Right as the coffee finished dripping, the butler finished pressing and straightened his back. Pressing the newspaper still wasn’t a task the butler had handed over to me. I was practicing, but for some reason, whenever I did it, the newspaper ended up burnt pitch-black, and I had no idea why.
"Yeah, the aroma’s good. Is there a trick to it?"
"You have to bloom the ground coffee long enough at an appropriate temperature. That way, the flavor and aroma extract more richly."
"So you’re saying don’t rush you."
"That’s the trick."
Even so, I took over the coffee-brewing duty in a week. The Prince, who shouted “faster, faster” even more than I did despite me being the one with memories of Korea, complained about how long it took to brew—but he was extremely satisfied with the coffee’s taste and aroma.
He would heap dark-roast grounds into a cup and pour rolling-boil water over it, then drink it as-is. Letting the grounds settle in the cup and drinking that way was apparently common here, and it definitely had its own charm. The problem was that the Prince drank it like he was drinking an iced Americano—before the grounds had even settled. It looked less like he was tasting coffee and more like his goal was to inject caffeine straight into his veins.
I couldn’t exactly tell him that getting addicted to caffeine at such a young age would stunt his growth, and even if I did, it would’ve been pointless. Besides, the Prince was already plenty tall even if he never grew another inch. It just felt like a waste that he didn’t properly taste good beans and simply threw them away like that.
After the butler tasted the coffee I dripped through cloth instead of a paper filter, he handed the coffee-making duty over to me right away.
I’d always had confidence in pour-over. Back on Earth, after I suddenly ended up running a jewelry shop, it had been my one hobby that let me bleed off stress.
Part of why it took a full week to hand over the duty was because I had to match a concentration even stronger than what I liked to drink, and an even bigger reason was that I had to figure out how to use the kettle that boiled the water.
It was a terribly picky device. I didn’t have to be able to do magic, but I did have to be able to feel what mana was, apparently. I also had to get the Prince’s permission, since he was the owner of the kettle—like registering a fingerprint on a digital door lock.
I really struggled just to handle this extravagant kettle that used a ruby like a rechargeable battery. I didn’t have a single tool that could precisely appraise gemstones, but I could say it with certainty. The exact same kind of ore as the rubies I’d handled on Earth was mounted in that kettle.
I’d suspected it even when I looked at the silver coins, but the ruby gave me certainty. This world really did have an environment almost identical to Earth.
Otherwise, how could a gemstone that only forms when a specific element exists under specific conditions—a gemstone that is rare and beautiful, and therefore valuable—appear in the exact same shape as on Earth? The more certain I became about my hypothesis, the stranger those powers called pheromones and magic felt.
Could I use that power, too. Doubt and curiosity grew at the same size.
It wasn’t that I suddenly had ambitions to become a mage and throw around vast power. I wasn’t some middle-schooler dreaming of conquering the world.
Gemstones were a medium for magic. Even if you weren’t a mage, as long as you could feel mana, they were also a storage device that let you handle artifacts that produced magical power.
There was an ability in gemstones that I hadn’t known about. Naturally, I had to find out. If I’d been forced to just boil water over a coal fire and brew coffee, I wouldn’t have thrown myself into it with that much heat.
I was already busy following the butler around and learning tasks by eye, learning Henia’s writing, and exercising to correct my posture. If I was going to learn mana breathing on top of that, I had no choice but to cut back on sleep. I worked hard to follow the breathing method the butler taught me, but I just couldn’t get a feel for what mana even was.
The first time I felt a change was on the night of the fifth day after I got my room.
Half-awake, I snapped my eyes open at a thick, sticky sensation clinging to my skin. There was nothing I could see, but I could definitely feel that something existed. It was the same when I breathed. I sensed something heavier than air entering my body. It was like breathing underwater—an unfamiliar sensation I’d never felt before.
That night, I couldn’t sleep for even a moment. I spent the entire night focusing on breathing. To someone who didn’t know, it would probably look like I was doing some pointless crap, but looking back, I think I fell into a kind of rapture then.
Every time I inhaled, it felt like I was recharging energy I’d spent. When I finally opened my eyes because my body couldn’t take in any more mana, I even felt regret.
While preparing the morning service, the butler looked at me and said, "Looks like you actually slept properly today." That uplifted feeling—like I’d gotten a runner’s high—didn’t seem to be just my imagination. The Prince also said, "Your eyes aren’t red today, Jay. See? You’ve got to sleep properly." Coming from someone I strongly suspected had chronic insomnia, the statement shot up in credibility.
