Rules Ch.364

Chapter 364: The Fountain of Youth (21)

Rolinta, whose full name was Rolinta Megan, was the daughter Grant had fathered with the spouse of his second body while he was inhabiting it. She was also the younger sister of Eli Megan, the fourth body Grant had taken over.

She was a child who had been born with something extraordinary about her.

Her unusual bloodline may have been inherited from her Irish mother’s side. From childhood onward, every plant or flower that Rolinta cared for flourished with extraordinary vitality. Even in winter, they would incongruously sprout lush, tender green leaves.

Moreover, dying animals that Rolinta happened to pick up from the roadside could recover rapidly with only minimal care, and they rarely became ill.

Rolinta’s mother soon noticed that something was unusual. Concerned, she spent a fortune bringing in a renowned exorcist to examine her daughter.

After conducting an examination, the exorcist told her that Rolinta was not being haunted or possessed by any evil spirit.

“Madam, there is nothing unclean around your daughter. She is filled with pure, fresh natural energy. You have no need to worry. The reason she displays these unusual phenomena is simply because she carries a certain concentration of the bloodline of the Bountiful Witch.”

They were a relatively uncommon type of nature-based witch.

They could not learn spells and were not particularly skilled in witchcraft rituals. Their only innate advantage lay in caring for plants and animals. In agricultural societies, they were revered for bringing about bountiful harvests. But by the industrial age, in the wealthy Megan family, what use could there possibly be for someone like Rolinta, whose gift was “abundance,” other than marrying her off for an advantageous alliance?

But was that really all there was to it?

[Abundance, or harvest—A bountiful harvest from the land requires suitable weather, fertile soil, and crop varieties that combine high yields with resistance to pests and diseases. A bountiful harvest from livestock requires high-yield, disease-resistant, adaptable breeds, sound breeding and selection systems, and a suitable natural environment.

Any farmland or livestock cared for by Rolinta is able to resist disease and produce a bountiful harvest. This may mean that her ability improves the quality of biological seed stock and breeding stock…]

Grant made this analysis in Eli’s diary.

He wanted to obtain a body that came as close as possible to the original “Grant.”

At the time, however, the concept of cloning had not even been proposed. The only thing he could do was inbreeding.

Grant was no illiterate. After being taken in by a wealthy merchant, he had received a certain amount of education. After changing bodies, he became even more diligent, constantly expanding his store of knowledge.

In 1883, a geneticist in the Kingdom of Brita published a paper scientifically explaining the dangers of consanguineous marriage from a genetic perspective. Grant had read reports about it. He knew that inbreeding could lead to a higher incidence of genetic disorders, weakened immunity, physical deformities, and other adverse consequences. With particularly bad luck, it could even result in a stillbirth.

So, could Rolinta’s “abundance” influence the fetus in her womb and protect it from the harmful effects of inbreeding?

Grant did not know, but he believed it was worth trying.

She was indeed his granddaughter, the daughter of his second body, and the younger sister of his current body. But so what? Without him, the Megan family’s wealth could never have grown to what it was today. His descendants were all enjoying the fruits of his hard work. Was it not only natural for them to contribute something toward his pursuit of immortality?

Grant had Rolinta kidnapped and imprisoned.

The poor, frail, and innocent girl still believed her brother was merely joking until the moment he ass**lted her.

Rolinta, with the bloodline of a Bountiful Witch, truly was fertile, rich soil. After a year in captivity, their first child was born.

It was a boy. He had inherited Grant’s blond hair and blue eyes. He had a loud cry and a strong heartbeat, and when Grant held him in his arms, the baby even kicked him hard with his little legs.

The examination showed that the child was extremely healthy, with no illnesses or abnormalities.

By then, Rolinta, who had given birth to a child born of inc*st, had already lost the will to live. Yet hormones were truly a remarkable thing. When the baby let out his first cry beside Rolinta’s ear, a strange light suddenly appeared in the girl’s dim eyes.

She forced herself upright, picked up the baby, and fed him his first mouthful of milk.

It was also the only time she ever shared such closeness with her child—or at least, the only time during his childhood.

Before the child was even a month old, Grant took him away and had him raised elsewhere.

With her child constantly on her mind, Rolinta became completely obedient to Grant and never dared throw another tantrum.

For more than a decade, she yearned day and night to see her child again. Her only memory of him was the tiny, wrinkled-faced baby she had held in her arms.

