The Immortal Duke’s Physician Is an Internist - Chapter 19

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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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“Hey! You’ve been wandering around all day and brought back only a single coin?”
Thwack! The boy crumpled under the kick to his stomach. His skeletal frame had no strength left to resist.
“Even a scrap of bread is wasted on you. A worthless brat who can’t earn his keep should drop dead!”
The man unleashed several more savage kicks, as if his rage refused to abate. Only when the boy lay completely motionless did the man finally spit and disappear into the shadows.
As the sun descended from its height, countless people passed before the alleyway.
Yet not a soul paid the slightest attention to the boy wedged beside the trash bin.
To make matters worse, rain began to fall. In the damp, suffocating air, the boy stared blankly upward.
‘I’m sorry, Shilo. I’m so sorry…….’
He had fled the Orphanage to earn medicine money for his ailing sister.
He’d wanted to return quickly. Wanted to cure her illness…….
It was then that the flickering candle of his ten-year-old life—already heavy with so much sorrow—was beginning to gutter out.
Splash. Someone entered the alleyway.
A man so tall his frame filled the boy’s entire field of vision.
Long, snow-white hair hung down his back. An eyepatch covered one eye. And……jewel-like, those gleaming violet irises.
“Hey, you alive?”
“…….”
“Dead, then.”
The man turned to leave faster than the boy expected. With what little strength remained, the boy seized the hem of his trousers.
“……P-please……save me…….”
“…….”
“I’ll…… I’ll do anything. Anything…….”
The man coldly wrenched his leg free from the boy’s grip. Then, as if irritated, he clicked his tongue once.
“Listen, boy. You shouldn’t throw around words like ‘I’ll do anything’ so carelessly. This world isn’t filled with kindness alone.”
“…….”
The boy’s head drooped. The man’s words cut colder than the chill of the pavement.
Watching the boy sag beneath the weight of despair, the man asked him something.
“So then, who did this to you?”
“……?”
“I asked who beat you.”
The boy hesitated for a moment.
The man who’d struck him was a notorious thug in these parts—one who gathered street children to pick pockets, and beat them viciously if they failed to meet his daily quota.
Moreover, he claimed to be on friendly terms with the local police. But what could this man possibly do about it?
The man prompted the hesitant boy.
“Come on. Give me a name.”
“B…… Billy.”
“Age, appearance, distinguishing marks?”
“Thirties…… tall…… has a lion tattoo on his arm.”
The man didn’t even respond. He simply strode away. Soon he vanished from the boy’s sight.
More time passed. The boy still lay there, still in pain, still hungry.
This must be the end…… he was thinking when he heard the same footsteps again.
“Get up.”
Opening his eyes, he saw the white-haired man. When the boy stared blankly, the man furrowed his brow and bent down. Suddenly the boy’s body lifted into the air.
“Let’s go.”
And so the boy left the alleyway cradled in the man’s arms.
Almost at once, the boy’s eyes went wide at what he saw.
Billy lay sprawled across the main road, foam flecking his mouth, his lion tattoo now a mass of gore.
“How……how did…….”
“I’ll spare you the details. But you—you said you’d do anything, didn’t you?”
People began to gather around Billy. At first they held their breath in shock, but soon they cursed him, throwing stones and spitting.
The boy watched the raucous crowd for a long moment, then nodded his head.
“……Yes.”
His words continued.
“I’ll do anything……anything at all. Truly, anything.”
“A fine answer.”
The man nodded. A small smile played at the corners of his mouth.
“From this moment on, you live for me and you die for me. In return, I will give you what you desire.”
The two walked for some time through the softly falling rain.
And ten years passed.
“Everain. In recognition of your remarkable service and loyalty, I grant you the name of Karseido.”
Everain, now a youth of twenty, bowed deeply. From his blue eyes shone a profound loyalty.
“Thank you, Your Grace. I shall live a life worthy of the noble Karseido estate.”
In the turbulent life of a street boy, it was a moment worth counting among his happiest.
* * *
In the days when the Immortal Duke wore an eyepatch and kept his hair long under the name Ricar Karseido—
he took in a small boy from the streets and brought him home.
And so Everain Karseido’s days, now his knight, fell into a schedule as rigid as it was simple.
