Shadow Ruler

Chapter 1.1 - Encounter and farewell

I dont know anything.

I dont know how to talk.

I dont know letters.

I cant read, I cant write, I cant speak.

I dont know any place other than the room Im in.

I dont know anyone other than the man I call father.

I dont know the outside world.

And I dont know the warmth of people.

I dont know my mother.

My mother had a difficult birth when she gave birth to me, and she died at the time of my birth.

My father is a very nice man in the eyes of the world.

He was kind to everyone, helped people a lot, and always lived life to the fullest.

He was also a man who cared about the world to a great extent.

The people around him were only aware of the degree to which he was strict about his status and rules, but from my perspective, it was abnormal.

He would even trample and throw away the lives of people other than himself with a smile on his face for the sake of the world.

Some of you may have noticed this from the flow of the story.

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I have never been loved by my father.

He lost his beloved wife at the time when I was born.

This made my father perceive me as nothing more than a mother-killing abomination.

He instantly knew that the world would think him insane if he didnt take good care of the child she risked her life to give birth to, so he pretended to be kind to me when others were around, and usually left me to the care of a nanny who was hired for money.

As a baby, I didnt particularly care for her, but she had large breasts and was very beautiful.

And she was the only person who was truly kind to me.

That was until I developed something that looked like magic.

It was one day after I was born, when I was over three years old.

One day, when I was three years old, I was attacked by a ferocious wolf demon that recognized me as food and pounced on me.

It was defeated by my nanny, who was good at fire magic, without a scratch.

However, for a young child, the existence of demons was terrifying to no end.

It wasnt until much later that I learned that the wolf demon was the size of an ordinary medium-sized dog and of a very low rank, but it was scary enough for me at the time.

I was unconsciously activating something that looked like magic because of that fear.

For some reason, by nature, my shadow was always darker in color than most people.

And I had far fewer emotional ups and downs than most people.

I could hardly make any facial expressions change.

Whether I was angry, laughing, or sad, my expression hardly changed, and my heart was rarely shaken.

However, in my first encounter with this demon, my feelings of fear appeared not in my facial expressions or gestures, but in my shadow.

My shadow was fluttering like water.

In other words, ripples of moving waves kept spreading around me.

The ripples were limited to the small area where my shadow was formed.

But because of the fluttering shadows and the strange magical power that my nanny had never felt before, it seemed to be a very frightening presence.

After that, the nanny never appeared in front of me.

I was not allowed to go out into the garden, which was the only place I could go out, and I was always confined in a room that could barely accommodate three adults.

However, I was only allowed to go out to the garden for a few minutes a day, and even that one day was only once every few dozen days.

The only time the door was opened was when the food came.

There was a potty in the room, so I used it.

My nanny taught me how to use the potty, so I was able to do it, though it took some effort.

I could not speak.

My nanny told me that it was because my father had crushed my throat after a few days of crying at night, crushing it so thoroughly that no amount of recovery magic could heal it.

And since my nanny disappeared before she could teach me to write, I couldnt read or write.

So, there were times when I desperately tried to communicate with my father through actions and gestures.

However, my father would stare at me with nothing but anger in his eyes and beat me and kick me until I could not move.

The world was told that I had done something to my nanny that would scar her for life, along with her disappearance, so she had disappeared, and I myself was locked in a room because even my own parents could not help me.

And that the only reason he didnt kill her was because his beloved wife left her to him.

Then every single person in the town I lived in, including those who didnt even know I had existed, hated me and called me the devils child.

The only friends and protectors I had been a cat with a long tail and beautiful fur that looked like a blue moon that I could sometimes see through the window coming in softly, and a pitch-black bird with three legs.

I later realized that the bird was what people call a crow.

I also learned from the bird that the cat was the size of a normal adult cat.

The relationship between me, the cat, and the bird is unknown to my father, who only comes to bring me food.

This is because they only visit me when he was not around.

The only food that comes to me is a glass of water and a piece of very hard bread called black bread.

Thats all I get in a day.

The bread is so small that it can fit in both of my small hands.

The only reason I am still able to age up to five years old is because the cat and the bird secretly gather nuts and berries for me.

Also, the bread was so hard that no matter how hard I tried, I could hardly eat it, so I barely finished it.

This led to me being beaten up again by my father.

My father would vent everything he didnt like about the town many times a day in the form of violence against me.

The bird told me that I should be able to listen and understand even if I couldnt speak.

The bird seems to be a rare species in this world, and it can speak human language.

The cat cant speak properly, but it can do everything with its tail.

When I was sick, the cat would make me medicine.

It could make simple concoctions.

It entertained me by making all sorts of shapes with its tail.

Hearts, surprise marks, wave marks, and so on.

So, even though I couldnt leave my room, couldnt move, and couldnt speak, only the cat and the bird were kind to me.