Love Guru

After that last gathering of fellow countrymen, Rudeus and I grew even closer.

Although Nanahoshi and Rudeus were from the same country back on Earth, I realized he basically never went to see Nanahoshi.

Instead, Rudeus often came to me to discuss magic, though most of the time it was some trouble of his, and he wanted me to help clear up his confusion.

For instance, two days ago, his reason for coming to me was to learn advanced healing magic from me, but halfway through the lesson, he casually let slip the real purpose of his visit.

"Brother Dolin, do you have a teacher?"

"I do. My teacher is very famous. When I was in Ars, my grandfather found her for me. Her name is Bredikond Galanod, and she's an elf. You might not have heard her name, but you should have read the book she wrote. It's called Travels Across the World."

"Ohh, I really have read that book. So your teacher is the author of Travels Across the World, Dolin. Your teacher is actually an elf, so she must be a lot older than you, right?"

"She really is much older than me. Or rather, she's already over three hundred years old. At that age, among all of us, maybe only Elinalise can compare to her. Do you know how old Elinalise is?"

"I don't know. When I first met her, I asked her before. But her answer was: 'Oh my, you mustn't ask a woman her age. By the way, I'm almost fifty.'"

"I feel like she was definitely lying. So it should be pretty hard to find out her age."

I thought about Elinalise being Sylphie's grandmother, and calculated how old she had been when she gave birth to Rolz. Fifty was definitely a lie. She was at least eighty, and that was the most conservative guess.

When I thought about how I was often having wild outdoor sex with a woman over eighty, I couldn't help admiring myself a little.

"All right, let's not use her age as a reference. After all, elves are an extremely abnormal race. In another couple of years, I'll probably look older than my teacher. In another twenty years, if I go out with my teacher, people will probably think she's my daughter."

"Right, right, that's exactly the problem I have. Teacher Roxy is Devil Race, so she should have a lifespan of over two hundred years, and their race doesn't age. They always look like children."

"When I'm outside now, I don't even know whether I should still call her teacher."

"What does that matter? Are you saying you're no longer willing to be her disciple? Teacher, master, those are just forms of address. Do you really care about that?"

After hearing my answer, Rudeus smiled a little awkwardly. He probably hadn't come to me to ask that question. After thinking for a moment, he hesitated and said:

"Brother Dolin, I don't know how old you were in your last life, but at least for now, you're older than me, so I'll ask you directly."

"If your teacher has a very good relationship with you, and you're very close in everyday life, and you have lots of shared memories, and you chat together and live together very harmoniously..."

"But recently, for some unknown reason, she suddenly became a bit cold toward me. Or rather, she started avoiding me. What's going on? What should I do?"

When Rudeus asked me that, I understood. At first I'd thought he had come over because he disliked that Roxy was older than him! Let me think.

I pondered for a while, patted Rudeus on the shoulder, and then said fairly:

"Rudeus, did you ever date anyone in your last life? Or were you ever married?"

Those words made Rudeus break out in a cold sweat. He said quietly:

"No. In my last life, I had nothing to do with that sort of thing. But I did play a lot of romance games like that. Does that kind of experience count?"

"Well... your current situation can be understood as a romance game, where the affection level has already reached MAX, but you haven't entered the confession stage yet. You can understand it like that, right?"

Rudeus nodded seriously.

"Have you ever tried, when playing a romance game, raising one character's affection level to full without confirming the relationship, and then immediately going to raise another character's affection level?"

"At that point, wouldn't the previous character's affection suddenly drop very quickly, and soon turn negative, or enter some special state?"

"But as long as you go back and raise the previous character's affection level again, the recovery speed will be much faster than before."

"Think about the situation around you recently, then combine it with my analogy and consider the problem carefully!"

Rudeus fell silent there. I guessed he had already sunk into a brainstorm. Haha.

I patted him on the shoulder again.

After leaving him with the words, "Good luck, brother,"

I got up and left.

Haha, when I was reading the novel in my last life, I felt that Rudeus's love life was way too smooth.

Sylphie was basically delivered to him for free, and Roxy was also handed over by the plot. Only Eris had a few twists and turns, but there was basically none of the love, hate, and tangled grudges you'd see in a melodramatic romance. At most, it was just Rudeus unilaterally misunderstanding Eris.

This time, I had already helped him remove Eris, the hardest and most difficult bone to chew. As for the remaining two, I'd originally thought he would be able to catch them as easily as stretching out his hand.

Sigh, looks like it wasn't that simple. The young man still had to work hard!

Two days after I left Rudeus, today, another young man came to me because of romantic troubles.

Actually, I wasn't very familiar with him. Cliff Grimoire and I basically hadn't exchanged more than a few words at the special class's weekly meetings.

