Even If It Means to Break - Chapter 35 - 9. Side Story

9. Side Story

He remembered the moment of his birth.

The instant he escaped the stifling womb and came writhing out beneath his mother’s body.

There was a strong, metallic smell. At the time, he did not know it was the smell of blood. His mother, gasping as if she might die at any moment, cut the child’s umbilical cord with her own hands.

“Hngh… hngh… haah…”

Driven senseless by the pain of childbirth, the woman could not even think to hold the baby. She sprawled on the floor, scraping at it weakly. The child did not cry even once. Curled between his mother’s legs, he took in the world.

The faint light seeping through his closed eyelids.

His mother’s ragged breathing.

The sticky stench of blood and amniotic fluid.

The air he was breathing with his own lungs for the first time.

Everything was strange, unfamiliar, and wondrous beyond forgetting.

That was the first impression of the world he received as he breathed through his lungs, before learning a single word.

* * *

Despite having given birth to the king’s child, his mother was dragged off to work starting the very next day.

The red eyes inherited from giant blood clearly marked his father, yet everyone pretended not to know his lineage.

Bleeding as she was forced to work, his mother returned crawling, drenched in cold sweat. The same thing happened the next day, and the day after that.

The child did not cry. He did not demand milk.

Newborn and lacking any foundation of knowledge, he merely breathed, engraving every sensation felt through his skin as if carving it into memory.

After several days, thin porridge entered his mouth for the first time. At first he pushed it away, then realized it was something he could eat and accepted it. When he lifted his eyelids, a lifeless face came into blurry focus through vision that had not yet fully cleared.

“Royal blood… and still won’t die easily…”

That barely audible lament was swallowed along with the porridge and etched into his mind. The child was thirsty for information.

Time continued to pass. From the day she first fed him porridge, his mother began to take care of him at least a little. He was able to eat once a day. He could pick up fragments of speech. Even with little food, he grew rapidly, likely because of the giant’s blood flowing through his veins.

“Never leave this room. Do you understand?”

Realizing that the child she had borne was unnaturally sharp, his mother warned him again and again. The child nodded obediently. She stared at the son who could already understand words and nod after barely two seasons of life, then turned away with a weary expression.

Left alone, the child watched her retreating back in silence and closed his eyes.

He continued to grow. He passed his first birthday, then his eighth season. Yet even after two full years had passed since his birth, he had never once stepped outside the room.

A narrow, dark room—and his mother.

Those two things were his only world.

His mother did not like talking with her son. But on the rare occasions they exchanged words, she always repeated the same obsessive warning:

“Hide yourself. Lower yourself. Never reveal what makes you extraordinary in front of others.”