"….I'm not telling you."
I wanted to avoid Yves' persistent gaze, but he continued to carefully leer down at me. It didn't matter if I told him or not, but then I would have to open up about my past life and explain everything, which I was too lazy to do.
"Is it a man?"
When I nodded, the corner of Yves' lips twitched. It was the expression he usually made when he tried to control his expression.
I also added that there were men and women and stray cats, too. Yves leaned back on his chair and glared at me.
It seemed like quite a bit of time had passed since we sat at the table–the ice in our cups were almost completely melted. I stared at the small floating bits of ice as my mind wandered into uncharted territory.
I let out a deep sigh as I remembered those who meandered in my mind whenever things grew quiet. My worries came out with my sigh.
"I'll never be able to see them again, but I miss them and want to see them so much. Most of all, I'm so worried. What do I do?"
When I asked as I stared at Yves, he looked uncomfortable. Yves said that I was asking the wrong person even as he tried to worry and think about what to do for me.
"…..I don't know. That's hard."
Yves muttered quietly. Yves, who was thinking about something even as he stared at me, stretched his arm and wiped along my mouth.
"If you're worried for them even if you'll never see them again, then is there anything you can do except trust and believe them?"
I stared at Yves, who stared straight at me as he spoke, and thought about how much he had changed.
At first, he looked frantic and anxious in a lot of ways, but now he was calm and collected enough to think about understanding and trust towards someone else.
I knew that he had slowly changed for the better until now, but this was something that I felt all of a sudden.
"You spilled all of your food on my shirt a long time ago, but now you're spilling on your own shirt too?"
While I had been engrossed in my thoughts, a tiny, a teensy-tiny bit of food spilled on my shirt. Yves smiled as soon as it spilled as he saw the spill.
"I guess it's too bad. Let's go buy some new clothes."
I was already thinking of stopping by a shop. My former self had wanted to walk around the city wearing pretty clothes, after all.
I nodded at Yves' words and was just about to stand up from my seat when my wallet disappeared.
"Shushu, to be honest, I saw a pickpocket stealing your wallet earlier."
Yves held my wallet in his hands as he spoke.
So you were the pickpocket, huh.
Yves looked at me as if taunting me as he threw my wallet and caught it a few time before he made it disappear.
It was more likely, honestly, that he used teleportation magic to transport my wallet to send it back to my dorm.
Yves approached me and slung his arm around my shoulders. He flung a few coins to the payment cup in a bulls-eye.
The person paying is usually the one that likes the other person more. Yves muttered into my ear. He had an annoying grin on his face.
That day, I stayed as Ye-an the entire day.
When I had come back after playing with Yves in the city the entire day and bought a ton of stuff, the sky was bleeding orange as the sun began to set.
Right before I went back to the dorms, I headed to a small lake in the school. When I went back to my dorms, I would have to change my clothes and get out of Ye-an's form, but I didn't feel like doing that so quickly. It was the weekend, anyway, so there weren't going to be a lot of academy students. It wouldn't matter too much.
When I arrived at the lake, I barely saw a few students here and there. I sat in front of the lake and stared at my reflection.
"Are they living well after I died?"
I stretched my hand towards the surface of the water.
"I'm nervous about Se-yoo...."
He wasn't the type to take responsibility, either. I felt like he was definitely going to go astray. I wanted to believe that Se-yoo and my other siblings were going to be just fine, but to be completely honest–I was very nervous.
My good mood from earlier went down to rock bottom again. They were already riddled with emotional scars, and my situation would've only added onto them.
I was worried and wanted to see what happened after, but I was scared of what I would see if I did.
"It's so annoying..."
I wiped off the makeup I had put on Ye-an's face and freed my hair from the neat ponytail it had been in.
I touched the water and made a small wave with my hand. My reflection became blurry in the water.
I was just about to return when I could see Swanhaden sitting under the shade of a tree. In his hand was a book titled 'Ten Traits of a Trustworthy Person'. But honestly, it looked like he was using it more as a shade than as a book.
Swan sat at a direction where I couldn't see him too well. So I hadn't realized that he had been here the whole time until now.
I felt awkward for no particular reason and was trying to ignore Swan and hurry back. This was probably the first time that Swan would've seen Ye-an, so he wouldn't recognize me. I hoped he didn't recognize me.
"…..hold on."
He called me.
"You, you're strangely familiar..."
Thinking back, I had bumped into Swan with this appearance before in the guild leader's estate. I remembered that he looked surprised when he saw my face back then.
"Han, Ye-an.... That was the name that Shushu remembered them by."
Swanhaden frowned as he tried his hardest to remember. I turned around, surprised at his words.
I didn't know about Cory and Hylli, but I had never, ever said the name of this form to Swanhaden.
