After locking eyes with the dragon, Jake trembled like an aspen leaf, flailing about as if his breath would stop, then didn’t miss the brief gap and leaped up to the ground.
“Huk, heo-eok…!”
As he lay face-down on the floor catching his rough breath, the sound of tongue-clicking came along with the Duke climbing up the stairs.
“To think you’d tremble like a beast, crushed by a mere monster’s威pressure. How pathetic.”
A mere monster? Did they treat dragons as ‘mere monsters’ in this world and regard them as insignificant? Were the people of this world that strong?
Jake panted while surveying his surroundings. The knights guarding the Duke were in a more serious state than Jake. If so, it didn’t mean Jake was pathetic, but rather that the man called the Duke was remarkable for having withstood the dragon’s pressure.
‘Who is he?’
A human as strong as a dragon—could he perhaps be someone who was once a Hero? If he was a Hero, born with the same power as the ability stats possessed by the Demon King according to the laws established by the Lord God, it wouldn’t be strange for him to possess power transcending humans.
That is, assuming his opponent was an extremely strong Demon King.
“Kuleok.”
At Jake’s coughing sound, as if his breath would cut off any moment, the Duke clicked his tongue repeatedly.
Jake put strength into his trembling arms and legs and stood up. No matter how much his motivation had disappeared, he didn’t want to receive such reproach from this ‘Duke’ whose manner of speaking resembled his father’s so closely.
Then the Duke sent him a look of considerable surprise.
“The dragon… how…”
“Are you only curious about that now?”
The Duke turned around and left without giving a proper answer.
Just what did he want to show? The greatness of the ducal house that subdued a dragon? His own dignity that doesn’t crumble even before a dragon? Whichever it was, seeing that the head of the family was someone who liked to flaunt his achievements, this place was definitely the House of Duke West.
‘Just where on earth is this place?’
Jake grabbed his throbbing head and looked around. Though the decorations adorning the walls and the picture frames had changed somewhat, this place had a structure similar to the Duke West castle that Jake remembered.
‘If this place is the ducal castle, then the Duke from before and that person called Ellen must also be members of the West family.’
Though he didn’t know what had happened, others regarded him as a person called ‘Ellen’. Jake decided to gather information about him and assess the situation first.
“Guide me to my room.”
Jake ordered the servant who had brought him here. Perhaps because they were waiting upstairs and weren’t affected by the dragon, the servant supported Jake without complaint.
“Phew.”
Taking a deep breath made breathing much easier.
If the plan was to bring him to his senses through shock therapy by throwing him into a threatening situation, Klad’s plan had half-worked. Light arrived as the fog cleared from Jake’s mind, which had felt like he’d been constantly wandering in a place thick with fog.
But even so, his lost motivation didn’t return. Rather, only strange thoughts came to mind.
“Shall I support you to the bed, Ellen-nim?”
“No, I’m fine. You may go—I’ll call when I need you.”
The servant bowed in greeting and withdrew without incident, not noticing that Jake was a different person from ‘Ellen’ even after conversing with him.
‘By location… this is a room on the completely opposite side from my room.’
In the ducal castle of the era Jake had lived in, this was decorated as a guest room. Given the circumstances, there was no way ‘Ellen’ was a guest visiting the ducal castle, so it must be that the castle’s structure had changed over the years.
Jake took another long deep breath and entered the room. His heart pounded needlessly at the thought that the real Ellen might be inside.
Creeeak—
The room he entered with full tension was completely empty.
That’s a relief. Or is it not a relief? Perhaps meeting this person called Ellen here would have helped him understand the situation.
Sabak.
He quite liked the sound of stepping on the carpet laid densely across the floor. Jake went inside as if this were truly his room and walked around the spacious room.
A room no different from his own room that Jake remembered. The only differences were perhaps the colors of the curtains or bedding.
Seeing how every object in the room was perfectly aligned without being displaced even slightly from where it should be, he felt the diligence of those working in the ducal castle first, rather than the warmth of someone living there. He could assert that even if you shook down this room thoroughly, not a speck of dust would come out.
“Phew…”
Jake sat down in a chair placed in one corner of the room. It was splendid but more uncomfortable than an ordinary wooden chair. Considering that aside from the bed, this chair was the only place to sit in the room, he could deduce the room owner’s disposition in one of two ways.
Either someone who disliked receiving guests, offering uncomfortable chairs to whoever visited to drive them away quickly, or someone without a single close friend who would visit the room, using the chair only as a splendid decoration rather than for receiving guests.
