My life had been nothing special. I was an ordinary young man who liked games, worn down by work and struggling to pay off his credit card debt.

The end of that life was nothing special, either. Cause of death: hypothermia. One winter night, after my longtime girlfriend dumped me, I got thoroughly drunk on my way home. Someone knocked me out and left me there, and I froze to death. That was the end of my first life.

When I opened my eyes again, I was wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a crib. Then I heard an unfamiliar language for the first time.

“Alex, you’re the son of the Duke of Gresia.”

Strangely, I understood her at once. A beautiful woman smiled gently as she spoke to me. She had blond hair and wore an old-fashioned dress. She was my mother, and I was a newborn baby.

The moment I heard her words, the word reincarnation naturally came to mind. It was hard to believe, but I had clearly been reincarnated, and this place didn’t seem to be Earth. With three moons hanging side by side outside the window, there was no way I could think it was.

Time passed. My new life looked pretty good. No, better than good. An opulent room with a medieval feel. Several maids. And my mother had said I was a duke’s son. I had clearly been reborn as the son of a great noble.

Even as I struggled to stay awake, I was delighted. But of course, things couldn’t all go my way.

Not long after I first opened my eyes, a handsome man came in. He glanced at me, then took my mother away. From the look of things, he was undoubtedly my father, the duke. He hadn’t seemed particularly happy to see me.

As it turned out, my mother was a commoner, and I was an illegitimate son the family refused to acknowledge. The duke already had two wives and two sons, leaving me the unwanted child. I even saw a maid click her tongue at me when my mother wasn’t around. The relationship between the duke and my mother looked quite different from the marriages I knew, too. Things did not look good.

‘What am I doing celebrating being born into a noble family? What kind of ancient cliché is this? If I’m going to be born a duke’s son, I should be the youngest, with an easy life, or the eldest, secretly hiding his strength! Or at least give me a system window!’

There were no glittering spirits in sight, and shouting “System window,” “Settings window,” and “Status window” brought up nothing. I had no gift from a god; I hadn’t even seen a second-rate angel, let alone a god. I fought to keep my sleepy eyes open and find some way out, but I couldn’t keep thinking about it for more than a few minutes. I was a newborn baby. Sleep simply overcame me again.

Perhaps because this was a great noble house, my mother and I had separate rooms. I spent my days nursing from a wet nurse and worrying about things I could do nothing about.

Then, one night, I woke with a start. A maid stood in my moonlit room.

‘Oh, it’s Kanna. Is she on duty tonight?’

She was one of the maids who helped my mother care for me.

‘But why am I awake? I’m not hungry, and my diaper isn’t wet...’

I stared blankly at Kanna. She stared back with a gloomy expression.

“You should’ve stayed asleep. Why did you have to wake up...?”

She muttered in a strangely apologetic voice and approached my cradle without a sound. Something was wrong.

Startled, I opened my mouth, but a large pillow came down over my head before I could cry out. Kanna held it in both hands, pressing it over my face. I couldn’t breathe.

“I’m sorry, young master. You were born too soon.”

Her voice reached me as my mind grew hazy.

‘What the hell kind of trashy soap opera is this? This isn’t right! An assassination when I’m not even a few months old? I haven’t had the chance to do anything!’

I screamed inside my head, but with the pillow pressed over my mouth, I couldn’t make even a whimper. My consciousness slipped away. Unfortunately, no rescue came, even at the very end. I stopped breathing.

‘Damn. Of all the absurd reincarnations...’

With that hollow grumble, my second life ended, too. Pitch darkness. My mind dissolving. Death came for me. Then, at the very end, a bright light appeared before my eyes.

Was it heaven?

...

How much time had passed?

Light suddenly flooded the darkness.

And then—

“Waaaaah!”

I opened my eyes again.

A beautiful woman stood before me.

“Alex, you’re the son of the Duke of Gresia.”

The woman I had seen every day for months spoke to me again, wearing the same expression she’d had when I first saw her.

And then words finally appeared before my eyes.

[You have died. Restarting from the autosave point.]

At the sight of the Korean text, I abruptly stopped crying.

After spending several days in a daze, I had to accept it. I hadn’t stayed dead. After dying, I had returned to the moment I was reborn. Reincarnation, and now a return to the past. Dying before I was even a few months old was absurd enough, but finding myself back at the beginning left me both happy and dumbfounded.

What was more, when I concentrated, the words appeared in the air again.

[You have died. Restarting from the autosave point.]

They told me this return wasn’t necessarily a one-time event.

‘An autosave point...’

I’d often seen that phrase in the single-player games I’d enjoyed in my previous life. Instead of the player saving manually, the game saved automatically when they passed a certain location. If they died afterward, they respawned where the game had saved. It was a save-and-load system, and “autosave point” was the phrase that came with it.

‘But if it’s a point in time rather than a location, does that mean the save is tied to a particular moment?’

I thanked the unknown being who had brought me to this world. I hadn’t been thrown into a strange world with nothing to fall back on after all. Still, being able to come back to life wasn’t an unqualified blessing.

‘I need to find a way to keep from dying.’

Coming back to life would mean nothing if I died every time. There was no guarantee I could keep returning forever, and even if I could, I might be trapped in a life of endless deaths. That would make this ability a curse rather than a blessing.

