Transmigrated into Eroge as the Simp, but I Refuse This Fate - Chapter 357

Capítulo 357: The one who sees (2)

She had been there the day he was born.

Of course she had to be, isn’t it? That is the most natural thing for a grandmother.

The Elford wing of the Dominion’s hospital had been sealed, every passage guarded, every attendant hand-picked and scrubbed in both mana and memory.

The moment Vivienne’s labor began, Erin had already arrived—silent as ever, veiled in that dark-stained gold she always wore when something important was about to happen.

Not even Dominic had dared ask her why she came.

He knew.

Because this was her blood being born.

And when Damien Elford first opened his eyes—

Erin Valeheart had already seen his threads.

They glowed.

Not like most infants, whose threads were soft, clouded with potential and the blankness of innocence.

Damien’s were taut. Sharp. Thick with meaning. His soul shimmered with intersections, probabilities cascading in hundreds of directions—many of them laced with power, consequence, danger.

An heir born of steel and mystery.

The Valeheart blood. The Elford might. Foresight and fire in a single vessel.

A child whose future danced close to the thrones of gods and tyrants alike.

She had looked down at him, hours old, and thought:

He will change things.

He will be something that cannot be ignored.

She had seen it. Just as she’d seen it with Adeline—his older sister, a girl whose threads already burned with the clarity of leadership even as a child.

But Damien?

His threads were more complex. Less defined.

He carried freedom in them. Rebellion. Not chaos—but something else.

Possibility.

The kind that made kings shiver and prophets weep.

The kind that could tear down systems or birth new ones.

The kind that had to be shaped. Watched. Forged.

And then—

He grew.

And with each year that passed, Erin watched in disbelief as those threads dimmed.

No tragedy. No curse.

Just waste.

The boy showed no drive.

No discipline. No ambition.

He slept in when he should have been training.

He skipped rites, avoided politics, ignored his tutors.

He laughed off responsibility with an irreverence that burned at her patience.

Not because he was incapable.

But because he chose to be less.

That… that was what made it worse.

Erin Valeheart had seen failures before. Had stared down broken men whose threads tangled with guilt and ruin, had judged cowards and murderers and creatures hollowed out by grief.

But this?

This was choice.

A boy born with the densest concentration of inherited power in two generations—

Deliberately choosing to be nothing.

And that…

That angered her.

Not because of pride.

Not because of politics.

Because he was hers.

He bore her blood. Her eyes, even—just a touch of that same glint when the light hit right.

But he walked through the world like it meant nothing. Like he meant nothing.

A thorn. A waste. A curse in the shape of a grandson.

And yet—

She could never fully sever him in her mind.

Because no matter how strange her life became—no matter how deeply she sank into visions, into the folds of Mystery, into the truths that broke normal minds—

her family remained her only anchor to the real.

The Valehearts had always straddled the boundary between this world and something older, stranger.

But family… family was real.

Her daughters.

Her granddaughters, grandsons…

And yes—Damien.

He had to matter.

Even when he made her want to tear the threads from the air.

Even when he stood like a joke in the halls of his bloodline.

Even when he became the one thing she couldn’t explain.

Because deep down, beneath all the disgust and disappointment—

he was the family.

And so—

she had accepted him.

Not with warmth. Not with pride. But with the cold, steady patience that one gives to a blade that refuses to sharpen.

He is what he is, she told herself.

The truth is not always beautiful.

Even when it shares your blood.

And yet, even knowing—even seeing how his threads unraveled, how the shimmer of his potential dulled year after year—there had always been something in her that refused to cut him off completely.

Because no matter how her perceptions twisted the world,

no matter how the Mystery pulled her into places others would go mad trying to grasp—

family remained her only constant.

It was the one truth she clung to.

Her daughters.

Her granddaughters.

And yes… Damien.

She kept her distance, yes. Not because she didn’t care, but because to be in his presence was to ache.

To feel, again and again, the dissonance between what she had seen at his birth and what he had become.

That contradiction—it scraped at the edges of her sanity.

A reminder that not all truths could be trusted.

That even the Sight could lie.

So she avoided him. Let Vivienne and Dominic manage him.

Watched from afar.

A shadow at family meetings, a silent figure at formal gatherings, speaking to him only rarely, and never for long.

Not out of cruelty.

Out of necessity.

She could not bear to feel it again—

that strange wrongness wrapped in familiar skin.

And then—

a month ago—

She felt something.

It was subtle.

Not a shift in power. Not a scream through the threads.

Just… a silence breaking.

Something in the weave of the world moved differently that day.

She had been meditating, locked in the lower sanctum beneath Valeheart Tower, eyes closed to the physical world, senses stretched into the undercurrent of fate—

when it tugged.

A ripple.

A fracture healing—or forming.

She couldn’t tell.

She opened her eyes and spoke no word of it.

Not even to the Elders.

But that night, she had trouble sleeping.

And not long after—

the information reached her.

From her eyes in the Elford mansion.

From the whispers embedded in the walls.

Damien Elford had left.

Voluntarily.

He had walked out of the estate, left behind the comfort he clung to for years, and moved to the Blackthorne mansion—a place empty, derelict, and unsupervised.

He took one single aide.

No drama. No explanation.

Just left.

That alone should have made her pause.

Because that was not something her grandson would have done.

Not the Damien she knew—the one who fled effort, avoided weight, and curled into comfort like a beast refusing the hunt.

At the time, she didn’t investigate further. She couldn’t—not because she didn’t suspect something, but because the world demanded her elsewhere. Erin Valeheart was not a woman who floated above the Dominion without weight. Her position as 11th Seat Holder, Matriarch of the Valeheart Line, and bearer of the Black Seer’s Sight came with obligations—ones not easily delayed, even for family.

So she turned from the question. Left Damien’s strange departure to sit in the background of her mind like a whisper she refused to listen to. There were negotiations in the fractured eastern provinces, a dispute among the Seated Families regarding succession laws, and an ancient relic uncovered in the South that called for her direct judgment. She was away from the Elford territories for almost a full month.

And then—Vivienne contacted her.

That alone had been enough to make her pause. Vivienne did not reach out often. And never without reason. Her daughter, for all her precision and pride, had learned long ago to treat Erin’s time like a sacred thing—never disturbed without purpose.

But this?

Even through the emotionless tightness of her voice, Erin could feel the ripple of tension.

Vivienne and Dominic were calling to inform her that Damien had wanted to be an Awakened.

“Awakened?” Erin had repeated aloud, her voice colder than frost. “What are you saying?”

The silence on the other end was brief, but heavy. Then came the words that still echoed in her memory:

“Yes. He wants to enter the Cradle.”

The Cradle.

That was the moment she stilled. Truly stilled.

The Cradle of Primordials was not a training ground. Not some noble child’s curated ritual. It was an ancient trial, a vestige of a world older than the Dominion, older than the Families themselves. A method of Awakening so dangerous that most called it a fool’s grave.

But those who survived?

They emerged changed. Forged. Marked not just with power, but potential that twisted fate itself. The greatest Seat Holders of past generations—those whose names were now etched into the bones of history—many of them had walked through the Cradle.

And now Damien—Damien, who had fled from the simplest rites, who had treated responsibility like a passing inconvenience—wanted to enter that?

It did not make sense.