Male Lead Is Obsessed With My Health - Chapter 80

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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 80

My mouth sealed shut as if glued.
“Hmm? Try calling me Dad.”
Emergency Quest.
Call the man you’ve seen four times “Dad”!
“…….”
“…….”
Silence descended once more.
Halbern, his eyebrows drooping in disappointment, launched a face attack on me.
“You won’t call me?”
“…….”
Ugh.
Honestly, this was a crisis.
With a face like that, I’d want to do anything he asked.
But…….
‘The word “Dad” just won’t come out.’
I acknowledged he was my biological father, and I held no resentment toward the fact that he was my father, but I simply didn’t want to call him “Dad” and cling to him. Was that it?
As I narrowed my eyes, Halbern, who had been studying me carefully with his chin resting on his hand, suddenly burst into laughter.
The laughter was so clear and refreshing, so boyish, that it made him appear younger than his actual age.
“You’re cute. You don’t take after me at all.”
“……?”
Was that an insult?
I was deliberating whether this was a moment to take offense when Halbern, who had been studying me openly, evaluated me as if appraising a painting.
“Your eyes.”
“…….”
“They’re beautiful.”
Well. Yes. Thank you.
Maybe he wasn’t as bad a person as I thought, like Mehren said?
Anyone who complimented my eyes was a good person.
“Your eyes are beautiful too, sir.”
“Sir.”
Halbern burst out laughing.
I’d thought the same thing last time, but this man really did laugh a lot. What was so funny?
“Is it because you hate calling me Dad?”
“It’s not that I hate it…….”
“Is it uncomfortable?”
“It is uncomfortable, but…….”
My stammering seemed to strike my biological father as hilarious, and he continued to laugh.
Because of that, I couldn’t bring myself to call him Dad.
“So.”
“……?”
“I’m curious why Mehren became your mother. Are you planning to tell me?”
There was nothing grand about it, but I didn’t particularly want to explain.
“It’s a secret.”
“Creating secrets already—I suppose that’s very Halbern of you.”
When he asked me to tell, he wasn’t pushing the issue at all. He really was a strange man.
His hand gently stroking my hair was tender too. I wouldn’t have thought him capable of such delicate control of strength.
‘Halbern…….’
An old question I’d buried resurfaced in my mind.
Why had House Halbern fallen after Arelin’s death? Why had Mehren left, and why did Halbern appear as a villain at the story’s end?
What circumstances lay behind it all?
I still couldn’t find the answer.
If I continued to live, would I eventually learn the truth? Or would I lose the opportunity to know, forever?
Perhaps that’s why I became curious about this man.
“Why did you never come to see me? Not once?”
The hand stroking my hair stilled for a moment.
His warm expression hardened briefly. His transparent eyes grew dark again, and his lowered lashes trembled with unease.
“I thought it was because I hated myself.”
I hadn’t voiced it, but I’d vaguely thought as much.
“But if it’s not that, why didn’t you come? Not even once?”
I hadn’t particularly wanted to see him, but still, sometimes I’d wondered. Why didn’t he come? Did he dislike me that much?
That blank space in my life—a question mark I’d learned to ignore even as I couldn’t completely banish him from my existence, as if he mattered and yet didn’t.
His hand moved again. With a touch so tenderly persistent, stroking my hair, he answered with a resigned, quiet murmur.
“I was afraid it would become difficult.”
“What would?”
“That I might want to kill you.”
“What?”
What did I just hear?
I blinked in surprise, and warmth spilled into the eyes that met mine.
“That I might kill you.”
“…….”
“Unintentionally.”
Despite the content—which amounted to a death threat—his voice held no inflection. I was momentarily thrown into confusion by the emotionless, understated voice and his tender gaze.
What? Did he mean he wanted to kill me? That he would kill me? That he was threatening to kill me?
And he claims he doesn’t dislike me?!
My biological father gazed at my shocked expression and offered a bitter smile.
Wait, you just made a death threat—why are you making that face?!
“Right now—do you want to kill me?”
Halbern shook his head.
A firm denial.
But even so, the anxiety kindled in me didn’t fade. Especially given that there was no trust between us to begin with!
“Daughter.”
If he hadn’t called out to me so gently just then, I would have fled.
In a voice so sweet and tender, he whispered to me like a priest reciting absolute truth.
“I could do anything for you.”
The violet eyes holding me were so sorrowful, so achingly sad it seemed almost like weeping, that I could tell—if nothing else—that these words were sincere.
“Let’s go to your mother.”
As if there was nothing more to say, Halbern picked me up in his arms.

