Despite my plausible reaction, Father’s expression remained unchanged and gentle. It meant he had anticipated even this reaction from me.
‘No. Rather than anticipating it, he must have already seen it.’
Since I began freely wielding my precognitive ability, Father naturally became unable to use precognition. Though the inheritance patterns differed for each family’s power, the Sayus Family’s precognitive power had always been this way. But that didn’t mean he knew nothing about the future at all. In fact, there was a high possibility he knew more futures than I did, as I only saw relatively near futures.
‘Just how much did he know?’
My mouth went completely dry. Even though the man before me showed not the slightest sign of trying to threaten me, it felt as if a predator was opening its jaws toward me. Simultaneously with sweat running down my spine, Father opened his mouth.
“That’s right. You said he must have been very sad about his son’s death, didn’t you? Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case at all. So there’s no way my reason would disappear to the point of mistaking who I’m talking to.”
His words were flawless. My head throbbed, knowing it was nearly impossible to persuade someone who was this certain.
“I saw my son die in my precognitions dozens of times, so when it actually became reality, I felt nothing. What an ironic thing.”
The words that followed were so utterly unexpected that even as my stomach churned, they stuck in my ears. I thought he hadn’t grieved because he had no affection for me at all, but I never imagined the reason would be that he’d seen my death too many times.
“Pardon?”
“There are things I saw in the future but couldn’t change. Those were Tienas’s death and this current meeting. No matter what I tried, they wouldn’t change. As if they were matters beyond my jurisdiction.”
An unfamiliar sense of defeat I’d never seen before settled on Father’s face. It was an expression I’d thought would never be associated with him in his lifetime.
“If you want to live as Aila rather than Tienas, then do so. I have no right to interfere in that, so I won’t force anything. However, won’t you at least listen to an old man’s confession? I’m not asking for forgiveness, I’m just telling you because it seems better that you know.”
Everything was unfamiliar and strange. It felt as if the person conversing with me wasn’t Father but some other entity that had taken over his body. Since entering Aila’s body, I’d seen different sides of many people, but this was the first time I’d seen a change so fundamentally twisted that someone appeared like a different person, like Father did now. The gap of that change was so dizzying that I couldn’t even answer.
“I am a person of the Caesius family.”
“Yes. Aila Caesius, can’t you think of it as just listening to an old man’s regrets?”
Father looked exhausted, as if he’d thrown off a mask. The true appearance of someone who had always been an object of fear and awe was more pitiful than I’d thought.
“I will do so.”
If I couldn’t persuade him anyway, it seemed better to at least hear the information he was trying to convey to me. Though I had no idea what kind of story would emerge, I had an intuition that it wouldn’t be a story that would be poison to His Highness.
“Officially accepting a bastard child as a member of the family is forbidden. That’s why even though Tienas was an open secret as a bastard, he was disguised as the child of my wife Sela.”
“Yes. I know that.”
The Sayus Family wasn’t the only one that had taken in a bastard child. It was just that most cases were hidden more elaborately.
“Handling it that way didn’t make anyone happy. If one commits adultery, it would have been better to send them somewhere no one knows and support them with money, and I knew that well, yet I didn’t do it that way. Do you know why?”
“No. How would a mere knight know the circumstances of the Sayus Family?”
I stubbornly maintained my pretense of ignorance. Father continued the conversation despite my attitude. It felt somewhat like a farce, both of us knowing the truth but not openly stating it.
“Right. You probably didn’t know yourself either. Because I never told you. That child must have had suspicions, but wouldn’t have had certainty.”
There were mainly three reasons for forcibly bringing a bastard into the family. Either there was no heir, they loved the bastard too much, or they loved the one who bore the bastard too much. But I didn’t fit any of those three. So I’d simply been vaguely thinking that perhaps Father hadn’t cast me out of the family because he knew in advance through precognition that the precognitive ability would be inherited by me.
“But to be precise, it’s not that Tienas was accepted into the household despite being a bastard. He was born because he was a bastard.”
Father’s face twisted faintly as he said this.
“Do you mean there was a reason he had to be born as a bastard?”
I couldn’t believe there was a reason I had to be born as an existence called a child abandoned by god.
“I don’t know the reason, but none of the children Sela bore could inherit the precognitive ability. After seeing a future where it was the same even if she bore four or five children, I had to make a different decision. If I hadn’t had a bastard child, the precognitive ability would have ended with my generation. It might have been born in the next generation, but that was too distant a future even for me, and our family’s situation was urgent.”
