Chapter 281 – 281. Familiar Heart (2)
Lily was the daughter of her family, who earned her living by running a restaurant on a provincial estate during her childhood.
Even her father and mother were not her family members as she was fed up with a three-person household.
But she managed to live without going hungry, and she lived with happy memories in her own way, Lily could be proud of.
Lily, who was only 15 years old when she couldn’t be called an adult, later grows up and becomes an adult, and while she agrees with her, she playsfully talks about the marriage she will have someday.
She wasn’t rich, but she was never lacking.
Then one day, change came so suddenly.
“Are you really going to do this!?”
“Only once! Just one more, let me go! I can really hit the jackpot this time!”
It was the beginning of a regular meeting formed not too long ago, once a week, in the morning, a wagon that stopped by the manor, picked up the men from the provincial manor, went somewhere, returned in the evening, and dispersed.
The number of times they attended the meeting started with one, then two, then four, and continued to accumulate. I found out that I was going.
Her mother, as well as her daughter, were desperate to dissuade her father, but Lily’s father was unwilling to listen to her family.
Later, there were many cases in which the father, who had to return in the evening, spent time at the gambling house and did not come home for an entire week.
Lily’s daily life at home is gradually distorted, and her manageable time of happiness is beginning to crack.
“Mom… Are you okay?”
With her father spending more time at the casino than at home, all the burden of her store’s work shifted to her mother.
One person was missing, but the work that had been gradually deteriorating only with the loss of one person in charge of the job that required strength was gradually disrupted, and the management of the store became poor.
“Are you okay. Mom is fine Don’t worry too much.”
Even as her young daughter’s eyes could see the increasingly difficult operation of the store, Lily’s mother did not lose her smile.
It wasn’t too hard to realize that it was her affable bravado to not create insecurity for herself.
Her increasingly difficult family situation was one that her mother and daughter had to work together through her efforts.
“You! That can’t be! This is the price you have to pay the purveyor!”
“Noisy! If you pick… If you pick it up, you can make up for it and give it back!”
The purpose of the father’s return home, who had not returned home at all, was not to return to his family’s arms before he knew it, but to extort the family’s property to be used as a gambling fund.
“Stay calm at home!”
After his father left with the money to pay the vendors supplying food materials to the store, the operation of the store, which he had barely managed, finally began to become difficult.
After that, it was two weeks later when my father returned.
Not alone, but with most of the large men with stern looks.
“Is this the house?”
Thud!
Seeing her father thrown to the floor as soon as she broke into the store, her mother was horrified.
“Hey, honey!”
“Ugh…”
Her face was swollen and bloody red, and her husband, who couldn’t come to her senses, was hugged tightly, while her mother looked up at the men who had entered the store.
“You guys… Something! Why did my husband do this… !”
“Because I didn’t pay back the money I borrowed.”
“Yes… ?”
“It is an IOU.”
The man who seemed to be the most bossy took out a paper document from his bosom and dropped it on the floor.
Lily’s mother, who was holding a paper document that had slid down in the wind and dropped in front of Lily’s mother, read the contents and her eyes trembled.
“Fifty gold coins. If you don’t pay it back within the year, the interest will be higher.”
“We… We don’t have that much money! The store’s monthly income is probably a little over two gold coins… !”
The paper document called IOU in front of my eyes was literally a disaster itself that plunged my whole life into hell.
The men refused to listen to her plea to save her family from the swamp of disaster.
“Are you saying you can’t repay that?”
There was no hesitation in the men’s actions and they were quick, as if they were preparing an appropriate response right away from the expected response.
“Live… Help me!”
Lily’s father, who had been subjected to extreme violence from time to time by the footsteps of many gangster men, hurriedly awakened his hazy mind.
He begged with bloody tears and snot pouring out.
“Wrong! Please! Please don’t hit me!”
It was pitiful and pitiful to see the father grabbing the chief thug’s crotch and servilely begging for his life.
“Then pay me back.”
“Everything, the money you can prepare right now…”
“If it’s impossible, I’ll give you everything you have. That is…”
The head gangster looked at the three mothers and daughters with a grave expression and spoke cruel words to her.
“Even if it’s a person.”
“… !”
Realizing who it was alluding to, Lily’s mother looked at her husband with her hard face.
She said no, she pleaded with her eyes, that she never made that choice.
No matter how perverted, pathetic, and ugly she was, she shouldn’t have made that choice, Lily’s mother said with her eyes.
But her husband, Lily’s father, wasn’t looking out for his family.
Holding on to the top gangster by the crotch of his trousers, the father, who was wearing an infinitely servile smile, smiled and nodded his head as if he had waited.
“Yes, yes! Take me!”
“Honey!”
Lily’s mother, unable to believe her husband’s choice, looked on in horror, but he did not answer her wife’s cries.
“Take him.”
The head gangster who nodded his head ordered his men to capture his mother and daughter and raise them up.
Lily and her mother fiercely resisted the thugs’ arrests, but were overpowered by the bulk of the men and dragged them by force.
“You… How do you… !”
