MBMP 01

Chapter : 01

May the Lamb Be Protected

“Wait, what did you just say, Oppa?”

I dropped the cookie I had been eating.

When I looked up at the boy in disbelief, he gave me an awkward smile and avoided my gaze.

“Um… somehow, I seem to have caught the Emperor’s eye. He asked me if I happened to be free on the night of the festival.”

“Surely you don’t mean that Emperor, right? The one I know?”

He couldn’t possibly mean the mad Emperor of Delphiam—the one rumored to be a homosexual, obsessed with collecting beautiful boys, and notorious for replacing his favorite concubine every year.

Surely not.

It couldn’t be him.

Even though we were currently in Delphiam, and Kallian had gone to meet the Emperor of the Empire with the head of the family this morning…

Still, surely it wasn’t that Emperor.

I forced a smile and picked up the fallen cookie.

But before I could even brush the dust off it, Kallian answered with a helpless smile.

“Hmm. If you mean the ruler of the Delphiam Empire, then… yes, I think it is.”

I dropped the cookie again.

Oh my God.

My brother was about to be dragged away as the tyrant Emperor’s concubine.

Brilliant platinum-blond hair and vivid vermilion eyes.

A slender body lined with delicate muscles, and exquisitely sculpted features that looked as though they had been carved by an artist.

Kallian Winyak was the prettiest of pretty boys.

He had turned fifteen this year and possessed the astonishing status of being the next head of Winyak, one of the Transcendent Houses of the Kingdom of Abwie.

And he was my older brother.

Though we didn’t share a single drop of blood.

Explaining that requires a bit of a story.

I entered the Winyak family three years ago, when I was around nine years old.

Kallian found me rummaging through a garbage can on the street, filthy and searching for something to eat, and brought me back to the mansion.

Fortunately, I had a talent for swordsmanship, and the head of Winyak, a prestigious swordsmanship family, accepted me as a member of the household.

This was an extremely unusual occurrence.

That was because receiving the surname of a Transcendent House meant receiving a share of the power of the Star that protected the family.

The ‘Stars’ were divine beings that looked down upon this world from the distant reaches of space.

There were five Stars that directly influenced this world, Rachnar.

The Judge of Darkness and Chaos, the Wordmage of All Things, the Creator of Beginning and End, the Messenger of the Formless, and the Foretelling Eye.

Each of them had formed sacred covenants with one of the five great families, lending them their power.

Families blessed by the protection of one of these Stars were called Transcendent Houses.

Winyak was one of them—a prestigious swordsmanship family that had earned renown across the entire continent with the sword under the protection of the Judge of Darkness and Chaos.

Every year, they held selection trials to recruit disciples, accepting only swordsmen with exceptional talent as members of the family.

And among those members, only a tiny number who possessed truly extraordinary talent were granted the surname Winyak, which carried the power of the family’s Guardian Star.

It was a ruthless world where even direct blood relatives were cast out if they lacked talent.

And yet, I—a scruffy nine-year-old girl—became a member of Winyak practically overnight.

It was not merely unusual.

It was shocking.

There were two reasons it had been possible.

First, I was no ordinary genius.

Second, Kallian was exceptionally frail for the heir of a prestigious swordsmanship family.

Let’s start with the first reason.

Why was I no ordinary genius?

The answer was simple.

I was someone who had died once and been reincarnated with all the memories and abilities of my previous life.

My original name was Rosietti Kirges.

In my previous life, I had been a candidate to become the head of Kirges, another Transcendent House blessed by a Guardian Star, just like Winyak.

While Winyak was a family that had reached the pinnacle of swordsmanship, Kirges was a family of sorcerers who wielded the Words of Power.

They were a gathering of people who could cause supernatural phenomena by speaking words imbued with the power of the Stars.

Although I was now living as Rosien Winyak, there was a time when the name ‘Rosietti Kirges’ was known to everyone in the Delphiam Empire.

As ‘the mutant born from Kirges.’

I had certainly been born into Kirges, but I possessed a far greater talent for the sword than for sorcery.

So, when I turned seventeen, I lost to my brother in the succession battle to determine the heir of Kirges and died.

That was because the succession battle permitted the use of sorcery alone…

Damn it. If I had been born into Winyak, I wouldn’t have had to die!

Perhaps thinking that right before I closed my eyes had somehow made a difference, because after I was struck by the sorcery my brother unleashed and left this world in such a pathetic manner, I was reincarnated in the neighboring Kingdom of Abwie.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes and abandoned on a wooden board.

As a newborn, no less.

“Waaaaah! (Alfien Kirges, you bastard! Even if you hate me that much, did you really have to use a lethal spell?!)”

Just you wait.

Someday, I’ll come back and chop your damn head off!

The only person who took me in while I could do nothing but scream and cry in outrage was a middle-aged woman who lived nearby.

Out of a sense of moral responsibility, she kindly went so far as to leave me in front of an orphanage.

And so I lived among the children at the orphanage until I was nine, when I was discovered by twelve-year-old Kallian.

Even when he was younger than he was now, Kallian was exceptionally beautiful.

“Are you hurt?”

“What do you want? Get lost!”

And, well, I had a bit of a nasty personality back then.

It couldn’t be helped.

