Thought It Was ‘The End’, Only to Return to a Changed Genre - Chapter 110

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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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Epilogue 2. Forget About Love, I’ll Just Make Money (1)

Before long, the wind had turned cool.

Lloyd, who was opening the window for ventilation, casually looked up at the sky.

The blue sky was so high it made his eyes sting.

It’s a good day to wash blankets.

He muttered without realizing it and chuckled.

He hadn’t done blanket washing for nearly a year now, but on days with good wind, his first thought was still that it was a waste.

Since entering the Blancarde Estate as a servant, Lloyd hadn’t done household chores directly. His main job was to dress in proper, luxurious clothes as a servant and pretend to be well-mannered while attending to others.

Sometimes he would request investigations from Lucian, and even more rarely receive orders from Shane, but most of his time was spent by Edelaine’s side.

Edelaine tried not to make Lloyd do menial tasks.

It had been that way since the day she brought the boy with her.

‘But then there’s no reason for me to be here.’

After all, she had taken him in under the pretext of making him a servant to keep by her side.

Lloyd was a common street vagrant.

He didn’t know who his parents were, and couldn’t remember how he ended up living on those streets.

Unluckily, he hadn’t died right after birth, and perhaps luckily, someone had taken him in and raised him.

There were many children in similar situations.

Some, like Lloyd, didn’t know where they came from, but most had been abandoned by their parents. Or their parents had died, leaving them alone.

“I miss my mom.”

“What’s that?”

“A mom is a mom, how do I explain that?”

“Don’t you know how to say it? You know but can’t explain it?”

“Well, just… someone warm who smells good?”

“The bakery owner is also warm and smells good.”

“But that’s an old man…”

Children in similar situations banded together and wandered around until they caught Lucian’s eye.

It wasn’t because of any special incident, but because around that time Lucian had started a business of taking in street children and selecting useful talent from them.

Lloyd was quickly put into the field.

There were many jobs only children could do. People naturally let their guard down around children and the elderly.

It wasn’t that he felt disillusioned. However, one day he made a childish mistake, and because he didn’t apologize for that mistake, he was kicked out to the streets.

Even being kicked out, he would be taken back in within a few days. Lloyd knew that Lucian had invested in him. If only to recover that investment, he wouldn’t be completely abandoned.

It was then that he met Edelaine.

Whatever her reason for extending that hand, Edelaine said she would raise the boy as a servant.

‘Then she should give me work to do as a servant. Not take care of me like a stray dog she picked up.’

Lloyd needed work to do by Edelaine’s side. Without even that, wouldn’t there be no reason for him to be there? However, Edelaine often seemed to forget that she had made him her servant.

Lloyd didn’t forget. That was the new pride Edelaine had given him.

When it was just Edelaine and him living together, they had to do all the household chores themselves.

Five years was enough time to form habits.

‘I had no manual skills, but I wasn’t bad at housework.’

When she said it looked strangely familiar, it was because of memories from her previous life.

‘A previous life.’

Who could have ever imagined such a thing?

Even Shane, who had no limits when it came to Edelaine, probably couldn’t have imagined this secret.

Was that all? They were even characters in a novel.

Edelaine knew everything about their lives, emotions, and even their endings.

Because of that, many things changed.

At least for Lloyd, the life Edelaine had changed for him was fortunate.

Without Edelaine, by now he would be living in a cold, damp underground, taking people’s lives.

He would have died without ever knowing the leisurely happiness of sunny places. He wouldn’t have even known that where he stood was a sticky pool of blood.

Shane and Saint Genevieve, and the families she had abandoned, might feel differently, but for Lloyd alone, every moment was fortunate.

When he thought that he might have taken Edelaine’s life with his own hands, his spine went cold and his insides felt like they were turning over. He would rather take his own life than do such a thing. The mere thought was horrifying.

Edelaine said she had died easily hundreds of times in her dreams.

Lloyd, Shane, and everyone else who learned the secret didn’t talk about that part, but no one had casually dismissed it either.

Edelaine had a tendency to speak lightly about difficult and painful matters.

The more casually it sounded, the more it meant she had suffered for a very long time, very much.

Very long. Very much.

Lloyd knew all of that.

*

The land where the two settled was remote countryside whose name they had never heard in their lives.

They had to take a ship, then a carriage for quite a while before finding a village worth settling in.

It was a foreign country, so the language didn’t work and naturally there was no one they knew.

“Why did you choose this place when you don’t even know the language?”

“I didn’t choose it, I just came wherever my feet led me.”

