Xia Xi spoke casually, as though he were saying, "Nice weather tonight."
But those words instantly covered Tanjuro's back in cold sweat.
He felt... the evening breeze, which had clearly begun to warm up.
Now carried the bone-deep chill of midwinter again.
Was he... about to die?
If an ordinary person suddenly heard something like that.
They might have flown into a rage on the spot.
But Tanjuro did not.
He simply fell silent.
Because, just as Xia Xi had said.
Tanjuro had actually sensed the changes in his body for quite some time.
His body...
Had begun rapidly declining after he turned twenty-five.
He aged and weakened faster, and far more severely, than the residents of the surrounding towns.
That sense of deterioration seeping out from within his body.
How could he possibly not know?
Tanjuro had also examined his own body through that transparent view of the world.
He had noticed that his body was in an extremely contradictory state, with extreme strength and extreme weakness existing side by side.
His lungs, and many of his other organs, were far less healthy than those of the townspeople.
Yet some of his organs contained [strength] far beyond that of ordinary people.
But as time passed, that weak, deteriorating area kept spreading.
Sometimes, when he woke in the middle of the night, he would cough up streaks of blood without even realizing it.
However...
He had not let Kie or the children notice.
He had only said that his "winter cold still hadn't cleared up, and he still had a bit of a cough."
Of course, he had secretly visited the town's traditional practitioners and doctors.
But despite taking plenty of medicine, he had seen little improvement.
So Tanjuro could only pretend that nothing was wrong with his body.
Dragging