But finding a way to survive wouldn’t be easy. I had died only a few months after birth, when I couldn’t talk, much less crawl.

‘Hell difficulty right from the start...’

That didn’t mean I could let myself die again. Reliving that horrible death and starting my helpless life as a baby all over again? I had to survive.

Fortunately, I knew who the killer was. Someone else had probably given the order, but I knew who had carried it out. All I had to do was get her out of the way.

The maid who had killed me was Kanna. She was an unremarkable woman, neither troublesome nor particularly conspicuous among my mother’s maids. She even seemed fairly diligent. To someone with memories of a previous life, she didn’t look like a woman who would casually kill a person.

‘Well, this is a different era from the one I lived in before.’

It was obviously the kind of medieval age where blood and flesh flew. Even in a prosperous noble household, the people were bound to be no different.

I fought off my constant sleepiness and kept watching Kanna. The maids and my mother found it strange that I hardly ever cried and rarely slept, but I couldn’t afford to worry about what they thought.

The same stretch of time passed again. My father, the duke, occasionally came to look at me with an impassive expression. As I gradually slept less, I had more time to observe. And as time went on, Kanna’s expression grew steadily darker.

‘How did I miss that?’

Now that I was looking, her face was so gloomy I could tell at a glance. The other maids sometimes looked at her with concern, too.

‘Of course she wouldn’t look fine when she’s planning to kill someone—especially a duke’s son. Has she not thought about what happens afterward?’

She had used a pillow to pass it off as a natural death, but that wouldn’t free her of responsibility. She could well be held accountable and put to death. Still, seeing her face grow darker only made me snort. I had no reason to pity my murderer.

“Oh! The young master smiled.”

“He hardly ever smiles. What a relief.”

“Doesn’t his smile look a little strange, though?”

“Tut! How dare you say such a thing!”

The head maid scolded the maids who had been talking as they watched my face. Apparently, I wasn’t old enough to pull off a proper sneer.

The time of my death was drawing near. At first, the maids had taken turns watching over me every few hours at night, like soldiers on sentry duty. After a few months, though, only one maid stayed overnight. Unless I cried, she would sit in a chair in the corner and doze. It was much less attentive care than before, though compared with my previous life, it was still excessive. Such was life in a great noble house.

Kanna appeared to have been waiting for a night when she would be left alone.

On the night Kanna was left alone, she waved back at the other maids as they finished their shifts.

“Good night.”

“Have a good shift.”

“I’ll be fine. The young master is quiet, so it isn’t hard work.”

Once they were gone, she glanced my way with a fleeting look of apology.

I wasn’t interested in her expression. In a few hours, when night deepened, the same thing would happen again. I couldn’t let that happen. Instead of waiting, I opened my mouth wide and cried at the top of my lungs.

“Waaah!”

The cries of a baby who almost never cried rang through the mansion. Naturally, all hell broke loose.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s the young master crying!”

The maids who had left hurried back, and even my mother came rushing from her room. They all asked Kanna what had happened, but she had gone white and could only shake her head.

“He just suddenly started crying.”

“He’s always so quiet! He wouldn’t suddenly cry for no reason!”

My mother snapped at Kanna. She rarely got angry, so she must have been badly startled.

But Kanna was telling the truth.

The head maid carefully picked me up.

“Perhaps he had a bad dream or was startled when he woke. He’ll fall asleep again soon.”

Not a chance. If I fell asleep, I was done for.

“Waaaaaaaaah!”

Full power, one more time! I cried until my face turned red. The startled head maid nearly dropped me.

“Fetch the priest and the family physician at once!” my mother shouted to the maids.

Huh? I understood the physician, but why a priest? Could it be...?

In any case, while everyone ran this way and that, I desperately kept crying. It was exhausting. Some babies apparently cried all day, but how was that even possible? It was insane. And I was only getting started. If I wanted to live, I had to hold out.

I didn’t stop crying.

“Waaah, waaah, gasp, gasp, ack, waaah!”

That night, I stayed up until dawn.

The next morning, I lay sprawled on my bed, panting.

“He doesn’t appear to have any particular illness. Apart from a swollen throat from crying so much, he’s perfectly healthy. His throat should recover soon, too.”

I heard the family physician, but I was too focused on something else to pay attention.

A bright light dazzled my eyes. An old man in a white robe had placed a finger on my tiny throat, and light was pouring from it. When my mother called for a priest, I’d wondered, but I hadn’t expected my suspicion to prove true. This wasn’t an ordinary medieval world like Earth in my previous life. The clergy here could wield divine power.

In that case, there might be mages, too, and knights who could wield sword aura. Was that good news? I still couldn’t tell whether it would work in my favor.

No, that wasn’t what mattered right now. I’d made it through the night safely, but nothing had changed. No new message had appeared to tell me the danger had passed, and Kanna was still standing over there, perfectly fine. My mother was even going over to apologize to her.

“I was so startled yesterday. Please don’t take it to heart.”

“It’s all right, my lady.”

As long as Kanna was still here, the danger hadn’t passed. It was disappointing, but I had anticipated this possibility. I wasn’t finished yet, either.