It has been three days since I was found unconscious in the room containing Gaea's Embrace. The next day, when I had properly woken up, Father and Mother questioned me about it. I told them the truth: I knew nothing. How I ended up in that predicament deludes me, but I knew that it was related to that 'dream' I saw.

Ever since then, I could see the 'ghost' of Vain. Seeing the see-through image of a six-year-old boy whom you thought was dead was a disconcerting sight. I'm not sure why, but that dream gave me the strongest feeling that this 'ghost' is Vain's soul clinging to life... But then there's also that part of me that's concerned that I may have gone mad.

In any case, Mother and Father had left it alone, and told me to immediately inform them of anything that went wrong. Not that I would tell them that I'm seeing the ghost of my not-so-dead twin brother... Or would it be more accurate to call it his spirit? Vain's spirit appears occasionally; it's hard to explain, but I can somehow understand him. With his appearance now matching his age, I have this weird connection with him in knowing how he feels despite any lack of expression or words from him. He shows himself at least once a day – only whenever he feels like there's something interesting going on. Whenever I'm in his body, he doesn't appear. Instead, I can even more strongly feel what he feels and I'm almost a different person whenever I am 'Vain'. Doing the things he wanted to do... It was the least I could do for him who was desperately clinging to life – especially since his current state may be most likely due to my influence to this world.

For the past week, I had been desperately trying to remember all the details I could about 'Hera: Captured Hearts'. As a result, I've come up with some assumptions. My first concern was Vain's relation to Velloa. If that dream I had was a true vision of the past, then there's some kind of false belief against twins being 'cursed'. These things are obviously spread for a reason, I'm just not sure what. In any case, I suspect that the Imitheos family had to make the tough decision of separating the twins and sending one off to hide somewhere; after all, Mother's pregnancy was most likely well known. As a result, Velloa was the only one who was publicly recognized as a child of the Imitheos house, but as for Vain... Perhaps something went wrong during the process of hiding him away. In the game and anime, he may have been taken away by an external party and dare I say brainwashed, however in this case, rather than a fate like that he instead died at birth. I'm not sure which is worse...

I lamented over the fact that my knowledge of this world only comes from the game and anime, but I had to give credit to the fact that I already knew more than I should have. Carrying on with my assumptions, I suspected that Velloa's darkness attribute was kept hidden through her parents' influence and wasn't touched upon due to the dangers of the Encroachment, however, that left the fact that she had inherited the Imitheos family's mark. Oh, wait... There was that conversation in the game. I remembered that there was something mentioned to the MC in the game by Virgil. The earth and fire attribute love targets were inheritors of their family's forbidden art, but the air and water attribute love targets weren't. In Virgil's route, I think he said something about feeling pity for Velloa who inherited the mark... Virgil hadn't disclosed the reason for his pity nor what the family's forbidden art was, but I guess when the forbidden art involves the body of a dead person, then one could see where he's coming from. Being able to swap bodies is useful – it is one of the biggest reasons why Hakoda is the Kingdom's Spymaster, but while there are no major repercussions to losing the second body, there are grievous consequences to losing the original body... In other words, death. That includes staying in the second body for too long, which is approximately a month, for that too would spell the certain death of the person's soul.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

After a while, I left my assumptions, as well as figuring out Vain's predicament, to the side. My current motto now is: There's no need to rush. As for my plans to avoid the humiliation ending, I was rather optimistic. All I had to do was simply not get in the way of the romance between the MC and her harem. I figured that meeting at least two of the love interests would be inevitable, so I have to ensure that my behaviour and actions don't bring on my humiliation end, or any bad end for that matter. I must create good relations with the love targets that I may meet so that there will be little to no reason for them to trigger my bad end flag.

And so, my first mission is to have a good relationship with Virgil. He is THE love target that is closest to me and therefore the person I would like most at my side should the bad end flag be triggered. Honestly, Velloa's fate in Virgil's route was incredibly sad. She had continually warned and told both her brother and the MC that a student/teacher relationship was inappropriate, but the two were too blinded by 'love' to see her logic. Velloa was left shamed by her own brother in front of many people, as well as in front of their parents, for she was condemned for apparently not knowing her place as a student and as a younger sibling. What the fuck... Why was it only then that Virgil was a teacher and older brother? Even so, he used his authority for the wrong reasons. There's also the fact that while he was the older sibling, Velloa was the one more likely to carry on the family's nobility status for having inherited the family's mark. This game did have its fun parts, but MAN, if you give this otome game a second glance you start to realize how stupid the plot was.

A figure leaning over me suddenly broke me away from my thoughts. Glancing up, I found that it was Virgil. Probably having seen me reach for a book that was out of my reach for long enough, he reached for the book that I desired and then handed it to me with a friendly smile.

"I liked this one when I was younger." He commented.

I looked up to meet Virgil's azure eyes. His expression was as expected of a reliant looking brother. In the future, he's going to grow up to have a strict character, but he will still have that signature gentle interior that many of the players loved. However, he's currently eleven years old... Meaning that there's plenty of time for me to build up a good and solid relationship with him before the MC arrives.

I returned his smile with my own. "Thank you, Brother. If you have time, can you please help me read this book?"

----------CHAPTER END----------