Mushoku Tensei: Life and Strife.

It’ll be fine. It will be fine. It’s alright, it’s okay. I have two months to make this work. I can handle this.

Hah. I sighed and put down the magic circles I made. These days have been especially tiring. I didn’t show, but I was scared. I knew what the red gem in the sky was. It wasn’t a gem either. It was a rift. A spatial rift.

Originally a wish granted by a Miko from the distant future to save the hero by forcefully summoning his ex to help. But when you touch something you are incapable of handling, naturally there will be consequences. And now the past is paying the price for said future to happen.

I thought over this countless times on how to handle it, but to no avail. There’s no point in calling for help. No one would believe me even if I tried. So, this was the only thing I could do. Making circles after circles of magic circles with protection of the intermediate rank. Why intermediate rank, you ask? Because that was my limit. If I had trained more, then I would have already reached advanced rank by now.

Yeah. Pathetic, aren’t I? Oh, how I wished I could turn back time and strangle the fool who thought that telekinesis was worth the time. As a matter of fact, why had anything mattered?

I kept asking myself what I could have done over and over and over—No. Stop. We don’t have time for this. Clumsily, I carved out circles and circles, hoping for an end. What has been done has been done. There’s no point in regretting.

I learned how to transcribe faster. But that didn’t change the fact that I didn’t have enough mana. So, I borrowed Rudeus’s mana; his bottomless muddy waters should be enough to make it work, and he wasn’t using more than half of it either. The problem is the pain.

It was painful, probably like mixing up a horrendous drink. It wouldn’t be as bad if I had taken it the way I did in the past, but this time I had gone over the safety limits. I felt like puking. I wanted to ditch that disgusting muddy water out of my mana stream, but I held back. This wasn’t the time. I don’t have time to waste.

…

When I was about to leave the Citadel of Roa, however, I was suddenly hugged by a crying Hilda. I supposed that to her, it felt like losing another child, so I hugged her back, patting her back and telling her that I’ll visit her often.

The truth was that I myself needed the hug. I wanted to cry—No, I had already cried by then. I gave everyone a protective charm each as a gift, with the excuse of thanking everyone for taking care of me these two years. But the truth would not change. Hilda was going to die. Philip was going to die. Sauros was going to die. Everyone in this mansion was going to die.

It looked like they wanted me to stay a little longer, but I didn’t have the time. Circles, circles, circles,… Against the ticking clock and the passage of time, I drew nothing but magic circles, each a single one-time-use intermediary spell that could last up to three hours if not affected by external forces.

Circles, circles, circles… Damn it. The disgusting muddy waters drowning my core, the hallucinating feeling over my mind, and my eyes so weary that I can’t see another person’s face aside from their mana colors…

The nauseous feeling, the dizziness, and the maddening and the corrupting despair—against all these odds, I will carve magic circles. Again and again, again and again and again. No matter the cost.

Drip. Dripping down my hands was blood. I was having a nosebleed. I’m out of mana, again. How careless of me. It seems that fear has taken a toll on my mental health. Quickly wiping off the blood, I drew the circles using the mana I stored from my caterpillars.

When I have mana, I use it. When I am nearly out of mana, I use my caterpillar storage. When some of the caterpillars were out of mana and mine had been refilled, I continued with my own again. This was their purpose, to be used in case of emergency. This IS an emergency.

“Laurel, what’s wrong?”

“… Nothing. Just working on a project.”

Days passed. I think people started to notice my abnormal behavior. Considering that I’ve been giving protective charms to the entire village while telling people that there was an increase of monsters and telling them to stay safe, it was pretty obvious. But it didn’t matter.

This is okay, I told myself. This will be alright. I can’t save everyone. I just have to save those whom I could. I will save my family and as many people as possible.

…

Lilia’s POV

…

Lilia was a royal maid. Once served in the Imperial Palace, retiring after she got stabbed in the leg. After entering the family with open arms, she was expecting to do work just as normal as always. Quote unquote, Normal.

Both of the twins were abnormal. Rarely cried or made a fuss. Once they learned to crawl, they were everywhere around the house. Laurel simply disappeared the moment he was out of sight. Lilia wasn’t sure when she had developed an instinctual fear of the twins.

Rudeus was always smiling. A kind of smile that viscerally repulsed Lilia. It reminded her of the minister’s face when he eyed Lilia’s chest. The same cabinet minister who was rumored to have purchased a number of young women as slaves.

Laurel, on the other hand, wasn’t all that noisy. He was quiet. Way too quiet for a baby. Sometimes he could be found bobbing his mouth like a fish as if he were trying to eat something, which makes him a little cute.

But when he noticed he was being stared at, he stared back at her. He doesn’t say anything. He just stares at you with his purple-colored eyes as if he were analyzing her. Eyes that don't feel like those of humans to her.

She had raised a princess before, so she knows for sure that’s not how normal children behave. And, while it might have been her imagination—no, Lilia had been sure of it. Laurel had been reading. Yes. Reading. At the age of one.

At first, she thought she was imagining things and the child was just staring at pictures. But the fact that the child had been slowly flipping pages and doodling things that looked like he was taking notes was eerie to her. Sure, it wasn’t like Rudeus, but there was a subtle, indescribable feeling of fear towards him.

She once thought they were possessed, secretly performing a traditional charm of banishment from her homeland. Nothing. Well, Laurel saw it happened to Rudeus and was even clapping. She thought she had had a heart attack at that moment.

Now gone were those moments, and the strange children had grown into reliable young boys. It was thanks to them that she and Aisha had survived, and she was grateful for that. She had always wanted to repay them for that, but there wasn’t much that she could do.

That was when she saw him stuck drawing magic circles. It gave her an idea. Recently, monsters have been showing up very often. Paul had been going around to settle them, and she was no stranger to knowing that Laurel had participated in those monster-culling events.

Whenever Laurel ran into a problem he couldn't solve, he tended to lock himself at his desk, sometimes walking out for fresh air and returning immediately to that desk until he figured it out. But even then, it wasn't as bad as this time.

Perhaps the worried-filled expression of his was simply due to being stagnant with no way out. After all, fighting hordes of monsters wasn’t something a child could handle, even if he was unusually talented. If that was the case, then she now knew what she could give him. She started to write down a letter to her parents with a smile on her face. Knowing Laurel, he would be jumping in joy if he knew about her little surprise.

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