At most, I'd only heard him boast about how amazing he was. Also, I'd never run into him getting beaten up by a crowd and then gone up to rescue him.

So I had never imagined he would come looking for me. But for some unknown reason, through some unknown connection, he still learned that I was very close to Elinalise, and asked me to introduce Elinalise to him.

This time, Elinalise had come to Ranoa University of Magic to study. Although she attended classes in the normal class, we only met outdoors under special circumstances.

At other times, we basically didn't have much more contact. But I had still heard her reputation many times at this school.

For example: elf succubus, virgin terminator, mobile juicer, and so on and so forth.

There was even a campus legend saying that boys shouldn't walk alone through the little groves on campus at night, because it was easy to be targeted by the witch, and in the end, they would lose the most important thing in a man's life. Stories like that had spread.

Looks like capable people would have their own legends no matter where they went.

So I hadn't expected that, in the end, Cliff Grimoire would still find me and ask me to introduce Elinalise to him. Normally speaking, this was an extremely crazy choice.

But I, who knew the plot, was very clear that Cliff would succeed.

In the end, I agreed to his request, but given the strange relationship between Elinalise and me, I didn't take him straight to her.

Instead, I made a detour and had him go find Rudeus, telling him that Rudeus and Elinalise had often traveled together in the past and had an excellent relationship. As for my relationship with Elinalise, it was average—no, it could only be described as negative. Better left unmentioned!

After all, this was an important plot point that would affect the later stages, so I still took it seriously. Only if the two of them got together would Cliff research how to suppress curses, and in the end discover the ultimate method to counter Orsted's curse.

I had already prepared myself to cut ties with Elinalise. In truth, I didn't think I mattered all that much to her.

To her, I was merely a tool she used to suppress her curse during her travels.

Even after she had relations with me, she hadn't stopped looking for other curse suppressants. That was the best proof.

But then an accident happened.

The next day was the school's routine homeroom meeting. I thought I would see Elinalise sitting on Cliff's lap during the meeting, the two of them all lovey-dovey.

But the actual result was that only Cliff was in the very front row, secretly wiping away tears.

After I sat down, Linia and Pursena deliberately came over and sat on my left and right.

"Boss, good morning, meow. Another happy day, meow. When can we go to your house and eat barbecue again, meow?

"Pursena said that if she can eat barbecue, she'll let you touch her as much as you want, meow."

Pursena, off to the side, somewhat shyly covered her own head.

I ignored these two female animals' morning-in-heat behavior. I pursed my lips toward the front and asked, "Do you know what's going on with that?"

What I was pointing at was, of course, Cliff wiping his tears over there. Could it be that after Elinalise squeezed him dry yesterday, he felt sorry for his own essence and cried in grief?

"Oh, you mean Cliff? Apparently he got dumped yesterday."

"Yeah, yesterday I heard from a Beast-kin classmate that they ran into him drinking his sorrows away at a bar, meow. While drinking, he kept saying things like, why wasn't it me, why can't I do it.

"So gross. If he confessed to me, I'd reject him on the spot too, meow."

"Yeah, after all, he's so short. Not brave or martial at all."

The cat and dog each chimed in beside me, and I had more or less figured out the situation.

Perhaps because the two of them were talking too loudly, Cliff turned back and glared at them, then ran off angrily.

My head started to hurt a little. What was going on? Why had his confession failed? This wasn't following the plot at all.

Was it because of me again? What exactly had caused this situation? It couldn't be Hitogami's arrangement, could it?

It was possible, but Hitogami shouldn't be able to see futures concerning Orsted, and he definitely shouldn't be able to see that Cliff would research a method to counter Orsted's curse.

Now that Cliff and Elinalise hadn't gotten together, Cliff wouldn't go research Elinalise's curse either. When the time came, would there still be any chance of him researching a method to counter Orsted's curse?

Probably a bit dicey.

But this matter didn't have much to do with me anyway. After all, whether Orsted's curse could be solved or not wasn't that important to me.

I wouldn't live to see the day he killed Hitogami, so that was all something several generations later.

Even so, I still wanted to investigate the reason behind the deviation in history.

That afternoon, I went to find Elinalise. She was lying over the windowsill, looking at the scenery in the distance.

It couldn't be that she was lying over the windowsill again, with her butt raised high in the back, could it?

Should I first check whether there was anyone behind her, then decide whether to disturb her today?

But the result was quite good. After she saw me, she waved at me. That meant there was no one behind her, right?

I went up to the second floor and found her. Sure enough, she was only leaning over the windowsill looking at the scenery. There wasn't a single person in the room.

"Dolin, did you miss me? So hungry for it? Has your little maid not been serving you well these past few days? Or is it because her technique isn't good enough, and you prefer big sister's technique?"

Sure enough, no matter when it was, she would always make dirty jokes. Truly a terrifying existence.