Her wife’s faith that she would not abandon her family, no matter how pathetic and ugly, had been shattered in vain.
“Oh no! No! Don’t touch the kids! Please! Take me, take only me! Please!”
“Hey, let go of this!”
“Mom!”
The two mothers and daughters broke up without even being able to properly say goodbye, and Lily’s family quickly fell apart.
This is Lily’s story when she was 16 years old.
Captured by her men and forced into a carriage, Lily is separated from her mother and arrives at a slave market.
Lily, who had really become alone, thought.
Why did it become like this?
Why did he have to go through this?
Could she have no choice but to collapse in her own family in less than a year?
Her cause was her own father.
Her father’s involvement in gambling caused her business to decline.
His father sold him and his mother to gangsters.
Why was she able to give up herself, who was her own blood, and her wife, who had been with her all her life, without a single thought.
“… It doesn’t make any sense.”
No matter how much she thinks, ponders, and draws conclusions, her current life, which has fallen into abyss, will not be restored to its original state.
Lily eventually gave up on her idea.
She toured the slave market and many buyers, and no one was willing to buy Lily, who as time went on she thinned and deteriorated.
At first, her body, which had some stamina, became weaker day by day, and it got worse day by day without proper rest and nutrition.
She had been sold to a brothel, but she was so skinny that she could see her bones, and she didn’t seem to have a sexual desire to satisfy her desires.
Lily, who moved to various places, gradually became a nuisance as time went on.
As time passed, her health deteriorated, and fearing that the price continued to drop, she was sold from slaver to slaver and from slaver to slaver at an ever-decreasing price.
About two years passed before she went to and from the slave market.
“It would be better if I starved to death like this…”
As Lily turned 18, separated from her family forever, she gradually awaited a merciless death with her withered body.
“Hmm,”
A man visiting the slave market looked with interest at Lily, who was getting thinner and more skinny and skeletal.
“Do it with this.”
“Customer… This slave is waiting for the day she will die soon to the point where she can’t even move anymore…”
“Doesn’t care. She’s not going to make you work, and she’s not going to be used to satisfy your needs.”
At first glance, the man, dressed in luxurious clothes and accessories, left the slave market with Lily, paying the price at will without listening to the slave trader’s answer.
When a man who appeared to be her servant lifted her body and put it in her carriage, Lily identified many people in her carriage who were in a similar situation to her.
“This… Where are you going… ?”
No one was kind enough to answer Lily’s questions and clear her doubts.
It’s just that everyone in the carriage is staring at each other blankly, unable to speak.
It makes sense if you think about it.
There was no way that slaves who had been sold under circumstances similar to hers would know the proper destination.
Hours passed, and even though it was dawn, the wagon did not stop running.
There was a possibility of encountering witches in the middle of the night, but Lily and other sold slaves did not have the energy to worry about such a thing.
“Get down.”
Soon after, Lily and her slaves, who got off the wagon in turn and entered the mansion under the guidance of a servant, were locked in the dungeon and had to spend the whole day in prison.
As the door opened and one by one went out each day, one day the number of slaves who were thrown into prison in a state of unconsciousness, crying, and becoming distraught increased one by one, and the number of slaves who died also increased.
When the number decreased, again, slaves were procured from somewhere to fill the prison, and time passed and a year passed.
It was during an experiment to transform Lily’s body into a demon that Lily realized that the owner of the mansion above the dungeon was a black magician.
“Kyaaaaagh!”
Injecting contaminated mana into a part of his body and seeing his body undergoing mutations was fear itself.
As her flesh was torn and reconstituted repeatedly, Lily, who was reborn as a half-horse succubus, had to feel more excruciating pain than when she was hungry and dry.
“Huh? Did you succeed?”
A demon named Lyra, a succubus who provided her with tainted mana to turn Lily’s body into a demon, became intrigued when she saw Lily’s body, the only one who succeeded in transforming into a demon in a close attempt for a year.
And while spending another year in that state, Lily, who had lost her will to live, became desperate to protect the children who were sold as her slaves and imprisoned together in the dungeon.
More than once or twice she thought, ‘I wish she had died like this.’ The reason why Lily acted desperately to protect her children was simple.
Because it reminded her of her own parents.
Lily’s mother did not abandon Lily even in the midst of difficult circumstances.
Lily’s father became addicted to gambling and spent a dissolute life, eventually abandoning her wife and daughter.
Let her act like her mother, thought Lily, but let her never be like her father.
Seeing the expression of the children who came to sell her and lost her hope in a situation similar to her own, she wondered if she was doing this with her eyes, and she became an opportunity to win her own mind. It was a moment.
When she’s like that, giving her own meals to her kids a little bit, and taking care of her kids somehow while being savvy.
Drooling! Chunk!
Pushing through the iron sliding door, Lily made a nervous expression as the man with gray hair entered the dungeon bathed in bright light.
“Is the devil wrapped around a human?”
As he put the children behind him and looked at the man with a wary look, the white-silver-haired man muttered with an expression that he had encountered an incomprehensible creature.
That was the moment that allowed her to live a second life, as she met the man who saved Lily.
