In This Life, I Will Be The Lord - Chapter 303
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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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This Life, I Will Become the Clan Head
Side Story Episode 45
Shan doubted her own ears.
“I… die?”
Why would I?
She couldn’t understand it.
To die if she left the forest.
The prophetic dream had been clear.
Her destiny was to leave this forest, fall in love with a man named Gallahan, and give birth to a daughter named Pirenthia.
“You must have seen it wrong. That can’t be right.”
Shan shook her head in denial.
“Please tell me exactly. What did Mother see?”
Soura looked at her daughter’s face, which was more hardened than ever before, and spoke as if groaning.
“In some winter, I received news of your death. News brought by someone who came to find me from outside the forest.”
“B-but that could be a story from long after, couldn’t it?”
“They said you had a very young daughter. Not even a year old since birth.”
“I… die less than a year after giving birth to Tia?”
“You even knew that child’s name?”
Soura’s voice turned sharp.
If she was Shan’s daughter, she would also be Soura’s granddaughter.
But the name of a child who would never be born was nothing more than unwanted noise.
“Forget that name. You will never give birth to that child.”
“Mother, such words…”
Shan tried to protest.
She was about to get angry, saying that even if she was her mother, she shouldn’t say such terrible things.
But suddenly her vision blurred.
At the same time, the scenery of the house where they had been talking changed.
She had returned to that bedroom she had seen in her dream just moments before.
To that place where she had smiled happily with Gallahan while holding Tia in her arms under the warm sunlight.
Gallahan was still beside Shan.
Right next to her, holding her hand tightly and shedding tears.
“Shan…”
His face, a mess from cold tears, touched the back of her hand.
“Please, don’t leave me behind.”
He sobbed.
She wanted to tell him, who was suffering so much.
To stop crying. That she was okay.
But no voice came out.
So she tried with all her strength to squeeze his hand tightly, but only a few fingers moved.
But even that seemed too much effort, as breathing gradually became difficult.
“Please, ah, please… Shan, no.”
Gallahan clung like a child.
Somehow trying to keep her by his side, fumbling her face with both hands and giving countless kisses.
Tears of unknown origin flowed down Shan’s face.
She tried to say that she too didn’t want to leave his side.
If no sound would come out, then at least just the shape of her lips.
She wanted to convey that to him as he grieved.
Shan reflexively reached out and grasped Gallahan’s clothes.
At that moment.
“Gasp!”
What she grasped in her hand was the hard back of a chair.
Shan had returned to the house in the forest, to the present.
“Do you understand now?”
Soura, who had been watching Shan stare blankly into space and shed tears during their conversation, asked in a cold voice.
“Haa, haa.”
Shan, who couldn’t collect herself for a moment, roughly wiped away her tears.
“Why… Why do I…”
In the future she had briefly glimpsed, she was certainly dying.
She was afraid.
She was scared and wanted to run away.
Reading Shan’s heart, Soura said.
“Now that you know, you can avoid it.”
Shan weakly raised her head.
“Just like we avoided the flood that swept through the village and took many lives, you can do the same this time. You can make a different choice.”
Shan said nothing.
She just looked at Soura with empty eyes.
“…Go back to your room. You’re tired, so sleep and we’ll talk again when you wake up.”
Shan followed Soura’s words.
Thud, thud.
With powerless steps, she returned to her room and closed the door.
Soura, who had stood a little longer in front of Shan’s silently closed door, also returned to her own room.
And she lay down her tired body.
There was certainly some relief in her heart.
If Shan had been stubborn, she was prepared to give orders not as a mother but as the chief of the Chara Tribe.
She would have kept her daughter here even if it meant making her lose the right to leave the forest for life.
That was Soura’s way of protecting Shan.
Soura, who had fallen asleep as if losing consciousness, opened her eyes when morning came.
She got up, straightening her disheveled clothes.
The house was still quiet.
After what happened yesterday, it was perhaps natural that Shan hadn’t come out of bed yet.
She opened Shan’s door, which was still tightly closed as she had last seen it yesterday.
“Shan.”
She planned to wake her and force her to eat even if she had to.
But Soura stopped as if nailed to the spot.
“…Shan?”
Shan was certainly lying in bed.
But at the same time, she was not here.
No matter how many times she called her name and shook her shoulders, there was no response.
Shan did not wake from her deep sleep.
