The Baby Who Regressed Refuses Childcare - Chapter 284

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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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Side Story. Hiana and Annellia ⑴

“Sister!”

At the voice that suddenly reached her, Hiana raised her head.

Through the wide-open tent, she could see a young girl running with a dragonfly net in her hand.

“Sister, I caught a dragonfly! It’s huge!”

She was staring blankly at that sight when—

“Doctor?”

At the voice from across her, Hiana snapped back to attention and looked straight ahead.

The woman sitting in front of her wore a worried expression.

“You stopped speaking mid-sentence. So you’re saying my child’s cold isn’t pneumonia or some serious illness, right…?”

Hiana quickly smiled.

“Yes. If you just give him the syrup I prescribed consistently, he’ll get better soon.”

Relief crossed the woman’s face as she received the medicine bottle.

She soon spoke with an expression of overwhelming gratitude.

“How can I keep receiving precious medicine for free like this? You never even charge consultation fees.”

“Please don’t feel burdened. Just as I mentioned before…”

“I know! I just shouldn’t spread rumors anywhere, right? If you get punished for running an unlicensed clinic, you won’t be able to come here again.”

“That’s right. You understand perfectly.”

“Oh my~ Why worry about such things? Just trust me!”

The woman who had exclaimed this stood up from her seat.

She bowed to Hiana several times before leaving the tent.

Another patient who had been waiting outside came in.

“Elder, you’re here again?”

It was an old man well over eighty who had also visited her last month.

“You mustn’t keep drinking cold water. Even if it’s troublesome…”

Hiana prescribed herbal powder good for stomach pain and digestive medicine to the old man.

After the old man left, four more patients came to see her.

By the time she finished treating the last patient—

“Hiana.”

A familiar face entered the tent.

It was Kilios and Lewis, who had been out at the nearby marketplace during the day.

“You look busy? Still not done with work?”

Hiana answered while organizing the items scattered on the makeshift desk.

“No, I just finished everything.”

Lewis came over to help put the items into boxes.

Kilios, as if accustomed to it, gathered the patient chairs and waiting area chairs and stacked them neatly.

He let out a long yawn.

“We should start heading out soon if we want to cross over to the south. Let’s hurry.”

“What about the broken cargo wagon wheel?”

“Jas fixed it. He said he repaired it completely.”

A short exclamation escaped from Hiana’s lips.

‘I see.’

He had been doing something outside the tent all day, and it seemed her perceptive second brother had indeed fixed the wheel.

Hiana folded the examination table in half, leaned it against a pillar, then stretched her stiff back.

The sun was setting beyond the mountains.

Lewis approached and asked.

“Little sister. Did you have many patients today?”

“Not too many. You know too, brother. Ever since Annel… I mean, Her Majesty the Empress ascended the throne, the number of impoverished patients has decreased significantly.”

Hiana had started running the clinic when she was eighteen years old.

It was around nine years after the Longton family disappeared and she had been hiding with her three brothers.

As she reflected on that time, memories from even earlier naturally came to mind.

Philomena’s death, Duke Longton’s death.

A servant setting fire to the empty duke’s mansion had already become a distant memory from long ago.

Hiana had been nine years old then.

The memory of that day when the manor was engulfed in flames was still vivid in her mind.

Originally, she had intended to disappear from the world along with the Longton family that day.

“Little sister, what are you doing?”

Just then, Jas entered the nearly organized tent.

His face was covered with grease stains.

“Did you hear that I fixed the cargo wagon wheel? Brother, did you tell Hiana?”

Kilios, who was lifting three boxes at once, let out a sigh.

“How old are you to still childishly boast about such things, Jas?”

“If you do something praiseworthy, you should be praised for it. I like hearing our little sister’s praise the most.”

Hiana burst into laughter seeing Jas massaging her shoulders.

The Longton princes, who had been fifteen, seventeen, and twenty years old, were now all over thirty.

“Brothers. Don’t you think time passes really fast?”

When she spoke nostalgically, Jas’s eyes widened.

Kilios asked with a smile on his lips.

“Why suddenly? Do you feel regretful?”

“It’s just, looking back, it feels like it all passed by so quickly…”

“I’m fine with it. Because I was able to spend all that time together with you all.”

Lewis, who had been drinking water, made a “pfft!” sound as he pulled his mouth away from the cup.

Jas also looked at Kilios with a disgusted expression.

But Kilios continued awkwardly.

“I’m being sincere, so why are you acting like that? If even one of you hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have been able to endure it.”

Hiana closed her mouth.

She felt like she knew what Kilios was thinking at this moment.

Eighteen years ago, on the day the manor burned down.

It was Kilios who had pulled Hiana out of the smoke-filled room where she sat alone.

“Hiana! What on earth are you doing here!”

Kilios’s face when he burst into the room was already blackened with soot.

With flames spreading to the threshold and scorching heat that seemed to melt one’s body.

In the middle of the room flickering with red light, Hiana had said.

“Leave me alone.”

What expression Kilios had worn then was hazy in her memory.

He seemed to have looked dazed, then sad, then finally furious.

“Hiana Longton! Does your life end just because the family falls? You’re still only…!”

“My name is Hiana Calbey. Not Hiana Longton.”

But Hiana couldn’t help it either.

The daughter of a back-alley commoner who got drunk every day.

A pest who had snuck in to destroy the family.

That was who she really was.

“I was never, not even for a single moment from the beginning, part of your family…”

At some point, Hiana herself had forgotten.

Who she was, where she came from.

But not anymore.

Because Philomena, who had changed her from ‘Hiana Calbey’ to ‘Hiana Longton,’ was dead.

Philomena had achieved her revenge.

She killed Lambert Longton and turned her back on the world herself.

In truth, her ending could have been better than this.

If Hiana hadn’t betrayed her.

If she hadn’t cunningly led her to death.

However, Hiana had abandoned this life’s Philomena to help Annellia.

That woman who might have been a villain to someone, but was a benefactor to me.

“I’m not your sister. I’m, I’m…”

Left alone after everything ended, Hiana was nothing at all.

The name Calbey she received at birth had been abandoned long ago.

She couldn’t live up to the name Longton either.

Looking back, life had never fit her from the beginning, like clothes that weren’t hers.

So she wanted to disappear.

Like Mother who left as if falling asleep in bed during her childhood.

Like Philomena who met her end after achieving revenge.

She thought that if she did so, the sins thickly staining her hands would disappear along with her.

“…You’re my sister.”

At that very moment, Kilios’s voice shook her mind.

“You’re just another victim caught up in Father’s karma.”

Hiana found herself looking into Kilios’s eyes without realizing it.

At that moment, Kilios’s pupils were trembling sadly.

“If we must find a perpetrator, if we must name a terrible bystander, that would be me.”

“…”

“Not you…”

That day she learned.

The fact that the Longton Princes had also remembered everything that had happened.

Hiana couldn’t tell what was causing the tears flowing down her cheeks.

Whether it was because of the smoke filling the room, or because of guilt.

Or because of her despicable self who wanted to live again at just a few words like those.

“Hiana? Let’s go!”

She snapped out of her thoughts with a start.

The three people who had neatly organized the temporary tent were calling for her.

“Coming now.”

Hiana moved her steps as if entranced.

Lewis and Jas loaded luggage onto the large cargo wagon, and Kilios held the reins.

It was the moment she was about to climb onto the wagon.

“Huff, huff! Oh my, Doctor!”

Someone came running breathlessly from afar.

It was the young woman who had gotten medicine for her child’s cold during the day.

“This is terrible! They say some kind of wanted criminal has hidden in our village!”

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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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