"Before anything else, I'm going to speak in the first person," I said to the girls in the room. "Referring to myself in the third person feels too strange, and I can't see myself as separate from this body anymore."
Sarah puffed her cheeks at me. "We don't care. To us, you're Rick, so just get on with it!"
Her energetic reaction made me smile—if only briefly.
Because the story I was about to tell was not a pleasant one.
"The Forster family—my father's side—once belonged to the kingdom's nobility long ago. A lineage of alchemists that spanned generations."
"W-What?!" I could see Sarah and Alicia's eyes widen in shock at my revelation. The others were just as stunned, left speechless by what I had said.
Sarah already knew about the tattoos on my back, but she barely knew anything about my family's origins or the true nature of the symbols carved into my skin.
"So you're telling me I've been walking around with a noble's son my whole life and didn't know?" Sarah said nervously.
