I Became the Emergency Food Supply of the Bear Family - 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

Aleksei caught Ber as she stumbled, cradling her against his chest while his eyes darted across her face in alarm.
“Miss, are you all right?”
Despite the urgency in Aleksei’s voice, Ber didn’t lift her head. Her breathing came in shallow gasps as she gripped his collar, and then—she convulsed, something rising in her throat.
Warm liquid spilled down Aleksei’s shirt and onto his palm.
Blood.
“No—miss, miss!”
Aleksei shook her shoulders frantically, but Ber remained motionless, her eyes shut, her strength draining as she sank against him. He barely managed to keep her upright, pulling her close.
“I’ll get the instructor.”
Adrian’s voice, urgent footfalls, the creak of a door opening, and then Aleksei’s voice calling out, trembling with distress.
The world dissolved into blackness, and those sounds grew distant, fading away.
Why… why is this happening to me all of a sudden?
With that brief question, Ber’s consciousness slipped away entirely.

***

The Black Wolf. The black wolf.
The Black Wolf bore fur as dark as midnight. That darkness was proof of their strength. Wolves born with black fur typically possessed robust hearts and lungs.
But mutation was always possible.
Years after his birth, his mother fell ill.
Lung disease with no known cause.
After his mother, already frail from the start, took to her sickbed, that same illness appeared in him not long after.
His mother tormented herself with guilt—that she had passed her disease to her son—and began delaying her own treatment to prioritize his recovery.
Though truthfully, neither her illness nor his would ever improve, no matter what they tried.
Wracked by guilt and his son’s unchanging condition, his mother’s lung disease only worsened. Three years after diagnosis, she was gone.
It had been unbearable.
Does she still suffer guilt, even now from heaven, watching over him? Does she remain tormented, still grieving at the sight of her son enduring the same illness that took her?
That was why he had to escape this dreadful disease.
Physicians with renowned skill, herbs with proven efficacy, foods said to strengthen the heart and lungs—he had tried everything, yet his health never improved.
The lung disease had stunted his growth far below the average for wolves. A body too small to even be called a wolf, so frail and withered that he couldn’t bear to look at himself.
After his mother’s death, his father brought a woman into the mansion—one with malice in her heart. She abandoned him alone in the harsh northern climate, though he came to see it as an opportunity.
The spring power that the goddess Eostreis was said to possess—if he could obtain that, surely it would heal his lung disease.
His first attempt failed, but afterward he visited the North Pole multiple times with his direct servant Jang to seek out Eostreis’s incarnation.
But those visits were limited. Marinella’s interference prevented him from returning to the North Pole more than a handful of times.
Though in the end, it proved fruitless anyway.
Once, he encountered a young arctic hare.
It had come out with its parents to feed on hay. While the mother kept watch, the young hare ate with its ears perked up.
It would be simple—silence the parents’ necks, render them immobile, swallow the child. Prey like rabbits fell to all predators without question.
But in the end, he had only swallowed dry saliva and returned.
He couldn’t bring himself to eat it.
He lacked the courage to seize power by devouring something so much smaller and younger than himself. For reasons he couldn’t explain, images of his mother and his own form kept surfacing in his mind.
Time passed.
With Jang’s help and that of other servants, he sought treatment from countless physicians. But none of their remedies eased his lung disease.
The strange warmth he felt that day in the Northern Region when he lost consciousness—nothing had ever soothed him as deeply. That day when he returned to the castle by carriage with Jang, miraculously, his breathing had felt easier.
But only that. His lung disease never actually healed.
A disease that refused to improve. Even his father, who had never stripped him of his Minor Baron title out of guilt over his departed mother, was beginning to consider a decision.
Raul—a wolf-human born to his father and Marinella, bearing dark brown fur entirely unlike that of a Black Wolf. His father was moving to place the healthy Raul, who had no blood relation complications, into the Minor Baron seat of the Nuarel Family.
Unlike him, Raul was unburdened by illness, clearly a robust wolf.
But he couldn’t simply give up.
This year, at sixteen, he and Raul had both been admitted to the Royal Academy.
He would surpass Raul’s grades and win his father’s heart. He would stop at nothing to achieve it.
Perhaps the Capital held physicians or mages superior to those he had found. Whether through bribery or coercion, he would cure his lung disease.
With that resolve, he attended the entrance ceremony.
After the ceremony ended, on the way to receive dormitory assignments—
A servant of the Nuarel Family bowed as though offering a caution. He didn’t respond, didn’t even glance in that direction. He already knew whose side today’s attendant was on.
Marinella’s doing. That woman had steadily expanded her position in the mansion until now only Jang remained as his ally. No doubt she’d arranged today for Jang to be tied up with tasks, unable to accompany him to the ceremony.
His father paid no attention to such matters anyway.
Raul, walking ahead, raised a hand to greet the servant. As he watched the back of Raul’s head with narrowed eyes, Raul suddenly began backing up slowly, drawing alongside him.
“I’ve got something to tell you.”
Another pointless provocation, no doubt. He kept walking without sparing a glance, and Raul let out a soft laugh.
“You’d do well to listen to me today. There’s someone who wants to see you. They’re waiting in the academy’s garden right now.”
“…What are you talking about?”
“Jang. He was actually fired this morning.”
Those words stopped him cold. Raul halted too, then yanked him by the arm out of the crowd, pulling both of them behind a pillar.
Thud. Raul pinned his shoulder with sudden force, pushing him against the stone. He endured the pain and fixed Raul with a glare.
“What… what does that mean?”
“He kept begging me to let him see you, saying he won’t be able to meet you anymore. I didn’t want to bother, but he looked so pathetic I told him.”
You.
Raul added as if in afterthought, his voice a whisper.
His lips twisted involuntarily. Raul released his shoulder, a smile playing at his corner of his mouth.
“Go meet him and hear it from him directly. I’ll take you there.”
Raul walked away in the opposite direction they’d come, then looked back at him over his shoulder.
“Should be interesting.”

