The Sakura Noble Family

Mizuki Sakura was not a woman known for her warmth. Where her husband trained students with an open hand, she managed the family’s political affairs with a closed fist. Empathy, to her, was a tool; used only when it gained her something.

She carried herself like someone who was always thinking, always measuring. Before she was a mother, she was a scholar and swordsman, and she had never abandoned the habit of study. Mizuki approached every decision as if it were an experiment, every person as a variable to be understood.

Her appearance matched her nature: her haori was a deep midnight blue with silver patterns of the moon in place of the family’s dragons. Her hair was a mix of the dark obsidian that tainted her daughter’s hair and a fresh, moon-like platinum white. Her eyes were a cold, steady blue that never seemed to soften, not even in the face of the child who stood crying before her.

And so Yoruhi found his stay at the estate to be quite… conditional. Despite everybody else in the family being on board with his adoption, the mother of the family seemed to be interested in something else.

After Yoruhi had finished his bout of crying, Mizuki laid out her own conditions for adding him to the family. Although they owned a dojo, she did not want Yoruhi to be trained in the way of the sword—much to Hayate’s dismay.

You see, even his reasons for wanting to adopt the boy weren’t unconditional. Other than wanting to atone for the guilt for being unable to protect Yoruhi’s family, another reason was because he wanted a child of his own to teach the way of the sword. Originally, that person was supposed to be his daughter, but Tatsuko seemed heavily disinterested in swordsmanship despite his best attempts to convince her. Like her mother, once she was interested in something, it was hard to divert her to something else.

Mizuki on the other hand wanted to teach Yoruhi the art of magic. When Hayate heard this, he was surprised, and when the information was later relayed to Nene, she was even more surprised.

It wasn’t like magic was uncommon in the world; in fact, it was something that everyone was eventually capable of doing when they reached a certain age. Therein lies the problem. The age when most people developed their magical capabilities was between the ages of 7 to 9. They did not know Yoruhi’s exact age but based on his appearance, they figured he was around the same age as their daughter, possibly even slightly younger.

This fact didn’t deter Mizuki however, because she was led to believe from her studies that it was in fact possible for a child as young as 5 to acquire the ability to wield magic under the right guidance. It was a feat she wanted to achieve because while there had been documented situations where it had happened before, they were outdated, and Mizuki was a woman who liked pursuing the possible impossible.

Like her husband, she had originally tried to convince Tatsuko to learn magic, but upon seeing that her daughter’s interests lied somewhere else, she decided to drop it. She knew that her daughter’s unique fixation on things came from her own after all, and so she decided to let her be.

Now however, she was given a child to experiment on on a silver platter. When she heard from her husband that Yoruhi possessed signs of being able to read, she was doubtful at first, but when she saw the child herself and the tiny glimpses of stardust behind his pupils, she figured that the child might be a little more special than she had originally thought.

Yoruhi’s opinion on the whole situation wasn’t entirely negative. In fact, he was elated when he heard that he got to learn magic. He had been excited about it ever since he saw Nene use it. The only thing that bothered him was that his stay in the family was conditional. It created an emotional disconnect between him and everyone else that lived in the estate, especially Mizuki who he had yet to acknowledge as his adoptive mother.

He was disappointed that in this world, he truly didn’t have a real family either, and that it was going to be always something that he yearned for but never got.

After dinner, Yoruhi silently laid on his bed in the room that was assigned to him.

The family had a lot of spare bedrooms in the residential area of the estate, and according to Nene, it was because different generations of the estate had differing numbers of children. Yoruhi’s room in particular was directly across from his adoptive sister’s—a decision made by Nene because it made it easier for her to clean.

There were a lot of things that Yoruhi learned at dinner that he was still trying to process.

He learned that today was the 15th of the Winter Moon: the name of the month that replaced what he knew as December.

He obtained the information from Tatsuko after he fished it out by casually asking what day it was. Being the big sister she always wanted to be, she stepped up to the task of explaining everything she knew about the months to her presumably amnesiac brother.

The calendar system of this world wasn’t too estranged from the one Yoruhi was used to. According to Tatsuko, there were 360 days in a year with 30 days in a month, and it was based on the cycle of the moon which somehow managed to always be a new moon at the start of every month.

It was a system that wouldn’t otherwise work in Yoruhi’s old world because of the actual length of the astronomical cycles. He figured that it only worked in this world, because the positions of the sun and moon probably differed from his.

The last thing he learned at dinner was from his new parents. It was important to them for Yoruhi to know about their status as a Noble Family. Yoruhi had heard it mentioned once or twice before but never really understood what it meant.

There were a total of 15 Noble Houses, established from the last names of the 14 heroes who had played a major role in restoring the world over a millennium ago. Each family was fairly distinct from each other in their specializations and they were tasked with upkeeping the peace and safety of the world.

Their Noble Family, the Sakura, specialized in the teaching of swordsmanship. Their Family’s political system was equally split between four heads. Each of the heads were tasked with teaching one of the four main styles that the Sakura taught to the public: the Fox God Style which focused on overwhelming attacks, the Hidden Tempest Style, which focused on predicting and redirecting the opponent’s strength, the North Wind Style, which focused on being unpredictable and free, and the Balanced Dragon Style, which specialized in being the jack of all trades.

Hayate was the current head in charge of passing down the Balanced Dragon Style, and because of this, he and his family had a responsibility to uphold the balance of the world. Now that Yoruhi was a part of the family, the responsibility also extended to him, which meant that he wasn’t allowed to go around causing trouble for people.

“But you’re a good kid, so I’ll trust you to behave,” Hayate said with a smile.

A good kid huh… Yoruhi silently pondered the man’s words as he rolled around in bed, that’s what you may think but the truth is I’m just a bitter, hateful, person.

But deep down inside, he wanted to be better

He recalled what he said to himself just before he died.

“If only my world had magic.”

“If only I had parents that cared about me.”

“If only I had friends that would stay by my side forever.”

“I would then not be such a bitter, lonely, person.”

He didn’t have the last two conditions fulfilled, but he was willing to work with the first. The existence of magic in this world had opened up a future for him that he never saw for himself in his past life.

Perhaps maybe, the boy thought, this chance at reincarnation was given to me to prove my words. If that’s the case, then there might be hope for me after all.