To be honest, I hadn’t really considered Shina as anything more than the original Shinji’s mother.
I certainly didn’t consider her my own mother.
I simply referred to her as such due to the convenience.
No one in this world could replace the lovely mother I had been fortunate to have in my previous life, at least, not anyone that I’ve only spent a week with.
It wasn’t that Shina was a bad parent, far from it actually.
From the week I’ve spent with her, she had acted completely in accordance to how you’d expect a young mother to be with her firstborn child, sweet, caring, and occasionally melancholic.
It should be noted that, aside from my lack of crying, I generally tried to act as your average baby as to not arise any suspicion.
Because of this, Shina had no trouble breastfeeding me, clothing me, embracing me, and playing with me—just as any mother should.
It was awful having to live day-to-day as a newborn, but Shina made the experience somewhat bearable.
That being said, I wasn’t so naive as to think that this treatment would last forever.
At the end of the day, she was a Magus, and the Magi from this universe were notorious for being absurdly selfish and pragmatic, especially to their own family.
Furthermore, once her newfound motherly status became the norm rather than her most recent venture, her affection would naturally fade away.
This was what I had thought would happen sooner or later…
…But then this lady actually decided to completely flip the script and sacrifice herself just to save me!
It was so illogical that I briefly wondered if she was even a Magus at all.
If she was, then perhaps this was one of the reasons why she wasn’t a very good one in Zouken’s eyes.
Regardless, my impression of her improved dramatically and I felt a twinge of guilt at having stolen Shinji’s body.
She did all of this for her son, who no longer existed in this world.
Furthermore, the otherworldly being that had stolen his body would never consider her his mother no matter what she did…
wasn’t that just sad?
Well, her son ended up being a real villain, but that didn’t really have anything to do with her.
I felt bad even if it was Shinji I had replaced.
Thus I ended up reciprocating more of her outward affection so that she’ll at least pass away thinking that her son loved her as much as she loved him.
Shina clung to my tiny form with a firm grasp, probably afraid that I would somehow be whisked away by the outside wind.
Her breathing was stable, but the tears dripping from her closed eyelids clearly displayed her inner turmoil.
She had been in deep sleep for a solid half an hour now and she never once let go of me after her offer with Zouken was finalized.
The old man wasn’t completely unreasonable.
He allowed Shina one month to be with me before she had to meet her end of the bargain.
He probably had some sort of ulterior motive with such an arrangement, but unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out what that motive might be.
Regardless, I knew from the start that Shina was fated to die.
Shinji’s mother was explicitly stated in Heaven’s Feel to have died by worm pit after his uselessness came to light.
Unlike Sakura, whose survival was non-negotiable for the success of Zouken’s future plans, Shina had merely been food and the Crest Worms completely treated her as such.
However, aside from that one mention, Shinji’s mother remained obscure and I had fully prepared myself for the scenario in which Zouken forced her into the pit, leaving me a half-orphan.
Instead I now had to face this complicated situation where she actually consented to the whole ordeal.
It was quite frustrating.
Although I didn’t regard her as my true mother, it would have been a deception to say that I didn’t care about her.
The value of a human life wasn’t much to me.
Call it teenage edge, but that’s what I thought.
However, my opinion on the matter could change very quickly once said human stopped being an NPC in my eyes and started being an actual, developed person with loving feelings.
The current Shina was as loving as it could and the thought of her manggled, rotting corpse in the worm pit made my stomach churn even more than the thought of myself in that pit.
…In the end, I remained helpless.
I couldn’t prevent her fate no matter how much I tried.
I was trapped in the body of an infant yet already burdened with the weight of teenage wisdom.
My only possible hail mary would be trying to speak now, potentially exposing my otherwordly nature and disregarding any of the consequences that would surely follow.
I couldn’t do that even if I tried sadly, as my vocal cords were still underdeveloped.
This body was only a week old, after all.
My heart became enveloped in despair as I made this realization.
Was this really it, could I really do nothing to prevent the horrible death of Shina Matou?
The answer to my question came sooner than expected.
It wasn’t some deity or any grand divine being.
What appeared before me, having flown in from the outside wind that I had occasionally heard blowing in the background, was an insect.
A butterfly, to be exact.
It was bright blue, even more cerulean than my own and Byakuya’s hair.
The butterfly resembled that of the monarch species, only that the patterns on its wings were like crystaline shards of shattered glass.
Its body was much more unusual as parts of it were semi-translucent, exposing the circulating liquid inside that gave off the impression of refreshing spring water.
‘What…
what is that?’
To say that I was confused would be an understatement.
Even weirder, my earlier despair seemed to have been washed away completely as an inexplicable sense of hope filled the vacancy it had once occupied.
Gazing at this unusual butterfly, I was filled with determination.
It soon landed on my head, giving me an awkward angle that exposed its underbelly.
‘Hey, you’re kind of ugly this close up.’
I’ve never seen a butterfly in such an angle.
Their beautiful wings usually distracted me from the fact that butterflies were still icky insects up close.
The butterfly ascended upon the air after thoroughly inspecting my face.
Out of curiousity, I didn’t try to swat it away as this was very clearly not an ordinary butterfly.
It took a few flaps before the tiny butterfly positioned itself above my navel, maintaining its position in the air as it carefully avoided Shina’s arm.
To my surprise, it began to glow, emanating a bright blue radiance that pulsated in the air.
This radiant light formed into an ethereal stream that coalesced into my body.
Specifically, it gathered in the area above my kidneys, somewhere within my waist.
After a few seconds, I could feel a bang that reverberated through my entire body, shuddering my bones and ligaments.
I felt an earthshaking reaction.
My muscles clenched, the fine hairs on my body stood up, and my mind tightened to an unprecedented degree.
It felt like my kidneys had been stuffed with hot charcoal and that they would burst in a fiery explosion!
That sensation remained brief as it soon gave way to a calm serenity.
As though placated by an unseen power, my heart remained at ease, unyielding despite the discomfort.
At this point, I was perspiring.
Sweat covered me from head to toe and I breathed ruggedly as the turbulent energy settled down.
One thought surfaced in my mind as I gazed at the blue butterfly, ‘What the hell just happened?’
The butterfly didn’t give an explanation as it merely flapped away back into the outside.
If it wasn’t for me witnessing the whole event, I probably wouldn’t have believed it either.
‘Was that a Phantasmal Beast?’ I theorized, then furrowed my eyebrows.
Why would a Phantasmal Beast suddenly do that out of the blue?
For a moment, I thought it wanted to slice me up like sashimi when that blue radiance appeared from its wings, but after giving me that unknown stream of energy, it just upped and left!
My intuition naturally led me back to the area underneath my navel where that butterfly had focused its entire stream of energy on.
There, I inexplicably felt that a new body part had spontaneously manifested out of thin air.
It wasn’t a physical organ, but rather an ethereal one that seemed to be contained in its own separate space, resembling an enclosed dome of dim, spectral light.
Inside that dome was a green coppery ocean that was quite deep, enveloping about half of the entire dome.
Faced with this unusual organ, my eyes widened in familiarity.
Wasn’t this the cheat I’ve been hoping so hard for?
Only that the cheat ended up being the thing I expected least; an Aperture from Reverend Insanity.