IBGF 4

A horrific pain wraced my entire body.

Even if my whole body were sliced to pieces with knives, it couldn’t possibly hurt more than this. When I was hit by the car, or when I was struck in the back of the head and stabbed in the back, it hadn’t hurt this much. I couldn’t even fathom the reason why I had to endure such severe pain. It just hurt. Yet, even while hurting like crazy, I couldn’t even let out a scream.

Is this the kind of agony everyone tastes when they die? To be completely honest, I felt so aggrieved I thought I’d go crazy. Frankly speaking, what did I do wrong to deserve this kind of treatment? It felt like my only crime was living harder than anyone else, and the reward I got in return was two deaths.

Literally, a sudden, tragic demise. And both times, as I unjustly lost my life, I couldn’t even manage to spit out any proper last words. The hit-and-run driver, and those nameless assassin bastards who struck the back of my head. If I had just been able to hurl a satisfying curse at these scumbags before closing my eyes, my boiling rage wouldn’t be this intense.

Tsk, are you spacing out again? With focus this lacking…

On top of hearing agony-inducing pain, now some ghost-like mumbling was ringing in my ears. I was already on the verge of losing my mind; if I could, I wanted to hurl the most vehement curse words I could muster.

“You fucking bastards!”

Right. Just like this…

“······?”

Having barked out the abuse with great vigor, I realized something was strange. I was supposed to be dead, so how could I yell with such fiery strength?

“Young Master, no matter how much you dislike your lessons, you mustn’t shout so ungracefully. What are those meaningless words supposed to mean?” “Huh······?”

A stern-looking middle-aged man was looking at me with an absurd expression. As he began his lecture, a dumbfounded reaction slipped out of me involuntarily.

“Did my words displease you that much? But you are turning twelve, and it is a problem that you still cannot read Latin properly with any satisfactory proficiency. When everyone else is starting to look forward to entering the Collège, falling behind like this…” “Huh?”

For some reason, I had a vague recollection of hearing a similar remark before. Understandably so, because the man in front of me was the very tutor I had first laid eyes on the moment I reincarnated yesterday.

He had definitely complained about my slow progress despite being twelve years old and retreated just like before.

“It seems difficult to continue the lesson today, so I shall take my leave. And do not just play around every day; apply yourself to your studies.” “Huh? W-Wait. What is going on here?”

It wasn’t a question thrown at anyone. It was a pure self-talk, mired in confusion and bewilderment.

The tutor walked out blankly, just like before. Left alone, I stood dazed inside the room and looked around my surroundings.

“I’m going crazy. What on earth is happening?”

Just a moment ago, it had definitely been dusk. Reflexively, I checked the back of my head and my spine, but they were pristine, without a single stitched mark.

“Well… if I had wounds bleeding profusely, the tutor wouldn’t have reacted like that.”

At the very least, he would have had to ask if my body was okay. Before that, there was no way I could be walking around completely fine after suffering such severe injuries.

The future action plan I had written in Hangul yesterday was also nowhere to be seen.

“Is it a dream?”

I had no choice but to entertain that possibility. The fact that I had reincarnated in the first place was an undeniable reality. Then, while taking lessons, I must have nodded off from sheer boredom and had a ridiculous, vivid dream.

Thinking about it that way, it should make sense… but it didn’t.

This wasn’t some joke; if it were a simple bad dream, those vivid sensations of pain wouldn’t have lingered. It felt as though the feeling from back then was still vividly etched into my head and back. Besides, what on earth was that horrific pain I felt right before opening my eyes just now? No matter how bad a bout of sleep paralysis was, feeling that kind of agony in a sleepy daze made no sense.

“Right, the snack.”

If my memory served me right, the maid would bring in a snack shortly. I even remembered the menu. It was definitely brioche, a traditional French bread. Specifically, it was shaped like a rectangular brioche Nanterre served with cheese on the side. While brioche was common, it was a different story when it was this specific.

Sure enough, following a cautious knock, the maid entered carrying a snack and hot milk.

“Young Master, I will leave your snack here.” “Oh, right. Thanks for your hard work.”

