The Reincarnated Demon King Can’t Escape~ When I Reincarnated 1000 Years Later, My Yandere Heroines Were Waiting for Me~ - Chapter 2

Waking Up One Thousand Years Later

I am drifting inside the darkness.

I don’t have a body. There is no weight. There is no up or down.

Only my awareness is floating in the endless emptiness.

Where am I?

Pieces are floating by.

The fragments of the memories that used to belong to me are scattered around like a broken mirror, flashing on and off over and over again.

The sound of clashing swords. The smell of blood and dirt. Beyond the burning castle walls, countless military flags are fluttering.

The throne. The cold stone armrests. A crown that is way too heavy. A name that is way too heavy.

My three subordinates. Flattened silver ears. Spreading black wings. A proud sword.

Why, Reidlark?

And finally, my own voice was echoing at the bottom of the emptiness.

“Let’s meet again at the edge of dimensions.”

It piles up over and over, losing its shape, and eventually changes into just a simple echo.

Ah. Right. I died.

The Demon King Erdrain. That was my name.

I guess I should talk about it in the past tense now, as something that “used to be.” In that throne room, inside that puddle of blood, I let go of everything including my soul. It is a life that ended.

But I have my awareness. I have my thoughts.

I am still right here.

Did the time and space transposition magic succeed? Is there something beyond this emptiness?

As if answering my question, a light suddenly shone through.

—

It’s white.

The whiteness filling up my vision slowly starts to take shape.

A ceiling. It’s a white ceiling. A flat, sterile ceiling that I don’t recognize at all.

It’s completely different from the grand stone style of the throne room, and it’s different from the sky of a battlefield too.

The thing hitting my nose is the smell of antiseptic.

The thing reaching my ears is a regular electronic sound. It is beeping quietly, accurately, and at a steady interval.

The thing under my body isn’t a stone floor, but a soft bed. There are metal rails on the left and right.

Is this a hospital?

I tried to move my body.

It moves just fine. But there is a strange feeling.

The body itself is small. My arms and legs are short. My muscles are thin.

Everything is completely different from the body of the demon king that I built up through training on the battlefield.

I lifted my right hand and held it up in front of my face.

It was the hand of a young boy.

It’s nice and clean, without a single scratch. It isn’t a thick palm from holding a sword for ages, nor is it a finger tip burnt from the recoil of magic power. It’s a kid’s hand that doesn’t have any history written on it at all.

Is this my new body?

The exact moment total confusion filled my chest.

Something snapped deep inside my head, and memories that didn’t belong to me came rushing in.

—

Eldi.

That was the name of the owner of this body.

It feels like taking a quick look through someone else’s life on fast forward.

Fragmented images and emotions come pushing in one after another.

It looks like a whole thousand years have passed while I was drifting through the emptiness.

In this modern time, it seems that coexistence between demons and humans has become a totally normal thing, and they don’t shed blood between races like they used to anymore.

But Eldi was a mixed-blood half-demon and half-human.

It seems that coexistence and being mixed-blood are two different stories, and half-demons are still a minority, so they get looked at with prejudice sometimes, especially in the world of kids.

And out of all things, this boy was given a name that comes from me, the legendary Demon King Erdrain.

Eldi. A child who carries the name of Erdrain.

However, his magic power rank is F, the absolute lowest.

A half-baked kid who can’t live up to his name.

That was the label that got slapped onto Eldi.

The memories speed up.

The textbooks are gone from inside the desk. Someone is laughing at his back as he searches all over the place every single time there is a break.

The exact moment he puts his foot into his shoe, a sharp pain hits the bottom of his foot. A thumbtack. Blood oozes out from the tip of his finger as he pulls it out.

“Hey, half-baked kid. That name is way too heavy for you.” Sneering. The silence of the surroundings. Nobody protects him. There is no friend who will save him. Even the teacher turns their eyes away.

And the very last memory.

The rooftop.

Past the rails where his feet stepped over, the ground spreads out far below, looking tiny.

The wind blew up from underneath.

He fell.

A strange feeling of freedom, and an overwhelming terror that pierced through his entire body in the next split second.

The memories broke off right there.

I closed my eyes.

Blocking out the whiteness of the ceiling, I quietly let out a breath in the dark.

This kid tried to end his own life.

While having the exact same name as the legendary demon king, he got crushed by the weight of that name, lost his place to belong, got pushed into a corner, and the thing he chose at the very end was the other side of the rails on the rooftop.

I thought to myself that it’s pretty ironic.

A demon king who fought at the very top of conflicts, got tired of it, and died.

And a boy who got stepped on at the very bottom of conflicts and got tired of living.

The exact same name. Totally opposite lives.

