Thirteen hours had passed since I'd become a dad against my will.
Outside the window, the weather was bright and clear. I'd skipped school on the excuse of having a cold.
The air had that autumn chill to it.
The room was a comfortable temperature, no need to turn on the air conditioner.
And in front of me was a Ghoul baby whose main job was sleeping.
Right now she was asleep, but once she got hungry again, she'd wake up and start looking for food.
Except Ghouls can't get nutrients from anything but human flesh.
The closest human to this baby at the moment was me.
Unless I offered up my blood and flesh, this baby wasn't going to stop crying from hunger.
"Okay, I'm already starting to want to give up!"
As soon as Mister Kuzen left Eto with me, I'd half-escaped reality by going to sleep, but when I woke up again, the bleak truth was right there in front of me.
I'd heard that after meeting Ms. Ukina, Mister Kuzen stopped hunting humans and satisfied his hunger with the corpses of people who had taken their own lives. But for someone like me, who normally had no contact with corpses, going to recover a suicide victim's body took a pretty serious amount of nerve.
On top of that, I needed all kinds of baby supplies, and I had to figure out how a human baby differed from a Ghoul baby.
There was also the problem of how to balance school life with childcare, and how to hide the fact that I was raising a Ghoul baby from my parents.
"Mmmn..."
I flinched and looked back at Eto when she made a small sound. Thankfully, she still wasn't awake; she was only talking in her sleep.
Letting out a quiet breath of relief, I started thinking about what to do next.
"I can't keep panicking every time I feed Eto. First, the food problem. I'll think about the rest after that."
I still didn't have the guts to go recover a suicide victim's body. But that didn't mean there was no way at all to solve Eto's hunger.
Leaving Eto alone in the room wasn't ideal, so I wrapped her in a fairly large towel and carried her outside.
Something I'd noticed last night was that Eto, being a half-breed of Ghoul and human, only showed one of the Ghoul's defining traits: the dark red [Kakugan].
Eto was still a baby, so she didn't know how to control her [Kakugan]. It would naturally surface when she was hungry, but even when she wasn't, it would sometimes appear and disappear on its own.
So I casually covered the right eye where the [Kakugan] would appear with the towel.
"Huh?"
As we walked through the streets, the motion must have shaken off her sleep, because Eto opened her eyes before long.
The moment she did, a [Kakugan] surfaced in the right eye hidden by the towel. And the expression on her face, like she was about to burst into tears at any second, said only one thing.
Our princess was hungry. Work, my finger.
I held out the finger Eto had bitten yesterday, and she smiled brightly before biting the exact same spot as before, tearing it open and drawing blood. The pain was so sharp I almost screamed.
She was still a baby and didn't even have teeth yet, but just from her grip, the flesh of my finger was crushed like it had been chewed under a bench, squeezing out blood.
Thinking about what would happen once her teeth came in made me afraid.
But only for a moment. The sight of Eto sucking my blood hard, like she was nursing, with such an adorable expression on her face, made a warm feeling rise up in me to the point that I forgot the pain.
"...Is this why people raise daughters!"
Even while part of my body was being eaten, I was becoming one with the hearts of all the daughter-obsessed fathers in the country. I didn't care if the people around me looked at me like I was weird.
How long had we walked like that?
By the time my finger had been drained so much that it was starting to turn blue, Eto seemed satisfied. She let go and drifted back into soft, steady sleep.
"If I look at it this way, it seems like a baby Ghoul can satisfy hunger with blood alone without necessarily needing meat..."
That made me certain I was heading in the right direction.
I stopped in front of the neighborhood blood donation center.
When I opened the door and went in, a woman who looked like the clerk greeted me with, "Welcome."
At her question about whether I was here to donate blood, I put on a serious face and got straight to the point.
"Big sister, would you sell me a blood collection kit without asking any questions?"
**
To get to the point, it was a failure.
The blood collection kit was a medical tool, so she said it couldn't be sold carelessly. Besides, no matter how you looked at it, I only looked like a student, so she was probably suspicious about what on earth I planned to use it for.
Maybe she even made some dangerous assumptions by combining the blood collection kit with the Eto I was carrying.
So what did I do instead...
"Can you really get medical equipment this easily..."
The blood collection kit I'd been refused at the donation center arrived at my house the very next day through an online order, as simple as that.
I found myself thinking that the internet really did sell everything these days. If I'd known it would be this easy to get, I wouldn't have needed to go to the donation center at all.
Well, I decided to count it as Eto's first outing, thanks to that.
Anyway, as a test, I tied off my arm the way they did at the donation center and found a vein before inserting the needle.
Since it was my first time trying it, I fumbled around several times and had a rough time of it.
Still, watching the blood steadily fill the transfusion pack, I started thinking about what to do next.
"The food problem's solved. Next is the school problem, I guess..."
I couldn't keep using the cold as an excuse forever.
As long as I kept my attendance days up, graduation wouldn't be a problem, but to do that I'd have to keep going to school for at least another month.
But while I was at school, I was worried about Eto being left alone.
Shouldn't I always be right beside her to make sure nothing happened to the baby?
That meant sending her to a nursery or something was out of the question. By the next day at the latest, a Ghoul Investigator who'd been tipped off would show up.
Then...
As I watched Eto stare curiously at the blood filling the transfusion pack, I made a decision in my heart.
"...Should I just go through with it once?"