I nodded and took a deep breath. After calming my mind for a couple of minutes, I slowly turned my gaze to check the snack the maid had left behind.

Are you kidding me? The menu didn’t differ by a single hair from the snack in my memory. Not only the type of food, but even the shapes of the plate and cup were identical.

How was I supposed to accept this absurd situation?

For a split second, I almost fell into a panic, but I calmed myself down and retraced the situation. Though I said so, I was someone who had carved out my own life from long before I even came of age, right up until the moment I died. To maintain a living, I had done every conceivable part-time job, tutoring, and student labor position available. It’s a bit sad to call it a qualification, but at least when it comes to adaptability and survival instinct, I was confident against anyone.

First, the most important thing right now was to objectively analyze my current situation. Fortunately, because it was a trope I had seen quite a lot indirectly, I was able to deduce the answer before long.

If we’re talking possibilities, it was either a prophetic dream… or, naturally, that. Regression.

Given my current state, I had to consider both possibilities. It felt too vivid to be a prophetic dream, but since such premonitions might exist, jumping to conclusions was forbidden. My personal philosophy was always that considering the worst-case scenario was better than hoping for the best, so I decided to keep the possibility of a prophetic dream open for now.

The reason a prophetic dream was worse for me than regression was simple. If this was merely a preview of a death that would happen today, it meant there was no next chance. In other words, if I actually died subsequently, my life would likely end right there.

No, considering the worst-case scenario, regression wasn’t all that different. Even if I died and regressed, there was no guarantee that I could keep doing so forever. Perhaps regressing from yesterday’s death was a one-time deal. Frankly speaking, starting out with two lives was already an absurd cheat code.

Whether I had two lives, three lives, or perhaps an infinite number of them was something I couldn’t know without dying. However, I didn’t have even an ounce of desire to experiment with my life by dying.

This was my life, and nobody else’s. I had to mobilize all my capabilities as tightly as possible to ensure I never went through an experience like that again.

Though I should call it a misfortune amidst fortune, it wasn’t as if there were no positive elements at all. Perhaps due to the shock of dying or the lingering pain from moments ago, the mist that had been hanging hazily over my head felt lighter.

Thanks to that, a considerable amount of memories—if not all of them—surfaced. For instance, the name of the maid who had just brought the snack was Melissa. And I could recall the grim reality that my background was, to put it mildly, far from good.

Why had I never heard the name Louis-Christian de France in my past life? It was simple. The name Louis-Christian de France was never officially bestowed by the House of Bourbon.

I was the son of Louis Ferdinand, the eldest son of the reigning King Louis XV and the Dauphin of France. The problem was that I was not born of a legitimate wife.

Actually, it wasn’t unusual for royals in the House of Bourbon to keep mistresses or concubines. In fact, it would have been stranger if a male of the House of Bourbon—the very embodiment of debauchery—didn’t keep a mistress.

However, my father, Louis Ferdinand, was a man with unusually strong moral convictions for a royal. Naturally, he also harbored immense aversion toward his father’s private life, which was the epitome of corruption.

Since King Louis XV’s public popularity was scraping rock bottom, the Dauphin appealed to the public by highlighting his own morality, which contrasted with his royal father.

The strategy paid off properly. Unlike their criticisms of King Louis, the French populace showered the Dauphin with boundless love and expectations.

Yet, for a man—and a crown prince at that—to completely suppress his youthful vigor was close to impossible. One day, after finishing a hunt and getting suitably riled up, Louis Ferdinand drew a girl from an ordinary country home into his bed.

It would have been fine if it had just ended as a one-night affair, but the woman became pregnant with the Dauphin’s child.

For the Dauphin, who had gained popularity through a path completely antithetical to his father’s private life, this was an agonizing predicament. It was a situation where he was bound to hear people scoffing, “You act all high and mighty, but you’re no different!”

“No, wait. Even if the Dauphin didn’t step forward himself, the numerous nobles on his side were even more likely to criticize him severely, and they wouldn’t have tolerated the girl’s existence.”

