In a certain country of a certain world, there was a noble who ruled over a certain territory.
His name was Randall von Malbert, and he was the Lord of Malbert. His noble rank was Baron, and he was awarded the title of Baron and Lord of Malbert by His Majesty the King for his military exploits in a war when he was 15 years old.
Randall was now 28 years old, had a wife and three children, and lived a picture-perfect happy life despite his poverty.
His wife, Clarice, was a former daughter of a Viscount. And although she was basically mild-mannered, she'd a terrifying side that was impossible to handle when she was angry. By the way, she was 26 years old.
They had two sons and a daughter, the eldest son, Roland, the second son, Mark, and the eldest daughter, Laura.
Mark and Laura were twins and were now 10 years old. The younger brother, Mark, was the son of an aristocratic family, with good looks, good manners, and excellent grades.
The younger sister, Laura, like Mark, was good-looking but a little on the naughty side, and had extraordinary feelings for me, her older brother. She was a kind of "brocon".
I'd introduced my family so far, but my name is Roland. I'm the eldest son of the Baron Malbert family, and I'm currently twelve years old.
Before I went into the details, I guess I should tell you about myself. It went back to when I was six years old.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
As I was lying in bed, as usual, I had a dream. It was very vivid for a dream, and I felt as if I had wandered into a different world.
There were buildings with unbelievable height, paved streets large enough for several black and white carriages, and box-like carriages made of iron traveling at a speed never seen before.
The people on the road were dressed in formal clothes like noblemen's formal wear, and they were walking incessantly toward a certain place as if they had a single purpose.
I was one of them, and since I had the word "go to work" in my head, it seemed I was on my way to work now.
As I took one step closer to my destination, memories I'd forgotten come flooding back. The scene I was looking at now was undoubtedly a memory from my previous life.
I was born and raised in an ordinary family, went to an ordinary school, and got a job at an ordinary company. My life was not very exciting at all, and I was living a boring but safe life.
And then, I reached retirement age at the company I had worked for, and I remained single for the rest of my life. And although I had good friends and acquaintances, my life ended in loneliness, alone… but….
"Ha, ha, ha. ......"
After witnessing such a scene, I immediately awoke and sat up. It seemed that the time was still in the middle of the night, and it was dark outside.
After such a dream, there was a change in my body. It was that the memories I'd experienced in my previous life had been added to the memories of the six years I'd lived in this world. To put it simply, the memories of my previous life had come back.
The moment I became aware of this, I suddenly felt a sense of frustration. What was it about my current position that made me feel this way?
As I explained earlier, I was the eldest son of the Baron Malbert family, so naturally, from the point of view of the people of the Baron family, I was their heir.
In my previous life, I hadn't led a turbulent life, but I'd worked diligently for my company, and my achievements had been recognized, and I'd worked my way up the corporate ladder to eventually became a director of the company.
However, while I was serving as a director, the other directors, the president, and other executives pushed me to do miscellaneous tasks that they should have been doing themselves, and I was essentially treated like a maid.
I guess they didn't like the fact that I was a newcomer to the company, and although they didn't harass me directly, there was a time when this sort of thing became a regular occurrence.
That was why I know, the higher the rank, the easier it was to get caught up in the hassle of factions and ties, and the busier you became......
In other words, a Lord was nothing more than a slave bound to a territory.
"If I don't do something, I'll end up living a life without freedom. I won't accept that!"
Thus, the fight to avoid being reincarnated and becoming a lord at the young age of six years began for the boy Roland. And that was the beginning of my story.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now that I'd got most of the prologue out of the way, let's move on to what exactly I needed to do to keep myself from becoming a lord.
I thought of many ideas, but none of them seemed to fit, and I was puzzling over them when suddenly a light bulb went on in my head and a strange idea came to me.
“That's it! Let's just push it over to Mark!"
Yes, if you didn't want to do something, had someone else do it for you. That was the idea that came to me, and it sounded like it might work.
I had a twin brother and sister, one was my brother Mark and the other was my sister Laura. And the idea was to had my brother take over the territory and became the Lord in the future. However, the world of the nobility was not a simple process of handing over the title of a Lord to the younger brother.
Among the nobility, only the eldest son of the family was eligible to inherit the title and the domain. However, this was not a legal restriction, but a customary one, so there was no problem for people born after the eldest son to become a Lord.
However, such custom was troublesome, and it was said that giving the title of head of the family to someone other than the eldest son without a valid reason wasn't good for the appearance of the noble family, and wasn't a good thing from the standpoint of public opinion.
This was why a noble needed to have a "good reason" to force his younger brother to take over the role of a Lord, and one example was when the eldest son was weak.
There had been a precedent in the past that if the eldest son was judged to be too weak to fulfill the duties of a Lord. Then the position of head of the family was given to the second son or younger.
However, my memories of the last six years since my reincarnation showed that I never had any serious illnesses and am in excellent health. Thank you, my parents, for giving me a strong body......
Then, if there was any other legitimate reason, the one that fits best was if the eldest son died for some reason, but no matter how much I didn't want to be a Lord, a foolish act like committing suicide was not an option from the start.
In that case, there was only one option that would save me from dying and would allow my brother to become the lord smoothly without any opposition from anyone.
"If I play the foolish older brother and raise him to be an excellent person, he will naturally become a lord.”
One of the valid reasons for a person other than the eldest son to become the head of the family was when the other siblings are more talented than the eldest son. If you were the head of a noble family, you wanted to make sure that your successor was as talented as possible.
Once that was decided, I should've taken action right away, but to raised my brother to be an excellent person, I had to first gain knowledge of this world. I tried to get out of bed so that I could decide what to do, but I realized that it was still the middle of the night, so I decided to wait until after dawn to start moving and went back to sleep.