* * *

I was in trouble.
Or rather, the one in trouble was Dad?
Mehren, arms crossed, glared at us sideways.
“Why is my lord bringing Arelin here?”
“Our daughter wanted to see her mother, dear.”
A fountain pen flew through the air.

* * *

Halbern Manor, sometime in the past.
In the landscape of the manor, its colors more faded than she remembered, a slightly older Arelin lay.
Cough, cough.
When the dry cough seized her, her small hand instinctively covered her mouth—blood stained her palm.
Arelin’s cheeks were deathly pale with the signs of sickness.
‘You should prepare yourself mentally.’
‘There isn’t much time left…….’
Among the physicians speaking their grim diagnoses, Mehren—looking more haggard than ever—furrowed her brow in an expression of despair.
The mysterious medicine that came from the Imperial Palace no longer helped Arelin’s condition.
It was far too late when she realized that someone had been stealing the medicine during several of Arelin’s episodes.
Mehren, wracked with inexplicable guilt, clung to the communication device. The direct line to the Northern Castle brought no reply from her lord.
‘Come back. You have to see your daughter’s face at least once before she dies.’
When it connected just once, Mehren informed him of Arelin’s critical condition and urged his return.
Halbern put it off, saying he had matters to attend to.
‘Damn it, what could possibly be more important than coming to see your dying daughter’s face?!’
She prayed for the connection again and again, devoted all her efforts to Arelin’s recovery, but Mehren’s struggles amounted to nothing.
In the end, as the child asked her to hold her hand, Mehren held it—and for the first time, she felt her own helplessness.
Arelin died.
In her own hands, the lovely, beloved child she had raised simply slipped away.
‘……Arelin.’
Mehren, who had always believed herself to be a rational person, learned that day just how emotional and irrational she could be.
Arelin’s death felt entirely like her own responsibility. It made no sense, yet it was her fault.
Most of all, she could not forgive Halbern.
When she saw Halbern appear at the funeral, arriving far too late, Mehren’s patience shattered.
‘Why did you come now?! Why are you only coming now?!’
Bitter rage boiled within her.
‘Was coming even once so difficult? She was your daughter. Your daughter, whom you carelessly abandoned to me and left. Does this situation make any sense to you?’
The lord offered no excuses. He simply stood there, looking down at the small child who had grown cold.
Though his beauty had impressed all of the Imperial Capital and he bore multiple wounds despite being among the empire’s strongest, Mehren saw none of it.
‘I’m sick of your irresponsibility.’
‘Mehren.’
‘Let’s stop. No—I’ll stop.’
Mehren was exhausted. And she despised the man who had brought her to this moment.
The loyalty and faith she had harbored for him faded when the small child drew her last breath.
‘Live however you wish from now on.’
A bond begun when she was six years old, following him thoughtlessly from the street, ended with the twenty-six-year-old Mehren’s unilateral severance.
‘Let’s never see each other again.’
Mehren left Halbern Manor, leaving behind her position as proxy, her title, her name, and all she possessed—taking only the wages she had earned over twenty years.
Halbern never tried to stop her, and he fell apart.
And so, on a winter’s day,
Halbern disappeared from the manor.
Various rumors about the missing lord circulated quietly through the capital.

* * *

I woke but remained dazed, blinking blankly.
I seemed to have had some kind of strange dream.
“Just my imagination?”
No matter how hard I tried to recall it, the memory was too hazy to grasp anything.
Only the pattern on the back of my hand, which had been quiet for a while, was unusually luminous, and I grew anxious that someone might notice.
“There’s no Stalker, so why is this glowing?”
Now that I thought about it, I couldn’t see it.
Trying to judge whether that was good or bad, I concluded that whatever worked was fine, and I was about to enjoy another peaceful day when—
“Arelirin, help me!”
An uninvited guest had arrived.

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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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