Even without the Dauphin stepping forward himself, the countless nobles on his side could never tolerate the child’s existence. In the end, sensing a threat to her life, the girl fled with the child in her womb, and after wandering aimlessly, she drifted all the way to Austria.

The woman gave birth to the child there and passed away, but the child barely survived by drifting through the slums. Amidst that, she was miraculously discovered by France’s robe nobles and brought back to Paris.

They hadn’t brought me back out of any particular pity or sympathy. Louis Ferdinand, the Dauphin who was supposed to succeed Louis XV, had died of tuberculosis two years ago. The king of the next generation was the ill-fated figure known to history as future Louis XVI. Though it had been decided that Louis Auguste, the eldest son of the Dauphin, would take the throne, nobody knew what kind of variables my existence might introduce.

Of course, as a bastard at best, I was normally someone who couldn’t inherit rights to the throne. It was most likely that I wouldn’t be able to play any particular role, but they probably calculated that keeping me around wouldn’t hurt.

Frankly speaking, if an epidemic were to suddenly break out and wipe out all legitimate heirs to the throne, the story would change. Who’s to say they couldn’t conjure up some far-fetched excuse to push me forward as a candidate?

Just a few years ago, nobody would have imagined the Dauphin would die of tuberculosis. It was a natural course of action for those who witnessed his death to consider various possibilities.

In the end, the owner of the body I had inhabited possessed a destiny where he could never possess his own life from the moment of his conception.

“How ironic that a plight of being swept here and there is an exact spitting image of my past life in reality.”

Even the pathetic conclusion of having my life extinguished vainly before I could even see the light of day was an exact copy of me.

“Perhaps that’s why I reincarnated into this body.”

Thanks to that, I could firmly establish the goal I needed to tackle above all else. How to somehow escape a future destined for ruin and successfully meet tomorrow.

Easier said than done, though. If this were a game, this was the absolute trashiest of trash games. Objectively speaking, my mere existence was a death flag.

With a 99% probability, no matter which choice I picked, I was likely to board the express train to the underworld. It wouldn’t even be strange if I suffered a sudden, tragic demise without doing anything special, much like a certain ocean sunfish.

This is why they say premature celebration is the root of all disasters. I wanted to tell the guy who blabbed on about “easy mode” not to act so cocky anymore. He looked like a guy who wouldn’t come to his senses until he got beaten right up to the brink of death.

Anyway, the ambitious plan I drafted last time was thoroughly scrapped as of this hour. Making money, getting close to the core of power—these were luxuries I could only dream of after my safety was guaranteed.

Trying to make money with such an unstable status was nothing more than adding yet another reason to die to a pile that was already overflowing. The moment my existence became known, people wanting to kill me would undoubtedly swarm like a horde of zombies. Perhaps they already knew.

“Wait, hold on. Isn’t it certain they already know, rather than ‘might’ know?”

Those scumbags who struck the back of my head yesterday. They had to be assassins hired by some nobles. Nobles of this era were people who would mercilessly wipe out children or anyone else without blood or tears if it meant preserving their own vested interests or status. My previous experience had already proven that they wouldn’t spare a twelve-year-old child.

“You crazy thralls of power… No wonder your heads all flew off cleanly at the guillotine.”

I still didn’t know who the mastermind was, but as long as I stayed in this house, there was no doubt I would die before tonight was over. I wasn’t a fool; I couldn’t just sit here and let myself get got when I clearly knew assassins were coming.

There was no time to hesitate. I had to move right now.

I hurriedly packed my things and prepared to leave the room. Of course, I didn’t forget to shove the brioche and cheese into my mouth before doing so. Even if I was running away, I couldn’t leave free food behind.

“Melissa! Prepare a carriage for me right now!”

Unbothered by the fact that my pronunciation was muffled by the bread filling my mouth, I hurried my steps as much as possible.

Objectively speaking, I couldn’t deny that the situation was despair-inducing enough to make one’s vision go dark. However, it was also an undeniable fact that I possessed knowledge no one else in this world could possibly touch.

Therefore, it wouldn’t end like this. No, I’d make damn sure it didn’t.