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Chapter : 8
“So, what’s the method?”
I tilted my head.
“If a spirit mage joins my faction, there’ll be a lot of gossip. If they run their mouths in front of me, I can just cut them down.”
I let out a small scoff. It seemed he’d finally decided to listen to what I was saying.
“I’m assuming you don’t have any romantic ideal about marrying for love.”
I placed the proposal I had prepared in advance—stamped with the seal of the Tower Master of the Spirit Tower—on the low table between the sofa I was sitting on and the seat where the prince sat.
The prince’s eyebrows shot up.
“A proposal?”
I nodded.
“The term lasts until you become emperor, or until my revenge is complete. After that, we divorce, and our relationship ends.”
After staring at the proposal for a moment, the prince slowly alternated his gaze between me and the document.
“It doesn’t seem like I’d lose anything. If anything, you’re the one at a disadvantage. Is this revenge of yours really something you want so badly that you’d go this far?”
I nodded indifferently.
What did he think he’d been listening to all this time?
Only after I gave him a clear answer did the prince slowly nod.
It was a sign of agreement.
“Write down what you want.”
After briefly leaving and returning, the prince handed me a thin sheet of paper.
I could feel faint mana emanating from it.
“This isn’t an ordinary contract.”
“It’s a contract imbued with mana. If you violate the terms, your heart will rupture immediately.”
Though the contents were rather chilling, I nodded slowly without any change in expression.
We had no trust between us yet. This seemed safer.
[The spirit mage Rien will help Lihar von Lupium ascend the imperial throne.]
[Lihar von Lupium will help the spirit mage Rien take revenge on House Isien and the current crown prince, Chris von Lupium.]
Since what we each wanted was clear, it didn’t take long to write.
After signing both the contract and a future divorce agreement, I stood up, my stiff body protesting slightly.
“I’ll send an official proposal to the imperial palace within a few days.”
“…She’s a strange woman.”
“Pardon?”
Kyle, his subordinate at his side, asked back, but Lihar ignored him and flicked the proposal in his hand—a document that had formally flown from the Spirit Tower to the imperial palace, the Tower Master’s seal stamped clearly upon it.
At first, he hadn’t been able to believe that Adrielle had returned.
When he heard, after returning from a subjugation campaign, that the child had been kidnapped, it felt as though the sky had turned yellow before his eyes. When Adrielle later came back and said she’d seen the crown prince’s emblem—something that must have been shown deliberately—his anger had surged to the top of his head. He hadn’t shown it, though, because a spirit mage had been right there.
Wasn’t it practically a threat, saying they could endanger Adrielle at any time?
Yet the child, whom he had searched for throughout the capital without finding even a trace, had returned.
Only after calming the sobbing Adrielle, who had rushed into his arms, did he notice the suspicious figure beside her, cloaked in a robe.
Lihar drew his sword and aimed it at them.
Instead of attacking in response to his killing intent, the unknown person removed the robe they were wearing.
Long black hair, trapped beneath the robe, slid free.
The face revealed beneath it belonged to a young woman with an eyepatch over one eye.
He had noticed her small frame, but hadn’t imagined she was a woman. After a brief hesitation, he hid the child behind him and pressed the blade closer to the woman’s throat.
But then she said she had come to see him.
And that she was the one who had saved Adrielle.
At first, he dismissed it as nonsense. But after Adrielle loudly insisted, and after seeing the spirit that silenced her mid-sentence, things changed.
Perhaps it was the seriousness in the woman’s eyes. Or perhaps it was her words.
Lihar guided her to the reception room of the prince’s palace. He rarely attended banquets anyway, and it wasn’t as though the emperor had summoned him to one out of genuine concern, so he paid that little mind.
The woman behaved boldly.
She was the most shameless yet cold woman he had ever met.
What was amusing was that since he spoke casually to her, she responded just as bluntly.
He wondered if she simply didn’t care about his status as a prince, but then decided it would be even stranger if she spoke formally, so he let it be.
However, that wasn’t the only surprising thing.
The Blessing of Lupium.
One of the reasons he still couldn’t openly kill that damned crown prince himself, despite having powerful noble houses and the absolute loyalty of the military at his back.
Members of the Lupium imperial family—emperors, princes, and princesses—could never kill one another by blood.
It was said that the first emperor, a dragon half-blood, had bestowed the blessing to prevent power struggles within the imperial family.
