“Oh heavens, his forehead’s like a ball of fire! Your Highness! Your Highness, please, wake up!”
“What are you standing there for? Fetch the physician, now! This instant!”
My ears were stuffed full of cotton, so the voices didn’t really reach me, but watching the silhouettes rush frantically back and forth, I came to a natural conclusion.
Ah. So I really am dying today.
I hadn’t lived long enough to meet anything like a natural death, but a short life had been handed to me as my fate from the moment I was born.
I’d heard it so often the words had worn a callus into my ears: he’d be fortunate to see his tenth year. A precise diagnosis, worthy of an imperial physician, as it turned out. Here I was, floating at death’s door with exactly two years left to go before ten.
Limbs dangling limp as a corpse’s, I was scooped up into an attendant’s arms and carried off somewhere.
My head felt like a stone baked in a fire, and my breathing wouldn’t obey me either. My body had been thoroughly, properly wrecked.
Holding me tight, the attendant went racing up the red-carpeted palace staircase.
The agony it takes me just to get down these merciless stairs... A tall adult bounding up several steps at a stride, and the flat landing was already in sight.
Every time I let my heavy eyelids fall shut and slowly dragged them open again, reality and hallucination took turns appearing through the blur.
Blink.
I’d only closed my eyes for the briefest of moments.
And yet, in that instant of blackout, the red carpet vanished, and what should be shimmering in front of me instead but the grey stairwell of a crumbling multi-unit apartment block.
Each time a foot landed on those narrow steps and passed a landing, an orange sensor light flicked on with a little click.
The me inside the vision arrived at a drab front door and lifted the cover off the keypad lock with a practised hand.
Beep- beep- beep- beep.
Four careless button tones, then the sound of the lock disengaging, and when the door swung open—
Blink.
The excessively lavish, excessively vast bedchamber of a small prince appeared.
Strange... I could have sworn I was just standing in a cheap little rented one-room flat, cramped, no sunlight, and noise coming through the ceiling.
I honestly couldn’t tell which of the two was real, and I meant to blink once more to check, but the attendant buried me in a thick, downy quilt and my thoughts went no further.
I’m cold. And sleepy...
My vision darkened by degrees, and my mind floated up and away until the pain itself turned faint and distant—
And then everything was stained a complete, perfect black.
...
...
Click.
Out of the total darkness, a bright light suddenly switched on. When I came to my senses, I was sitting all alone in front of what looked like a cinema screen.
Whirrrr-.
A phantom sound reached my ears, like film reeling past. On the rectangular screen, footage began to play at high speed.
My first thought was, what on earth is going on here, but the bewilderment lasted only a moment. Before long I was completely absorbed in watching that screen.
Because what was streaming across it was the life of someone far too familiar to me.
Is this the farewell, then? A graduation album for my whole life?
Slowly, I sank into the memories playing out on the screen, memories I’d forgotten I had.
There’s a word for the phenomenon where, right before a person dies, the memories of their life flicker through their mind like a short film: your life flashing before your eyes.
You know the sort of thing. In films and dramas there’s always that scene where a character loses their footing and plummets from somewhere high up, and time crawls to a stop while they leaf through their fondest memories.
It’s been used as a cliché in fiction so relentlessly that some people probably assume it’s nothing more than a storytelling device.
Astonishingly enough, though, it’s a thing that really can and does happen.
According to the most credible theory out there, that flash of memories is the work of the ‘survival instinct.’
In other words, think of it as the brain trying to dodge death by tearing through all the big data of life it’s accumulated so far, hunting for any usable countermeasure buried in there.
Michel Fridrasil. Born with a feeble body, forever falling ill, having spent the better part of his existence wheezing and bedridden: an eight-year-old third prince.
With death right on my doorstep, my brain triggered that survival instinct and sped through my records, checking whether my memories held anything of use.
And it seemed to have arrived at a single conclusion.
Ah. There’s absolutely nothing in this life to work with.
Asking it to extract a decent survival tip for escaping death from the life of a small child who had done nothing but battle illness was pushing things well past unreasonable.
After all, mine was a life on a timer, one that had to set early without ever properly enjoying the little everyday things everyone else takes for granted: a day out, a nice dessert.
Honestly, it would be a lie to say I wasn’t bitter. It was already miserable enough never getting the range of experiences other people get, and now a shortage of experience was robbing me of my chance to survive as well.
But setting my personal grievances aside, this world has one absolute law that applies to everybody, young or old, man or woman.
