Chapter 0: Prologue

Coughing echoed through the large room, which was decorated with a luxurious yet elegant atmosphere.

Not long after the violent coughing erupted, as if trying to vomit something up, the door burst open and two men rushed in.

“Ian!”

“D*mn it, go fetch the doctor immediately!”

In truth, there was very little a doctor could do even if they came, but Ilya called for one urgently.

A servant, who had briefly left to fetch water, also came running back in.

It was a seizure.

A seizure no different from the usual ones.

Claire hastily snatched the basin of hot water from the servant and soaked a cloth that was by the bedside.

A significant amount of blood was spewing from his mouth, his brow was furrowed in pain, and his two hands gripped the sheets tightly, turned deathly pale.

Wringing out the moisture, Claire gathered Ian into his arms—bedsheets and all—and silently began to wipe down Ian’s face, neck, hands, and body.

Once a seizure began, there was nothing anyone could do.

They could only watch and try their best to keep his ice-cold body as warm as possible until the episode stopped.

The only consolation was that the frequency was gradually decreasing and the recovery time was getting shorter.

After ten minutes that felt like a war, Ian’s eyes opened along with ragged breaths.

Shortly after regaining consciousness, his focus had not yet returned, and his slightly reddened eyes—perhaps due to the physiological tears shed during the seizure—made one’s heart ache.

“Cla…ire?”

At the sound of his name slipping through those cracked lips, Claire finally breathed a sigh of relief.

“Ian, are you awake?”

“Ah, did I… again… cough—,”

“Shh—it’s alright. Save your strength. Your throat is damaged. You there, bring some warm honey water.”

Ilya, who was sitting next to Claire, received the honey water mixed with various medicinal herbs and began to carefully pour it into Ian’s mouth.

Knowing that Ian struggled to swallow even a single spoonful of honey water immediately after a seizure, he had to be extra cautious.

In fact, it was closer to letting it flow down Ian’s throat rather than him swallowing it, but because Ian often suffered from exhaustion or dehydration after these fits, they had to force-feed him at least a little.

As Ian blankly accepted the honey water with a hollow complexion, his eyes slowly closed again, and only then did Claire look up to face Ilya.

“Just when will he be able to escape from that disgusting Demon King?”

“I was thinking the same thing. Claire, let’s change Ian’s clothes first before we talk.”

Claire and Ilya began to strip Ian of his pajamas, which were a mess of cold sweat and blood, and put new clothes on him.

It was originally the servants’ job, but they wanted to take care of Ian with their own hands as much as they possibly could.

As they unbuttoned the shirt to change him, the first thing they saw was a large scar in the middle of his chest.

In fact, there were many other traces of fatal wounds carved all over his body, but Claire and Ilya—who knew those had only vanished due to the Goddess’s blessing—suppressed their surging emotions and moved their hands quickly and gently.

Only after laying Ian on the bed with freshly spread clean sheets and covering him with a blanket up to his chin did the two leave for the meeting hall, where they were already late, with lingering footsteps.

A name that no citizen of the Empire could fail to know: the Hero, Ian.

Though he came from the slums with no family name or title, he was a legendary figure who defeated the Demon King with a character more upright than anyone else and outstanding skill.

Born an orphan in the slums, he had never once committed an act against the law; despite being ostracized for his black hair, he grew up properly without losing his kind and gentle nature.

Even though everything he learned was merely through observation while doing chores for a back-alley mercenary group, he showed exceptional talent in both magic and swordsmanship, befitting the Hero chosen by the Goddess herself to save the world.

The moment he became known to the world as the Hero was four years after the Demon King began plunging the world into chaos, following an oracle delivered to the temple.

[A black-haired boy who has not yet reached adulthood shall restore the light to the world.]

Ian, who was famous in the capital as a black-haired orphan boy, became the Hero in an instant and headed to the temple.

The black-haired boy, who had not yet even fully matured, received the Goddess’s blessing in front of her statue at the Great Temple and was personally selected as the Hero.

Thus, Ian came to possess inexhaustible mana and divine power within his body.

The Hero, who possessed overflowing talent but lacked the leisure to hone it or a master to teach him, grew into the Empire’s most outstanding magic swordsman after five years of bone-shattering effort.

The seventeen-year-old boy had grown into a twenty-two-year-old young man, and though he succeeded in leading the final battle to victory just one year after joining the war against the Demon King, he failed to protect himself.

To stop the Demon King, who attempted to spread demonic energy across the entire world as a last resort in a suicide explosion, the Hero sealed that demonic energy within his own body.

The demonic energy was so thick and vast that the Hero’s breath and pulse stopped momentarily, but perhaps the Hero knew that if it spread throughout the world, it would become nothing less than a living hell.

In the end, he risked his life and fell into an unconscious state while harboring the Demon King’s power within him.

Exactly one year after the Hero fell asleep within the holy water of the Great Temple, he regained consciousness along with a new oracle.

However, despite the Goddess herself laboring for a year to drive it out, only half of the Demon King’s demonic power pooling inside his body had vanished.

The Hero’s body, composed of high-purity divine power and mana, could never coexist with demonic energy; yet the moment he released it, the Empire would surely fall into pandemonium. Thus, the Hero chose to embrace the demonic power.

The Hero’s divine power was purifying the demonic energy little by little, but every time it did, the collision between the two forces inside his body caused the Hero to grow weaker and weaker.

Yet, no one ignored the Hero who was still fighting a lonely, unfinished war against the remnants of the powerful Demon King, and all citizens of the Empire prayed for his recovery.

…Of course, Ian himself, the party involved,

“D*mn it, she really is a Goddess; the scale of her fake illness is in a league of its own.”

Was merely grumbling such things.