The two arrived at the garden soon after. Following Raul’s gesture, he moved toward the ginkgo tree, but Jang was nowhere to be found.
“So the Minor Baron does have a naive side after all?”
“…”
“Did you really think he’d come see you after being fired because of you?”
It had been a lie.
But strangely, relief came before indignation at being deceived. Perhaps that earlier claim about Jang’s dismissal was also false.
“The part about Jang being fired—that was a lie too, wasn’t it?”
“Unfortunately, that part was true. Here’s the proof.”
Raul pulled something from his pocket and tossed it at his feet. He picked it up and smoothed out the crumpled object—a letter.
Jang’s final farewell to him.
The letter contained no personal explanations from Jang himself, only concern for him, page after page.

“My loyalty was sworn to Lady Lea Nuarel.”
“I harbor no thought of abandoning you, so spare yourself the needless worry. That would be an insult.”

His hands trembled as he gripped the letter.
Jang had been abandoned in his homeland and taken in by his mother. He had nowhere else to go.
Had his father truly forgotten his mother entirely now?
“That fool swore loyalty to the deceased lady rather than the household head. Can’t have such an impudent servant remaining in the mansion. Obviously he had to be driven out.”
“…Father would never have permitted that.”
“Don’t you know? It’s Marinella Nuarel who manages the household now, not Lea Nuarel. Think someone in her position would lack such authority?”
True. His father had never cared about such things. He had known that all along.
Crackle. The letter crumpled in his grip.
“Now you have no one left in the mansion who’s on your side. Quite the predicament. Better cure yourself soon, or you’ll lose the Minor Baron seat too. Why not voluntarily surrender it?”
“…”
“Before Father forcibly takes it back.”
Father.
The way that word fell from Raul’s lips made his skin crawl.

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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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