Morning.
"Haaah."
Nothing like a bright ray of light shoving you out of sleep... That, and an angry looking maid doing everything in her power to hide the fact that she absolutely despises me.
Not that I blame her. Honestly, anyone who isn't disgusted by me is the one with a problem.
Kael.
The worthless bastard son of a duke, the embarrassment of a noble house with no allies, no backers, nothing.
If my father wasn't the duke and quite literally the head of the family, the branch families and distant relatives would have gotten rid of me a long time ago just to spare themselves the shame of having such a useless piece of shit in the line of succession. I do have a feeling the only reason no official attempt on my life has been made yet is because ever since I came back from Alpheroisa, I haven't once stepped outside the mansion, not for a stroll, not for fresh air, not for some completely pointless thrill of adventure, nothing. I haven't done any of that.
Why? Because I'm not stupid.
I know, probably better than the people plotting my death, that I'm not safe even inside my own dukedom, not even when surrounded by knights from our own estate, so I never bothered trying. Instead I put all my effort into something else, and by that I mean being so thoroughly useless that my father would have no choice but to pick someone else from the family to be the heir. A simple, quiet life has been my only goal since I was a child, it's my dream, and I'll do whatever it takes to make it happen.
There's actually a reason I'm this fixated on it, and it goes back to something that happened when I was a child, one incident that changed everything.
I could be wrong, but I think that incident has something to do with why I ended up awakening a worthless D rank talent.
If I remember right, it happened when I was 6, or maybe 7. I was in a coma for so long that I can't pin down exactly when it started, and my father never liked talking about it, so everything I know was pieced together from the scraps of information I had at the time.
So, when I was 6, or 7, I got sick.
Not the usual kind of sick that passes in a few days.
This was the kind that nearly killed me.
I got so sick that I fell into a coma, and no matter what the healers did, no matter what anyone tried, I wouldn't wake up.
What none of them knew was that the entire time I was out, something was happening to me, something I still can't explain to this day.
I met myself.
Yes, me. I met me.
It was in a completely white space, the floor was white, everything above was white, and there were no walls, just white stretching out endlessly in every direction. But something was off. Every time I walked in any direction, I'd eventually hit a point I couldn't push past, like some kind of barrier, an invisible wall meant to keep me from going any further, and it was the same no matter which way I went. At some point I realized the space that looked endless wasn't endless at all, there was only so much of it, like being stuck inside a house with no visible walls, where everything outside looks perfectly reachable but you can't get to any of it. A prison, basically, just one you can't see.
I was there for a long time.
There was nothing to measure time with, so I had no idea how much of it was passing. I tried counting seconds at some point, but I always lost track and gave up. I stayed there until I started feeling like I was losing my mind.
I cried.
I cried again.
I laughed.
I played.
I slept.
I talked out loud to no one.
I did whatever I could think of to keep myself from going completely insane, but eventually I just... stopped.
I sat down at the center of that invisible box and stared straight ahead at nothing.
Hours? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? Decades? Centuries?
I have absolutely no fucking idea.
But then one day, something new happened.
Somehow, in that place where nothing worked the way it should, I fell asleep. When I woke up, there was someone sitting across from me, facing me.
He was me.