Reincarnated extra refuses to die

Arc 2. Chapter 1-3

That night, Lucas and I were in the henhouse, a small construction of wood with a stone ceiling a little away from the house. We were here, like always, to read and discuss what we've found in the viscount's journals and books I got from his office before we left the castle, so we wouldn't attract my family's attention if we accidentally raised our voices while talking. Or, more accurately, Lucas was reading and summarizing things for me because I didn't know how to read and never actually had the opportunity to learn, what with my parents being illiterate and most of the farming community as well.

I was now, though. Learning, that is. Lucas taught me and Thomas the basics when we had free time, and slowly but surely something was coming out of it. I still had difficulties with my writing, but I could already read simple things. Lucas was astounded at my learning speed but I knew it was simply because, for me, it was just like learning another language. Here in this part of the world they used the Latin script. I was very fluent in both English and Spanish in my past life, so it wasn't as difficult for me as it was for little Thomas, who had to learn from zero.

Still, most of the reading fell on Lucas anyway. Whenever I couldn't understand something or found a word I didn't know, which happened quite often, it pained me to admit, I would ask him and he would help me... sometimes even by taking the book from my hands and just reading it himself. Because of this, I only tended to look through books that he had already read and waited for him to find something interesting or just finish so he could give a summary of what he read.

I didn't mind, really. Since it was something important I thought it would be better to give the books to someone who understood things from the beginning, instead of wasting time myself trying to decipher what I read.

Unfortunately, the quantity of things of importance we found was very scarce.

The books talked only about the experiences of previous holders with the demon. Those experiences greatly changed depending on how compatible they were with it and if they tried to contact it or not. No one ever did, as it was incredibly difficult, apparently, what with the demon being jailed in a deeper plane of consciousness than all the other predecessors. Not counting it was dangerous, too.

What the viscount told me also held truth. The farther you dived into the dreamscape, the more difficult it was to find previous holders, never mind talk to them. Because of that, the information in the books always felt second-handed. It was the typical 'I was told from someone who was told from someone who was told from someone else...' scenario.

The most aggravating thing of all was that even the oldest books held no relevant information. Judging by the fragile pages, I could assume the oldest was quite a few centuries old, maybe six or seven-hundred years, but, of course, that was not enough. Not if what the viscount said was true and the demon had been running down his family even before the demon wars that, by the way, are thought to have taken place at least two-thousand years in the past.

So, in other words, we were screwed.

Ironically though, the books with the most information were the journals written by the viscount, apparently the only one in his family to take an interest in the demon beyond how to live with it and transfer it when the time was due. Plenty of times he talked about how discovering the origins of the demon might aid in how to get rid of it, but up until now, no definite information was given.

Like this, we were in a conundrum. On one hand, there was a demon being passed down in a family for generations that could brew chaos if it ever got loose. On the other hand, no one, not even the same family who had been holding it for possibly thousands of years had any idea where it came from or the reason they even held it in the first place. And thus, no one tried or even knew how to get rid of it.