Yomigaeri no Maou

There were few things an infant could do.
They received food from their mother, slept according to instinct, and did their business.
It was just these three at most.
However, Luru had what infants normally didn’t; a strong ability to think.

Because of that, he was able to consider thing, and arrange the information he heard from perking his ears up.
From the time when he clearly recognised that he held his memories as the demon king, each day he would listen up for the conversations that went on in his home, and a number of facts became clear to him.

What he learned about in most detail, was of course, information about his own family.

According to the conversations that his mother and the servants had, it seems that their family name was Cadisnola.
In other words, Luru’s real name was Luru Cadisnola.
It seemed that his mother’s name was Medea Cadisnola, and his father’s name was Patrick Cadisnola.
They had probably said their names right after Luru was born, or perhaps around the time things had calmed down but unfortunately, Luru had no memories of the time between his birth, and the moment he recognised himself as the demon king, so it was only recently that he was finally able to hear this from a conversation between his mother and a servant.
Of course, just knowing the names of his parents and his family name wasn’t enough to satisfy Luru’s thirst for knowledge.
At present, Luru wanted to know a great number of things.
That’s why he actually wanted to hear about more things in greater detail.
To that end, he had considered asking his mother or the servants directly, but right now he still hadn’t reached the age where he could talk yet, and it would probably have been odd for him to suddenly start talking.
That’s why for now, when he was hungry, or wanted to defecate, he would just cry and scream without using real words.
Even so, his mother and the servants would still speak to him, so he didn’t feel that uncomfortable, and there wasn’t any information he needed urgently so there was no problem but…

It was just that life as an infant, was to Luru, nothing more than idleness.
Eating and sleeping.
Once he compared days of doing nothing but that to his memories of being busy with office work or fighting as a demon king, it was such a helplessly idle lifestyle that even right this second, it felt like his mind would grow slow from it.

That’s why after Luru gained self-awareness and gathered information for a few days, he started to wonder if there was anything he could do to kill time.
And to that end, he felt that he had to think about what he’d do from now on.

Luru had been born again as a human because of a strange incident.
Though he didn’t know what kind of life he’d lead from now on, finishing his life without doing anything was much too boring.
That’s why he wanted some kind of objective.
Moreover, there was also the fact that he felt that if he didn’t have a goal, then in the end, he would die without having accomplished anything, just like his previous life.
And he would hate that.
He’d pa.s.s on being an idiot who wouldn’t change even after dying.

In the past, Luru was the demon king.
Right now, he was a human.

Being the case, just what would he do from now on? Just how would he live from now on?
It was a profound question, and yet another issue.
It was for this reason that he spent a number of days seriously contemplating it.

For just how many days had he been ruminating over this?
Because of the complicated way in which the body of an infant perceived time, he couldn’t say for sure, but during that time, Luru had reached an answer for now.

That is, he would live as he wanted. It was a very simple conclusion, and was an answer that held in a sense a great deal of freedom.

Could that be called an objective?
Wasn’t it just living randomly?

There were probably people who lived as such.
However, if you thought about it carefully, you could probably understand that this was definitely not the case.

In his previous life, Luru was the demon king.
Because he was blessed with a mighty mana and physical strength from when he was a young child, he had been burdened with expectations, and had most of his life planned out for him since he was small.
Naturally, Luru remembered that it would have been unacceptable for him to have lived freely as he wished.
And he had memories of being a little rigid, and feeling that he had to answer these expectations.

Because he was stronger than any other demon, he also had the responsibility to lead their race.
Because of that, he wasn’t particularly dissatisfied with his position as the demon king.
However, it was the truth that because he was in a position of responsibility, there were choices that he couldn’t take.

Holding the hand of humanity, and cooperating was one of those impossible choices.
That’s why Luru painted over his heart, and fought as the incarnation of revenge and war.
After all, the Luru in those days was allowed nothing but that.
He could do nothing but that.

However, it was different now.
Right now, Luru was the human child of a lower cla.s.s n.o.ble family, and on top of that, he could feel from his parents words that they weren’t wishing for him to succeed their office in the slightest.
In other words, they wouldn’t mind if he lived as he wished.

In that case, I want to live a unbound lifestyle that I couldn’t in my previous life, he suddenly thought.
And once he had come across that idea, he felt that it was and extremely interesting and wonderful one.

Certainly as an objective, it was much too vague.
So he feel that.
But even so…

He would live as he wished.

What an interesting ring that has to it, he thought.
And then, not leaving that thought as merely a thought, he began seriously considering it.

To freely live as he wished in this world.

He would absolutely, definitely, do so, he thought.

And for the sake of that, what he would probably need to do so, was power, he thought.

That the world wasn’t so gentle a place that the absolutely powerless could live in was something that he knew much too well from his previous life.
Those who had no power at all would just be wounded, trampled on, and then killed.

The demon race held mighty power.
However, even that powerful demon race had been overrun not seldomly by the human race that used the violence of numbers.
Even the demon king himself had been destroyed by the group of four heroes.
All of it was because they lacked enough power.
That’s why things happened the way they did.

That’s why this time, he didn’t want to end up weeping because of his lack of power.
No matter what, he wanted to gain enough power that he could stop raining embers[(figuratively)].

However, right now, Luru had the body of an infant.
He couldn’t just simply start working out[training his body].
Even if he could, it would be after his body grew up a little more.