Either way, it seemed interpersonal relationships weren’t very good. Perhaps the reason no one he met here recognized that he wasn’t the real Ellen was also because he had minimized contact with others. It was shocking that even the Duke of this era, presumed to be Ellen’s father, didn’t recognize him, but…
‘Perhaps my face has changed to that of this person called Ellen.’
Jake pressed both hands against his cheeks firmly and swept them down as if to confirm the shape of his face. Even doing so, there was no way to confirm whether his own face had changed or not.
Jake got up from the uncomfortable chair and walked around the room once. Though he wanted to lie down on the plush-looking bed and stare at the ceiling as he had for the past few days, this situation of being dropped in an unknown place and treated as an unknown person was far too unsettling for that.
Deureureuk.
When he opened the first drawer of the splendid nightstand, there was a letter thrown in carelessly.
Though touching another’s belongings without permission went against a noble’s duty, he was currently permitted to enter this room with ‘Ellen’s’ status. If others recognized him as Ellen, then for this time it should be acceptable to regard Ellen’s possessions as his own.
Having reached a completely self-serving conclusion, Jake first picked up the letter envelope. Seeing how crude the traces of opening the envelope were, it seemed this person called Ellen had an unrefined personality.
Jake exhaled briefly and checked the letter’s recipient.
[Ellen West]
As expected, he was someone with the surname West. Considering that Ellen was the only one presumed to be the Duke’s child present at the important occasion of introducing the dragon, Ellen was likely the heir to succeed to the next generation with high probability.
‘Ellen West. Ellen West…’
Jake repeated that name. If this place was a world within the past as Klad had explained, and if a person named Ellen West truly existed, wouldn’t this name have been mentioned in the history of the House of Duke West that he studied during history lessons?
‘It feels like a name I’ve heard somewhere…’
It wasn’t easy to recall a single name from the list of all past Dukes recorded from the first Duke West to his own father.
Moreover, there was no way more than the one line where the name was recorded would have been allocated to a Duke who didn’t achieve special accomplishments, so if Ellen West was an unremarkable Duke, even if he wracked his brain to dredge up the contents of history books from memory, nothing would be helpful in the current situation.
“…I remember now, Ellen West.”
Just when he was about to give up on recalling, something flashed through his mind as fast as lightning.
Only then could Jake understand why the name Ellen West had been so difficult to remember. He hadn’t been able to figure it out because he’d been working his way up through the names of past Duke Wests. Of course he couldn’t—because Ellen West was an heir who never ascended to the Duke’s position.
In the long, long genealogy of the House of Duke West, there was no place for anyone who wasn’t a Duke. Yet Ellen West had his name recorded in the history books for a special reason. He was the heir to the House of Duke West born approximately 730 years before the point when Jake was born, and was the perpetrator who had nearly cut off the ducal house’s line for the first and last time.
Because he died in the year he turned twenty-three.
‘They said there was chaos because he was the only offspring of the Duke of that era, and since even the Duchess had died long ago, there was no one to succeed to the next generation.’
It was only thanks to the Duke of that era stopping all external activities, remarrying anew, and quickly producing an heir that things were saved—otherwise, the line of the House of Duke West would have been cut off more than 700 years earlier. This incident was treated seriously enough to be recorded in history books, and so it remained in Jake’s memory as well.
If so, the current point in time was about 750 years before the era Jake had lived in. Having finished assessing the situation, Jake calmly picked up the letter.
Dalgeureuk.
A small frame had been hidden behind the letter.
‘A portrait?’
It was a small painting presumed to be a portrait of Ellen West. Jake picked it up and checked the face in the portrait.
In the painting drawn with considerably excellent skill, the face of a man who looked exactly like Jake was depicted.
“…”
So such coincidences occurred if they were of the same bloodline, even if they were descendants separated by hundreds of years. Since they resembled each other this much, it was understandable that everyone would mistake him for Ellen West. Seeing how even the father and the servant who saw him daily didn’t notice, perhaps even their voices and manner of speaking were similar.
Tak.
Jake set down the portrait with a face that had resolved something.
What if this place was the world in the year when this person called Ellen turned twenty-three? If he had already died? Or if he was about to die soon…
‘Wouldn’t it be alright for me to continue living here in his place?’
Where he was neither a Hero nor anything else.
Where he bore no responsibilities whatsoever.
Where he didn’t have to worry about meeting death at his father’s hands.
In this world where he didn’t have to do anything, and where simply living and breathing had value.
