Who Asked to Be Reincarnated Like This

A sensation of endless falling, drifting through nothing.

My eyes snapped open.

“Ugh— hah……”

I jolted upright on instinct and swept my gaze around the room.

“Y-Young Master!”

“Are you all right?”

I narrowed my eyes and looked at the speaker.

An elderly human man in formal servant’s attire.

“Uh……”

I tried to ask who he was, but my voice wouldn’t come out.

My throat ached.

“……”

It had been so long since anything had hurt.

I rubbed at my throat in vague fascination, and the old man spoke.

“Do you recognize me? I’m Pavel — your butler!”

“……”

I’d never seen his face before in my life.

I stared at him blankly, and he filled the silence himself.

“You’ve been unconscious for ten days, so your body must be in terrible shape. Please don’t push yourself.”

Ten days unconscious?

Then what about the empire’s affairs?

If I took my hands off the wheel for even a single day, those ministers would start their pride-fueled squabbling and tear everything apart —

A bolt of worry hit me before the old man continued.

“Amelia, please bring the young master some water.”

The woman standing beside the bed extended a bowl of water toward me.

Silver-gray hair. Wolf ears perked upright on top of her head.

A wolf beastwoman — and a silver-gray one at that.

One of the rarest bloodlines among beastmen, wasn’t it? Nearly extinct, if I remembered right.

I stared at her with quiet curiosity as I accepted the water and drank.

The old man let out a long, heavy sigh.

“Still, it’s a relief you’ve woken up. Everyone was terribly worried.”

“That so……”

Why did my voice sound like this?

“Ah. Ah? Ah.”

My voice as emperor had been commanding. Thunderous. On the battlefield you had to rattle the bones of the soldiers in front of you.

But the voice coming out of me now was the mournful warbling of a troubadour.

Some might call it a beautiful tenor. To me, it sounded like a funeral dirge.

“Young Master Rigen? Is your throat bothering you?”

“……”

Why was he calling me ‘Young Master’?

I was famously informal with my ministers, yes — but that didn’t mean my ministers got to be informal with me.

I stared at him in bewilderment, and the old man’s eyes began to glisten with tears.

“You must still be disoriented from just waking up. Don’t worry about a thing — please rest. I’ll speak with the lord on your behalf. Amelia, stay by Young Master Rigen’s side and attend to him for now. I’ll see to the finer details of the manor.”

“Yes, understood.”

The words drifting around me — these were not words meant for an emperor’s ears.

I examined my own body and looked down at my hands.

Soft, unmarked hands.

No calluses from gripping a sword. No ink stains ground into the skin from years of correspondence. Not a trace.

“……Oh.”

Had I reincarnated?

My stomach dropped.

This wasn’t my first time.

I’d been an ordinary person from Earth, reincarnated into this world — Karakas — and after every manner of struggle, I’d built an empire and become its emperor. That was my life.

“But……”

That time, I’d come back as a child.

The hands I was looking at now belonged to an adult.

I scanned the room and pointed toward a mirror.

“Yes.”

The maid Amelia brought it over to me.

The reflection showed——

A pale face. Eyes carrying a quiet, sunken melancholy.

Black hair. Blue eyes. A delicate jawline.

“What in the……”

Barely past twenty, by the looks of it. A pretty boy, and not in a complimentary way.

That alone would have been fine.

But the body — the trained physique, the trapezius, the pectorals, the biceps — all of it was gone without a trace.

A dried apple core wearing a shirt.

“Look at all that muscle, gone.”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing, nothing. It’s just……”

All right. Jarring as it was, I had to accept it.

I, Sirik Karakas, first emperor of the empire, appeared to be dead.

And I had apparently taken up residence in this withered young man’s body.

“……Well. At least I’m a human man. Could’ve been worse — could’ve come back as an elf woman and really been in trouble.”

“Pardon?”

“The five W’s and H — who is this, and where am I?”

“……You are Young Master Rigen, and this is the main estate of House Librata, an earldom.”

The wolf beastwoman maid, Amelia, answered with visible bewilderment.

Right. Completely meaningless to me.

I asked the only question that actually mattered.

“What year is it? How many years into the empire?”

“……Imperial Year 124.”

A hundred years had passed since my reign.

I kept my tone light.

“Then who’s the current emperor?”

“……Pardon?”

Amelia’s voice shifted. The tone that had been answering me cooperatively until now changed entirely.

