The Weight of Legacy

The issue with the lighting had gotten somewhat better in time. Perhaps it was like how people could get used to smells, perhaps not, but wherever the green light came from, it wasn’t bothering Malwine as much as it once did. Nowadays, it was only about as noticeable as the difference between a ‘warm’ light and a white light would have been in her first life.

At last, she could properly appreciate the joy of lounging in a candlelit area.

Actually interacting with Bernie had helped. Not just listening to her lessons and interacting with her through questions, no, it had been actually interacting with Bernie as a child might that had practically flipped a switch. For all this new world's system had reminded Malwine of games, she hadn’t truly wondered whether the existence of the system might have been affecting how she viewed the people around her.

At her core, Malwine had always understood that they were real people—obviously—not just shallow presences like the NPCs of a game might be. They were people with their own thoughts and lives—their own problems, no doubt.

Her mindset would never be perfect—as a person, she knew she would always think of their relevant details and their relation to her whenever she interacted with her family. But maybe, just maybe, she didn’t have to treat them as she would have long-dead ancestors.

Malwine might have still been a bit more hung-up on her past life’s origins than she’d been willing to acknowledge.

Some things grew clearer when she dwelled upon them—some, the opposite. But she knew the widow hadn’t gotten along with her adoptive family, and only got to know any of her blood-relatives near the end of their lives.

Family was all but an idealized concept to the widow, and given how she’d clearly had children in that life, that really said a lot.

Malwine sat on a solid slab of stone amid the chilling grass, her hands pressed against her mouth, clad in thick gloves. Her very first gloves! For this life, sure, but the sentiment still mattered to her.

Winter clothes in this world hadn’t particularly surprised her. Beyond the lack of the brighter colors and shiny surfaces that had been more common on her Earth’s more recent trends, they were similar enough.

Furs and tightly-packed fabrics, with enough superfluousness that she could easily pull on the neck of her coat to warm her chin and so on. She could have used a scarf, but maybe they just didn’t have a toddler-sized option laying around.

Not to mention that, at that point, Malwine was just being picky.

They’d first been outside to the supposed playground about a week before, if Malwine had been counting the days right. A simple slide and a couple of swings were more than enough to entertain children of their age, even if they looked haphazardly put together to such an extent that Malwine wouldn’t have been surprised if Kristian made them himself.

Because if that was the case, it showed, given how Paul had scratched himself on a nail almost immediately, and so, the children were no longer allowed to use the playground.

Nevermind that neither Adelheid nor Malwine had gotten a chance to before that.

Paul was the second of the ones Malwine had started to dub ‘the bonus children’, meaning Bernie’s other kids that she’d somehow never noticed before. She’d been spending most of her time in a single room, sure, but her skillset was clearly lacking if she went over a year without successfully learning of every single family member that lived there.

It was, admittedly, starting to get a bit weird to find out that every kid in the estate was somehow related to her. Did no one else live in this town? Or did they just get no visitors? The size of the place certainly made it bizarre for there to be none other than the family using it.