Chapter 7
The day after the duchess withdrew, the real rearing began.
First, even the food changed.
Instead of nothing but bread and milk—just enough to keep me barely alive—a chef came personally and said he would prepare proper meals, whatever I wanted.
The furniture that had burned to ashes was replaced in a single day, and a designer came to my wardrobe and provided clothes on the same level as the princes’.
And the people who helped me use those things changed too, from maids to ladies-in-waiting.
Not workers who got paid for their labor, but people who took pride in serving whoever their master happened to be.
I didn’t really think that way, of course, but in any case, they had become something different from ordinary servants—people employed by our house in a different sense.
That was how the Blium ducal house altered the whole matter of my clothing, food, and shelter around me.
The very things that were said to be essential to human life had been rearranged.
As if, once I grew used to this life, I would no longer think of dying.
So I behaved in the exact opposite way.
I tore all my clothes to shreds, slept naked on the floor, and ate nothing.
It didn’t matter what they did—whether they put on a fire show in front of me or used sugar like water to make something sweet.
As far as the collar would allow me not to leave, I lived like a beast inside my room.
It wasn’t easy.
The moment I shredded every last piece of clothing, new ones were brought in; when I lay down on the floor, the ladies-in-waiting came rushing over and tried to get me onto a bed somehow.
When I refused to eat at all, a knight came to force something into my hands, and when I fought that off by setting the whole room on fire, they even held a knife to the chef’s throat and threatened me.
As if to say that if I didn’t eat, this person would be hurt.
So I stopped drinking water too.
Whenever they tried to force food on me, I drove out the knight and the ladies-in-waiting with bursts of dying embers from my whole body, and never let anything touch my mouth.
Then my body began to wither at frightening speed.
I’d only starved for about a month, yet the plumpness that had belonged to a child vanished almost at once, leaving me gaunt, skin clinging to bone, with the grain of muscle and the shape of veins showing starkly through.
The only thing that swelled was my stomach.
Probably because I was burning muscle for energy, and there was nothing left to hold my organs in place.
If I cut my belly open now, would my intestines spill out?
I thought that as I lifted my fingers, but in the end I still couldn’t kill myself.
Unlike starving to death, I couldn’t bring myself to commit suicide.
Ridiculous, really.
I supposed I would just have to go through another food-defense battle again.
A curse like this wouldn’t let me die from simple starvation anyway, but that hardly mattered.
I wanted to spit in the Blium house’s face.
Just as I was forming embers in my body with that thought, the mansion broke into chaos.
As if some enormous problem had occurred, the sound of dozens of people running at once echoed through the corridor, and the smell of blood—not mine—drifted in strong.
Someone injured had come.
Not just one, either, but several—important enough that they’d had to open the main house for them.
In that kind of situation, no one would come near me either.
It would be easy for a few days.
Thinking that, I lay down, and sleep came quickly. I tensed myself toward any presence nearby, and then fell asleep just like that.
As expected, those few days were certainly peaceful.
Neither the head of the house nor the duchess came to see me.
The servants couldn’t endure my tantrums and only pretended to work, leaving once they were satisfied just seeing me alive and moving.
Now all that remained was for me to die.
As I thought that and turned over how I ought to die, someone came into the room.
She was small.
Probably a child.
Servant?
No, not a servant.
Servants had to move around too much to wear such impractical shoes.
With that thought, I slowly sat up. A girl with wavy golden hair was looking at me, visibly flustered, and after staring at her for a moment, I remembered who she was.
She was the Eighth Princess.
The emperor’s youngest daughter.
I had heard she was about my age.
As I thought that and forced myself upright, my knees began to shake violently below me. I pushed my unwilling eyes open and looked at the princess, and she looked back at me with a startled face.
“W-who are you?”
Her speech was jumbled, as if she were still awkwardly trying to force herself into a way of speaking she wasn’t used to.
At that voice, I slowly approached her—then walked right past her, to the limit my collar allowed, and looked out into the corridor.
“Huuuu……”
“T-this is the Blium house, you know? Huh?”
The princess looked flustered.
Then, when her eyes fell on my arms and legs, she let out a small scream, looked toward the door, and I sat there blocking it, gazing at her quietly.
“P-please, move aside. I’ll call a healer.”
