“Oh!”

Egret had a small accident on his way back to his dormitory. He crashed into a student pushing a cart with many beakers stacked precariously on it. The beakers fell and shattered on the floor, spilling liquids and fuming strange gases all over the place.

“Oh my. Are you all right, child?”

“Ah… Oh, um.”

“You are not hurt anywhere?”

“I-I’m okay.”

She was a girl about the same size as the prince. Her dark brunette hair swayed around her waist. Although she was a little taller than him, she appeared to be about ten years old. The girl looked between him and the broken beakers as tears gathered in her eyes.

“I am sorry about this. I was lost in my own thoughts and did not watch where I was going,” Egret said apologetically as he gently patted the girl’s shoulder.

It hadn’t exactly been his fault. The cart had so much equipment—stacked higher than the student’s height, hindering her view. An accident had been inevitable, as she had been nearly running while not looking ahead. At best, Egret might have been able to dodge her if he had noticed. But he still felt partly responsible for her distress.

He looked down at the shattered glass on the floor. He crouched, thinking that he should start cleaning up. But when he tried to reach for a shard of glass, the girl stopped his hand.

“Ah, no, you can’t. This… It-it’s dangerous to touch with your bare hands…”

Looking back at the mess, Egret noticed that the shards were covered in unidentifiable liquids emitting mysterious gas. Some of the glass was even beginning to melt down. While neither seemed to know what to do, maids passing by found them and started cleaning the mess.

Egret watched the stone floor as the cleaning experts swept and cleaned busily. He bowed his head to the girl with an apologetic heart.

“I am so sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. I can… make it again.”

“I saw how the mandrake and distilled keteops essence were mixed together. Were you perhaps studying toxic medicines?”

Most of the liquids seemed to be acids or of some toxic variety. Egret recognized those two because they were commonly used in general medicine. The girl’s eyes went wide and round with surprise.

“Do you know about medicines? But, um, these were ingredients for a healing food.”

Healing food, as the name implies, helped to heal those who consumed the food. It was helpful in invigorating people who’d had a drastic decline in stamina and patients recuperating after being wounded. It even helped minor ailments like intoxication and upset stomach. Unlike topical medicines for external use, the food served as a catalyst to accelerate a patient’s self-healing ability.

Egret scratched his cheek in thought at what she’d said. “Hmm, the ingredients looked a bit dangerous to make into healing food.”

“I’m still experimenting…”

“Ah, if you carefully blend in ceton with them, the formula may be able to neutralize toxins. Although getting the ratio right will be quite tricky.”

“What...?” The student perked up.

There were very few formulas for healing food that helped with neutralizing toxins. It was difficult because neutralization required the same family of toxins to counteract its effects. Naturally, there wasn’t much information on the subject.

She looked like she wasn’t sure if he was right, but she seemed to be considering that it could be a good lead in her studies. Her eyes lit up with eagerness to continue experimenting right away.

“Ceton, you say? I’ll give it a try!” Overtaken with zeal, she almost ran to her lab without her cart. She quickly came back for it and turned to look at Egret. “Um, thank you!”

He gave her a smile. The girl ran off with haste. Egret waved at her back quite leisurely.

She was timid but also clumsy at the same time. Finding a new direction for her healing food formula must have been more important than spilling all her ingredients on the floor. Putting all things aside, she also seemed quite naive to take on a stranger’s suggestion. Egret scratched his head at how young she seemed and then moved on.

The next day, Egret greeted Baikal with a bright smile, absolutely ruining his mood.

“Baikal, the breeze is lovely today. It seems a spring shower is in for a visit.”

“What…”

Baikal glared at the prince sitting next to him. He didn’t understand the sudden change of heart that had made Judas attend class without a single absence or tardy in the past ten days.

Not only that, but he’d also been following Baikal like a duckling and kept taking the seat right next to him. But he couldn’t tell the prince to move to another seat, and he couldn’t move himself because it’d feel like he was somehow losing. He had his own crowd, but his mistake was that he had sat apart from them, not wanting to be always together.

Eventually, Baikal gave in to Judas’ aggressive approach and halfheartedly responded to the prince. “What do you mean? The sky is completely clear.”

“Haha, the cloud can appear out of thin air if it wishes, child.”

Baikal had noticed that the prince talked kind of like an old man. He glanced over at Judas and narrowed his eyes.

“What’s gotten into you lately?”

“Hmm?”

“Why are you poking around me and everyone else? Nobody welcomes it. Are you having regrets or something?”

