Nobody Told Me My Pets Were Monsters
He wanted a quiet life. His pets had other plans. He hasn’t noticed yet.
The ritual was meant to summon four legendary heroes. But the grimoire it was drawn from was ancient, and the years had quietly eaten a word here and a line there, and so the worn-out spell reached a little too far and dragged back a fifth man it was never meant to touch: Kaito, a thirty-three-year-old cook who had simply been in the middle of his shift.
No weapon. No class. No aptitude. The court wrote mortal beside his name, pressed a single gold coin into his hand, and showed him the side door.
That was three years ago. Now Kaito lives exactly the way he always wanted — a cottage on a hill, a garden, a pond, and a village down the road that buys his eggs. It’s quiet. It’s ordinary. It’s perfect.
He simply hasn’t noticed that the lazy black dog on his porch can level an army, that the “big carp” in his pond is turning into something with teeth and weather, that his hen bursts into flame when the seasons turn, or that the tired, lovely woman who keeps coming back for a bowl of his stew carries the weight of a kingdom on her shoulders.
Everyone else has noticed. Everyone else is terrified, or half in love, or both — and every last one of them has quietly agreed never to tell him.
He’ll work it out eventually. Probably.
A warm, funny slice-of-life about good food, terrible pets, slow-burn romance, and the most powerful man in the world, who is entirely certain he’s nobody at all.