“Breakfast, office work, training, lunch, office work, training, dinner, office work, sleep…. The occasional dawn training. Even a hamster would live a more varied life than this.”
I sighed and tucked the schedule Kairun had brought me into a drawer.
Based on the information I’d gathered from Kairun, I’d confirmed that Everain had come here in childhood under the same circumstances as in the Original Work.
‘If that’s the case, then Everain likely began colluding with the Dark Mage starting around age thirteen, just as in the original story…. But judging from the situation so far, there’s no guarantee that everything aligns perfectly with the source material.’
The year Everain turned thirteen.
In the Original Work, the Dark Mage makes contact with him and blackmails him by claiming to be protecting his sister, whom he’s abducted.
Wracked with guilt over having left his sister alone at the Orphanage, Everain shares the Duke’s secrets as they demand—but….
‘Everything goes to hell because the Heroine suddenly appears.’
Everain had developed feelings for the kind Heroine. Yet fundamentally, his sister was an existence incomparable to her.
“Bring us the Duke’s woman, and we’ll return your sister. A fair trade.”
Everain abducts the Heroine as the Dark Mage suggests, but is discovered by the Duke and ultimately slain.
However, Everain and the Dark Mage were hardly easy opponents.
‘There was a passage in the original work where Everain and the Dark Mage, working together, drove the Duke to the brink of death.’
Didn’t that mean that if the Swordsmanship prodigy Everain and the Dark Mage joined forces, they would gain a means to inflict harm upon the Duke’s body?
Of course, I didn’t want to get close to the Dark Mage if I could help it, but….
‘I can only survive if I find a way for the Duke to die.’
I still wavered, but my resolve had hardened.
“…. First, I need to verify whether Everain really is an Informant. And whether his sister is truly alive.”
—At least finding Everain’s sister would be a good deed, after all.
Murmuring to myself, I stood—and my eyes caught the Pocket Watch on the desk.
Looking at the timepiece frozen completely still, the Duke’s voice echoed in my mind.
“I wanted to apologize on behalf of all adults for your childhood.”
Having lived a life far from peaceful, I could say with certainty:
no matter how old someone was, there were few who offered such comfort so easily.
Which meant that once the Duke safely died….
‘I might never meet another person who would apologize to my life again.’
I stared at the watch for a long time, then placed it in the desk drawer.
‘What I have to do doesn’t change.’
* * *
At the same moment, in the Karseido Duke’s Office.
Kairun regarded his superior with an extremely troubled expression. Blashion swept his subordinate up and down with the eyes of a predator.
“You had the audacity to steal documents from my Study. Explain—why did you share Everain’s schedule with the Heroine?”
“That is… well….”
The aide racked his brain several times over, but couldn’t withstand the predatory gleam in his superior’s gaze.
In the end, he confessed as though self-destructing.
“F-Frencia mentioned… that she’d taken an interest in Everain. She asked if I could find out his schedule!”
Blashion’s furrowed brows lifted in surprise. Like Kairun, he hadn’t seen that coming.
“Your physician said this herself? That she’s developed an interest in Everain?”
“Yes. Ah, but she told me not to tell anyone about this….”
Once words left his lips, they were meaningless to take back—yet Kairun emphasized the secret all the same.
While his aide fretted nervously, Blashion’s mind had already wandered elsewhere entirely.
‘…. If someone you took a liking to rejects you, of course you’d feel sad, wouldn’t you?’
Blashion wanted to verify his hypothesis as soon as possible. To do so, he would need to make the physician cry.
After a moment’s thought, he straightened and issued an order immediately.
“Kairun. Contact the Wardrobe Room. Tell them to come as soon as possible…. No—tell them to come tomorrow without delay. However much they charge for expedited service, I don’t care.”
“Yes? Ah, understood. Are you having new garments tailored for yourself, sir?”
“Not for me. For a woman.”
“…. ?”
I knew this was a deeply inappropriate thought.
But Blashion was prepared to invest his money and authority without hesitation toward his purpose.
“What’s on Everain’s schedule tomorrow?”
“Preparatory training for an upcoming sortie, but….”
“Cancel it all.”
“Your Grace, I’m afraid I’m not following the full scope of your plan. What exactly are you scheming for tomorrow?”
Blashion answered.
“A date for the twenty-somethings.”

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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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