Baikal was being cynical and sarcastic, but Judas cupped his chin and gave it some serious thought. Then he nodded and smiled. “Yes. You are right. It is regret.”

Baikal was lost for words at how confidently the prince had admitted it. This new white heron prince was more than peculiar. Before, a single word of mockery or cynicism would have made him go as pale as a ghost and as still as a stone statue. It would have been less funny if he could have at least run away, but even that seemed to be too much for him. He would stay in the same spot for a long time, unmoving.

Once that kind of incident happened, he would be sick and would not step out of his room for days. Even if he did leave his room, he would avoid the eyes of other students and sit in a corner alone. He used to act invisible to others and stayed quiet as a shadow.

But look at him now.

“I feel that perhaps I should not have given up. Thus, I mean to live differently.”

Looking at the mellow yet determined golden eyes of the prince, Baikal thought, He’s different. He’s so different from the white heron prince he used to be.

The change was drastic to the point that it made him think that the prince was behaving like someone who was facing imminent death.

He couldn’t figure out if the desperation had motivated the prince or if it was on a whim. After that conversation, Baikal’s sharp attitude turned much softer. Not that he liked Judas or anything. It was just that he wasn’t ignoring him like he had before. He wasn’t kind to Judas or thought that he deserved his title as the first prince of the kingdom.

Nonetheless, Egret was happy to experience this small change. Having lived as the great sage all his life, the one thing that he was awkward and inexperienced with was interpersonal relationships. It had worn him down so much that he’d given up living among humans and had run away with the spirits into nature. No matter how he’d tried, he hadn’t been able to make friendships or a family with humans.

As someone who knew himself to be not great at building relationships, he had committed himself to quite a precarious challenge. And a challenge he had failed all his life was not going to work itself out so easily.

“Egret!”

Something splashed on his head.

Egret stared at the water dripping from his hair before he looked up. Up on the windowsill was a bucket for cleaning dirty brushes after art class. It looked like it had been intentionally aimed at him, and it was now empty and just dripped droplets of dirty paint water. The splashed water wasn’t unhygienic, but the mixed paint had made the water opaque and muddy. It had stained his uniform all over.

This attack felt like it was totally out of the blue. It was in no way an accident, but he couldn’t point a finger at anyone, as the culprit remained hidden. The students who had witnessed the incident exchanged glances with each other and then turned their backs on him.

Bitterness flashed through Egret as he heard the whispering snickers. He let out a small sigh and took off his wet jacket, hanging it on his arm. He could see other students murmuring with each other.

Egret didn’t hesitate any longer to head back to his dormitory.

“Why didn’t you ask me to stop it?”

He continued walking.

“Egret!”

“Calm down, Yuni.” Even though she was clearly upset, he answered with a fond smile.

Spirits could not use their powers unless the humans they had contracted with wanted them to. It was the same even when the contractor was in grave danger. Nature was not supposed to meddle with human affairs on its own accord. They were not given the authority to make a move without the human’s wish. If they broke that rule, they suffered grave consequences. Even a spirit king was not exempt from the rule.

That was why Yuni could only look at Egret even as fury overtook her. Reflecting her mood, the wind blew with ferocity. Egret held on to his flapping clothes from the wind with hands stained with paint water.

“It would be unwise to make them fear me.”

“What is that logic? What’s so precious and important about those humans? I’m more afraid that you’ll be hurt.”

“Oh, my dear Yuni.”

“I know what you wish for. But Egret...”

A droplet of cold water fell onto his already wet forehead. He looked up to see that the clear sky of a minute ago was now full of dark rain clouds, just as he’d predicted earlier. Starting with that one drop of rain, more began falling.

“I don’t want you to be hurt…”

Now, the rain was pouring down. It was a spring shower, just like the tears of the spirit.

With the paint water and getting caught in the rain, Egret suffered from high fever and chills all night long. His weak, fragile body broke down at the slightest exposure to being soaked and cold. Even so, Egret still put on a spare uniform and headed out of his dorm in the morning.

Yuni anxiously flew around him, watching him almost collapse several times on his way to class.

“Really! You should take a day off, Egret.”

“I am all right. This is just a simple cold. It is nothing compared to what I have suffered before.”

“But that time, you were dying—”

Yuni flew to his side with a worried sigh. She knew very well how stubborn he could be from being with him for several decades. There wasn’t anything she could do.

The economics class was at a faraway building that usually made him out of breath, but today, he had even gotten dizzy on his way over. He made it to the classroom somehow, but he couldn’t feel any strength left in his body.

He slumped down in his seat next to Baikal, who firmly shut his book upon Judas’ arrival and looked eager to talk.