And that day, I succeeded in boiling water using the mana kettle. It boiled so instantly it was almost shocking. Riding the momentum, I challenged the ironing too—I almost started a fire, and the iron was immediately confiscated from me.
In fact, it wasn’t just the kettle and the iron. Every convenience in the main house where the Prince lived—the lighting, the hot water, the heating and cooling—was controlled entirely by magical devices. No wonder I couldn’t find a fireplace.
The only people who could handle all those magical devices were the Prince and the butler, Philip. Even the chef needed Philip’s help when using mana-powered cooking tools that made it easy to control heat. The fact that I’d been permitted even a part of that meant I was clearly being treated as someone special.
Some people didn’t like me and picked fights for no reason. Others tried to curry favor and showed me kindness. Either way, I didn’t care much.
What mattered to me was that my employer had the excellent financial means to use all those magical items as a matter of daily life. Any magical item, no matter what it was, used gemstones as its power source. That meant it couldn’t help being expensive.
The Prince was extremely busy. The place he spent most of his time was his study. All kinds of documents went back and forth. There were also plenty of letters and invitations that I couldn’t tell whether they were love letters or fan letters, sent by young omegas around his age, but what he actually spent time looking at was mostly real estate paperwork. Philip assisted with a considerable amount of work, but in the end, the one who made the final decisions was the Prince himself.
The more I learned about the Prince’s stable financial base and diligent work attitude, the more my loyalty to my new workplace increased.
"You heard Philip’s explanation about rut, right?"
The Prince spoke after downing, in one go, the hot coffee I’d brewed with sincerity proportional to that loyalty. His tone was light, like he was talking about today’s weather. The one who couldn’t take the topic lightly was Philip. The posture Philip always kept so straight visibly tightened.
"Yes, I heard the explanation."
I answered while pretending not to hear Philip’s heavy breathing. Rut—the alpha’s heat. When Philip explained rut to me, Philip’s voice had been far more serious than usual. This was a period when the Duke became extremely sensitive, so I needed to be even more careful in my conduct. That was clearly a warning.
"The reason I’ve been staying home lately is because I don’t know when my rut will come. It could be today, or it could be a week from now."
"Yes, I heard that too."
I’d heard that because the Prince’s pheromones were powerful but unstable, his rut was irregular as well.
Philip said that the weaker an alpha’s pheromones were, the more often—and the shorter—the rut would be. Some alphas had rut once a month, for one day, but on average it was once every three months, taking roughly two to three days.
In the Prince’s case, Philip said it seemed to be almost once a year, lasting about ten days. If it truly followed an exact one-year cycle, it should have started a week ago already.
"Aren’t you scared?"
The Prince asked with a face that had completely shed its playfulness.
"Am I supposed to be scared?"
"Everyone else is."
A smile formed at the corner of the Prince’s mouth. It wasn’t the usual playful smile—it was a twisted one. I couldn’t deny the claim that everyone was scared. The servants’ behavior had been extremely stiff lately. There had been several fights from people getting overly sensitive with each other, and the frequency of people picking fights with me for no reason had also gone up.
"Honestly, I don’t really know. It’s not something I’ve ever experienced myself."
Even so, it was someone else’s story, and to my eyes, those people who were bristling like hedgehogs were more curious than anything. When it came to the Prince—the one I saw every morning—it was hard to find anything that looked different.
The Prince’s bitter smile deepened. Who was he mocking. The people who feared him?
"If an omega is nearby, an alpha in rut gets swept up in the instinct to get it pregnant. A beast, that’s what it is. No matter what feelings the alpha had for the other person in ordinary times, no matter what feelings the other person has, the alpha gets desperate to spread his seed."
Or was it the Prince himself.
Philip had explained it to me carefully, choosing each word. Not like how the Prince was saying it so nakedly now.
There was something off about his tone. He was talking in generalities about alphas, with none of his own experience in it.
"Even a beta, if they get swept up in my pheromones, they’ll try to spread their legs for me. Without even knowing what they’re doing. And when a beta I can’t even get pregnant begs me to fuck them, I start wanting to tear it apart and kill it."
When he turned the topic to himself, it wasn’t sexual—it was violent. I realized then. The Prince’s bitter smile was rooted in self-loathing.
"I’m the one who brought you here without asking. I’m the one who said I’d make you my exclusive attendant. Telling you the truth this late is definitely cowardly, but I’ll be honest now. It’s fine if you say you’re scared. It’s natural to be scared. I’ll make it so you can do different work."
As if giving me time, the Prince closed his mouth. A silence continued where even the ticking of the second hand of the pocket watch inside Philip’s jacket pocket could be heard clearly.