1

“I heard that you summoned me.”

The one who had summoned Noel was his father, the Marquis Saratoga, the head of the marquis family that was Noel’s birth family.

The marquis residence was not very far from the Magic Institute.

However, it had been a year since Noel had set foot here.

There was no parent-and-child conversation at all, such as asking Noel, whom he was seeing for the first time in a year, whether he was well or how he had been.

Marquis Saratoga looked at Noel with cold eyes and uttered only one sentence.

“How is the completion of the elixir?”

Noel replied without changing his expression at all. This was how this father always was.

“I believe we now have a general estimate.”

“What do you mean, you have an estimate? Explain.”

A sharp gleam flashed deep in the marquis’s eyes. It was not the answer he had expected.

“We have arrived at a method of transforming the quality of the potion by raising the quality of the ingredients to their utmost limit. With this method, I believe magical contamination will not occur.”

“…Well done.”

At the brief praise, Noel was startled and looked at Marquis Saratoga’s face.

Even when Noel searched back through his memories, Marquis Saratoga had never once given Noel praise.

However, the marquis immediately reflected Noel in eyes as cold as ice, eyes that closely resembled Noel’s, and said without emotion,

“If you give the elixir to the princess and wake her from her sleep, your sin will be atoned for. Never forget that this is the only means of survival left to you.”

“…Yes.”

Noel’s mother had been a great saintess who possessed an extraordinary amount of holy power, unmatched in her age.

With an extraordinary passion, or rather, a passion that could be called obsession, Marquis Saratoga repeatedly appealed directly to the head of the Temple and took this saintess as his wife. The Temple permitted it on the condition that one of the female children born from the marriage would become the next saintess.

Holy power was hereditary.

A saintess’s daughter was born with almost the same holy power as her mother.

And in the year after this marriage, which had been an extremely significant political event as well, the saintess became pregnant, and a child who closely resembled the saintess was born.

It was Noel.

What neither the marquis nor the Temple had expected was that immediately after that birth, Noel’s mother recovered poorly after childbirth and passed away.

It was because the magical power the child possessed had surpassed the holy power the mother possessed.

The child born at the cost of the saintess’s life had been a boy.

A boy.

In other words, because Noel was male, he had not inherited any of his mother’s holy power as a saintess, and before she could give birth to a girl who would become the next generation’s saintess, Noel had brought about the death of the woman his father loved. For that, his father loathed him.

The Temple, too, did not bless Noel’s birth.

The birth of the next generation’s great saintess had been forever obstructed by the birth of this boy’s life.

A hateful child who had stolen his beloved woman, and whose only trait was that his magical power was pointlessly high.

A child of sin who had not inherited the saintess’s power, and who had prevented the birth of the girl who would inherit it.

Noel was treated coldly both by the marquis family and by the Temple, and his high magical power was treated as though it were a curse.

Even while receiving cold treatment, Noel grew into a handsome young nobleman who possessed extremely high magical power.

After graduating at the top of his academy, young as he was, he awakened one talent after another in healing magic, and displayed a gift for making potions that could be called genius.

Although he had no holy power, the potions Noel made, which had excellent healing power, were highly praised.

The royal family, which was locked in a power struggle with the Temple, treated Noel courteously as a person blessed with great ability and talent.

Recognizing Noel’s talent in magic, they allowed him to study under Naranda, a renowned magician connected to the royal family and enrolled at the Magic Institute, and by royal command ordered him to devote himself to research as a researcher at the Magic Institute.

Perhaps the guilt that his own high magical power had reaped the life of his mother, the saintess, had caused Noel to devote himself to healing magic and potion making.

With his natural talent as well, Noel, who studied under Naranda, rapidly distinguished himself and was appointed the person in charge of the Magic Institute at a young age.

And at the same time that Noel was appointed chief magician and person in charge of the Magic Institute, the king designated Noel as the fiancé of Her Highness Eugenia, the third princess.