* * *
It had already been three days since Shan wouldn’t wake up.
In the quiet room where only her daughter’s breathing could be heard, Soura sat blankly staring toward the bed.
Instead of having the same eyesight as others, she sees what others cannot see.
That was Soura’s ability.
And now Soura was observing the emotions of Shan, who was dreaming.
In the dream made of glimpses of the future, Shan was happy.
Occasionally sadness and weariness crossed her face, but that was all.
Freedom, joy, fulfillment, love.
It looked like viewing a flower garden where such things bloomed in full splendor.
“What could be so wonderful.”
Soura scolded her sleeping daughter.
“I told you not to leave the forest, yet you stubbornly escaped into dreams.”
Soura murmured desolately and turned her head toward the quiet door outside.
“Come in, Anai.”
Anai, who usually served as Soura’s guard and followed her everywhere like a shadow, was keeping watch by her side today as well.
“Don’t worry about Shan, Anai. She’s just sleeping deeply.”
“Can she… wake up?”
Anai, now in her late teens, asked in a voice heavy beyond her years.
“She will.”
Soura answered quietly.
Inevitably, sadness also settled on Anai’s face.
Though she had the great strength to uproot and wield trees, she was utterly powerless before the fate of the two people most precious to her.
She was tormented by her inability to help either Soura, who had accepted her after she killed her parents unable to control her strength, or Shan, who had first extended her hand telling her to call her sister.
In the silence, Soura suddenly asked.
“You once said something, Anai.”
A bitter smile crossed Soura’s lips.
“You said that monstrous strength of yours seemed like a curse rather than a blessing. Perhaps you were right.”
“Chief.”
“My ability, your strength that knows no pain, and Shan’s ability to see her own future.”
Because the Chara Tribe had individuals with mysterious magical powers, they had been able to survive in this jungle until now.
That had been Soura’s deep pride in leading the tribe.
But now she only resented that power.
“Perhaps we are all sinners. Seeing how we’re being punished like this.”
Watching Shan’s emotions ripple with joy once more, Soura let out a deep sigh.
Until now, she had thought the price of her magic to see many things was her two eyes that had darkened early.
But that cost had been woefully insufficient, it seemed.
Soura finally realized this.
* * *
As the morning sun rose and the blue sky brightened.
Soura opened Shan’s door with hurried steps.
Shan, who had been sitting on the bed looking out the window, turned her head.
“Mother.”
With a face that had grown thin from not eating or drinking properly for days, Shan smiled.
“Good morning.”
Soura gripped the door handle with distant strength.
It was just a greeting, but she could feel it.
Though it was the same smiling face, in just a few days Shan seemed to have become a different person.
Bright but detached.
Like someone who had seen the end and returned.
“You seem to have seen many things.”
“Haha, I slept quite long, didn’t I?”
Her tone was languid, as if she had just taken a satisfying afternoon nap.
“It seems my ability has awakened once more. I feel like I can see much farther and more than before. Even without falling into sleep.”
“That’s…!”
“I know. It’s not such a good thing.”
Shan smiled bitterly.
“It’s probably because I’ve decided to sacrifice much more.”
“You really…”
Soura’s face contorted with anguish.
“I tried to listen to Mother’s words. Just avoid it, make a different choice. That’s what you said. And dying is scary too.”
Shan scratched her cheek.
“I cried for a long time. It’s ridiculous. They were things I hadn’t even had yet. But I was so sad and lonely as if I had lost everything, as if I was being left alone. I cried a lot. Then I fell asleep.”
“…How far did you see.”
“Everything. All of it.”
Shan’s answer was strange.
“And I realized something. I think I’m incredibly lucky, Mother.”
Her voice even carried an excited tone.
“Lucky? Even though you’re going to die?”
“But Mother, I was given the chance to choose. The opportunity to see beforehand, to feel, and to choose one of the two.”
Shan smiled with genuine happiness.
“Now I know. How much that person loves me, and how he smiles by my side.”
Even the steps he took stiffly, unable to hide his trembling, and the warmth when he intertwined his fingers with mine.
Everything remained vivid.
“I don’t know how many years I’ll be given, but I still want to make that person happy. I want to make him smile like that.”
Awakening from her long sleep, Shan had made her decision.
It was a choice that was absurdly easy and natural.
“I’m going, Mother.”
Because I fell in love with fate.
“I want to go, to that person’s side.”
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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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