When he began to wonder how he would do so then, what came to mind first was the thought of his mastery over mana and magic.

Mana, magic, magecraft.
Those who manipulated these were known in his previous life as casters, magicians, and magi.
As for the distinctions between then, a caster was one who could personally invoke magic; a magician was one who was a certain amount more educated in magic theory, and could utilise magecraft in battle; and a magi was one who surpa.s.sed magicians, and was a magic specialist.

In the past, Luru was the world’s strongest demon, and also the world’s strongest magus.
The magic he fired off himself was matchless, and his understanding of magical phenomena was so deep that n.o.body else could reach him.
The archmagus in the hero’s party was also a powerful spellcaster, and was a magician with deep knowledge as well, and was an existence like the demon king in this regard, but there was quite the difference in ability.
Compared to the demon king who possessed enough power to match the four heroes by himself, the archmagus’ limit was one high cla.s.s demon.
As for the hero, she could exchange rallies with the demon king on equal fotting for a certain amount of time, but even so, a few minutes or a few dozen minutes was her limit.
Even for the hero, had she been unable to land a decisive blow on the demon king, she wouldn’t have been able to win.

The reason was that the mana the demon king held was much too powerful.
Though his base strength was already considerable, his seemingly endless amount of mana could be used in body reinforcement magecraft without end.
The level that the hero had finally reached only after shaving down her soul, acquiring the divine protection of G.o.d and spirits and making use of a large number of magic tools, was a level that the demon king could reach by his pure ability alone.

Could he reach such a level this time as well?
While wondering about this, Luru aimed for a moment when his mother and the servants weren’t in the room, and began to a.n.a.lyse the mana that dwelt within him.

This time, Luru had been born as a human.
In other words, this body was that of a human, and the mana that he was born with had a limit.
The demon race was powerful because from the moment they were born, they already possessed a pool of mana whose size had no match in the other species, and because Luru was presently a human, he shouldn’t have been able to expect that much from himself.

However.

When Luru began moving the mana in his body, he noticed it.
That his mana pool was unnaturally ma.s.sive.
It was in a sense extremely natural, but for a human this was clearly strange.

In other words, inside Luru who should have been a human, dwelt the same mana that he possessed as the demon king.
Luru noticed inside his body a seemingly limitless fountain of mana.
Even if he pumped it out, and pumped it out, it didn’t seem to run out at all.
This was an extremely convenient situation for Luru, but at the same time it meant that he couldn’t just readily fire magic out like he did in the past.
He held enough mana that if he carelessly fired magic and failed to control it, it was liable to easily turn the whole place into charred earth.

And he noticed some other problems as well.
Certainly he was used to this amount of mana.
It was the same amount of mana as he had as a demon king.
Because of that, he thought that using magic would feel the same.
However, the feeling of the mana coursing through his body was a great difference to how it felt when he was the demon king.

It was extremely difficult to flow mana through his body.
Having understood that a fountain of mana was pulsing in the depths of his body, he decided to flow it through his body to use body reinforcement, but it felt as though he were trying to cram more contents into an already full container.

It was probably a greater amount of mana than this body could contain, he thought.
Should it be called the difference between the bodies of the demon race and the human race?

However, even amongst humans, there were those who held ma.s.sive amounts of mana like the hero, and it was probably not impossible that his body could achieve the same thing.
Was it because the way he was supposed to do things was different, or was it because this body was immature?
It would be an important point of research from now on.

From now on he would be following this a.s.sumption, and would need to exert some effort, he thought.

His body being filled to the brim with mana meant that body reinforcement using mana was impossible, but then what about emission types?
It wasn’t impossible to emit mana out, even without running a large quant.i.ty of mana through your body.
You could feel the source of your mana in the depths of your abdomen, and to draw it out from there you would need to make your mana flow a little, but if it was just that much, he felt he could do it with his current body.

However, a large problem was that testing it would be difficult.
If he made a mistake in his choice of magic, it was possible that it could give rise to great harm.
Though he was called the incarnation of evil in his past life, Luru was by no means a murderer for fun.
On top of that, there was no way that he would want to annihilate the mother that had given birth to him, nor the servants that had taken care of him.

That’s why he had no choice other than to test out his magic, little by little, starting with small scale magic.
After he grew up a little, and his range of activity widened[the range in which he is about to move about], he wanted to test out the large scale magic from his time as the demon king, but for now he had no choice but to give up on it.

Concluding as such, for now Luru decided to test out emitting mana from his body.

As for the method and technique needed to do this, he had thoroughly exerted himself to master these back when he was a demon king, and could do so correctly even without anyone teaching him.
He thoroughly knew the little tricks, the right feeling when doing so, and the principles behind it, and on top of that, mana in and of itself was the same whether you were of the demon race or the human race.
That’s why if he started practising from this age, it should’ve been possible to use magic reasonably efficiently.

When he decided to try emitting mana as a test, he quietly closed his eyes, and slowly began to draw out mana from his abdomen.
And then he brought it out, brought it outside of him.

What he found was that there didn’t seem to be any problem.
Certainly it was difficult to run mana through his body, but even so, it wasn’t as though he couldn’t do it at all.
He didn’t know if it would become more easy to do so in the future, but that was what you’d call ‘something to research’.

At any rate, it seemed that he’d be able to make do somehow.
Feeling relief at knowing his, Luru continued to practice.

/Chapter 2 END