Let’s Go Home.

…And by the time Kikori was finally released from Priest Idred, it was completely night.

He seemed to be the type who got carried away once he started, and Kikori ended up being taught all sorts of things.

“I never thought he’d start from the Book of Genesis…”

He felt like he understood a lot thanks to it… though it also felt like he was just feeling like he understood.

Still, he thought he’d managed to grasp the general outline, at least.

And… the thing he’d wanted to know, too.

“…Demons, huh.”

Apparently, they were lifeforms made of mana, similar to ghosts.

Ghost-type monsters were known for entering living beings, but demons were especially strong at it, and could even replace the creature they entered.

Because that phenomenon was called demon possession, the custom spread of calling any drastic personality change “demon-possessed”… or so it seemed.

“Once you understand it, it’s nothing.”

Now it made sense why the village priest had asserted, “You’re not demon-possessed.”

He was a priest, so he simply knew—accurately—that Kikori wasn’t.

Nothing more than that: a straightforward statement of fact.

Part of Kikori couldn’t help thinking, He could’ve just said that… but even if the priest had explained it back in that village, how many people would’ve understood?

Well, it didn’t matter now.

He was never going back to that village again.

“…”

There were reincarnators in this world.

Kikori was one of them, and until now he’d been tormented by that knowledge and those memories.

He hadn’t been able to align himself with the sense of mismatch he felt with the world.

Fortunately, the memories themselves had faded a great deal.

No… they had been overwritten.

Before he knew it, the mismatch was gone, and now he was feeling the happiness of being alive with everything he had.

That was surely thanks to Aria.

And… more than anything—

“Maybe I was overthinking it.”

There was no meaning to being reborn with memories.

He had no attachment anymore to a “previous life” whose very name he’d forgotten.

The “previous world” was the same. Now, he could say with his chest out that this world was better.

So surely… that was fine. That was all there was to it.

“…Let’s go home.”

Aria’s house.

No one was there today, but he had a spare key.

And… he no longer felt even the slightest discomfort about calling that place “home.”

That was why the fact that Aria wouldn’t be there tonight made Kikori feel a small loneliness.

But it also felt closer to what you felt for “family.”

Was it because, in this life, he’d been starving for the warmth of something like a family?

He didn’t know… but for now, he couldn’t think any further than that.

Murmuring those thoughts, Kikori made his way back to Aria’s house.