Raising the Grand Duke of the North as a Farmer Behind Dad’s Back - Chapter 1

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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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Episode 1
Again.
Another child had died.
“…….”
Dantelion held his cooling daughter close and bowed his head.
Protector of the Goddess.
Apostle of the sacred light.
The most noble, the mightiest Holy Knight of the Empire.
Dantelion Klein bore all these titles.
His vast Holy Power was proof of divine love, and his lofty, unbending conviction was the pride of mankind itself.
Yet now.
“Why…….”
The holiest of knights knelt before him, a figure more fallen than any demon.
Eyes desperate enough to curse God itself. His Holy Power utterly corrupted.
“Why was she only twelve this time…….”
His vacant eyes traced numbly across the child’s cheek.
Why couldn’t she live to sixteen in this life either?
Haniel. My daughter. My child. My treasure.
“……Again.”
He clenched his teeth.
“Father will try again, little one.”
This time, he would find the cure. He had to.
Whiiiiiii—
White light rose like smoke from his body.
Then a massive Regression circle appeared.
As if to punish the Holy Knight who had broken Taboo, wild rain and thunder crashed against the windows.
Bang! Bang! Bang, bang bang bang bang!
“Dantelion Klein! Stop at once! Won’t you stop? Damn it!”
“Grand Duke Bertuus! Please withdraw your sword!”
He felt someone shouting from beyond the door, but his ears had long since ceased to hear.
Black blood spilled from his mouth. The pain piercing through his entire body was like punishment itself. Yet he did not stop.
There existed in this world something more precious than his wretched life or his meager faith. If awakening to that truth was his crime, then so be it.
“Soon we’ll meet again, my princess…….”
This time, Father will reach you faster.
In agony as his heart was torn from his chest, Dantelion smiled faintly.
Thus his ninety-eighth life came to an end.
*
Dantelion stood atop a hill and slowly opened his eyes.
Everything around him was loud.
“Bread! Bread! It’s mine!”
This was the slums—Z District.
Below, he could see the quarantined poor struggling.
They flailed their hands beyond the containment line, desperately trying to catch the bread flying toward them.
Utter chaos. A living hell.
Dantelion stood still, enduring the waves of headache that assailed him. Why was he here?
“Pang…….”
At that moment, in the haze of his vision, a small child’s form came into focus.
“Me too, please give me bread……!”
The child was jostled between the adults, waving tiny hands desperately.
But for a child not even reaching an adult’s waist to catch flying bread was no easy feat.
The child hopped about for a long time. Then, by chance, she spotted a single piece of bread that had fallen to the ground.
The moment he saw her small back as she clutched the bread smeared with dirt and filth and ran away.
“……!”
Dantelion snapped to attention as if struck by lightning.
‘Haniel!’
“Ugh.”
The ninety-ninth life had begun.
Memories from the previous cycle crashed down upon him all at once, violent and overwhelming.
In suffocating agony, he clenched his trembling jaw. Even staggering was a luxury he could not afford now.
Like a madman, he sprinted down the hillside.
He should have come to his senses earlier.
But the Regression point was always at this moment, and with each cycle, it became increasingly difficult to regain consciousness.
He forced open the sealed door to Z District and tore through the maze-like alleys in desperation.
And finally.
At the end of some dark, filthy alley.
“Sob…….”
He found his six-year-old daughter curled up and weeping alone.
The child looked even worse than before. The bread she had clutched so carefully was gone.
“The bread……, sob, my bread…… I hadn’t even tasted it, I only smelled it…….”
Dantelion knew why.
The bread she’d picked up had been snatched away by the neighborhood children.
“Little one.”
He forced his expression to remain calm and took slow, measured steps forward.
Every part of him wanted to rush over and hold her, but he couldn’t afford to startle her.
“Sniff, whimper, huh……?”
At the sound of a stranger, Haniel lifted her head.
“So you were here.”
“Sniff, w-who…….”
