Table of Contents

Cover

Prologue

Chapter 1: Night Festival in the Slums

Chapter 2: The Woman from the Black Guild

Chapter 3: Lady Liz’s Miscalculation

Chapter 4: My Childhood Friend, the Mastermind

Chapter 5: Feminine War Tactics

Chapter 6: The Confession

Chapter 7: Somewhere to Belong

Epilogue (I)

Epilogue (II)

Side Story: Bedtime Talk

Afterword

Color Illustrations

About J-Novel Club

Copyright

Prologue

Life in a slums orphanage was notoriously harsh.

Children were seen as free labor and treated as slaves. No adults watched out for them, and they were only fed scraps once a day. Each child was assigned a task; things like meal duty and maintenance work were comparatively better, but most jobs, like begging, being sent away for hard labor, or criminal activities, were far from conducive to a child’s healthy development. Some were even abruptly sold off somewhere, and no one knew where they ended up, or what became of them.

Zenos’s task had been to loot corpses. It was a common occurrence in the slums for people to simply collapse and die; the boy’s job had been to quickly spot the bodies and steal anything that might be worth some coin. But he’d had no interest in doing so, and had often ended up burying the dead instead of looting them, only to be berated for it later.

To him, the sight of those people, dead in the street, had been like catching a glimpse of his own future. So perhaps at first he’d been driven by sympathy. Not only did these people fall over and die, they got looted too? Maybe it’d be better if he just brought them back to life, he’d thought.

And so he’d begun observing the numerous decaying corpses in the streets and learned the anatomical structure of various different species, visualizing how they functioned. Despite not knowing how to read the words, he pored obsessively over tattered books on anatomy and magic that someone from the orphanage had picked up from the roadside.

And thus, Zenos attempted to resurrect people. Every day, he’d cast spells on the dead, willing them to return to life. He lacked the know-how, but he had a mental image. Blood vessels, threadlike nerve fibers, muscles, skin. Those things would organically join together, repair themselves, and regain their original functions. He had a strange conviction that he could do it, even though he had no basis for it at all.

Over time, a white light began to envelop the corpses during his attempts. And today, at last, it seemed like it was going to work. The white light shot out, resounded, and the corpse’s fingers felt like they were about to move—

A harsh smack on his head from behind broke his concentration. The light dispersed and vanished. Turning around, he saw a dirty-looking man with a scruffy beard glaring daggers at him.

“Don’t ever use that power on the dead,” the man told him. “That’s for the living only.”

And that was how Zenos met his mentor.

***

“Zenos?” said Lily, tilting her head curiously. The afternoon sunlight pouring in through the window reflected off her blonde hair, making it sparkle and gleam.

“What is it, Lily?” Zenos replied, snapping out of his reverie and looking up at the young elven girl.

“Um, you were just spacing out, so I wondered if something’s up.”

“Huh. Was I?” he said, looking confused.

Lily glanced at the letter in the healer’s hand. “Are you reading Mr. Becker’s letter again?”

“Oh. Yeah, kinda.”

They were in a corner of a ruined part of the city that had once been decimated by a plague. Zenos was a brilliant healer but unable to obtain a formal license due to having been born in the slums, and thus had secretly set up a clinic here. His intention had been to operate quietly, away from prying eyes, but his days had turned out to be wilder than he’d imagined. Between visits from the leaders of the largest factions in the slums, a royal knight, and a rampaging golem from the Great Human-Demon War, his life had quickly become anything but on the down-low.

And last month, one of only seven elite-level healers in the whole Kingdom of Herzeth had stopped by. That man, Becker, had offered to turn a blind eye to Zenos’s illegal clinic in exchange for help with searching for a missing person from the Royal Institute of Healing. After many twists and turns, an unprecedented mass poisoning attempt, and a case finally closed, he’d returned to his clinic.

The letter in his hands was from Becker—part of the payment he’d received for his troubles—and described the man Zenos had once called his mentor.

“My mentor...” he muttered quietly.

Becker had supposedly once been close to Zenos’s mentor, yet even he couldn’t remember the man’s name or face anymore. According to the letter, this was likely due to a curse. The mentor—at the time an elite healer himself—had paid a steep price for dabbling in the forbidden arts of resurrection magic.

Zenos quietly recalled the furious expression on his mentor’s face after smacking him for trying to use resurrection magic on a corpse in the street. He still remembered the man, perhaps because the curse had activated before they’d met. Becker had written in his letter that, if Zenos wanted to know more, he should look for his mentor’s notes.

“His notes, huh...?” he murmured.

Lily peered into the letter. “Hmm. Are you friends with Mr. Becker now, Zenos?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Look, it says so right here.”

At the end of his letter, Becker had written, “Zenos, I hope your path as a healer is filled with fortune. Your friend...”

“Oh, you’re right. It does say that,” Zenos said. “I see. So we’re friends...”

“What do you mean, ‘you see’?”

“I haven’t really had friends in a while, so I’m not good at this stuff, you know.”