Only the place they arrived at was the exact same death.

I am sorry, Eldi.

I told him quietly inside my heart.

I am borrowing your body.

I will take on the pain that you were carrying around too.

So just rest for a bit.

—

I had a hard time even sitting up.

The body that kept sleeping after getting hurt wouldn’t move the way I wanted it to, and my arms tremble just from grabbing the rails of the bed to lift up my upper body.

I turned my eyes outside the window.

I gasped.

The world of one thousand years later was spreading out right there.

Even the shapes of the buildings are completely different. They aren’t made of stone or wood, but groups of buildings drawing smooth curves stretch up toward the sky. Streaks of light were running across those walls.

Light that is controlled by magic technology. A system that converts magic power into drive power, which existed only as a theory back in my time, must have been put into practical use over the thousand years.

When I look up at the sky, a dragonute with spread wings was flying. She is carrying a big box on her back. Is it a delivery business? A dragonute, who would have been a main force on the battlefield back in my time, is carrying packages.

I drop my eyes to the streets. People with horns. People wagging tails. People walking with folded wings. And people who don’t have any physical features at all are walking along the exact same path completely naturally.

There wasn’t a sign of fighting anywhere.

“Eldi? Oh my, you’re awake!”

When I turned around at the voice, a nurse was standing in front of the door. Her eyes went completely round with surprise, and she smiled right away. “Thank goodness, I’ll go call Teacher,” she said, and hurriedly ran down the hallway.

Eventually, I received an explanation of the situation from the doctor who came back.

It is the third day since I was in a coma. They treated the fractures all over the body and the internal organ damage from the fall with healing magic as an emergency measure, but my awareness didn’t come back, and he said there was a chance I might never wake up like this.

“It is a miraculous recovery.”

The doctor said so, and then he hesitated to speak for just a bit.

“Nobody came to visit you during these three days, though.”

That single sentence backed up Eldi’s memories.

For three days, nobody came. Not his parents. Not his classmates. Not his teachers.

While a single boy was hovering between life and death, the number of people who visited this hospital room was zero.

I see.

After the doctor left the room, I turned my eyes outside the window once again.

If I layer Eldi’s memories together with the scenery I am looking at with my own eyes right now, I can see the general shape of this world.

Demons and humans had assimilated.

Back in the time when I lived, demons and humans were split into two forces, repeating wars and short truces over and over. They stole each other’s territories and killed each other’s people.

But over the thousand years, that boundary melted away, and now they form a single society. Human styles became the main trend for daily life, and demons live their lives the exact same way as humans do. On the other hand, it seems that “human” got mixed into the classification of races as a type of demon. A race that has weak strength but is excellent at magic suitability and is smart with strategies, that was the position of humans in this era.

Assimilation. Fusion. You could call it either one.

At the very least, large-scale conflicts don’t exist anymore.

Isn’t this the exact world that I wished for at the moment of my death one thousand years ago?

I want to live my life over quietly in a place where there is absolutely nothing.

The prayer from back then is right in front of my eyes. The races that used to kill each other are living peacefully in the same town, under the same sky.

If that’s the case.

This time, I am going to live a peaceful life.

Without fighting. Without standing out. Quietly.

I will start over the life of this boy named Eldi.

—

The night before leaving the hospital.

The checks were finished, and I was told that I can leave the hospital tomorrow. That part is fine, but when I think about how the thing waiting for me after leaving the hospital is Eldi’s daily life, my feelings get a little bit heavy.

Well, whatever. What is a demon king who lived for a thousand years doing getting scared of something like a kid’s bullying?

The exact moment I built up my spirit like that, I suddenly noticed a strange feeling.

Something I don’t recognize is placed by my pillow.

I sat up and picked it up.

It’s a tiny flower decoration that can fit right inside my palm. Clothes made to look like colorful petals are carefully sewn together, and the shape is fixed up with thin wire. It is simple, but it was a handmade item where a lot of heart went into every single petal.

There was no such thing here during the day.

I called the nurse and asked, but she said nobody knows about it. There is no matching person in the records of visitors either.

When in the world did who get in here?

Underneath the flower decoration, a small card was attached.

The handwriting is polite, but clumsy somehow.

Only a single line was written like this.

“Welcome back, Master.”

The beating of my heart speeds up.

Master.

I know only one person who uses this way of calling me.

The one who flattened her silver ears and stood quietly by my side.

No, that’s stupid. A thousand years have passed, you know?
There is no way a subordinate from a thousand years ago is in this era.
It’s a coincidence. An acquaintance of Eldi wrote it as some kind of joke. It has to be that.

I lay down on the bed while keeping the card tightly squeezed in my hand.