Dantelion lowered himself and forced a smile, as gentle as he could manage.
But the fists he kept hidden behind his back had gone white with tension, trembling uncontrollably.
“I’m a man who came looking for his lost daughter.”
“Sob…… Y-yes?”
“You have a pretty star mark on the back of your neck, don’t you? That’s proof you’re my daughter. Have you ever seen it?”
He steadied his voice.
He spoke the lines he had repeated dozens of times before.
‘This time, surely.’
Your father will save you this time, no matter what.
The ninety-ninth.
This was their first meeting.
Haniel was suffering from an incurable disease.
The name was Mucolessness—a condition in which one was born unable to hold Holy Power or magical force, and one day the heart simply stopped. It was a curse as much as a disease.
There was no known cause, no cure, no recorded cases of recovery.
In truth, Haniel had been a tool to him. He had created her out of a sense of obligation—the need for an heir to inherit his Holy Power.
As befitted a First-Grade Holy Knight, producing a child with powerful Holy Power was itself a form of service to God.
So he had sought out a noblewoman whose interests aligned with his, married her, and she bore the child before departing to a distant foreign land with her payment and new identity, as the contract stipulated.
Up to that point, nothing had seemed amiss.
The one thing he had not anticipated…….
“She’s quite small, isn’t she.”
“Whimper!”
He never imagined that this tiny creature would shake his entire world.
He was bewildered—as though he had been cast into a world entirely different from anything he had known before.
But before he could even begin to explore that feeling…….
Tragically, the child met with an accident.
On the way to the Holy Temple for her first birthday blessing, she fell off a cliff into the abyss—or so they said. Her guards and attendants had died instantly.
Dantelion returned from a month of monster subjugation and heard the news in a daze.
“……I see.”
He searched the entire gorge to find her body. But he could not.
It was strange, but he was not a man given to wide swings of emotion.
He composed himself quickly and returned to his ordinary life. He had only seen the child a handful of times over the course of a year, busy as he was.
Just…….
That tiny baby must have suffered so very much.
Why had God not watched over her?
Had his prayers been insufficient? He would often fall into thought over such things.
Then, years later, he learned of a miracle—a child bearing the Klein Ducal House’s mark, alive in Z District.
He went at once, drawn as if possessed.
And there.
When he found Haniel weeping alone.
When he beheld that still-small, fragile little back.
‘This time…….’
Dantelion was seized by a feeling beyond words.
‘This time, I swear I’ll protect you.’
Only then did he realize.
He had always longed for and loved his daughter more than anyone else.
This child he had found again.
She had become his entire world.
And yet he was supposed to lose her again—to a mere illness?
It was unbearable.
Shamed by the thought that he had condemned his precious daughter to the slums and, worse, left her to die of a wretched disease, he trembled.
So he broke the Taboo. The absolute human Taboo of Regression.
Dantelion had always prized discipline and restraint over his own desires, yet he did not hesitate.
He searched the Holy Temple’s forbidden archives for the Book of Regression, poured his Holy Power into it, and rewound time itself.
But Haniel died in the second life as well. Dantelion could no longer stop. From that moment, his clock began turning backward infinitely.
Poison from monsters corroded his skin, his limbs withered, his eyes and ears grew blind and deaf—none of it mattered.
Whenever he heard of an Elixir, he would rush to find it. Sword in hand, he would break things and break himself, stumbling forward in tatters to obtain the medicine and force it down his daughter’s throat.
But the child died.
She died each time with the same face. No medicine and no treatment ever worked.
He became furious.
Why?
Why must my daughter alone die?
Does God truly exist? If so, why is He so indifferent to our suffering?
With each Cycle that passed—dozens of them—he felt something inside him crumble further. It was likely the faith that had once been stronger than anything.
And so, now, at the 99th Cycle.
Two years had already passed since he brought the child home after their 99th reunion.
‘My Holy Power is… increasingly tainted.’
