Conqueror of Dying Kingdom – Chapter 1 (part 1)

As if in a dream, I was floating in a sea that was like warm water.

The dream was incredibly long, but I didn’t get bored on the way, I didn’t seem to have the capacity to get bored yet, my head was monotonous and hazy.

In the comforting temperature and body heat, only the world of happiness was felt.

In the midst of this, I slept as if there was no end to my sleep.

After what felt like a week and a year of peace and quiet, I was suddenly hit with a violent squeezing sensation like a wrestler’s headlock, a direct twisting of my head, which suddenly broke the peace.

Was this an attempt to break my head and kill me? After feeling a serious existential crisis, I felt the sense of release from the nightmare, from the unexplained squeezing sensation, to the air of the outside world. The sensation of floating disappeared and I was supported by my fingers and arms as I dipped once again into the warm water. My body is washed clean in the clean, warm water and I am wrapped in a soft cloth and held in someone’s arms.

My eyes looked like myopic presbyopia, and I could only see the world from near to far. My head is as fuzzy as if I had been drunk on a good wine, avoiding the cause of the pain and desperately trying to satisfy my appetite for food and sleep.

I instinctively sucked on who knows whose bre*st, and when my vision was filled with light and the curtain dropped about ten more times, my head finally began to clear.

(Am I still dreaming?)

In soft contemplation, it was this thing that I kept thinking about.

However, it seems that I have been in this dream for a long time. The unexplained headache had been a few days ago, and it was strange to have such a long memory in a dream.

“Naa.. baaa.. oaa~”

Even if I try to organize my words, my throat won’t move properly and I can’t say a word.

What’s with this sense of reality? Is this heaven or another place? Or have I travelled to my next life?

The last memory I remember clearly is of me struggling to drown in the cold water. It started to get cold from the centre of my body, after which my body gradually became immobile, I drank from the river and sank into it. In other words, I should have died, but now there is no pain anywhere, and I am not cold.

Maybe, surprisingly, that was it.

Just as dreams that should be impressive are forgotten for some reason when you wake up, so perhaps everyone has memories of past lives that are immediately erased and forgotten in the next life. If that were the case, the experiences that would come to dominate the self known as me would disappear, but that didn’t matter, I didn’t feel much regret.

It seems that all I can do when I am placed in a soft bed is to spend the day in a daze. In a present where it was completely unclear whether it was a dream, reality or hallucination, I seemed to become a baby.

Bare chested, feeding me bre*st milk, it seemed to be my mother who had given birth to me, who was with me from morning to night, taking care of everything. There was something about having someone else change my nappy like this that made me feel like an elderly person all of a sudden.

Despite her small bre*sts, my mother was a great beauty.

Her European-like features were not deeply defined or Asian, yet she was a woman you would want to look at forever, with a dignified and elegant look.

However, that look was not the human look I was familiar with. It looked exactly like a human, but only the shape of the ears was distinctly different. The ears were a little pointed, like sideburns extending from the hair to cover the tips of the ears.

The ears are pink inside, but you can see the hair covering the tips of the ears around them. It seemed very warm, but the appearance was really different.

Moreover, I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Speaking Japanese with that face would have startled me, so it’s only natural that I should, but it bothered me that I couldn’t understand what she was saying. At night, she would hold me tightly in the swaddling clothes and whisper to me something like a bedtime story, but in this case, I couldn’t understand a word she was saying.

Sometimes the care of the child was handed over to my father.

He was also a man who seemed to be very popular if he walked through the streets of Japan. I could feel it when he held me in his arms, he was tall and thin, but his body was well toned under his clothes, and I could feel the firm muscles. Having said that, he had a lean appearance and was built like a boxer or a rhythmic gymnast.

What exactly did he do for a living?

I was very puzzled by this. Their standard of living was not really like modern life. The clothes were made of natural fibres and the fabric was woven with very uneven eyelets, so it must have been hand-woven. On one occasion when my mother took me to the kitchen, it was cooked using the cooker.

My family seemed to be in the super countryside. At night, only the birds and animals that inhabit the forest are heard, and hardly anyone comes to visit the house.

Assuming it was a farming family, the quality of the housing was good and meat was frequently served on the table, the standard of living seemed high. As far as I could see, the mother was a full-time housewife all day, and did not feel at all distressed by her income. Nor did she look like a businessman, judging by the fact that she hardly had any visitors, akin to a rich farmer’s existence?

I wasn’t sure about this, but I hadn’t learned to speak yet and I couldn’t ask. All I could do was to make sense of the words, while I slept in my cot.

In this way, I spent a year in a state of bewilderment.

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