It's been 13 hours since I accidentally became a dad.
The weather outside is clear. I'm skipping school under the pretense of a cold.
It's crisp autumn weather.
The room's temperature is just right—there's no need for the air conditioner.
And sleeping in front of me is a ghoul baby, for whom sleeping is a full-time job.
Right now she's snoozing, but when she gets hungry she'll wake up and start looking for something to eat.
But ghouls can't derive nutrition from anything other than human flesh.
I'm the closest human to this baby right now.
Unless I offer up my own flesh and blood, she won't stop crying out of hunger.
"Okay, I'm already ready to give up!"
As soon as Mr. Kuzen entrusted Eto to me, I half-escaped reality and fell asleep, but when I woke up I was faced with this overwhelming situation.
I'd heard that after meeting Ukina, Mr. Kuzen stopped hunting humans and satisfied his hunger with the corpses of those who had killed themselves, but I've never handled corpses before. Retrieving a suicide victim's body would require guts I don't have.
On top of that, I need all sorts of baby supplies, and I have to figure out how a ghoul baby differs from a human one.
I'm also worried about how to balance school life with childcare, and how to keep my parents from finding out I'm raising a ghoul baby.
"Goo..."
Flinch!
I flinched at Eto's sound and turned my shoulder to look. Luckily she wasn't awake yet—just talking in her sleep.
I let out a mental sigh of relief and contemplated what to do next.
'I can't chicken out every time it's feeding time. First, solve the food problem. I'll figure out the rest later.'
I'm still not gutsy enough to go collect suicide victims' bodies. But that doesn't mean there's no other way to satisfy Eto's hunger.
I didn't feel comfortable leaving her alone in the room, so I wrapped her in a big towel and took her outside.
I discovered last night that because Eto is a half-breed of ghoul and human, she only has the ghoul's signature kakugan in one eye instead of both.
Since Eto is still a baby, she doesn't know how to control her kakugan. It naturally appears when she's hungry, but sometimes it pops up and then disappears even when she's not.
So I casually covered her right eye—the one with the kakugan—with the towel.
"Hoo?"
The jostling as I walked seemed to drive off the drowsiness, and before long Eto opened her eyes.
She instantly revealed the kakugan in her right eye that I'd covered. And her expression, like she was about to burst into tears, said one thing.
Our princess is hungry. Get to work, my finger.
When I offered the finger she'd gnawed on yesterday, she gave me a bright smile and bit down on the exact same spot, breaking the skin. The pain nearly made me cry out.
She's still a toothless baby, yet her jaw strength crushed my fingertip as if it were a steak on a bench, squeezing out blood.
Just imagining what'll happen once her teeth come in scares me.
But despite that, seeing her adorable face as she sucked down the blood like it was milk warmed my heart enough to make me forget the pain.
"...Is this why people raise daughters?"
Even as a piece of me was being eaten, I empathized with every doting dad in the country. I didn't care if people stared at me.
How long had I been walking?
By the time she'd sucked out so much blood that my finger turned blue, Eto seemed satisfied, unclamped her jaw, and drifted back to sleep with soft snores.
"Judging by this, it looks like a baby ghoul can solve her hunger with just blood without needing meat..."
That gave me the confidence that heading to that place was the right call.
The moment I stopped was in front of the neighborhood blood donation center.
I opened the door and walked in, and a woman who looked like a clerk greeted me with "Welcome."
When she asked if I was there to donate blood, I put on a serious face and laid out my request.
"Ma'am, could you sell me a blood donation kit without asking questions?"
**
To cut to the chase, it was a failure.
They said that donation kits are medical equipment and can't be sold casually, and besides, I look like nothing more than a student, so they'd be suspicious of why I wanted a kit.
Maybe they imagined something dangerous, combining the kit and the baby I was holding.
So what did I do next...?
"Can medical supplies really be this easy to get?..."
The donation kit I couldn't get at the center arrived at my door too easily via an online order the next day.
It made me realize you can buy anything online these days. If I'd known it was this easy, I wouldn't have bothered going to the center.
Well, let's just say I took Eto on her first outing.
Anyway, as an experiment I tied my arm as they do at the donation center, found a vein, and stuck in the needle.
It was my first time, so I fumbled the procedure several times.
But watching the blood fill the collection bag properly, I started pondering my next move.
"The food problem is solved. Next up is school, I guess..."
I can't keep using a cold as an excuse to stay home forever.
I'll graduate as long as I hit the attendance requirement, but that means going to school for at least another month.
But I'm worried about leaving Eto alone while I'm at school.
Who knows what might happen to a baby if you're not there to watch over her?
But the idea of leaving her in a daycare is out—within a day the ghoul investigator would come.
So...
Watching Eto marvel at the bag filling with blood, I reached a decision.
"...Maybe I should just go for it."