It was said that the strong wish of the third princess, who had fallen in love with the beautiful Noel, was deeply involved in this, but of course, political circumstances of the royal family lay behind it as well.

Their aim was to draw the Saratoga marquis family, which belonged to the Temple faction, over to the opposing royal faction through marriage.

However, the condition that the Saratoga marquis family presented for the marriage between the third princess and Noel was, unbelievably, for Noel to marry into the royal family.

Even though Noel was the legitimate eldest son of the marquis family, he would marry into the family of the third princess, who did not even possess the right of succession.

In order to extend the power of the marquis family into the royal family as well, Marquis Saratoga, despite being of the Temple faction, handed over his legitimate eldest son to the third princess of the royal family like a tribute.

“Have the marriage with Princess Eugenia carried out, no matter what happens.”

That is the only way a useless one like you can be of use to the family.

Saying that, at the same time Noel’s engagement was established, the still-young half-brother born from the marquis’s second wife was designated as the heir to the marquis family.

If the marriage is not established, you have no home to return to. It was a strong message from his father.

Although it was an engagement in which not a single part of Noel’s will had been considered, his relationship with Princess Eugenia, who adored Noel, was not bad.

(From here on, we can nurture a small happiness.)

One day, when quiet days were just before his eyes, tragedy struck.

When Noel and the princess went out riding together, the two of them were attacked by a large spider-shaped magical beast.

They were attacked by the magical beast in the forest below the castle, which was not usually a place where dangerous large magical beasts would appear, so their guard was thin.

It was rumored as if it were true that a political enemy of Marquis Saratoga had sent the magical beast into the forest and made it attack the two of them in order to prevent the marriage between Noel and Princess Eugenia, but the truth remained in darkness.

After breathing in the spider-shaped magical beast’s mist-like poison, both of them suffered great damage and fell into a deep sleep.

After that, thanks to the exhaustive efforts of the royal palace medical corps and the Magic Institute’s treatment, Noel awoke from sleep one month later.

However, Princess Eugenia was still in a deep sleep even now.

The reason was that the amount of magical power the princess possessed had not reached a level sufficient to resist the magical beast’s poison.

For a person who had fallen into this state, there was no way to bring them back from the world of sleep except by having them take the miraculous medicine, elixir.

However, refining an elixir was extremely difficult.

The last time the creation of an elixir succeeded in this country was more than a hundred years ago, by the hands of a sage summoned from the continent.

The marquis had finally obtained an engagement that could have extended his family’s influence even to the royal faction, yet it had vanished, and he flew into a rage.

The princess’s deep sleep was by no means Noel’s fault.

It was because of the magical beast’s poison, and as for the ride itself, Noel had accepted the wish of Princess Eugenia, who had a somewhat selfish side.

However, the words hurled at Noel when he returned alive from the deep sleep between life and death were all harsh ones.

“It would have been better if you had continued sleeping in the princess’s place.”

“Not only the saintess’s life, but now you have caused even the princess to fall into eternal sleep?”

“This man brings only misfortune to everyone involved with him.”

Noel had no time to immerse himself in the sorrow of his own feelings over the fact that his fiancée, Princess Eugenia, had not regained consciousness.

From the moment he awoke, the Temple, his birth family, and even the royal family, which had been the only ones to treat him courteously, condemned him for being alive.

And Noel himself also came to feel intense guilt that not only had he failed to protect the princess, but he alone, who boasted magical power so high that it had caused his mother to pass away, had returned alive from the world of sleep.

Noel became afraid of sleeping.

Before going to sleep, in bed, he always ended up thinking.

—Will the next morning come for me? Am I permitted to greet the morning?—

From then on, Noel’s insomnia continued for a long time until now.

Noel, who even then had been one of the most capable magicians in the country, had, from that day on, poured his heart and blood into creating the elixir in order to awaken the princess.

It was said that if one did not wake within three years after receiving this poison, one would never wake again.

Noel had been on the verge of giving up on the princess’s awakening.