The north winds rattled the windows and filled the room with frigid air.
“S-So c-cold...” I woke up in the middle of the night, shivering. “If I sleep the way P-Patience thinks proper, I’m g-going to freeze.”
Until a few days ago, I’d been an office worker in Japan. For some reason, I’d awoken to find that I had become Patience Granger. Patience appeared to be some sort of noble, but she was quite poor—as poor as a church mouse, I should say—to the point that she might face some life-threatening consequences if her circumstances didn’t improve soon.
The first time I woke up as Patience, I was so emaciated that I immediately thought about crying out, “I’m going to die! Help me!” I wanted to call an ambulance, but upon scanning my surroundings, I found that not only was this not my room, but there was no phone in sight.
“Are you awake, Lady Patience?” a redheaded maid asked excitedly. For some reason, I knew that the maid’s name was Mary, and that I was Patience Granger.
“I feel really tired,” I admitted. “Can you call for the doctor?”
Mary seemed troubled by my request, and I could hear the Patience within me protest: She can’t call a doctor for my sake! That’s absurd!
“The doctor was here yesterday, and your fever seems to have gone down, so...” Mary explained. She then gave me some water using a feeding cup, and I felt a bit relieved.
Through Patience’s memories, I learned that a visit from the doctor was an incredible luxury only possible if I was suffering from a life-threatening illness. In other words, yesterday I, Patience, had been on the verge of death. It was unclear if I had just now possessed this body or if I had reincarnated into this world and been part of Patience her whole life, but either way, I was now Patience Granger.
Am I dead? It seems like Patience died, but then what about these memories? That was indeed the problem at hand.
I was Kaoru Aoyama, a twenty-five-year-old single college graduate with an office job. I had no issues with my health and led a normal life. I had no memory of getting run over by a truck like many protagonists reincarnated into other worlds did, nor did I wake up in a bright white room where a goddess gifted me with overpowered skills.
I’d come home from work, eaten a simple meal, taken a bath, and spent some time surfing the web before going to bed...so how did I end up here? I figured something fatal must have happened, like a fire or an earthquake in the middle of the night.
The strangest thing about this whole situation was that I could clearly recall not only “my” memories, but Patience’s as well. Thanks to her memories, I could speak and understand the language of this world. Though I was grateful for that, it was troublesome how Patience’s common sense kept influencing my actions.
Patience was an incredibly proud and self-sacrificing noble. Her mother had been similarly self-sacrificing before dying from pneumonia. The other members of the Granger family were Patience’s father Lord William, who was a viscount; the eight-year-old heir, Nassius; and the six-year-old Henry. According to Patience’s memories, her younger brothers were absolute angels, and Patience would give them the thin slivers of meat from her already sparse meals. Because of that, she had been incredibly thin and weak. In the cold of winter she had come down with pneumonia, which had eventually killed her. At least, that was my theory.
While I appreciated the clear memories, being forced to act with proper manners was a drawback. A noble lady sleeps in a classy manner by placing her hands atop her covers and clasping her hands together...or so Patience believed. I exasperatedly suspected she had died precisely because she had been following her late mother’s teachings and sleeping with such thin covers in a room with no heating, but my new body still reflexively followed Patience’s routine when I slept. Going to bed properly posed, like Sleeping Beauty in the tales from my childhood, should only have been done in a room with proper heating.
“It’s so cold! Maybe mother passed from pneumonia because she was sleeping like this? Once it’s morning, I must find out if these flimsy covers are all we have.” Until then, I would have to disobey the teachings of Patience’s mother and sleep buried under the covers, curled up like a cat. “It’s a little warmer... I wonder if those little angels are all right,” I mused aloud, thinking of my younger brothers.
I confess I was a bit of a shotacon—by which I mean I had a soft spot for younger boys. I wish I had deleted the shotacon manga I’d left on my computer back in Japan, but it was too late for that. From Patience’s memories, I knew that my two younger brothers slept together in the same room, so they were hopefully a little warmer.
Regardless, I needed to sleep as much as I could to recover, paired with eating something with a little more sustenance than the “porridge” I’d been having, which was mostly just hot water. Otherwise, though it was still uncertain whether I was just possessing this body or had reincarnated as Patience, I was going to die. Also, I needed to do something about the Granger family’s living conditions, for the sake of my poor brothers. Patience, who loved her brothers, and I, the shotacon, agreed about that.
The faint light of the winter sun shone through the old, thin curtains onto my face. It seemed that Patience’s habits had won, because I woke up with my head out of the covers and my hands out, clasped together gracefully.