How did you know?
For a long time now, Swanhaden enjoyed spending time near the lake. If you didn't bump into Swan in class, then the other place you would bump into him would be near the lake.
The leaves bumped into each other when the wind blew. Alongside the clear rustle of the leaves came the soft movements of Swanhaden's almost-white silver hair. It seemed like he had been asleep for a moment–his hair was rumpled.
Swan frowned as he walked towards me.
I stared as Swan approached me and wondered how I should act. I bit my lips, confused.
I wondered if I should run away, but I felt like he would just chase me so I couldn't just act first.
This was basically the first time that Swanhaden had approached me while looking me in the eye, so I was in a bit of a panic. I wasn't used to seeing Swanhaden with such an expressionless face, save for the surprise written on it.
Swanhaden stared at me for a while before he checked my magic. Then, he gave me a pretty smile.
"Oh, what. Shushu?"
Unlike earlier, his voice was considerably cheery.
Swan stared at my face for a while before he thought about something for a while. His eyes grew wide. Then, his face stiffened quickly.
"Hold on. You're Shuraina?"
Swanhaden muttered quietly without a trace of a smile on his face.
Swanhaden looked incredibly taken aback for some unknown reason. When I approached him, though, his ears burned red and he took a few steps back. Swanhaden requested for me to give him some time to get used to my new appearance. I was confused but nodded.
Swanhaden definitely called me Ye-an earlier, right? And he said that he read my memories.
He was extremely suspicious right now, so I frowned as I began speaking.
"How do you know this form?"
My legs hurt a little, so I sat where the grass looked the softest and looked at Swanhaden. When I slapped the spot right next to me with my hand, Swanhaden hesitated briefly before sitting next to me.
Swanhaden kept quiet at my question. He stretched his arms back onto the grass and looked up at the sky. His bangs fell backwards with his posture and I could see his clean forehead. He frowned as he tried to get his thoughts organized.
Swan wordlessly stared at the sky before turning his head to look at my face. This time, he didn't avoid my gaze. Swanhaden looked me straight in the eye before he put his hand under his chin and rested his arm on his knees.
"I feel like you're good, no matter how you look."
Swanhaden changed the subject as if he wanted to avoid it. You jackass.
When I glared at him and demanded the truth, Swanhaden rolled his eyes towards the lake.
"…..before, when you were really sick, I treated you. I happened to read your memories back then. But I didn't see all of it."
I listened to Swan reluctantly spill the truth. I narrowed my eyes towards him.
"I was sick?"
I had no memories of it. I only remembered pretending to be nice to Swan, who claimed we were close, and Swan claimed that I was sick. But at the time, I had been so healthy that I could literally eat rocks.
Anyway, Swanhaden seemed to have memories of me that I didn't have, and he said that I was sick so I just accepted it. Swanhaden briefly tapped his knee with his fingers before he turned his head and spoke.
"Is that appearance you have on you too? It's not someone else?"
"Mm, yeah. It probably is."
Swanhaden had already told me that he had read through my memories, so I just told the truth to Swanhaden. Even if I told him about my past life, I felt like Swanhaden wouldn't treat me as if I was crazy. Seeing as how Swanhaden didn't recognize me at first, it seemed like he really didn't read through all of my memories, just like he said.
When I nodded and agreed, Swanhaden easily accepted it. "No wonder. I couldn't help but look at you," he muttered. He stretched his hand to touch my long black hair.
"Then, you, were reborn?"
"Huh? Uh… Yeah. Probably. No, you're right."
It seemed like he was just accepting the situation without any issues, so I ended up being surprised.
Swanhaden, who was quick to the catch, saw that I was surprised and smiled thinly as he explained the situation.
"It's not impossible, after all. There's no reason to be surprised."
"….."
"There's a type of black magic that calls over a once-dead soul and pulls it into a body without a soul. There's no actual person who can use it, but it does exist. But you're probably the first who was brought from another dimension and was then reborn."
Listening to this explanation from Swanhaden felt strange. There was a litany of forbidden texts in the Blanche family library, so there was a high chance that Swan gained that information in his estate's library. This was the first time I had heard about this kind of magic existing within black magic.
No, I felt like I had learned about this in a book before, sometime. A god, or a similar existence was the one that cared for souls, right? And they made dimension travel possible.
Should I butter up Swanhaden later to ask him to let me visit the Blanche library later?
"But you read my memories, huh...."
I fiddled with my fingers as I spoke. No matter what the reason was, wasn't my privacy being intruded upon if my memories were read like that without permission? To be honest, it didn't really make me angry. It did make me slightly uncomfortable, though. When I looked at Swanhaden with narrowed eyes, he just turned his head to look the other way.
"….Sorry, I just wanted to help so much."