The crying of a four-year-old child echoed with heartbreaking force through the walls of the opulent room.
To anyone else, it would have been a simple childish tantrum. For Dante, it was the absolute collapse of his own existence. Weeks earlier, a torrent of memories from his past life on Earth had struck his small mind: the computer, the 4:30 in the morning exam, his sudden death... and the absolute certainty of where he had reincarnated.
He had ended up in the last Light Novel he read before dying.
However, the real reason he was crying so bitterly at this moment was the painful certainty that he would never be able to return to his previous life. Unlike other protagonists in reincarnation stories, he was not a lonely orphan; he had a real family on Earth that loved him, and the overwhelming suspicion that he would never see them again shattered his heart.
"Dante! My love, please, look at me! What hurts?"
A pair of delicate arms wrapped around him with infinite tenderness. Dante looked up through tear-filled eyes and gazed at his mother's face. She was a beautiful woman, with bright blond hair and green eyes overflowing with an almost heavenly warmth.
Seeing her made Dante's chest tighten even more.
'This can't be... I'm not the protagonist. I'm not even a good extra,' he thought with a mixture of horror and despair while looking at his own little hands. 'I'm him.'
Dante remembered the details of the novel perfectly. In the original plot, the character whose body he now inhabited would become a giant two meters and sixty centimeters tall, blond, with one blue eye and one green eye. An abusive and violent bastard who would marry a beautiful woman — the future mother of one of this world's protagonists — have two children with her, and then die without ever appearing in the plot again. But his death would only leave his wife at the mercy of an even more miserable fate: a second husband, a future villain, who would abuse her, humiliate her, and sell her for money before abandoning her to her fate, not before getting her pregnant with what would become another of the story's main MCs.
Before he could continue analyzing the chaotic future of this world, the deep sadness and grief for his previous family invaded him again, causing his eyes to grow wet once more.
'Those damn isekai protagonists are always orphans who don't miss anyone...' he lamented mentally, clutching his mother's dress and soaking it with his tears. 'I had a life. I had parents waiting for me. And now I'm here, destined to become a monster...'
Dante turned pale as he remembered how twisted his own original fate was, but he quickly shook his head, forcing himself to compose himself. 'No, I won't allow it!'
The atmosphere in his new home became suffocating as the days passed. One night, during dinner, Dante silently observed the man seated at the end of the table.
His father looked like an elderly and distinguished gentleman. He wore an impeccable black suit with a white shirt and maintained a rigidly upright posture despite being in his fifties. His hair and beard were dark as coal, and his cold blue eyes possessed the sharp gaze of an eagle. In his youth, the man had tried to become an adventurer, but lacking talent for mana, he pursued the path of an aura warrior. Since he did not stand out there either — in a world where mana was everything and aura barely surpassed the status of a commoner — he abandoned it and dedicated himself to business. He had only married his mother because she was beautiful and he wanted a strong heir. There was not even a trace of love in that eagle-like gaze.
Suddenly, a subtle sound interrupted Dante's thoughts.
Cough, cough...
His mother brought a handkerchief to her mouth, trying to hide a dry cough. Her face, usually pale and delicate, showed the faintest grimace of pain.
The father did not even look away from his business documents. To him, it was just a simple cold. But for Dante, it was a death alarm.
'The monstrous energy,' Dante thought, and a chill ran down his spine. 'In her youth, to earn money, she worked cutting up monster corpses and became infected. In the novel, it's explained that a mana master could expel that energy, but at this point it's already too late for that method; she has spent so long contaminated that the energy has rooted itself deeply into her body.'
Dante clenched his small teeth so hard that it hurt. According to the plot, she would die when he turned five years old. His father would immediately remarry another woman and have another son, who would become a minor villain in the story.
'I have exactly one year. One damn year before it becomes impossible to cure,' he calculated desperately.
Suddenly, a flash of memory illuminated his mind. He remembered that in the future of the novel, one of the protagonists — specifically the one following the potion maker route — had obtained a simple medicine capable of completely removing monstrous energy from the body. Best of all, its ingredients had no value; they were ridiculously easy to obtain.
But before he could rejoice, a harsh reality stopped him cold.
'If I try to tell my father, he'll ignore me or think it's childish nonsense. To them, I'm just a four-year-old child,' he thought anxiously. However, his eyes quickly filled with fierce determination and he clenched his fists. 'I have to do it myself.'
Fortunately, he remembered the details of the first volumes of the novel perfectly. The remedy consisted of two extremely common ingredients. The first was the stench snake, a common pest that was neither venomous nor dangerous, but everyone ignored it because of its unbearable smell and inedible flesh. The second was blue grass, a wild plant that grew like weeds on every corner. Boiled together, they created the perfect counterspell.
Dante made an irreversible decision: he would search for the ingredients himself and prepare the medicine on his own.
'I don't care if this body was destined to belong to an abusive villain,' he swore, forcing his short legs to run while his eyes, one blue and the other green, shone with savage intensity in the darkness. 'Now that I'm here, and I can no longer return, I'll live this life fully and without regrets. I'm going to change my future; I won't be a mere villain who doesn't even appear in the future of the story. I'll change my destiny, and I'll start by saving my beloved mother. I'm going to hunt that damned snake, I'm going to pull up that grass, and I'm going to save her. The destiny of this novel is going to obey me.'