—Was he doing well now? What would her grown-up child look like? Did he know who his mother was?

Would he… would he be willing to call her “Mom”?

Rolinta had a stomach full of questions she wanted to ask. She had imagined their reunion countless times, but never once had she imagined that more than a decade later, he would burst into her bedroom on a night of thunder and lightning just like his father had, ignoring her resistance and assaulting her once again.

Perhaps it was the witch bloodline at work, or perhaps there was some special bond between mother and child. Despite the more than decade-long separation, Rolinta recognized him at a glance.

That was her child. She was his mother. But why? Why?!

Rolinta went mad.

She went mad—and became pregnant.

Grant hired a specialized medical team to care for the deranged woman. They kept her carefully restrained, taking her outside for walks only at fixed times, tending to her meticulously like a valuable pregnant animal.

A year later, the madwoman gave birth to another baby boy.

He, too, was an exceptionally healthy and robust child.

Grant held the infant in his arms, his tenderness boundless, as though he were embracing his future self.

It was proven that inbreeding could indeed produce bodies with a high degree of compatibility. Every boy born from Rolinta’s womb could be used for more than ten years.

Unfortunately, Rolinta would eventually grow old. She could not keep giving birth to children for him forever.

Childbirth was extremely damaging to the mother. Grant had originally not wanted to exploit Rolinta to excess, but as he looked at the madwoman before him, now entering middle age, he changed his mind.

He decided to have as many children with her as possible while she still retained her fertility.

If they were boys, he would raise them and take over their bodies when the time came. If they were girls, that would be even better. Although the odds were low, with a sufficiently large sample size, perhaps one of the girls would inherit an ability similar to her mother’s, allowing him to continue his breeding program…

And so, from that year onward, the madwoman began an endless cycle of pregnancy and childbirth.

Every child, whether boy or girl, was healthy and strong. They emerged into the world crying loudly, only to be taken away and sent to a specialized “nursery” without even being given a drop of their mother’s milk.

Grant needed only their bodies. He had no need for them to learn the etiquette and rules of human society. At the nursery, the children were fed carefully prepared rations and dressed in crude white robes. They remained innocent and ignorant, growing recklessly like wild grass.

Growing, shooting upward, and then being harvested.

Before he knew it, Grant changed bodies once again.

In terms of blood relation, this new body was both Rolinta’s son and her grandson.

But it did not matter. As long as the children born were free of defects, Grant did not care about the tangled and pathological nature of their relationships. In order to make Rolinta give birth to a baby girl who possessed the same Bountiful power, he was even willing to continue impregnating her again and again despite her aging, slackened body.

Unfortunately, one child after another was born, yet the daughter Grant wanted never appeared.

By then, Rolinta was already over fifty.

Grant grew increasingly anxious. Seeing that Rolinta would lose her fertility before long, he finally could not restrain himself any longer and sought the aid of supernatural forces.

At the cost of more than a hundred human lives, Grant once again summoned the demon, risking discovery by the Church.

The demon refused Grant’s request to eliminate the “side effects,” but it agreed to grant him a daughter who would meet his expectations.

“Go back. The child you want is already in that woman’s womb,” it said.

From that day onward, Grant moved into the estate where Rolinta was imprisoned. He carefully tended to the pregnant madwoman with a level of caution he had never shown before, watching over her growing belly.

Ten months of pregnancy, followed by a single day of labor.

The moment the baby girl’s cries rang out, Grant, waiting outside the delivery room, revealed a rare smile of triumph.

But that smile did not last long before it was interrupted by screams from the medical staff.

Sensing that something was wrong, Grant rushed into the delivery room like a madman. The moment he pushed open the door, he froze.

Several medical workers lay unconscious on the floor. The only person still awake in the room was Rolinta. She was slumped on the blood- and amniotic-fluid-soaked bed, her emaciated fingers clamped tightly around the newborn’s throat.

The tiny baby girl had not even had her umbilical cord cut when her own mother took her life. Her face had turned bluish-purple, and her limp body hung from the woman’s fingers like a broken doll.

“What are you doing, you lunatic?!”

Grant roared and rushed forward, prying Rolinta’s fingers apart and snatching the baby away.

But he was still too late.

A newborn’s body was simply too fragile. The extraordinary baby girl he had spent decades waiting for—the child obtained at the cost of more than a hundred lives—had already been killed by her own mother.

