Pressing a cloth to her cut finger, Rosalind walked past Sora, who was far too busy staring out the window.
Before she dealt with this stranger, she needed to talk to her daughter.
She wanted to know how long Elena had known this boy, how she had gotten him into the house, and more importantly, why she herself hadn't known anything about it.
She opened the door to Elena's room.
Her daughter was lying on the bed. Her hair was spread across the pillow, there was a trace of dried blood under her nose, and her face was white as paper.
For a moment, Rosalind's heart stopped.
She immediately rushed to the bed and checked Elena's pulse. Her heart was beating. Her breathing was steady. It looked like she had just fainted.
The relief only lasted a few seconds. Then anger took its place.
When she went back to the living room, the white-haired boy was still standing in front of the window, watching the outside as if he owned the place.
"What did you do to my daughter?"
Sora answered without even turning his head. "Nothing."
"My daughter's lying there unconscious! Her nose was bleeding! I asked you what you did!"
Sora shrugged without taking his eyes off the view.
"Ask her when she wakes up."
For a moment, Rosalind didn't know what to say. This boy was one of the rudest people she had ever met in her life. Even worse, he didn't even seem aware of how rude he was being.
It wasn't actually rudeness.
When people managed to live for a very long time while keeping their sanity, at some point they started explaining themselves less.
Add to that the long years Sora had lived like a noble, and the arrogance that had piled up over all that time.
He really did use very few words when he spoke.
"Get out of my house right now. Or I'm calling the police."
Sora finally turned to her.
Those pink eyes rested on Rosalind for a second. There was neither anger nor fear in them. To Rosalind, they felt like the eyes of someone checking the weather.
"Fine."
Sora walked toward the door.
If she hadn't seen her daughter unconscious, maybe she would have been afraid she had broken the heart of an extraordinarily handsome potential son-in-law.
As Sora passed by Rosalind, he suddenly stumbled, as if his foot had caught on the edge of the rug. His tall body tipped toward her. Rosalind reflexively took a step back, but Sora didn't fall all the way. He just grabbed her shoulders with both hands and caught his balance.
In less time than it took to call it a moment, he murmured a quick apology and steadied his steps.
Before Rosalind had a chance to understand what had happened and start worrying, Sora had already straightened up, walked past her, and opened the door.
The door closed behind him.
...
In the hallway, Sora turned his right hand over.
A small pink wallet lay in his palm. An old-fashioned one with a zipper, its corners softened from use. On the front was a landscape painting. A hill, a single tree on top of the hill, and a setting sun behind the tree. The colors had been placed so carefully in such a tiny space that you could even make out the light on the tree's leaves.
Sora ran his thumb over the painting. The paint was slightly raised.
This wasn't a print. It had been done by hand.
"Not bad."
He tucked the wallet into the inside pocket of his jacket and headed for the stairs.
When he stepped out in front of the building, the first thing that caught his attention was the cars.
The vehicles parked on both sides of the street were all wide, round-edged, clean, shiny family cars. In the world Sora remembered, each one of these cars would have cost a middle-income family several years' salary. Here, they had just been left carelessly on an ordinary street.
Come to think of it, the home he had just walked out of also seemed to have pretty spacious rooms for a small family.
Maybe this summoner girl came from a rich family.
Silver, white, light blue, burgundy. Every car on the street was colorful. Except for four.
Right in front of the entrance of their building, four vehicles were lined up side by side. All four were completely black. Even their windows were tinted. They were a little longer and a little lower than the other cars. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Sora's eyes slid to the license plates.
The other cars' plates had a mix of letters and numbers. These four only had a few numbers, with a small emblem at the start.
Official vehicles.
Either someone important was visiting someone in this building, or this building really was home to rich people.
Sora looked at the cars for a few seconds, then lost interest. He had seen countless kings, emperors, and sect leaders across six worlds. A city official's car wasn't enough to make him curious.
He started walking down the sidewalk.
A young man was coming toward him. He had a wireless earbud in his ear, his eyes were locked on the phone in his hand, and his finger kept swiping across the screen nonstop. Without caring about anything around him, he was walking straight into Sora.
Sora's eyes caught on the phone.
A thin, shiny phone with a screen that stretched all the way to the edges. It looked far more advanced than the last phone Sora had touched.
Two hundred and eighty-two years.
As Sora looked at the colorful images on the phone's screen, he felt something stir inside him.
It felt like the tech-addicted part of him, lost in the depths of his soul, was starting to wake up again.
Should he beat this kid up and take his phone?
He seriously considered it.
First, he had to size up his opponent. After all, he knew this world wasn't completely ordinary.
The kid in front of him looked ordinary, but looks meant nothing. In the fourth world, he had seen a child half his height level an entire castle with a single spell.
He half-closed his eyes and focused on his sixth sense.
His combat instincts, which had never once betrayed him since the second world. The sense that detected danger before it even arrived, that weighed an opponent's strength at a single glance, that had kept him alive for over two hundred years.
Nothing happened.