10

“And so, Noel-sama! Where do you think the turtle was headed?”

What greeted Noel when he returned from town exhausted was, unusually, Beth, who was far more talkative than usual.

While grinning and enjoying the sight of his adorable, excited fiancée clinging to his neck, Noel learned that Beth, whom he had left alone at the inn without taking her out to play, had been enjoying walks in the forest near here with considerable enthusiasm while he was away.

“At most, I thought she had been walking along the forest paths or around the village pastures.”

The room at the inn had already begun to overflow with potted plants he did not quite understand, nuts Beth had picked up, and all sorts of other things, making it cramped, and apparently they had been gathered from deep in the forest.

Noel, who had been busy exchanging opinions with the medical team lately, realized that he had not been properly listening to the stories of Beth, who was not very talkative, and he was reflecting on that.

Noel had certainly not been playing around either.

The general treatment policy had been settled, but everyone was racking their brains over how to purify the old magic circulating through Felix’s body.

Felix’s magic was too strong.

It was necessary to purify it with magic comparable to that of royalty, but for now, there was no one in this country who possessed enough magic to oppose Felix. It was a troublesome problem.

Even so, chasing after a turtle with an injured leg and spending an entire day in the forest was truly like Beth, and truly outlandish.

“I wonder where.”

Noel stopped thinking about work for the time being, and for now decided to concentrate on listening to what words would come from this amusing fiancée’s adorable mouth.

With a broad smile, Beth told Noel the answer.

“And you see! It was a hot spring!”

“Oh, even wild animals go into hot springs, huh.”

“It looked so comfortable. The place seemed a little dangerous, but since I had gone all that way, I soaked my feet, and it felt so very good. Noel-sama, I want to go into a hot spring outside.”

Naturally, the inn in this village, which was a hot spring therapy village, also had a bath installed.

It was a large enamel bath, and it had cute feet like a cat’s on all four corners, which made it adorable.

They filled this bath with hot spring water that had been drawn for it.

The patients at the treatment facility supposedly reheated this hot spring bath and entered it as many as five times a day.

Apparently, the magic stones used to reheat the hot water were often mined from this hot spring area.

Noel answered this outlandish fiancée with a laugh.

“That is true, outdoor hot springs are fun. On the way back, I will take you to the hot spring plaza in the Royal Capital again. There are no outdoor hot spring facilities here, but in the Royal Capital, you can enjoy hot springs outside too.”

Without noticing that Beth still seemed to want to say something, Noel cheerfully dropped a kiss on Beth’s forehead and went to the bedroom to take off his cloak.

“Felix-sama. It is time for your hot spring treatment.”

“Understood.”

A maid came to Felix’s room to inform him of the bath time that came five times a day.

Felix sighed as he took off the underclothes whose fabric had become sticky with bodily fluids clinging to them.

Each time he took them off, the bodily fluids and pus mixed into the cloth stuck to him with a stinging sensation and peeled away his skin, which was extremely unpleasant.

The underclothes he took off were placed in a special bag, and a maid who could use cleaning magic cleaned them with magic so they would not be seen by anyone.

If word leaked outside that Felix’s underclothes were in such a wretched state, it would become a serious matter politically.

The proud Felix turned his eyes away from the state of the underclothes he had discarded.

“I cannot bear it.”

On the surface of the luxurious bath always prepared for Felix, numerous precious medicinal herbs and potions floated, boiling in a color close to black and giving off a strange smell.

It was an herbal bath made with highly concentrated hot spring water from the foot of nearby Mount Abeeb.

The bath’s components apparently were good for the skin, and after he got out of the bath, his symptoms became a little better.

However, when he soaked in the black bath that smelled as if its dissolved components had rotted away, together with the poor condition of his skin, Felix felt somehow as if he himself were rotting and melting into the black water, and because he also had to look at his wretched underclothes, he did not like bath time.

Because extremely precious medicinal herbs were floated in the bath, the water in this bath was changed only once a month.

Apparently, today happened to be that day.

On the silver tray placed beside the bath, numerous medicinal herbs and potions had been arranged.

The hot water placed in the bathtub was still a clear, transparent color.

These medicinal herbs and potions were put into the bathtub, and Felix cast magic to extract their active components into the water, then bathed in the pitch-black, muddy water.

He could leave the extraction to someone else, but somehow, he handled this himself.

His own face reflected in the transparent surface of the water, which he had not seen in a long time, looked ugly, and Felix instinctively twisted away from the surface of the bathwater.

There were no mirrors in this detached palace.

Felix had ordered every mirror removed from the detached palace.

“A monster.”

At the sight of his own face reflected in the water’s surface, Felix felt nausea rise in him.

“Would there be any human who could look at the face of such an ugly creature, one even I myself cannot accept, and not scream?”

Thinking that with self-mockery, he suddenly remembered the strange event that had happened in the forest today.

“Come to think of it, that girl… did not scream. Who in the world was she? From what I saw, she seemed like nothing more than an ordinary village girl.”

The one he had met by chance in the forest had been a plain girl with rustic reddish-brown hair, so unremarkable that he could hardly remember her face.

But even when that girl saw Felix’s festering face, although she had looked puzzled, she had not screamed.

“That’s right. She handed me some kind of bottle, and then chased after the turtle and disappeared somewhere.”

Felix took out the bottle he had left in the pocket of the clothes he had just removed.

Today’s experience had been so strange and so lacking in reality that it felt like a dream, but seeing the bottle in his pocket, it seemed to have been something that had truly happened.

“She told me to put it in the bath.”

Felix gently cast a simple appraisal spell on the contents of the bottle.

“No toxicity. The component is simply water.”

Normally, Felix was extremely cautious, and he also truly believed that an unidentified thing offered by a young commoner girl was not worth even a glance, but today’s events felt strange to him, and no matter what, he wanted to try using the contents of this bottle.

“It is only water. Trying something strange for one day should be fine.”

Felix pushed aside the mountain of precious medicinal herbs piled high on the silver tray and poured the contents of the bottle he had received from the strange girl into the bath filled with transparent water.

A pleasant floral fragrance drifted up softly.

Timidly, Felix tried soaking himself in the bathtub.

Unlike when he soaked in the usual black water, he did not feel unpleasant and miserable.

From the fresh, clean hot water, the good fragrance of flowers rose up, and Felix instinctively took a deep breath.

“It feels good.”

When he breathed deeply, it felt as if the scent of flowers was soaking all the way into the depths of his lungs, and it was truly comfortable.

Even his skin, which was always unpleasantly oozing, felt as if the things that wanted to flow out were flowing out as they were, and the things that wanted to enter his skin were slowly soaking in.

As the comfort sank into his very bones, it seemed that before he knew it, he had begun humming. Felix accepted with surprise the sound of his own humming echoing through the luxurious bathroom with its high ceiling.

For the first time in years since the skin disease had developed, Felix was enjoying a bath from the bottom of his heart.