The business management tutor praised Damian’s looks, remarking how truly adorable the younger brother was.
“What good is an alpha having a cute face anyway? If anything, it’s a flaw.”
“Given an appearance like that, I’d wager he’ll manifest as an omega.”
“Being of Vesper blood, he will naturally manifest as a dominant alpha.”
Was it because of the tutor’s useless chatter?
Callix ended up imagining Damian manifesting as a dominant omega.
Judging by his current looks, when he grew up, countless alphas would likely send him party invitations and beg him for a dance.
However, since Damian was his Gem, he could never leave the North.
His marriage partner had to be a weak and impoverished noble alpha youth willing to marry into the Vesper family as a matrilocal husband.
While Callix personally wished Damian would manifest as an alpha and stay by his side to assist him, since when did a person’s secondary gender manifestation go the way they wanted?
Either way, thinking that Damian might well manifest as an omega, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to look into potential marriage matches for Damian ahead of time.
A month passed since Damian began receiving lessons from Callix on correcting his pronunciation and accent.
Because Damian quickly mastered sentence structuring and vocabulary, his conversational skills improved rapidly, and he no longer spoke with a babyish lisp.
For Callix, seeing his younger brother transform to match the dignity of the Vesper house brought a twinge of lingering regret.
Deep down, he had found the child’s lisp rather cute.
Regardless, it was time to move on to teaching him how to read and write.
Sitting his younger brother—who was ten years his junior—on his lap, he read him fairy tales.
Merely through that physical contact, his rampaging mana calmed down like the surface of a quiet lake.
Damian learned letters while Callix received divine protection, striking two birds with one stone.
As the same fairy tales were read repeatedly, Damian began recognizing letters naturally on sight.
Callix taught him vowels, and in the following lesson, consonants.
Pointing out where they appeared in the fairy tale books, he meticulously explained how they were applied.
Watching Damian grip a pencil with his tiny hand and diligently scribble letters on paper, Callix sometimes felt as though this child were his own son.
Slowly and steadily, Callix opened his heart to Damian.
Over the past four months, Shushu had scurried all over the inside of the castle, completing a map to use for his future escape.
With Melissa’s help, he had even managed to add the passages used exclusively by the servants.
However, the real problem was that no matter how well he managed to slip out of the castle interior, in order to get past the massive, sturdy outer walls—which wouldn’t even crumble if a giant attacked—he absolutely had to pass through the main gates.
Naturally, the guards protecting the gates had no intention of letting him walk away unbothered.
How wonderful it would be if he could shoot spiderwebs out of his wrists like a spider-man and scale the outer walls, but he was just a seven-year-old child with garbage-tier physical strength who couldn’t even manage a single push-up.
Furthermore, the issue was that no matter how much he practiced, he didn’t think he’d ever become good at scaling castle walls by the time he reached the age of twenty, when he was scheduled to die in the original novel.
While Shushu was spreading out his map and deeply agonizing over escape routes other than the main gates, Melissa, watching him, grumbled with dissatisfaction.
“Seriously, why? What on earth is your problem with this place?”
Though Melissa had listened to Shushu’s escape plan and helped him, deep down she secretly kept hoping he would continue playing the role of fake Damian.
In the beginning, she had been panicked out of her mind for fear of getting caught as a Gem and urged him to look for a chance to run away quickly.
But after seeing him live with mages for four months without getting his identity discovered, her attitude had flipped completely.
She didn’t want her son to leave this place.
She had concluded that rather than living a life of hardship on the run out in the world, it was far better to live out his life as fake Damian—being served by others forever, eating to his heart’s content, and wearing fine clothes.
Well, any parent would naturally prefer their child to live as a wealthy aristocrat rather than a poor commoner.
Even if she couldn’t step forward openly as his parent.
If he could, Shushu would have loved to stay here with Melissa forever, playing the part of Damian. But because he knew the future, he couldn’t do that.
When he turned twenty, Callix would develop his name-mark, and he would discover that Damian was a fake younger brother.
Of course, even if he managed to survive that hurdle, another crisis loomed ahead.
In the future, the ‘real Damian,’ healed by the female protagonist Tang Miyuan, was scheduled to awaken as an archmage and return to the North.
In the original novel, he only killed Meiyou for abusing him and left it at that, but if he saw someone else living and stealing the life that belonged to him, it was obvious he would retaliate.
Because he couldn’t share such things with Melissa, Shushu still hadn’t been able to persuade his mother, who desperately wanted her child to live as the Grand Duke’s second son.
As a result, four long months had slipped away while they dawdled inside the ducal estate.
Still, the silver lining was that after receiving lessons from Callix, he had grown remarkably close to him.
It had even reached the point where Shushu occasionally harbored secret hopes: if he pushed Callix into an early marriage and made him a father, maybe when Callix’s name-mark manifested later and rendered him infertile, he might spare Shushu’s life.
As it happened, today was the day all the men of the Vesper family departed for the Thanksgiving hunt, and Cain was bustling around from early morning, busy organizing his clothes and grooming him.
Shushu dressed in a comfortable linen shirt paired with tight-fitting white riding breeches.
Over the shirt, to protect his internal organs and bones in case he accidentally took a fall while driving horses hard through the forest, he wore a thick leather vest, alongside tall riding boots that reached up to his knees.
Stepping outside the castle, all the servants working in the Vesper household were gathered for the occasion.
Large crimson flags emblazoned with the family crest fluttered in the wind.
Autumn had arrived in full bloom.