“Haha… hahahahaha…”

Seeing Grant’s twisted, furious expression, Rolinta threw back her head and let out a fit of deranged laughter.

As she laughed, two trails of cloudy tears slipped from the corners of her deeply wrinkled eyes.

“I kept wondering why my brother had suddenly become such a stranger, and why my child would torment me like that… I kept thinking and thinking, but I could never understand it. So I went mad.”

Grant completely lost control for perhaps the first time in his life.

He struck Rolinta across the face again and again, leaving her battered and bloodied.

Even so, Rolinta continued to laugh.

She opened her gap-toothed mouth and let out a hissing, serpentine laugh. Her voice was harsh and hoarse, like coarse sandpaper scraping against Grant’s nerves. His eyes reddened, and even violence could not extinguish the fury burning inside him.

“And then… while I was carrying this child, in the dreams that belonged solely to her, I saw…”

She had seen a filthy, decaying soul; a bloated consciousness that had devoured countless lives; a human demon consumed by selfishness and greed.

He had taken over her father’s body, her brother’s body, and the bodies of one child after another. He had violated every boundary of human morality, repeatedly taking control of her own body and forcing her to give birth to countless children who would ultimately become weapons turned against her.

It turned out that this tragedy, which had continued for decades, and the hundreds of lives that had been lost, had all happened for one simple reason:

Someone did not want to die.

Haha… hahahaha… How absurd.

He did not want to die, and because of that, her entire life—and the lives of so many others—had been reduced to nothing more than delicacies laid out on a dining table for someone else to toy with and consume.

“Thud!”

Another blow landed. Rolinta’s head lolled to one side, and she spat out a broken tooth.

Grant failed to notice that, taking advantage of the opportunity, she quietly reached for the dagger hidden inside his clothing.

It was the dagger Grant had obtained from the demon at the cost of hundreds of human lives. He trusted no one. Other than when bathing or sleeping, he never let the dagger leave his side.

After stealing the dagger, Rolinta deliberately wrapped her entire hand around the hilt, concealing its distinctive features, then shouted and thrust it at Grant.

Acting on reflex, Grant seized the dagger and, in the same motion, drove it into Rolinta’s chest.

It was only after he pulled the blade free and saw a great quantity of blood gush from the wound that Grant realized something was wrong.

He had been tricked.

Rolinta had deliberately provoked him into striking back!

She wanted to take over his body!

At that moment, an unfamiliar consciousness suddenly invaded Grant’s body. She screamed and howled, carrying with her an overwhelming fury and boundless resentment that whipped up a violent storm in his consciousness.

As Rolinta’s howls rang out, the consciousnesses of the dead whom Grant had devoured and assimilated suddenly began to tremble as well.

Grant had always believed that they were long dead, reduced to mere nourishment for him. Yet those feelings of anger, hatred, unwillingness to accept their fate, and pain had all been preserved.

They had been hiding in places Grant could not see, in corners he had never considered important, lying dormant and biding their time. All they had been waiting for was an opportunity to strike back. Then they would extend their claws, bare their fangs, and viciously tear and claw at their enemy, ripping chunks of flesh from him!

The battle within the world of consciousness lasted for three full days.

During those three days, Grant was once driven to the brink of despair. Later, forcing his uncooperative body to keep going, he spent money like water, throwing half of his fortune into the effort. He summoned several psychics to aid him and, with their external assistance, finally managed to withstand Rolinta’s counterattack through sheer cheating.

Grant would never forget the moment of his defeat.

As she was finally overwhelmed and devoured by him, Rolinta left behind an extraordinarily vicious curse in his consciousness, screaming as she disappeared.

“You will die on the road to immortality. You will die at the very last moment, just before you succeed. You will die, you will die, you will die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die, die…”

Rolinta had inherited the bloodline of a Bountiful Witch. She did not possess the ability to cast curses.

And yet, her curse remained like an incurable wound lodged within Grant’s consciousness, leaving him constantly on edge and plagued by unease, unable to sleep peacefully for long periods.

Still, no matter how deeply something is etched into one’s heart, the passage of time can gradually smooth it away.

Through deliberate efforts to forget, Grant had believed that he would never encounter the name “Rolinta” again in his life.

And yet, why… why was it that when he looked at himself in the mirror, the face reflected there was Rolinta’s?!

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