Chapter 690: Rekindling the Buried Memories

Third Person’s POV

The strange monsters they had encountered possessed abilities that were powerful and difficult to understand.

There was no guarantee that the next enemy they encountered wouldn’t be even more dangerous.

And with things being like this, he wasn’t confident that he could protect Princess Arlene while fighting those creatures.

Having a powerful helper like Ethan was therefore something Edhan welcomed.

Meanwhile, inside the room, the moment everyone had left, Eleanor was finally unable to maintain her composure.

She immediately rushed toward her son.

Without saying a word, she wrapped her arms around Ethan’s head and pulled him tightly into her embrace.

Ethan didn’t resist.

Instead, he simply allowed himself to be pulled into the warm, motherly embrace he had longed for throughout the past ten years.

For so long, he had imagined what it would feel like to once again rest within his mother’s embrace.

Now, after all those years of separation, that moment had finally arrived.

Eleanor’s body trembled as she held him tightly.

She had tried to remain calm and to remain strong while he had been teetering on the edge of life and death

But now that Ethan was awake and alive in front of her, all of that restraint finally collapsed.

A few drops of tears fell onto Ethan’s violet hair.

Then more followed.

Beside them, Aurelia could no longer hold back her own emotions either, as she jumped and moved her arms around the two of them.

Soon, the quiet room was filled with the muffled sobs of the two women as they held the person they had feared they might lose forever.

As another set of warm, silky hands hugged him from behind, Ethan realized that it was Aurelia.

Due to her stormy emotions, Aurelia had pressed herself tightly against his back, making him feel her squishy and quite large breasts pressed firmly against him.

The warmth of her body seeped through his clothes, and he quite enjoyed the feeling, perhaps more than he should have in such an emotional and bittersweet moment.

A sudden, unbidden, mischievous, rascally thought slipped into his head,

’The girl from back then grew up quite nicely, even though I was not here to help her.’

His focus, however, soon shifted, because the familiar sweet lavender scent of his mother drifted into his nostrils and overpowered his other senses as she buried his head inside her warm chest.

That soft, floral scent was achingly familiar as it carried him back through the years like a gentle current.

Unable to stop himself, he seemed to regress to his childhood, back to those days when he used to sleep with his mother every night, burying his face in her breasts without a care in the world.

In those days, she had been his anchor, the source of warmth in his heart, his everything.

Due to his father being dead and him being her only child, Eleanor had loved him like he was her whole world.

She indulged his every whim, no matter how small or strange it seemed to anyone else.

Not even a minor request of his was trivial for her.

None of his habits seemed peculiar to her.

If it made her son happy, she would allow it.

One of those instances was the fact that she used to breastfeed him even when he was ten years old, long past the age when a child should have been weaned—just before his awakening and his eventual disappearance.

Even though her milk had dried up long ago around the time when he had been a mere six month old baby, Ethan had shamelessly refused to stop his breastfeeding habit even after he grew older, from age three year old and onwards.

During the night, he would crawl into her lap, nuzzle against her chest with his face and hands, and demand what he believed was his birthright.

And Eleanor, whose heart was impossibly soft when it came to her son, had given in every time.

At the start, she had resisted.

She had hesitated, fearing she might be doing the wrong thing, that she might be harming him in some way she could not see.

But when he stopped eating anything at all, and after he cried continuously and inconsolably, while refusing all other food and comfort, she gave in.

And after that first surrender, she never resisted or admonished him again.

She never made him explicitly aware of the real world’s customs, never guided him that what they were doing was wrong or improper.

Their seemingly close activities after the dark became their own little secret.

She never told him that other mothers did not hold their grown sons this way, that other boys did not bury their faces in their mother’s chest long after they should have stopped.

She simply allowed it, because he was her son, and because she loved him.

And because, in some quiet corner of her heart that she never examined too closely, she needed him just as much as he needed her.

Ethan, for his part, had his own plans with his mother in those days, and why he acted that way in his childhood.

Being in that familiar embrace now, after so many years apart, caused those buried memories to flare up inside his mind like embers stirred by a sudden wind.

But now that he was an adult, and now that he had stayed so long separated from her, he wondered how she might react if he acted on those nefarious plans he had kept buried for so long.

Just as these immoral thoughts filled his mind, and quite a while passed, he tried to move his head out from her embrace.

But his mother resisted.

Her arms tightened around him, holding him in place.

The gentle pressure made him raise his head awkwardly, his face lifting from the soft valley of her large breasts.

As he met those starry violet eyes looking at him with boundless love and a small hint of a smile playing on that gorgeous face, Ethan was stunned at her beauty.