It was the tone of someone wondering whether to call a physician — or an asylum.

I gave a small smile.

“My head’s spinning from just waking up. Humor me, will you?”

“……There is no emperor in the Millennial Empire, Young Master.”

“What!”

How is there no emperor?

If I died, someone was supposed to take over.

Amelia pressed on, looking more exasperated than I was.

“Ever since the first emperor passed, there has been no emperor. Everyone has been working diligently to elect a second. This is common knowledge — and given your family’s involvement, it’s hardly a distant matter for you either.”

“……What did you say?”

I stared at her in horror.

I’d been dead a hundred years and they still hadn’t chosen a successor?

The sheer audacity.

“Those absolute lunatics……”

The curse came out reflexively, but I did understand, in a grim way.

Right. The non-human races lived long.

To elves, dark elves, celestials, demon kin, beastmen, and dragons, a hundred years wasn’t very long at all.

Perhaps they’d simply decided this was still the preparation period for selecting a second emperor.

“But then……”

The throne was vacant. Who was actually governing the empire, and how?

Suddenly I was deeply, deeply worried.

“No. Stop. Why am I worrying? I don’t need to worry anymore!”

I was the first emperor. I was dead.

My death certificate had been issued a hundred years ago.

Whatever was happening with the empire was none of my business.

“……”

A stare pressed against my cheek.

Amelia was watching me with eyes that had gone cold as ice.

I glanced over at her and smiled.

“I’m not crazy, so you don’t need to report that the young master has lost his mind. Or do — I don’t care either way.”

“……I won’t.”

“Good. Could you bring me some books?”

“Pardon?”

Amelia looked at me as though she’d misheard.

“……You want to read, Young Master?”

“History books and a primer on administration. A government organizational chart would be useful too. I don’t have the energy to move right now, so go pick out whatever history books seem appropriate.”

“……”

“Don’t tell me there isn’t a single book here. Sirik Karakas made a point of advancing printing technology and building libraries everywhere.”

Amelia studied me with open suspicion, then left the room.

“Hm. Well, suddenly acting like this shouldn’t make her think too hard……”

Amelia looked like a girl in her mid-teens, but beastmen lived upward of five hundred years.

You couldn’t judge age by appearance.

“That said…… those people. They really were planning to keep me going for another two hundred years.”

I never imagined that even after my death they’d leave the throne empty and just muddle along!

A shudder ran through me.

Dying was the right call.

“Though…… this body is pathetically frail. What is going on?”

I didn’t even have the strength to get out of bed.

I focused my mind and reached inward, searching for magical power.

Nothing.

The power that had once overflowed from me — not a single drop remained.

I tried again and again in disbelief. Zero response.

“Odd. He has a butler and a maid, so he’s clearly nobility — shouldn’t a noble have at least some baseline magical ability?”

Having not even a trace of magical power was genuinely unusual.

I checked myself over once more, then shook my head.

“All right, forget magic for now. Recover my psychic abilities first.”

In my previous life, Sirik Karakas had cultivated psychic powers.

Telekinesis. Clairvoyance. Various other supernatural abilities.

A secret power that touched on the soul itself — the strength of a great and refined mind.

Those abilities had carried me to the absolute peak of power, to the throne itself.

“Psychic powers have to be built from the ground up again too. Which means I need to absorb someone else’s mental energy and emotion……”

Click.

The door opened. Amelia returned.

As I watched her, I could see it — a soft amber glow radiating from her body.

Displeasure. Unease.

The emotions she harbored toward me.

The starting point of my psychic abilities: reading the aura of others as color.

It was something my teacher had taught me — the one who had trained me in these powers in the first place. Even after reincarnating, it came back to me immediately.

“……”

Should I absorb it now?

No. If I was going to absorb it either way, better to let it build first and then take it all at once.

Emotions weren’t an infinite resource. Sometimes they needed to be left to ripen.

Amelia stood beside the bed and said flatly,

“I’ll read it aloud to you.”

“What? I’ll read it myself. Just turn the pages.”

Amelia looked down at me with an expression of pure disbelief.

“You don’t know how to read.”

“……”

He was illiterate?

I had built educational institutions. I had worked to drive down illiteracy rates. And a young man addressed as ‘Young Master’ — a nobleman’s son — couldn’t read?

I clicked my tongue.

“I taught myself. In secret. Put it down.”

“……”

The amber aura wrapped around Amelia deepened in color.