If a royal ignored the blessing and killed another royal, the slain royal wouldn’t merely revive—their wounds, including any chronic illnesses, would all be healed.
Lihar, the empire’s second prince, was the son of the former empress, now deceased.
The current empress had been a common-born concubine dearly loved by the emperor even before Lihar’s mother was made empress, and she was also the mother of the current crown prince.
Due to the nobles’ outcry, the emperor had no choice but to elevate Lihar’s mother to empress. Naturally, the crown prince’s mother hated and resented her with a murderous intensity.
Lihar’s mother, gentle by nature, gradually lost her footing in the imperial palace. After becoming pregnant with him, she even lost the emperor’s interest.
The palace servants—and even the servants of the empress’s palace—ignored her.
And then he was born.
She neither loved the emperor nor had the will to live in the imperial palace, so she poured all her love into her only son.
For both him and his mother, they were the only ones they could rely on.
Even now, he sometimes missed it—the garden behind the empress’s palace where he had walked with his mother. Until the current empress overturned the entire garden because she found the flowers displeasing, he had still visited it from time to time.
But peace didn’t last long.
When he was ten—only ten years old—the emperor sent him to fight monsters.
He was injured countless times.
Rolling on the ground, being struck by monsters, barely surviving—again and again. Two years later, when he finally returned to the palace, he ignored the emperor’s summons and ran straight to the empress’s palace to see his mother.
What awaited him was not her warm embrace, but her cold, lifeless body.
He would never forget it.
The attending physician’s diagnosis: poisoning.
The tea she had always enjoyed contained not a small amount, but a massive dose of poison.
Yes. That was it.
While he was gone, the emperor, the first prince, and that prince’s mother had joined forces and killed his mother. A maid was executed as a scapegoat after poisonous herbs matching the toxin found in his mother’s teacup were discovered in her room, but he knew.
No—everything pointed to them as the true culprits.
The concubine became empress.
The first prince became crown prince.
The eyes of the once-young boy grew clouded, and his world turned gray.
[The Kingdom of Jeffrey has violated the border. Prince, go forth and fight for the empire.]
The funeral, unbelievably modest for an empress of the empire, ended quickly. Before he could even guard his mother’s grave for a full year, he was sent to the battlefield by the damned emperor who had elevated that concubine to empress.
And there, he awakened as a Swordmaster.
Returning alive from the brink of death, he earned the trust and loyalty of the military—who had once mocked him—through war.
Thus, the current power struggle within the imperial palace was formed.
To someone like him, the help of a spirit mage honestly seemed quite appealing.
The only problem was that he didn’t understand her intentions.
It was better not to bring in an untrustworthy force.
That was why, even as he was about to sarcastically refuse, he drew his sword upon hearing the familiar words “the Blessing of Lupium.”
“…Ha.”
“…Your Highness?”
Ignoring Kyle once again, Lihar let out a short laugh.
She was a funny woman. Truly funny.
She had frozen his sword solid in an instant, then grabbed him by the collar.
Such strength—so much so that he’d almost been dragged forward—coming from such a small frame.
[I told you clearly. I’ll help you until you become emperor, and you just have to help me with my revenge.]
Revenge.
She had said she was the former young lady of House Isien.
He knew the rumors to some extent.
That she had been expelled for causing trouble after the real young lady returned.
That was about five years ago, perhaps.
House Sutrien—the family of his maternal grandfather and a faction allied with him—had once suggested taking advantage of the chaos in House Isien to strike the crown prince’s faction.
Honestly, the turmoil of House Isien, the crown prince’s greatest support, hadn’t been a bad situation for him.
Well, he’d learn in time what kind of revenge she truly meant.
Rien, was it?
A human who was not only a spirit mage, but who had already signed a mana-bound contract—so betrayal wasn’t a concern.
Judging by how meticulously she’d planned, even preparing a proposal, she didn’t seem likely to harbor ulterior motives.
And when she mentioned House Isien and the crown prince, her turquoise eyes had burned fiercely enough to make even him flinch.
They were filled with raw, unfiltered rage and killing intent.
To incur the wrath of a spirit mage—how foolish.
“Kyle.”
Lihar crooked his finger toward his subordinate.
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Find out where that spirit mage is staying. She’ll be in the capital, and since she attended the banquet as the partner of the Agnes Merchant Guild’s leader, there’s a good chance she’s living nearby.”
“Understood.”
She really was an interesting woman.
