Chapter 71: Shocking discovery
The recording began by focusing on a clock that displayed a... peculiar date.
’Ten years later?’ Lucius thought as he noticed this oddity.
His father was sitting at a desk; he didn’t look all that different from how he looked now.
A bitter, bossy man, but handsome and rugged.
The door to his office suddenly opened without a knock. This made Valerius frown and look up.
"It’s you, Casius." Valerius nodded at him and broke into a smile. "What’s going on?"
The resemblance between Casius and Valerius was striking; among his sons, Casius looked the most like him.
"Something has changed at Laboratory L," Casius reported.
Valerius frowned. "Hm? Do you need more resources or something?"
"No, Father. I’m talking about that thing that’s been there for ten years!"
Valerius’s eyes were confused at first. But suddenly they lit up with shock, and he jumped to his feet.
"What changed?"
"It’s coming out!"
"Huh?"
"It’s coming out!" Casius repeated.
...
"Hm?" Lucius frowned when he saw the video stop. "Is it over? Shit, that short?!" He got angry and played it again to see if it had been a mistake... but it ended right there again.
"You stopped it right at the best part, you bastard," Lucius complained, but he quickly realized it wasn’t Darius who had stopped it there.
It had been Valerius himself—that was as far as the video went.
Lucius was beginning to understand some strange things about all this, and there was still one video left. Without giving it much thought, he started playing it.
The first thing he saw was Valerius staring intently at him through the video.
For a brief moment, Lucius thought he’d been discovered. But then he noticed that Valerius was simply recording a video, talking to the "camera"—or rather, to that special device.
Behind him was a window overlooking the mansion’s backyard.
A child was playing there, but Lucius couldn’t recognize him.
"Lilith," Valerius suddenly said, catching Lucius’s attention.
’Lilith? So that really was her name...’ Lucius nodded and listened intently to the video.
"Do you see that little boy back there? I named him Lucius. He’s your son."
’So that’s me?’ Lucius nodded. He didn’t remember that moment, but it didn’t matter. He used to play in the backyard often, since it was the place with the fewest people.
"Somehow he was born, Lilith. I don’t know how, but he was. He was born ten years after your death! It’s been 17 years since you died, and he’s 7 years old."
’...’
Lucius paused the video there and played it again; he needed to hear what the hell that guy had said.
"...He was born ten years after your death!"
He repeated it ten more times...
’What the hell? How could I have been born ten years after my mother’s death?’ His heart raced, and his mind spun.
Suddenly, he felt a severe headache. Much worse than when he was receiving information from this Lucius upon entering his body.
He began to recall images and inaudible words. He remembered things he couldn’t even see.
He remembered walls.
He remembered... his mother... The two of them were playing in a garden engulfed in flames.
’Fire?’ The headache grew so intense that Lucius had to stop thinking.
It didn’t make him pass out because he was in a dangerous place where, at any moment, he could receive an unexpected visitor, so his brain remained constantly on alert—but if it had been at any other time, it surely would have made him pass out.
The images stopped a minute later, and among all the blurry images that flashed through his mind... he couldn’t make sense of any of them.
He only understood the memories of him and his mother playing in a garden engulfed in flames.
And it wasn’t just any fire. It seemed to burn everything, yet at the same time, it burned nothing.
’What I remembered about meeting my mother comes from here...’ He realized.
But then the thought struck him again: He was born ten years after his mother’s death. How could they have played together?
’Shit, am I stuck in a time loop or something?’ He scratched his head in frustration. ’I hope not.’ He shuddered.
Even with all his intelligence, he couldn’t make sense of any of it.
He decided to keep watching the video without interruption.
"That might be my fault, but I’m not here to ask for your forgiveness. I just came to let you know that your son is growing up well..." Valerius said, turning to look at him. "Although he doesn’t take after you. He’s introverted. He’s dumb. He’s... useless. His magical core is destroyed. Sigh. He really doesn’t take after you at all, except for his face."
Valerius stopped looking at the young Lucius and turned his gaze back to the camera.
"And that might be my fault, too. But I don’t regret a thing."
"This is my payback to you. For abandoning us." Just as he said that, a group of people—Lucius’s brothers and cousins—surrounded him and began beating him.
Valerius smiled. "This is my revenge. I hope you enjoy it."
-
The video ended.
’They took me to a laboratory, and it took 10 years for me to be born. But it was all this bastard’s revenge against my mother,’ he thought...
Suddenly, he opened his eyes and looked around the room suspiciously.
Darius had come here once and tried to do something, but then left without doing anything.
This place belongs to his mother. However, it’s kept as a family secret...
He looked at the tools around him and then at the egg mounted on the research tool where he was sitting.
It was a normal egg, except that it was abnormally large and thicker than the eggs of large beasts.
’Even the dragon eggs I saw weren’t that thick. However, that bastard’s dragon egg was similar in thickness to this one.’
He recalled the dragon he had fought in his final battle, in his previous life—the one that had been taken from him by Kael.
’That’s a legendary dragon. Why is this egg as thick as that guy’s? Where did they get it...?’
Suddenly, Lucius tensed up.
Laboratory L... A birth that took 10 years... Experiments using a dead mother’s womb... His mother’s body...
"Freeze it in Lab L..."
He remembered Valerius’s lip movements when he answered the man who asked him what to do with his mother’s body...
’Shit...’
’Don’t tell me... I was born from an egg?’
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