She set the book down in front of me.

“Then read it yourself.”

“Fine.”

I skimmed through, looking for what had happened to the empire after my death.

I skipped past all the flowery praise heaped upon Sirik Karakas, the first emperor — that being me — and got to what I needed.

The day I died — referred to in the texts as the Day of Lamentation — had been followed by tremendous upheaval throughout the empire.

My children, princes and princesses, had been toddlers.

There was no clear second-in-command either.

The imperial throne became the center of a razor-edged standoff, a war waiting to begin—

“……Oh.”

My wives — the empresses, each representing one of the major races — had ultimately reached a final agreement among themselves.

Temporary partition of the empire into divided governance.

Exchange counsel between factions, but do not interfere in each other’s affairs.

“……And select the second emperor from among the humans? Why on earth?”

“……”

A stare against my cheek.

Amelia’s gaze had gone from cold to glacial.

The amber aura she was radiating had deepened to a rich, dark hue.

I looked back at her and smiled mildly.

“Ah — you think an illiterate young master is narrating things everyone already knows and pretending to read.”

“Yes.”

Straight answer?

“Refreshingly honest. But I’m presumably a wellborn nobleman’s son — can you really afford to be this cheeky? I’m starting to feel like knocking you on the head.”

“I’m the one who carried you on my back since you were a newborn.”

“……Oh. Is that — is that right?”

My attempt at intimidation collapsed entirely.

You cannot judge a beastman’s age by their face.

Amelia might look like a girl in her mid-teens, but she had apparently been this young master’s nursemaid.

Waking up from ten days in a coma only to immediately threaten the woman who raised you — her being appalled was more than reasonable.

“I never let you out of my sight, raised you with everything I had — and the older you got, the more you went sideways. I begged you to at least behave while the lord was away on his inspection tour…… and then you went out and did something reckless and ended up like this. What more am I supposed to do?”

“……”

As Amelia berated me, I found myself shrinking back.

I had commanded the known world as emperor…… and yet, for some reason, I couldn’t find my footing here.

Amelia radiated even more of her amber aura as she pressed on.

“Causing trouble constantly wasn’t enough — now you’re telling me barefaced lies? I didn’t raise you to be like this. What exactly are you trying to do?”

“……Well, this is what I’m trying to do.”

I reached out toward Amelia.

Whoooosh—

The amber aura she’d been radiating rushed into my hand and was absorbed.

“Ah……”

Amelia swayed — and then collapsed onto the bed.

The taut thread of her mind had snapped all at once, and she’d lost consciousness.

This happened sometimes when I absorbed mental energy. It was an occupational hazard.

“Hmm…… she trusted me though, didn’t she.”

Absorbing mental energy only went smoothly when the other person had genuinely opened their heart to you.

The fact that Amelia had fainted cleanly rather than violently resisting was proof that, beneath all her scolding, she had let this young master in.

In any case, I’d absorbed her mental energy and felt marginally better — but only marginally.

“That barely registered. This body really is a wreck.”

In my previous life, I had fought by combining swordsmanship, magical power, and psychic abilities simultaneously.

That combination was how I’d overwhelmed the other races — the servants of the Seven Sin God.

“But now, frail body, zero magical power, and even the mental energy I’d finally gotten my hands on barely made a dent. Long road ahead. Very long road.”

Still, at least I could breathe a little easier.

Ten days unconscious, yet turning pages felt effortless.

I kept reading, and my brow furrowed.

“The second emperor will be chosen from among humans. But only if all seven other races acknowledge him? What were they thinking when they agreed to this?”

A civil war would have made sense to me.

A succession struggle breaking out after the founding of a dynasty was nothing unusual — it was the same in both Goryeo and Joseon.

But this text skipped the process entirely and presented only the conclusion.

“Either way, it seems the humans are in a race to claim the second emperor’s seat. Humans are weaker than the other races, so…… the twelve houses qualified to challenge for the throne are…… Ariedt, Tarus, Minia, Kedrik, Leo…… Librata?”

As I scanned through the twelve houses, an uneasy premonition crept over me.

Hadn’t the butler — and Amelia — been calling me the young master of House Librata?

“……Wait. Hold on. No.”

Me — Sirik Karakas, first emperor of the empire, who had desperately wanted to retire.

I had reincarnated as the young master of one of the twelve houses competing for the second emperor’s throne.

Unbelievable.