So in summary, it meant I was born solely as a tool to inherit the precognitive ability. It wasn’t particularly surprising or shocking anew. The only impression I had was that it was curious that the power said to have been bestowed upon each family by the gods in the founding myth was given to a bastard child they called abandoned.
“I see.”
I stopped myself from asking if it was okay to reveal family secrets like this to an unrelated person. It was to avoid creating an unnecessary farce.
“As expected, you’re not even angry.”
“It’s not something for me to be angry about, is it?”
This came out smoothly because it was the same answer I would have given even if I were Tienas. My younger self might have shed tears of injustice upon hearing this, but now that I’d met His Highness, it didn’t matter what reason I was born for. I was prepared to be grateful even if I was an existence born to become a sacrifice.
“…Yes. To continue, because of the previous generation’s experience, the family leaders including myself believed the family would crumble without precognition. The times when the Sayus Family wavered were always when the successor’s precognitive ability was weak.”
“Still, I don’t think the power the Sayus Family has built up over the years would crumble that easily.”
Sayus was indeed a family built on the foundation of the power of precognition, but at least during Father’s time, it wasn’t only that. This might be a thought only I could have, as someone who didn’t use the precognitive ability solely for the family.
“Yes. Looking back now, the Sayus Family lost its way largely because misfortunes piled up. However, many people including myself had come to accept the Sayus Family’s precognition like divine revelation. Because of that dependency, in futures where you weren’t born, the Sayus Family walked a slow but certain path of decline.”
Father caught his breath for a moment. Even in that moment, his always upright posture remained unchanged.
“Whether with precognition or not, I didn’t know there’s no such thing as eternal glory. What will happen is bound to happen.”
I realized why Father had been able to remove his mask. He had broken a belief he’d held for a very long time. Whether it was voluntary or involuntary, I didn’t know. Even knowing I had no right and that it was ridiculous, he looked somewhat pitiful.
“The Sayus Family found a successor but lost its peace. The more children Sela bore, the more neurotic she became, and she particularly blamed Kaeun, the youngest among them. It got worse after the bastard Tienas was born. When we discussed creating a bastard child, I made a promise not to interfere with Sela’s methods of discipline, so under the excuse of keeping my promise and managing the family, I didn’t intervene.”
It felt like all the scattered clues were being pieced together.
Countess Sayus, whom I’d never once called mother, loathed me terribly yet tried not to show it in front of others.
[You useless child! After how hard I tried to birth you… You were my last hope!]
The place where that festering inside most blatantly burst was Kaeun hyung-nim. I’d wondered why Countess Sayus, who hated me most, was always angry at Kaeun hyung-nim, but now I understood.
[I’m sorry. It was my fault. Mother, it’s my fault.]
I often heard the angry voice of Countess Sela and Kaeun hyung-nim’s voice begging for affection to the point of abasement from the next room. Perhaps that’s why, even when Kaeun hyung-nim couldn’t hide his hatred toward me, I was sad but didn’t particularly resent him.
‘So those things didn’t happen simply because the Countess had mental problems.’
Despite hearing only a brief explanation, I understood everyone’s behavior, and so I didn’t feel particularly inclined to greatly blame anyone for what happened to me. It’s not that I hadn’t been tormented or lonely in the past, but within me, it was already a concluded matter.
“Selfishly, I thought it would have been better if we hadn’t loved at all.”
It was the moment I learned I wasn’t the only one who wore a lonely face while speaking of love.
“The Sayus Family must have had many hardships.”
“Yes. Still, at the time I thought it was right. Until I learned that I couldn’t change the future where Tienas dies.”
Though I gave a third-party-like answer, Father didn’t withdraw his tender gaze. That gaze I faced only after death was strangely uncomfortable.
“In the futures I saw, Tienas met dozens of deaths. No matter what measures I could think of, nothing changed. Not only that, but I also learned there was no way to save Sela, whose mind had collapsed. I’d never felt that powerless before, thinking I could grasp and shake everything with that power.”
His last words sounded like a sigh.
“Only after introducing Tienas to the Crown Prince did the future begin to change, even if faintly. The last future I saw was having this conversation with you like this. In the end, there was no way to completely save Tienas.”
“…”
“After the prophetic ability was completely inherited, I thought I’d become comfortable instead… Absurdly, if it hadn’t been for the prophecy, I probably wouldn’t have even thought you were my son. Because I was afraid this future would change, I couldn’t even offer Tienas an apology, so escaping the bonds of prophecy isn’t an easy thing. I suppose that’s how I became someone unqualified to be a husband or a father, all to protect the Sayus Family.”
Straight eyes looked down at me. My heart pounded and I felt as if a thorn was stuck in my throat, but I didn’t know what emotion this was.
