream flashed through my mind.
If that was true, then I had to die. I’d tormented and devoured the weak. I’d done it for no reason at all, laughing all the while. I hadn’t been content to do it all with my own hands—I’d even forced friends and family to kill each other. All of those evil deeds were already done, and the countless dead would never return to life. How could a man like that be allowed to live? The thought was intolerable, even for me. Where would I get off living a carefree life with these memories inside me?
Maybe I wasn’t in a rational state of mind. It definitely wasn’t normal to make life-and-death decisions this casually, even if the life in question was my own. If someone else had been having thoughts like these, I’m pretty sure I would’ve told them to slow down and think things through.
But right now—or rather, “now” within my personal perception of time—I’d only just finished taking my own life. Any hesitance I had about choosing to die was already worn as thin as it could be.
“All right.”
I got out of bed and stood in front of the mirror once more. The face I saw staring back was the same as before, of course. The same thick, wavy black hair, the same pale white skin, and the same deep scarlet eyes—the color of the blood that had stained every corner of my dream. I still felt an intense dissociation from this body, but it was unmistakably my own now. That thought spurred on my strange sense of duty even more as I collected my thoroughly scattered thoughts and settled on my objective.
My motive had changed substantially, but nonetheless, I knew what I had to do: My job in this world was to die once again, this time for good.