Chapter 41 – Zero’s Mother
Volume 3, Resonance 5, Part 8
Novel Title: 共鳴熱情 オメガバース (Resonance Passion: Omegaverse)
Author：岩本薫 (Iwamoto Kaoru)
Illustrator：蓮川愛 (Hasukawa Ai)
Translator: K (@kin0monogatari)
Protagonists: MC- 遠峰一紗 (Toomine Kazusa), Lemur & ML- ゼロ (Zero)
*Please read at knoxt.space, the original site of translation. TQ*
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“You’re more persistent than I expected.”
Zero’s voice sounded almost exasperated, and Kazusa’s face flushed with heat.
(Stupid, I’m being too nosy.)
Sometimes he’d shrink away and not be able to speak a word, and other times he’d step in too deep—Kazusa was the embodiment of someone who didn’t know how to handle these things properly.
This is why he always ended up angering important clients.
“…I’m sorry. I’ll keep quiet now.”
Kazusa slumped his shoulders in defeat. Lowering his head, he bit his lip, determined not to say anything unnecessary again. Then, the sound of the kettle hissing as it boiled, followed by the click of the stove turning off, broke the silence.
“Before I settled in this city, I used to play jazz overseas.”
Kazusa’s head shot up at the voice from the kitchen. He could see Zero carefully pouring the hot water into a heat-resistant glass cup, a little at a time. As Zero began pouring the remaining hot water into the pot, Kazusa admitted honestly:
“I don’t know much about jazz at all.”
He felt there was no point in pretending otherwise. His eyes met Zero’s, and for a moment, their gazes locked. Then, Zero quietly looked away.
“The essence of jazz is improvisation. Even if you play the same song with the same members, the performance is different every time. That’s why they say ‘jazz is alive.’ If you compare it to painting, classical music is like admiring a completed work, while jazz is about enjoying the process of creating the painting.”
Zero’s tone was calm. But Kazusa could tell from his voice that he still loved jazz.
If that was the case, why did he stop playing jazz?
It was easy to imagine that giving up something he loved involved some painful circumstances. The fact that he still kept the piano in his room, despite not playing, hinted at a lingering attachment he couldn’t quite sever.
If Kazusa handled it the wrong way, he might end up reopening old wounds. With that in mind, he carefully nudged the conversation forward.
“You mentioned being overseas earlier…”
“Not for long, just under two years.”
After that short response, Zero fell silent. A long pause followed. Kazusa thought that was the end of the conversation.
But after almost a minute of staring silently at the glass pot, Zero suddenly began to speak.
“It started with my mother. She was a jazz singer born in a foreign country. When she was twenty, she moved to this country and sang at a nightclub. That’s where she caught the eye of a patron, and she became pregnant.”
“And that child… is you?”
“Yes. My mother was an Omega.”
Kazusa gasped at how casually Zero revealed such a significant detail.
(The Omega he mentioned in his family before… was his own mother!)
“My mother returned to her country right after giving birth, leaving me, still a nursing baby, behind.”
He said it so casually, as if it were nothing. But it was the cruellest form of abandonment for a child, and there was no way it hadn’t affected him.
“I was taken in by my father, the patron, and grew up feeling alienated as the odd one out in the family. When I was young, I was mostly left in the care of a nanny. But when I was six, I learned the truth about my birth and realised why my father’s wife kept her distance from me. It’s a tough ask to expect a woman to love the child of her husband’s mistress. Especially when that child inherited dark skin and heterochromatic eyes from the mistress.”
As Zero revealed his deep and complicated background one piece at a time, Kazusa listened intently. He was careful not to interrupt with any off-target responses.
“After I graduated from college, I left home. I went abroad and, for the first time in twenty-two years, reunited with my birth mother. We began living together. She was still performing on stage and had an almost charismatic popularity. I started playing piano in her band. I was happy to finally have a place where I could freely play the piano, which had been forbidden in the house I grew up in. I also enjoyed the sessions with the talented members of the band—saxophone, trumpet, bass, drums. I felt like I’d finally found my roots, like I had finally discovered where I belonged.”
Just as Kazusa felt a sense of relief at the brighter turn in the story, Zero’s voice dropped a tone.
“But… the good times didn’t last long. Before she was a ‘diva,’ my mother was an uncontrollable ‘Omega.’ She refused to take suppressants, claiming they gave her headaches, and when she went into heat, she would change completely. She’d drag men into her room indiscriminately and lock herself away for days, lost in pleasure. She even made advances on members of the band and staff, which completely destroyed relationships.”
“………”
“There was no way we could perform well under those conditions, and I started arguing with her. She must’ve been under a lot of stress too. One day, she cancelled a live performance last minute and disappeared. The band, already on the verge of breaking, fell apart without its lead vocalist. I waited alone in our room for three months for my mother, who never once contacted me. During that time, I think I started to understand why she abandoned me as a baby. For her, the most important thing was herself. To live freely and without constraints—children would have only gotten in the way of that. I left a note of farewell and returned to this country.”
Zero stopped speaking, and silence hung in the air.
Imagining the mental state he must have been in at that time made Kazusa’s chest ache. But he sensed that Zero wasn’t looking for shallow words of comfort just to fill the silence, so he waited quietly for him to continue.
“I didn’t plan on returning to my family home. I ended up in this city purely by chance. The people here are too busy just trying to survive to pry into anyone else’s past. That made it comfortable for me. I started playing piano in a nightclub to make a living, and over time, I got to know all kinds of people with different backgrounds. Despite their hardships, they were energetic and resilient, much like my mother. Because they had nothing, they weren’t bound by rules, and they lived true to their desires…”
Zero poured the contents of the heat-resistant glass cup into the sink. He lightly swirled the glass pot filled with fresh herbs and then poured the lightly coloured liquid into the warmed cup.
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Next update: 2025.04.26
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