Seeing my limbs, the princess seemed to feel pity and said she would call a healer.
“Pfft.”
“……You?”
“This can’t be healed, so you might as well leave it alone.”
“T-then at least some food. You’re, so thin.”
“I’m not eating.”
“Nngh.”
When I lifted my eyes to look at her face, the princess stared down at me with a frightened expression, and in that state I asked her why she had come to the Blium house.
I told her I would move aside if she explained.
Hearing that, she glanced at my arms and legs, swallowed hard, and then explained why she was here.
She had come to the healing family, of course, to receive medical treatment.
But the person in question was not an ordinary person.
The Fourth Princess.
A girl born with an incurable illness from the start, who had been kept alive until now with elixirs from the imperial palace, but was gradually reaching her limit.
The goal was to prolong her life.
I had assumed emperors married and produced children for political reasons, so affection had nothing to do with it, but it seemed they had simply sent her here because they didn’t want to bury their child first.
She must have been a daughter born of love.
As that thought made a faint snort rise in my throat, an idea came to me.
“Would you like me to tell you how to cure an incurable disease?”
The curse had taught me many things.
After all, as long as it could torment the Blium house, it would give me knowledge or anything else, even telling me how to use a Blium family member who had become a lump of flesh.
So then—let me tell her how to use her own life to heal the princess.
Thinking that, I smiled, and the Eighth Princess looked at me with a doubtful expression.
“How would you know something like that?”
“Even if I’m an unnamed one, I am still a human being made by the Blium head of the house. Of course I know the art of healing.”
“Is that truly so?”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“And what is that? If it makes my sister better, I’ll give you a million gold coins!”
“Ahaha, no need. If I can cure the Fourth Princess, then what I want will already have been achieved.”
Putting strength into my legs, I stood up, and my limbs trembled violently beneath me.
At that sight, the princess came to my side and supported me, and I whispered into her ear.
“There is a living stone hidden inside the Blium house that endlessly emits recovery magic. It takes quite a while to make, but if they’re pressed, they should be able to produce one immediately. If you obtain that and take it with the herbs I tell you about, you can cure the incurable illness.”
The princess muttered the herbs I named several times, as if trying to memorize them, then soon smiled brightly and laid me back down on the bed. I gave a faint snort at the sight and closed my eyes.
How would the head of the house react?
Would he kill me? What would he do?
When there was no known cure, perhaps they could make do with anything. But now that a cure existed, could they still refuse it?
That would be blasphemy, wouldn’t it?
Only two people.
Wasn’t it enough to kill only two people and save a noble one?
Yes—come and kill me.
Thinking that, I fell asleep, and once again I felt a presence nearby. I got up to check what kind of face the duke was making.
“……?”
But the person in front of me was not the head of the house.
To be exact, the head of the house and the duchess were there behind her, but the one standing at the front was someone else entirely.
A woman who looked a little worn, but radiated presence as if that didn’t matter at all.
There was only one person who could make the duke and duchess step back like that while still projecting such presence.
“……Hmm.”
The woman—the Fourth Princess—was beautiful.
Her hair was split at the ends, her skin looked as though its vitality was fading, and her eyes were bloodshot.
She looked like a woman already on the edge of death, and yet there was something in her that drew the eye as if none of that mattered.
Was it those icy blue eyes?
Or was it that rose-gold hair that didn’t seem human at all?
As I looked up at her with those thoughts in mind, the princess took off her outer garment and wrapped my body in it, then looked at the head of the house. He looked at me in her arms with fearful eyes, and then at last removed my collar.
“Are you the child who told my little sister to take her own life?”
“I only said that if she did, everything—even the incurable illness—could be cured.”
“Hah. I didn’t think a child would be capable of saying such a thing. It makes me angry.”
“Well, I’m not an ordinary child.”
“You mean the one about the curse barrier?”
“Yes. So, what do you think? It’s a story where only one person has to die. Ah, and if you don’t trust the recipe, that’s fine. The one who cursed me has a mindset that says as long as the Blium house suffers, anything is fine, so there won’t be any problem for Your Highness at all.”
“Do you think I’d care about something like that?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
More importantly, where was she taking me?
As I wondered that and looked at the Fourth Princess, she frowned with that lovely face of hers and let out a deep sigh.