"Elinalise, I want to ask you something. Why did you reject Cliff's courtship before? In my opinion, he was very sincere."

Elinalise smiled and looked at me with eyes that seemed to be staring at an idiot as she said, "Don't you think you're asking a very strange question? How could someone like me possibly have only one fixed partner? That Cliff also seems to believe in the Millis Faith.

"Don't you think it would be very strange if I agreed to his request? Or are you saying the opposite on purpose, and actually came here to tease me?"

That was indeed true. Her answer left me speechless, but I was also very clear that in another timeline, she had agreed. I needed to know the difference between these two timelines.

"No, that's not what I meant. Mm... What I mean is, Elinalise, have you ever liked a man? Or rather, is it possible for you to like a man?"

This question seemed to touch a sensitive area deep in her heart. Her expression slowly changed from lofty teasing to an uncertain mix of light and shadow, as if countless joys, angers, sorrows, and pleasures were surging through her mind, then reflecting on her delicate face. In the end, she sat down on a stool without saying a word.

After that, I sat opposite her and waited for her to speak.

"Dolin, are you sure you want to hear it?"

"Yes. I want to know. If it's convenient for you, please tell me the answer."

"I once had a man I liked. You know the Long-ear Race has an extremely long lifespan, and I don't know how old I am. That's because I woke up in a labyrinth.

"The one who rescued me was my first husband. He was of the Long-ear Race. Back then, he and his companions rescued me from a mana crystal in the labyrinth. At the time, I had no memories at all.

"Over a long period of living together, he and I fell in love, and in the end we married in a Long-ear Race village. My curse was triggered at that time as well. After I did it with my husband for the first time, I increasingly discovered that I liked doing that sort of thing. If I went a few days without doing it, the curse would make me more and more uncomfortable and irritable.

But my husband and I never saw anything wrong with it. I had always thought it was because my own sex drive was too strong, right up until my husband was murdered.

Even after my husband was killed, my curse kept urging me to have relations with more men. In the end, the people in the village drove me out, and I began a life of wandering from place to place.

In the years that followed, I fell so low that I became a prostitute, a slave, and was even imprisoned in caves you could never imagine.

It was only in the last few decades, when I became an adventurer and joined the adventuring party of Rudy's father, that I finally had a happy, steady life.

Back when I was in his party, I had wanted to truly love someone, but that too was a kind of extravagant hope. In the end, I was abandoned once again.

But after being abandoned that time, my luck was very good, and none of those terrible things happened.

And that brought me to now. I actually wanted to have a relationship of my own too, but I was afraid the person I liked wouldn't be able to accept a curse like mine, so I was prepared to change my approach.

I did not plan to love anyone now. Maybe if I didn't love them, I could stay with that person for longer?"

I did not quite understand. Had she fallen for someone else? Had someone beaten me to the punch? Who? An apostle of Hitogami?

How come I didn't know? Besides, as for that unimaginable life in caves you mentioned, I could imagine it just fine. Wasn't it just Goblins? As if nobody had ever seen that before.

After she finished saying all that, I asked her for the specific details, but she refused to tell me anything else.

She really was a woman with a story. Of course, she didn't let me off either, and made me help her ease the curse.

Sigh. This was something I had mentally prepared myself for before coming here this time, so I very obediently helped her.

While easing the pain of her curse, I considered the impact this matter would have on the future.

First, Orsted's curse solution had probably gone up in smoke. But that was not important.

Another impact was that Cliff's son was probably gone. What was his name again? I forgot.

Oh, right, Nanahoshi's illness seemed to have been cured by Cliff too. Also, the poison inflicted on the Superd Race in the final period was cured by him as well.

Thinking about it that way, he had actually done quite a lot.

Right now, I wasn't sure whether those things would still happen. But I still had to prepare a method for easing the curse.

At that moment, something bumped against my waist.

"Hmph, don't get distracted. Dolin, which little girlfriend of yours are you thinking about? Getting distracted even at a time like this—looks like big sister's technique isn't up to par!"

"Hey, hey, hey, don't be so forceful. I won't be able to hold out, Miss Elinalise.

I was thinking about your curse. Would you be interested in letting me study your curse later? Maybe I can ease it a little."

"I don't care. I don't have any complaints about my curse now. I've already adapted to my current life. If you want to study it, I can cooperate with you.

But the price for cooperating with you in studying the curse is that you'll need to satisfy me while you're studying. How about it?"

I swallowed. I thought about my twenty-year-old age, and my red hair that was very likely to go bald in middle age.

Then I gritted my teeth, steeled my heart, and said, "Fine. I'll take it as risking my life to accompany a gentleman. I'm going all in."

When Elinalise heard my answer, her brows lifted, and she looked extremely happy.

Then she began rocking even harder.