『You’re telling me to become an Orc?!』

The woman’s spirit was friendly towards Vandalieu because of the effects of the【Death-Attribute Charm】and the fact that he had recovered her body, but she still had to refuse Vandalieu’s suggestion.

Even though she had already died, it would be torture for her to be reborn as the child of the one who had raped her body, an Orc, no less. In fact, if Vandalieu had simply asked her,「Would you like to go to the afterlife or be reborn as an Orc right now?」her immediate choice would have been to go to the afterlife.

「It’s alright, I will remove as many of the Orc genes as I can. You won’t become an Orc.」

『You can do something like that? If there’s any Orc blood in a child, that child will definitely become an Orc, you know?』

「I can do it. I have a little experience with this.」


However, Vandalieu had experience in the selective breeding of animals, plants and humans. To be more accurate, he knew that he could do this with death-attribute magic.

Among the experiments in Origin, there had been research to see whether it was possible to use death-attribute magic to kill off certain parts of certain genes, resulting in selective breeding. And these experiments had succeeded.

He had killed the horse genes in a half-donkey, half-horse mule fetus to produce a foal that was purely a donkey.

Seeds that were resistant to disease and cold but weak to heat and seeds that were resistant to heat but weak to disease were bred together, and then Vandalieu had cut the unnecessary parts out of the genes of the resulting offspring to produce seeds that were resistant to disease, cold and heat.

He had performed the same thing in domestic animals and human zygotes that had been produced by the sperm and eggs of people of different races, with a success rate of over ninety percent.

Thanks to these experiments, the military nation that owned the laboratory that Vandalieu was held captive in developed its agriculture and animal breeding and overcame a large number of hereditary diseases, becoming renowned as a great country for medical care.

(I’m not sure that things went so well for them after I died, though.)

Holding back this dark thought in his chest, Vandalieu continued to explain the process to the woman’s spirit to ease her mind about it.

「The perfect time is just before or just after the egg cell has been fertilized, but it has already been some time since it attached itself to the womb, so I can’t make you completely human. But I should be able to make you close enough to a human that you would never be considered an Orc.」

『So that means I’d become like a beast-person?』

「… I’ve never seen a beast-person, so I can’t say for sure.」

The woman’s spirit fell silent. She seemed to be deep in thought.

Vandalieu simply waited until she came to an answer. He wasn’t helping her purely out of his own goodwill. It would be convenient for him if she chose this「rebirth.」

Vandalieu’s goal was revenge, to survive against the cheaters who would be reincarnated in this world, and to revive his mother, Darcia.

One of the methods he had thought of for that last goal was to have Darcia possess a fertilized egg, as they had a high affinity for spirits, to have her undergo a pseudo-reincarnation. But it was best to have as many cards in his hand as possible.

There was no guarantee that the process would go well in Lambda as it had in Origin. He didn’t know whether creatures in this world even had genes and DNA, and even if they did, they might not have the same structure as the creatures in Origin.

He was intending to use this woman as an experimental subject to find out.

That was why Vandalieu simply waited as she contemplated the choice. If he told her his circumstances, the【Death-Attribute Charm】skill’s effect would force her to nod her head. But that didn’t mean that he wanted to lie to her, either.

How hypocritical. Vandalieu himself was aware that it was hypocritical. That was why he thought that if she agreed to do this, no matter what the result, it would still be true that he had helped her with her new life.

『I have made my decision. Please allow me to be reborn.』

「I understand. I will do everything I can.」

He used【Spirit Form Transformation】on his arms once more and buried them in the Live-Dead’s abdomen. And then he poured Mana into the fetus smaller than the tip of his pinky finger that was living inside the womb, determining its current state.

He could sense almost no human genes in the fetus. The genes were mostly those of an Orc, and if the child was born now, it would certainly be a Noble Orc.

As Vandalieu had guessed before, the reproduction of Orcs and Noble Orcs was different from normal creatures; the Orc’s genes absorbed the mother’s genes as the child developed.

With that being the case, he simply had to reverse that relationship. He weakened the Noble Orc’s genes with death-attribute Mana and stopped the weakening of the human genes, stimulating them to become stronger. If he just stopped the fetus from dying now, it would grow into a mostly-human child.

『… I’m glad I learned the Mana Control skill.』

Doing this without any kind of scientific equipment was very difficult. This wasn’t something that could be done by simply pushing his Mana through by force.

If he did that, this fragile fetus would be destroyed. He had to delicately sort through the genes and apply the treatment to each cell, one by one.

「Well then, let’s meet again.」

And then he had the spirit of the woman whose name he didn’t know possess the fetus. That suddenly reminded him, there had been controversy on earth over when someone possessed a soul – did a person have a soul right at the moment of fertilization, from some point during the pregnancy as a fetus or from the moment that he or she was born?

In Lambda, in this particular case, this person possessed a soul starting right now, Vandalieu thought. It wasn’t a particularly meaningful thought.

And then he transferred additional Mana to the Living Dead. Because he didn’t know how much Mana Luciliano had given to it, he had to prevent its heart from stopping before the woman was reborn.