[It may sound heartless, but this is actually a consideration for the soul. A soul born still carrying the grudges and debts of a previous life can never live a sound life. It will be bound to the past life no matter what, so it has to forget completely in order to live healthily. A healthy life takes root in a healthy soul.]

It’s not wrong, but it’s irritating.

And yet, on the other hand, there was a part of me that understood. Since I couldn’t remember anything about my previous self, I felt only a vague frustration. Not the grief or regret the rabbit had described.

I was simply annoyed at this furry creature shrugging its shoulders with that “it’s not my fault” expression. Do big, round eyes make everything forgivable?

“What kind of…… insane……”

[Still, it won’t cause major inconvenience in daily life. The world you lived in and this one won’t be that far apart.]

“They’re enormously far apart. I wasn’t someone who lived in a class-based society. I was someone surrounded by electricity and all kinds of machines.”

At the very least, I didn’t live in a world where climbing dozens of stairs without an escalator or elevator was considered perfectly normal.

As I suppressed the surging irritation and frustration, a fresh question that had gone unresolved surfaced.

The differences in civilization and development between this world and the previous one were significant, but the elements that made up the world were, as the rabbit said, not drastically different. Most of the food was made from ingredients I recognized, and even the language didn’t feel out of place.

“Come to think of it, everyday terms and names of objects are similar to the world before I died. Is that related?”

[It is. Partly because the worlds are close to each other…… The “Earth” you lived on is a world with high structural integrity and stable completion. So gods who are just beginning creation use it as their first benchmark. It has five billion years of trial and error and the accumulated data from all of that. The idea is to take the basic framework and then adjust the rest to your own taste.]

“What kind of convenient setup is that……”

[It sounds easy to say, but complete creation from scratch is that difficult. Of course, there are those who try it all from the primordial chaos out of pride, but as far as I know, none of them have produced particularly good results.]

The rabbit went on at length about how it had once tried to make such a world itself and nearly died dealing with the fallout when it collapsed.

I had no interest whatsoever in the hardships of a creator god, so I let all of it wash over me.

[Anyway, your current environment isn’t bad to live in, is it? The household you’ve entered is riddled with errors in its setup, but looking at you alone, you’ll live a long and healthy life without much hardship. I can guarantee that. You cannot get sick. There is no illness slot.]

That’s a remarkably startling thing to hear. What is it that doesn’t exist?

[Values need somewhere to go before they can take effect, but the people of that household have no “illness” parameter set at all. Your physical body also had no illness values entered from the initial creation. Illness is the exception. Physical impact and damage are separate, so be careful about those.]

“You said the dragons cast blessings or magic on this family. Is that what you’re talking about?”

[You’ve been doing your research already. That’s right. Your family has that setting in place. There are so many other absurd attributes beyond that one that I’d love to pull the whole thing out entirely, but it’s all tangled up too intricately. Touching one thing would set off a chain reaction, so I decided to leave it alone.]

Hearing the words “setting” and “attributes” made a strange question arise naturally.

“Are you saying it wasn’t the dragons who did it, but a god who set it?”

[Ah, about that. The previous creator apparently loved dragons very much. Under normal circumstances, you must never allow one creature to interfere with the attribute values of another. Fighting or killing is permitted, but involvement in the creation of life is not. Yet here, that modification authority was granted to the dragons and because of that…… The majority of the errors in this world are because of the dragons. Those creatures went around making modifications wherever they pleased.]

“Isn’t that insane? If the dragons caused errors by doing that, someone should have stopped them.”

[The affection must have been great.]

“Does love justify everything?”

[We don’t normally do this either. No matter how beloved a creature, if it endangers the world, we hold back tears and eliminate that individual. The one who abandoned the world and fled clearly had a weak mentality, but it says here that they couldn’t bring themselves to k*ll the dragons by their own hand, so they created a wasteland and relocated them there.]

The rabbit swung one cottony paw, and a horizontally elongated map appeared before my eyes.