Namely, the truth that if you don’t know, you die.
Having failed to find a way to live even by using my last resort, that flash of memories, I was supposed to simply end there. Following the order of nature, the way everyone else does.
But there was one variable in play here...
I don’t want to die yet!
Which was that my survival instinct was leagues stronger than an ordinary human’s.
Eight years is brief as a lifetime, but as a career it’s a fairly respectable stretch.
The sheer tenacity of clawing my way through one more day of life while fighting off disease my whole existence wasn’t something to be dismissed, apparently, because right up to the final moment my body simply didn’t know how to give up.
...Right. On that note, allow me to pose a question.
If the memories of this life are too hopelessly useless to get any mileage out of, what do you do?
The answer was surprisingly simple. If this life falls short, you haul in the memories of the previous one.
That’s right. Absurd as it sounds, in the middle of a burning fever, I went and remembered my past life.
And through those memories of my past life, I went and found a solution that would let me avoid death, too. Which was...
The Blue Rose of Fridrasil
And it was, in the most literal sense, a solution in book form. A romance fantasy novel, to be precise, one that hadn’t even finished serialising yet.
You’re wondering why, after all that rambling about my life flashing before my eyes and past lives and so on, I’ve suddenly started talking about a novel?
Well, obviously... because the world I’d been reborn into was the world inside that novel.
...It sounds like a joke, but I’m perfectly serious.
“Cough!”
The cough burst out of me and dragged my heavy eyelids open with it. At the same moment, the memories that had been unspooling like film in a cinema scattered apart.
Breathing hot and shallow, I looked around, and what I saw was a high ceiling decorated with a painting.
The first thing to come into focus was a crowd of small children romping about a golden sky, using the clouds as stepping stones.
Little white wings sprouted from their backs, and every one of them wore a smile so bright it dimpled their round baby cheeks.
That ceiling fresco, like a slice of heaven lifted down and set in place, had been commissioned from a famous painter in the hope that the child beneath it would be happy and healthy for a long, long time.
In my past life, a scene like that was something I’d only ever have glimpsed secondhand in an art textbook. Here, I’d grown up staring at it for a full eight years, until I was thoroughly sick of it.
Ever since my second life began, without a break...
As that sank in, the sense of reality that had drifted so far away began to settle back into its proper place.
Remembering my past life made one thing clear to me.
I used to think I might spend my entire life lying in this vast bed, looking up at nothing but that yellow painted sky until the day I died. But the years I’d lived under a real blue sky were far, far longer than that.
While I lay there turning over the sheer fact of being alive, the tears pooling and trembling across my eyes spilled over, leaving one faint track down my cheek.
And what good does that do me? Last life or this one, I’m fated to die young either way!
With my memories back, two facts arrived naturally together: that the me of my past life had died without even making it to thirty, and what this world actually was.
The country I lived in. The web of relationships around me, and the faces that went with them. And, decisively, the name and station I was living under. Every last piece of the puzzle pointed at one single truth, and it was far too obvious to ignore.
I didn’t want to admit it, but it seemed I’d been reborn as the third prince who dies helping the heroine escape in the novel I’d read in my past life. Michel Fridrasil.
Honestly... even having said it out loud myself and settled the matter, it was absurd enough to drag a hollow laugh out of me.
I never did any good deed worth writing into the history books, sure. But I never committed any crime grave enough to deserve punishment on this scale either...
Then again, I hadn’t lived long in the first place, so where exactly would I have found the chance to leave any great achievement behind?
At school I was a model student with a spotless record who’d never once gone off the rails, and once I had a job I became another cog in society, a diligent wage earner.
In short, forget anything illegal. I was a harmless little citizen who didn’t even drop litter on the street or jaywalk.
So why me, of all people?
There are over eight billion humans on Earth, so out of all those people, why single me out for a trial like this? Life is too cruel, seriously.
The tears dripping steadily down as I stared at the ceiling contained rather more indignation than grief.
Having soaked my pillowcase and then gone on to draw an entire map on it, I went to lift a hand and wipe away the tears still welling up.
“...?”
Then something felt off, and I turned my head to the side.
My hand wouldn’t come up, and I’d assumed it was just the fever leaving me with no strength. That wasn’t it at all. Someone was holding my hand.
1. Korean uses 주마등 (jumadeung), a revolving lantern whose painted horses appear to gallop as it turns.
2. The Korean word for ‘solution’ (해결책) ends in 책, the word for ‘book’, so Michel is making a pun.