“…”

“I’m a bit impulsive.”

She spoke well for someone who had planned alone and faked her death.

“Well, for a place deliberately chosen, it’s terrible.”

The single-story house was so old it was on the verge of collapse.

There were more than a few places that needed fixing, and it seemed like it would be cheaper to tear it down and build anew.

Moreover, Edelaine had suffered serious injuries and needed treatment, but the rural village had no priest, let alone a doctor. There was talk of a witch who dealt with herbs living on the outskirts, but that was all.

Unlike Edelaine, who was calm, saying she had known this would happen and had gotten medicine from a big city in advance, Lloyd was anxious.

Because Edelaine, who suffered from high fever every night, could die at any moment.

To Lloyd’s eyes, Edelaine looked like paper that would tear if touched, but surprisingly, she endured well.

When Edelaine had somehow recovered, she said:

“Let’s divide the housework.”

“What?”

Lloyd unconsciously frowned.

What housework could a delicately raised young lady do?

However, Edelaine was stubborn. She insisted that it didn’t make sense for her to do nothing when they were living together.

Edelaine took charge of laundry, Lloyd took charge of cleaning.

The first day they interacted with neighbors was the day they tried to make something in the kitchen, attempting what they called cooking.

They had clearly only put in edible ingredients, but they were puzzled as to why such a strange substance had emerged, when neighbors who had smelled the odor came running and knocked on the door.

“I thought there was a fire.”

“It only smells burnt, what kind of cooking did you do?”

Edelaine and Lloyd had nothing to say even with ten mouths.

“This all happened because you couldn’t control the fire.”

“Even the parts that didn’t burn taste strange.”

“You ate that?!”

“You have to taste it to know what it’s like.”

“What if you get an upset stomach from eating that! Spit it out! Spit it out right now!”

“It’s fine. I already swallowed it.”

“Ah, really. I told you not to pick up and eat just anything.”

“When did you say that?”

“Just now!”

“And I don’t have a habit of picking up and eating just anything.”

“Honestly, what we made… didn’t look safe to eat. So that means you ate just anything.”

Edelaine insisted this was all Lloyd’s fault for buying eggplant. Lloyd was dumbfounded and replied that it was the spinach’s fault.

The neighbor who had been listening to the argument said.

“I’ll make meals for you, so just buy the ingredients.”

“…Thank you…”

“We’ll eat well.”

Edelaine knew how to be quite agreeable.

She never forgot to express gratitude and apologies at any time, and she smiled so warmly and pleasantly.

Even so, adapting to countryside life wasn’t easy.

With her bright platinum hair grown to her waist, spotlessly white and pale skin, delicate and slender figure, and elegant mannerisms, anyone could see she was a noble. To countryside people, nobles were like disasters that would bring misfortune if wrongly provoked.

Except for one neighbor who provided meals to Edelaine and Lloyd, they lived in isolation without interacting with anyone.

Together they tended a palm-sized vegetable garden, and occasionally went to a slightly larger village when they needed other ingredients.

In summer they soaked their feet in basins of water, and in winter they tried things like knitting. Of course, the knitting failed.

From age 12 to 17.

Edelaine often said she was sorry for making him live buried in the countryside with just her during that important period, but Lloyd was incredibly happy with that life.

There wasn’t a spot in the nearly collapsing house that his hands hadn’t touched.

It was cozy, decorated with charming little items.

The crops grown in the palm-sized vegetable garden were unsightly but fresh and sweet.

A home, living with family.

To Lloyd, that house was more perfect than any utopia.

If he had lived with his mother, whose face and even warmth he couldn’t remember, it might have been like this.

Perhaps he had been secretly envying even children abandoned by their parents.

Though it was a sentiment he would never voice aloud.

‘Only a 6-year age difference…’

If she found out he was thinking of her like a mother, he might die of embarrassment.

For a long time, he thought Edelaine couldn’t have been happy. Feeling sorry and regretful about that, he acted even more gruffly.

Lloyd knelt down beside the vegetable garden that Edelaine tended.

This still humble vegetable garden felt like traces of those days to Lloyd.

It seemed like proof that those times hadn’t been bad for Edelaine either.

“Is now really better though.”

It doesn’t seem like it.

“It might not be for Edelaine.”

“Saint Genevieve.”

“But it’s fortunate for us.”

Lloyd looked up at the Saint who had become Pope.

Genevieve smiled brightly as she watched Lloyd, who kept his distance with an unrelenting wariness.

“You don’t know, do you. What those 5 years without Edelaine were like.”

Since she took only you when she left.

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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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