“Kyaaaah! Aaah! This is so annoying! Fix it! Fix it right now!”
A sharp, cat-eyed beauty wearing a dress that revealed her voluptuous chest threw a vase across the tower room.
With her bright red hair, she was Meiyou, the Grand Duke’s concubine whose fiery temper matched her flame magic.
“I-I am truly sorry, Lady Meiyou. I have no excuse.”
Bow-ing deeply, the doctor rolled his eyes nervously to check on Damian, who sat with his mouth hanging open and drool trickling down his chin.
The second young master had tumbled down the stairs and become an idiot.
Since there was no way Damian, locked away at the top of the tower, could have walked out of the room on his own, the doctor figured she must have pushed the child down the stairs once again.
“Shut up! What kind of doctor are you if you can’t even fix something like that?!”
It had already been five years since the Northern Grand Duke and his heir had departed for the battlefield.
While giving birth to the second son, Damian, the Duchess had died of excessive blood loss, and Meiyou, the daughter of a count, had come to the North to fill that empty place.
As it was, she was furious about marrying a man much older than herself, let alone being a mere concubine rather than the legal wife.
To make matters worse, overnight she had been saddled with an infant born to the rightful wife.
While her husband was away from the castle, Meiyou had indulged in all sorts of hysterics, locking the baby in the tower and abusing him.
Yet, of all things, Damian had turned out to be a cripple and a fool, and now the Grand Duke was returning to the North.
If her past atrocities were discovered, not only she but the entire Bastion family would face annihilation.
Annoyed by how tangled the situation had become, she flared flames in her hands to vent her anger.
Just as she was about to kill the useless doctor who couldn’t heal Damian, he cried out in a loud voice.
“I have a good idea.”
“What is it? If it’s any nonsense, I won’t let you off.”
“Doesn’t the Grand Duke not know what the young master Damian looks like, having parted ways with him when he was an infant? Besides, only a handful of people working inside the castle have cared for the young master. So, how about we find a child with the exact same pink hair and golden eyes and pass him off as young master Damian?”
“Hmm…”
For now, it was the best possible solution.
However, everyone in the North had dark hair.
On top of that, pink hair was extremely rare even in the Adamantia Empire, and golden eyes were just as scarce.
Even in the South, where hair colors were lighter, such a combination was hard to find—how on earth could they suddenly find a child in the North with all those conditions?
“Fine. If you bring me a stand-in for Damian before the Grand Duke returns, I’ll spare your life. If you fail, I will tell the Grand Duke that you made the young master crippled because you failed to take proper care of him!”
The doctor, who had been keeping his head bowed, barely managed to swallow down the curses threatening to burst out.
She was telling him to clean up the mess she herself had made.
But since Meiyou was a wicked woman more than capable of killing him, the doctor had no choice but to comply obediently.
“Yes, I will do my absolute best to find him.”
Stepping out of the room where Damian was imprisoned, the doctor let out the breath he had been holding.
His body shivered as his sweat-drenched back cooled down.
No matter how much he cursed her inwardly as a monster deserving of divine punishment, all he could do was find a stand-in for Damian.
Because he hadn’t reported Meiyou’s tyranny to the Grand Duke while keeping her company through her heat cycles, the doctor was a complete accomplice who could never fully escape responsibility for Damian’s accident.
There was once the most beautiful emperor in the world.
He possessed hair that looked like melted gold and emerald-shining green eyes, and was called the sun of the empire: Helios Adamantia.
The gods, marveling at Helios’s beauty, had bestowed divine power upon him.
However, an emperor who held numerous divine powers within a human body suffered from excruciating agony.
In response, Helios shared his divine power with the nobles of the twelve great families.
Even so, these noble beings who could use magic could not escape a chronic illness: mana overload.
The method to prevent mana overload had been discovered by chance.
When physical contact was made with a specific kind of being, the rampaging mana would calm down.
The mages called this act “divine blessing” and widely searched for individuals with “this constitution.”
They called them “Gem,” meaning a precious jewel.
If a Gem happened to be an omega or an alpha, they might get dragged off by the imperial family and nobility to bear children and live as concubines, but the vast majority of humanity was beta.
How many such chosen genotypes could there possibly be?
And the notion that alphas and omegas possessed noble status was common knowledge here, too.
Yet Shushu, despite being a commoner, had been born as a “Gem.”
Presumably, the reason he was being dragged away right now was because of that very fact.
The carriage door flew open, and multiple arms reached out, pulling both him and his mother inside in one go.
In broad daylight, right in the middle of the market, he had been kidnapped.
His mother held him tightly, trembling all over.
There were four men inside the carriage.
Since they weren’t ordinary betas, they all had handsome appearances and bulky frames that exuded an overwhelming sense of intimidation.
“Why did you have to bring the woman along?” the spectacled man scolded his companions.
“What do you expect me to do when she wouldn’t let go of the kid?”
“Let’s just ditch the woman right now.”
“This is driving me crazy. What should we do?”
“Let’s just take her along to Lady Meiyou for now,” a blue-haired man said in a gloomy atmosphere.
“Anyway, it looks like we did a pretty good job finding someone similar to young master Damian.”
“A misfortune within our fortune.”
At the names “Meiyou” and “Damian,” Shushu tilted his head in confusion before opening his eyes wide in shock.
He had thought he was simply kidnapped for being a Gem, but that wasn’t it.
As if someone had struck his head with a hammer to knock some sense into him, the memories of being an ordinary high school student on Earth rushed back in an instant.
He hadn’t been reincarnated; he had possessed a body in the dark, ruined web novel ‘The Black-Haired Healer’.
And judging by how things were unfolding, Shushu seemed to have possessed a minor supporting character who died so early he hadn’t even been mentioned by name in ‘The Black-Haired Healer’.
