Black-Haired Dad Isn’t Something You Reap - Chapter 50

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 50. The Prince’s Captive Life Manual (1)
Your adoptive father is a psychopath.
I must have wanted to tell Pisha this dozens of times. In fact, I’ve said it several times. But Pisha didn’t believe me.
“Ha ha, isn’t the Prisoner just naturally insane?”
She laughed it off like that.
But you see, Pisha. Your adoptive father is not someone who can be wrapped up in the pretty word “insane.”
That man is a genuine textbook psychopath! An antisocial personality disorder! You’re young but clever, Pisha, so you know what that means, right?!
“Kyaaaaaaah!”
“Ugh! Uaaaagh!”
“Save me! Please save me, Your Majesty!”
Today was one of those days when chaos erupted in the Imperial Palace. In other words, a purge day. This often happened when Pisha was playing all day and sleeping soundly, but this time it seemed the Emperor had seized an entire purge week while the Princess was away on a week-long business trip to the Empire.
“Ha ha ha ha! Run, run! If you can escape the Palace, you’ll receive a special pardon!”
Why must we kneel and witness this spectacle? When I first experienced this, I asked Sheryl Achilles about it, and the Achilles Young Lady said that watching and learning would prove useful later.
Surely this isn’t something we’re supposed to inherit later?
“You little ones over there! You’re watching carefully, aren’t you!”
“Yes, Father! We’re watching with both eyes wide open!”
“I am not your father!”
The Emperor, who had been elegantly having tea, flicked his teaspoon, and it severed a few strands of the Achilles Young Lady’s hair before embedding itself in the wall with a sharp crack.
I shuddered. Just watching from the side made my legs tremble, but the Achilles Young Lady seemed unbothered, laughing softly before wiping her palms clean.
“Ehe he! If you’re Pisha’s father, then you’re my father too!”
“Your mouth is all that’s alive.”
Looking at it, the Achilles Young Lady was also a psychopath. She was less of one than that psychopath who valued human lives less than flies, but she was undoubtedly a psychopath nonetheless.
That crude word for someone who behaves abnormally. It appears with the same meaning in both the Media dictionary and the Kisomalos dictionary.
“Why isn’t the Prince answering?”
“Yes, yes! I’m watching too!”
“Good.”
Pleased with my response, the Emperor shot his gun repeatedly, killing people. At first, I screamed the moment I saw someone shot fall headfirst to the ground, but by now I’d seen it so many times I’d grown accustomed to it.
Well, when you shoot someone with a gun, they die. That’s how people are made. They die quite easily, actually. And falling headfirst—that’s just physics. Newton determined it that way.
“Prince of Media.”
“Yes, yes! The Prince of Media is here!”
I immediately raised my hand and lifted my head at the Emperor’s call. If I didn’t show enthusiasm, I’d get hit.
“Would you like to try shooting?”
“Why would I?!”
Since I began my captive life in Kisomalos, I’ve become remarkably bold, or so I think. Of course, it’s partly thanks to eating well, exercising frequently, and Pisha treating me kindly, but most of it stems from the courage to talk back to the Emperor.
The Emperor is terrifying. But if I don’t talk back to him like this, he becomes even more frightening. He was truly a person with a twisted personality.
“If I tell you to shoot, you shoot, you brat! Stop talking so much!”
“Eek!”
If I had hesitated and not answered back like I did the first time I witnessed this, that gun would have been aimed at me. In fact, I nearly got shot once for being slow to respond. I’ve never shown this side of myself in front of Pisha. That psychopath. That two-faced psychopath!
“Catch.”
“Wow! Uaaaagh!”
What if I mess up?! I don’t want to die!
I crawled on my knees and grabbed the massive pistol, then engaged the safety. I had never realized how desperately I clung to life until I came to Kisomalos.
When I lived in Media, I used to think every day that dying might be easier, but now those days felt like a past life. Death meant the end—nothing, oblivion, terrifying oblivion.
Once you start living, tasting delicious food, reading interesting books, meeting people, and growing close to Pisha, nothing becomes as frightening as death. When you die, you lose all of it—the delicious meals, the interesting books, Pisha. Death is nothing, emptiness, void.
I don’t want to die! I want to live! If I can, I want to live long and healthy! And if I’m being completely honest, I want to stay by Pisha’s side even when I’m a grandfather and she’s a grandmother!
“How could I possibly shoot someone?!”
“I did it at your age.”
“Times are different now than back then!”
“Quiet. It wasn’t that long ago.”
The Emperor approached with heavy footsteps and pressed his heel firmly against the back of my head. My face was forced into the ground, and tears welled up as I pleaded.
“Wahhh! I can’t kill that person! And usually there’s an order to these things!”
“Order?”
“Yes! Usually the person who arrived first gets to experience it first, right?!”
“Hmm.”
The Emperor’s gaze shifted toward the Achilles Young Lady as if he found my logic sound. I couldn’t see her from where I was, but I could sense exactly how sharply she was glaring at me. My entire back prickled with the weight of her stare.
“Father! I believe something like this should typically be done by the eldest first!”
“So it seems.”
“Coward! You’re being a coward, Achilles Young Lady!”
“You’re the coward here, you fool! How dare you pull seniority in a situation like this?!”
Honestly, even I had to admit that was cowardly. Richelieu was two years younger than me, after all. But if I kill someone at this young age, I’ll have nightmares about it for the rest of my life!
“It’ll haunt my dreams! I’m terrified! I can’t handle this at my age!”
“I know from experience—even if you kill at twenty, it haunts you forever.”
“Then don’t make me do it!”
“That’s not how this works. You must protect my daughter.”
So to keep Pisha’s hands clean, he was willing to stain ours with blood. When I asked how he could do something so cruel, the Emperor lit a cigarette he would never dare smoke in front of Pisha and blew the smoke away.
“Then you shouldn’t have become a prisoner, or been sold to the Imperial Family as a friend.”
“That’s not my fault!”
Tears threatened to spill. None of this was actually my fault. The days spent confined in the Media Royal Family from birth, the beatings and struggles after being dragged to Kisomalos as a prisoner.
None of it had been my fault.
All of it felt like a script prepared by the entire world, designed to tear me down by force.
“The world is inherently unfair and irrational.”
“As expected of Father! You’re a master of early education!”
“Look at her—so spirited and admirable.”
Is that so? Is that what being spirited means? Am I not even in the same league as that?
When I lived in Media, I never had friends or even dared speak to my parents and older brothers, so I had no way to compare what “spirited” actually meant. I suppose you have to be at least as spirited as the Achilles Young Lady. Being spirited is far too difficult. I’ll never manage it in my lifetime.
“Take it.”
“Ahhh! Aaaahhh!”
Chiron forcibly placed the pistol in my hands and unlocked the safety. The man lifted me up lightly and urged me to pull the trigger, aiming at the back of the head of someone fleeing.
These people—they must have been some distant relative of a nobleman who just watched nervously when the Emperor brought troops to the Imperial Palace and did nothing. Apparently they were arrested because they were men who didn’t pledge loyalty to the Imperial Kingdom, and their bloodline needed to be erased.
“N-no! I won’t! I can’t! Please, save me!”
“You’re the one doing the killing?”
“Ahahahahaha! This will haunt your dreams!”
“Hahahaha.”
The Emperor laughed heartily, saying that all children grew up this way during wartime, and urged me to fire the gun already. If only Pisha had been present at this moment, or even Chief Chamberlain Listo—someone could have stopped him. But we were utterly powerless, and the tyrant, now free from watchful eyes, had found his own world.
We were too helpless, and the despot without anyone to mind had discovered his paradise.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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