Not only had I died an absurd death, but the dilapidated orphanage only gave us one meal a day.

Of course, the sorcerous power granted by Kirges’s Guardian Star had not disappeared entirely. I could still use the Words of Power, albeit only weakly.

But the Star wasn’t kind enough to feed me!

“Bread, appear! Ta-da!”

That sort of thing didn’t work!

Is there anyone who can maintain their dignity in the face of hunger?

My second life had begun with me constantly starving, and as the years passed, my personality only got worse.

Kallian didn’t receive a warm welcome when he first approached me, either.

“You have a wound on your cheek. The blood has frozen. Doesn’t it hurt?”

“What’s it to you? Mind your own business!”

“Why are you digging through that? That’s a garbage can.”

“None of your business. I’m really irritable right now, so could you stop bothering me and get lost?”

“Did you lose something? Want me to help you look for it?”

Kallian was the same kind, oblivious young master back then as he was now.

I got angry at him.

“I’m looking for something to eat for dinner! Why?!”

“Why are you looking for dinner in a garbage can?”

“I don’t have anything to eat, nobody to feed me, and I don’t have any money to buy food! Can’t you tell just by looking at me?”

“……Do you live like this every day?”

“Hey. Is this your first time seeing an orphan begging to survive?”

If you’re going to pity me, give me money!

After quietly listening to my tirade, Kallian gently corrected me.

“Hey? No. Oppa.”

“What?”

“Don’t dig through that. Why don’t you come with me?”

He had pulled his hood deeply over his head, so all I could see were his delicate jawline and reddish lips.

“I’ll give you food and money. I’ll give you a place to sleep, too. Come with me.”

“Who are you?”

I asked irritably, and he pulled off his hood.

The moment I saw his face, I completely forgot that I had been angry.

I was stunned.

The boy smiled brightly.

Wow.

So this was what a divine halo looked like.

“Kallian.”

“Uh…”

“My name is Kallian Winyak. So, what do you say? Want to come with me?”

Honestly, I didn’t even hear his name.

By the time I came to my senses, my mouth was already speaking on its own.

“I’ll follow you anywhere…”

I had simply been captivated by his face.

That was how incredibly beautiful he was.

So beautiful that it was difficult to believe he was a real human being with hot blood flowing through his veins rather than a doll operated by screws and gears.

It wasn’t until I followed the pretty boy all the way to the front of the Winyak mansion, holding his hand, that I learned who he was.

He was the one and only heir to Winyak, the strongest swordsmanship family on the continent…!

It was an incredible stroke of luck.

Winyak of the Sword!

Wasn’t that the very Transcendent House I had admired every single day back when I was Rosietti Kirges?

How strong could the heir of that family possibly be?

My innocent expectations were completely shattered just three days after I settled into the Winyak mansion as an extra mouth to feed.

“The sword is too heavy…”

“You call this heavy? You can’t even swing it?”

“Mm-hmm. I feel like my arms are going to break. My legs are shaking, too.”

It was a common occurrence for him to struggle just to lift a single sword.

“How are you supposed to lead the family if you can’t even lift something like this? Give it to me! I’ll do it.”

“Thanks, Rosi.”

He couldn’t even carry five sacks of training wheat at once.

And then there was this.

“You idiot! Fine, I understand feeling sorry for someone, but how can you give away everything you own and even come home after giving them the clothes off your back?!”

“But I thought of you, Rosi, so I couldn’t just walk past them…”

Whenever he saw someone poor and pitiful, he would immediately press cash into their hands.

And he was an absolute master at donating his shirt buttons, brooches, and expensive accessories to the streets one after another.

How was it even possible for him to leave the mansion alone and come back wearing nothing but a shirt?!

I should have realized it the moment he picked up a filthy little girl like me, who was rummaging through food waste, and brought me home to live in the mansion!

But that wasn’t even the end of it.

“Rosi. Look! I got all these flowers from Usella’s Salon for you! They’re the same color as your hair, aren’t they?!”

He had absolutely no understanding of the meaning behind flowers shyly offered by girls his age.

He simply accepted more than fifty flowers and brought them all home, saying he wanted to give them to me.

“Oppa, do you know that means ‘I have feelings for you’?”

“Oh, is that what it means? Then you really should have them, Rosi.”

“You’re giving all these to me? They’re a declaration of love!”

“Yeah. I want Rosi to like me even more.”

“……”

“You’re always busy scolding me, after all.”

Was he genuinely oblivious?

Or was he really so innocent that he could only interpret a declaration of love this purely…?

“Giving these to me means you want to date me, you idiot!”

You just came home with fifty girlfriends!

In the end, in order to prevent Kallian from building himself a harem, I personally took him by the hand and went around returning the flowers to each and every disgruntled young lady.

What on earth was I supposed to do with this hopelessly kind and destructively innocent boy?

I had lost count of how many times I had held my forehead because of the living national treasure known as Kallian Winyak.

So, at some point, I simply gave up on trying to educate him.

He was living proof that the Stars were remarkably fair.

Winyak’s Star had given Kallian unparalleled beauty while taking away his stamina, common sense, and practical judgment.

And so I reached a conclusion.

Fine.

I’ll just protect him.

If someone’s head was this full of flowers, they had to be a protected national treasure.