Dantelion walked swiftly down the corridor, a silver helm in his hand.
‘Even with the Purification Agent, the amount of usable Holy Power in this life will definitely be less.’
He knew his Holy Power was being corrupted as punishment for breaking the Taboo, but he could not stop. Now he could no longer even estimate how corrupted it had become.
‘For now… it’s fine. I can endure.’
He stared into empty space with hollow eyes.
‘Still, this Cycle isn’t a bad one.’
He had a good feeling about it. Haniel seemed unusually healthy this time around.
Of course, he did not let his guard down. She could still suddenly die at twelve, just as she had before.
“Dantelion! There you are. The Dragon Legion has attacked the Northern Region again. Bertuus is moving to counter them… wait, are you deploying?”
“Yes. I’ll go to the Northern Region myself.”
“What? But the army isn’t fully mobilized yet—it’s too dangerous to go alone!”
“I need to extract the Dragon’s core while it’s still alive. We didn’t obtain nearly enough last time.”
“…What are you—Dantelion!”
This time, he would succeed.
“Papa!”
Just as he stepped outside, a small child came running from somewhere, her rigid expression instantly softening.
“Haniel? What are you doing here… shouldn’t our little princess still be asleep?”
She hung from his waist, laughing with a brightness like dawn. Silver hair that matched his own. Adorable pink eyes.
“Happy birthday, Papa!”
The child held out a piece of paper she had carefully decorated with ribbon.
“Here, a present!”
Ah, had it come to that already?
Dantelion bent down and took the drawing from his daughter.
‘This Cycle…’
A lumpy, round brown shape.
‘A horse drawing. I thought she’d been playing well with the pony lately…’
“Ta-da! Potato Haniel and Potato Papa!”
“Of course it’s potatoes. I had a feeling it would be—and they do look delicious. Thank you, my dear princess.”
“Ehehe!”
He lifted her into his arms, and Haniel rubbed her round cheeks against him. It was warm.
He held the child close and strode toward the bedroom, though his mind was somewhat urgent—he couldn’t help noticing her thin slippers.
As they turned into the corridor, the child whispered something secret.
“Papa, you know what? I have something to tell you.”
“What is it? Do you want something?”
“Um, it’s not that…”
There was a time when he had wondered about that.
‘What if in this life I come to love this child a little less?’
But…….
“Thank you for running to find Haniel that day.”
“…….”
“Lately I’m happy every single day, you know? Like, like I’ve eaten ten cream buns—I’m just so incredibly happy!”
What foolish hope that was.
Love renewed itself with each cycle, and he was bound helplessly to its infinity.
“Dad, I love you. I like you more than bread now!”
How could he possibly lower this child into a cold coffin?
‘Little one, don’t die.’
Please don’t leave your father behind.
I don’t yet know what beautiful flowers you’ll bloom, what sturdy grain you’ll bear.
Can’t you show me just once what your tomorrow looks like?
“Yes. I love you too, my princess.”
So this time, without fail.
No matter what price I must pay.
‘I will save you, Father.’
Blackened Holy Power clawed into his heart.
And years later.
Dantelion Klein lost the child again.
It didn’t matter that he’d gathered every core from the Dragon Legion. The Elixir from the Western master, the Heart of the Deep Sea from the Southern depths, the Golden Root from the Eastern plains—nothing in this world held any power against it.
“…….”
In this cycle, Haniel was only ten years old.
Tears of blood streamed from her bloodshot eye, and the cheek pressed against his was no longer warm.
“……Again.”
He held the child’s cold body tight with one arm. Black blood surged up his throat.
“Dad will try again, my princess…….”
Crackle-crackle-crackle-crackle-
Once more.
The world’s time rolled backward.
And I, Haniel.
“This……what is this…….”
Watched all of this from the bosom of God.
[ Do you see? This is Dantelion Klein’s sin. ]
“What in the world is all this——?!”
I was appalled.

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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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