The first region the rabbit pointed to with its paw was the continent where the Tantalos Empire, where I was located, sat.

Crossing a sea of comparable size three times to the west brought you to another continent, slightly smaller.

So that’s the wasteland. The history books said they went beyond the north, but they were actually living to the west.

[The dragons are living here now. It’s just them and some primitive creatures, so they seem to be getting along well enough, roughing it out with each other. Because the dragons are still alive, the curse placed on your family is still active too.]

“……Curse?”

[Yes. The entry is listed as a curse.]

“I was taught it was a blessing.”

[Hardly. The contents that fall under curse are far greater in number. For example, the fact that no women have been born in the family until now is also because of the curse…… but this will only get more complicated the more you look into it, so let’s skip it.]

No women had been born. What does that mean?

And weren’t all the dragon spells supposed to be things that protected the family? Was the part about intruders burning to death being counted as a curse?

[For now, a certain level of cleanup is done, but the fundamental resolution requires catching the one who fled. So in the meantime, just one request.]

“At this point you’re asking me for a favor?”

[Please help a little. I’m exhausted cleaning up someone else’s mess.]

The rabbit put on a pitifully endearing act. Did it think that would work on me?

[Actually, I probably don’t even need to ask, but just in case. For now, you must not die. For the sake of this world.]

“……Pardon?”

[I dug through some records to find out why this world’s god fled, and it matches the timing. You, or more precisely, the moment your body died. Your body is essentially the detonator of the errors. If it dies, everything explodes. It seems the previous god couldn’t handle that and ran away…… I’ll do my best to catch the one who fled and resolve this, so you must not die before then. Be careful around water, watch out for physical impact. Whatever else happens, just keep breathing.]

“What?”

[Understood? I’ll be going then.]

What is this? What was that about errors?

“Oh my, Miss. How unusual. You opened your eyes right away.”

The rabbit seemed to vanish, and suddenly I could see my room, the ceiling above my bed, and the face of a maid.

She said if only you woke up like this every morning, and drew back the curtains hanging around all four sides of my bed.

I had thought those curtains were a romantic girlish item, but they turned out to be surprisingly practical insulation.

Before the person sleeping in the bed got in, the inside air was warmed with a pouch of charcoal, and once the person was inside, all the curtains were drawn and closed to keep the warmth from escaping.

No, that’s not what matters right now.

The maid was humming cheerfully, opening the window to air out the room, but I could not bear the unsettled feeling left by this dream.

Just keep breathing, it said. Is that any way to talk?

This wretched rabbit. Did it think a vaguely cute face and some fur would make me forgive everything?

***

A week passed.

The blasted rabbit did not appear in my dreams again after that.

Whether it thought it had said everything it needed to say, or whether it had uncannily sensed that my protests would change nothing. Either way, it never came.

Determined to press it further the next time we met, I had been napping and dozing off at every opportunity over the past few days, but no matter when or at what hour I slept, it never showed, and now I had given up.

The people of the estate and the Winstone family physician offered a simple diagnosis for my suddenly increased sleep.

Spring fatigue, apparently.

“Spring fatigue, does that even make sense? At your age, you’re supposed to be running around until you drop from exhaustion all day, so just how little have you been moving?”

“Running hurts my feet.”

“Your feet adapt when you run around. Don’t say that in front of anyone. If a Winstone child said their feet hurt from a little running, no one would believe it. Stop reading books all the time and move your body.”

What this meant was: from the day after the rabbit dream until now, I had been spending nearly every waking hour in the library, aside from eating and sleeping.

I hoped the dream was just a meaningless dream, but if it wasn’t, information was what I needed above all else.

The most important thing was to find out whether the information that had come out of the rabbit’s mouth was true, and if so, whether there were any distortions or inaccuracies in what had been conveyed.

First, I went through the entire list of spells the Winstone family had received from the dragons, commonly known as the blessing list, and every error the god had mentioned turned out to be true.