The Male Lead Is Obsessed With My Health – Chapter 275

Author: Asternkm

The melody flows.

It’s been a really long time since I last held a violin, but despite the long break, the violin still helped me produce exactly the sound I wanted, clean and clear.

Surprisingly, my very first memory is of my mom smiling as she played the violin for me.

This was the piece she played back then.

A song whose very name is full of love—
Salut d’Amour.

Maybe because of that memory, and because it’s a short piece of about three minutes and not very difficult, I used to play it often.

Still—

‘I never thought I’d play this score again.’

The old violin helping me now was a historic one, a violin that had been with my mom during her prime.

So that day became a kind of dedication performance—
a performance offered to my mom and to my past life, using the violin she left behind, playing the very first piece that connected us.

After letting go of my mom like that, I had decided I would never play this piece again.

I didn’t want to dig up something that was already over.

‘If Dad hadn’t come to find me after hearing this music back then…’

Then maybe I’d be playing a different piece right now.

‘Dad, are you listening?’

Sometimes, it’s easier to speak through music than through words.

Even now, I still don’t always know how to talk without causing misunderstandings, or how to properly convey my feelings and thoughts.

Words are too difficult, writing is even harder, and drawing is impossible for me.

All I can do is play.

Maybe because it’s something as familiar as eating a meal, the more I played, the calmer my heart became.

Come to think of it, when I was younger, every time I played, the corruption affecting mages would be purified, so I really thought I had some kind of “purification ability.”

‘So it wasn’t that I had a separate purification power.’

Playing like this, I finally understood.

The purification around me was just a side effect. Depending on the music I played, the power sleeping inside me was being finely divided and leaking out.

‘Is it resonating with my emotions?’

Strangely, it didn’t feel dangerous.

Right now, I was just playing.

—Ziiing.

Music filled with my emotions and heart spread far and wide.

‘I hope this sound reaches Dad.’

If he was wandering somewhere, I hoped he would hear this music and come find me.

Just like he did that day.

When Salut d’Amour ended, I took a short breath to steady myself.

“So this still isn’t enough, huh.”

It’s fine. I still have plenty left.

There were still many memories I shared with Dad.

Next… it has to be that one.

Manuel Ponce’s Estrellita (Little Star).

‘The piece Dad played when he gave me my violin.’

I closed my eyes and remembered the image of Dad, resting his chin in his hand, quietly listening as I played the violin in front of him that day.

Ziiing—.

A sound that would have been dissonant somewhere else layered harmoniously in my hands and became music.

Just like the peaceful times we spent together.

****

Valer stopped wandering aimlessly at some point and tried to recall his memories somewhere in the Other Side World.

“Shall I make you a god?”

Thanks to the memory he barely managed to recover, he now knew why he was in this state.

Some immortal bastard who had suddenly appeared and offered to turn him into a god.

There was no way he would ever accept such trashy nonsense.

‘Was it that guy from before?’

The dangerous one he had encountered in the Other Side World of the imperial palace.

It was just that too many memories from previous worlds had resurfaced at the time, so he’d been slow to recognize him.

Even aside from that, wandering through an ownerless Other Side World for far too long and getting unknowingly eroded was probably part of the reason as well.

Valer realized he was caught in a truly vicious trap.

‘How do I get back to the original world from here?’

There were too many failed worlds.

Which run was this, anyway?

There was no way he could remember that.

Should he just die? If he died, he’d lose his memories anyway and start over.

Overwhelmed by crushing fatigue, Valer let out a bitter smile as he finally understood why he had sealed his memories right after regressing, despite having useful information.

‘So that’s why I had no choice.’

Because no matter how many times he repeated it, the boredom and helplessness that always came from never achieving his goal would drag him down.

Up to a few hundred runs, he had even mistaken the dulling of his emotions and the lowering of his threshold from “these memories” as becoming more rational.

“Valer, what on earth are you doing…?”

Mehen, who looked at him like a bug for doing anything to save Arellin, snapped him back to his senses.

‘Ah, I remember.’

There were times when he killed everything that could threaten Arellin, even if it meant enduring that kind of blame—but the more unstable society became, the faster Arellin died. Back then, it was so hopeless that he’d almost wanted to give up.

“No wonder you seemed so interesting. If what you say is true, you may have become a different kind of immortal from me.”

The seal that let him see memories of previous runs in his dreams and retrieve them only when necessary had all been possible thanks to her help. Even then, once he moved on to the next run, he wouldn’t remember that even his laziness was her doing.

‘Right. I was trying to save Arellin.’

Valer suddenly looked down at the pendant he was holding. The pendant he had never let go of, no matter what.

This was the artifact he had come all this way to find—
“an artifact that seals any powerful ability.”

There was a reason he’d clung to it and never released it, even while out of his mind.

His thoughts cleared in an instant.

Even if he died, he had to give this to Arellin.

He forced strength into his powerless body. Luckily, it seemed he wasn’t dead yet.

“…Still alive, huh.”

His body was a wreck, but as long as he could move, it didn’t matter. The burning pain in his throat, the state where his insides were so ruined that he could barely even feel pain anymore—

None of that mattered.

Valer barely pushed himself up and spat out the blood pooled in his mouth.

‘Where should I go?’

Even as he wandered without knowing the direction, the illusion of his sister—who always stayed by his side—was smiling gently.

Come to think of it, he thought he’d seen her just now.

“…Sis.”

Maybe it would’ve been better if I’d died before you. So I wouldn’t block your path. Then you probably would’ve lived well on your own.

“And I can’t even regress to before that point. Was that on purpose? So I couldn’t die instead of you?”

She really was cruel to the very end.

Feeling the disconnect of time passing while his soul remained that of an ungrown boy, Valer laughed softly.

From far away, he thought he heard the sound of a violin.

A delicate sound, as if it were comforting him.

For some reason, an image came to mind—
a small child who barely reached his waist, struggling to hold a violin that looked too big to grasp with one hand.

Along with the surprisingly skilled music that didn’t match that appearance at all.

‘Is that… Arellin?’

It couldn’t be.

No matter how kindly he thought of it, there was practically no chance that such a miracle would conveniently appear before him—but for some reason, Valer felt drawn to the source of that music.

He couldn’t remember the composers’ names that Arellin always told him whenever she played, but he remembered the titles of the pieces.

Salut d’Amour, Estrellita, Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, Moonlight Serenade, Meditation, Liebesfreud, Romance, Elegy.

She used to say they were all masterpieces, and that memorizing the titles and composers was the bare minimum of respect, forcing him to learn the titles.

Arellin rarely played the same piece twice, but when Valer answered incorrectly, she would glare at him with genuine contempt and still replay the piece while demanding he memorize the name—so even when he knew the answer, he’d sometimes deliberately get it wrong.

‘What was it again? That Schumann’s Romance, Chopin’s Romance, Beethoven’s Romance, and Wieniawski’s Romance are all different, so it’s obvious you can tell them apart in just one bar?’

Remembering that, Valer let out a stifled laugh and blankly thought—

He missed Arellin.

‘I want to go back.’

He desperately wanted to return to that time when, even without doing anything, he was happy just because Mehen and Arellin were by his side.

For the first—and last—time, Valer no longer wanted to regress.

The place he wanted to return to was his home in this world, where Mehen and Arellin would welcome him.

Maybe that desperate wish reached someone.

“-!”

At the end of following nothing but the sound, Valer’s eyes widened at the sight of two people standing there.

The music ended.

And—

“Dad—!”