Flipping the Game Board
"Everything is in place."
Raymon gave a brief nod at his adjutant's report.
"The trap?"
"Set and secured."
"Any movement from the consort's faction?"
"None. It seems they haven't caught on to a thing. Sire..."
"Something on your mind?"
"To be frank, I still cannot fathom this plan."
Cassian's expression remained visibly troubled.
"May I speak openly? I truly have no idea what Her Imperial Highness Princess Titania is scheming. Regardless of the life debt owed to her... or why the young lady Bibi is so attached to her, this crosses the line."
Cassian was the only son of Duke Ortho Castrein's most trusted right-hand man. The duke had even granted permission for the boy to share his own middle name, 'Cassian'—a testament to the unshakeable loyalty binding both father and son to the ducal house.
"Yes, well, the terms of our initial contract were manageable. Up until now, House Castrein stood to lose nothing. Even if she played tricks, we could have countered them immediately. But this is an entirely different matter! If something goes awry, we will likely take the blame for unleashing a demonic beast right into the imperial palace. And in truth, looking at how this is playing out, that accusation wouldn't even be false."
"Do you truly believe I haven't considered what has crossed your mind?"
"I speak precisely because I know you have." Cassian let out a weary sigh. "We investigated her, just as you ordered. We turned over every stone we could find. And... well, her circumstances appear to have been far more pitiful than we ever imagined."
On the surface, things had always seemed presentable, so hardly anyone suspected how wretched Titania's reality truly was. A thorough look beneath the veil revealed an existence like a rotten egg, spoiled and festering from the inside out.
Yet even knowing the full extent of her plight, what of it?
From Cassian's perspective, the people on the northernmost frontier suffered far more. Despite every effort by the ducal house to protect them, demonic beasts swarmed incessantly, reducing the commoners' lives to something worse than death. It was certainly not the place of the Castrein family—whose members routinely threw themselves into danger, drenching themselves in monster blood and sleeping beneath frozen skies just to shield those people—to spare their sympathy for a pampered princess.
"So what if her circumstances were grim?"
"..."
Regrettably, by any measure, it would have been better had the princess never been born at all.
Born a daughter, her very existence had only fueled the imperial family's greed to play underhanded political games with House Castrein.
Imperial Consort Elaine's hollow, ruined life was testament to that truth as well.
And it was all the more bitter for Cassian, who served Raymon—a lord ensnared in these vicious circumstances and forced to take her as his fiancée.
"Just the other day, she hurled dishes at the maids of the Rose Palace and threw a violent tantrum. How much has she insulted and tormented you over the years, hiding behind her imperial status? In the end, she is still imperial royalty. She ate every meal on time, lived in warmth, and remained safe from the horrors of the world."
"So you believe I have no reason to harbor guilt?"
"Look at what the imperial family has done to House Castrein all this time!" A deep-seated distrust and burning rage laced Cassian's voice. "If the barrier didn't require the blood of the current imperial bloodline as one of its keystones, I would have begged the Duke to wipe out this wretched imperial house long ago."
A breakwater holding back the tide of beasts.
That was the grim karmic burden borne by the present House of Castrein.
The magic crystal mines were not a natural phenomenon.
Across the empire's blood-soaked history, in the northern lands where House Castrein ceaselessly slaughtered encroaching beasts, the piled corpses decayed into mineral veins over generations. One day, those strata began yielding magic crystals.
Though the crystals enriched House Castrein itself, wealth alone could never guarantee the prosperity or safety of every soul under their domain.
Meanwhile, the imperial family shirked their sacred duties, treating the ducal house's struggles as someone else's affair. If anything, they viewed House Castrein with paranoid suspicion, wary of the colossal army forged by defending against the beast swarms.
Far from offering aid, the palace was eager to obstruct them at every turn. Because House Castrein gritted their teeth, drove back the tides, and prevented the hordes from ever reaching the empire's interior, the court took peace for granted.
Yet with every passing year, the demonic beasts grew in number.
House Castrein had exhausted every conceivable method to reinforce the barrier that separated human civilization from the beasts. And time and again, they were reminded of an unyielding truth: because the barrier had been erected by the First Emperor, imperial blood was indispensable.
If every living member of the imperial bloodline ceased to exist, the barrier would naturally collapse.
"...And what if an imperial royal emerges who is willing to aid our cause?" Raymon asked quietly.
"I am telling you not to place such faith in Princess Titania. What if this is all merely part of some grand scheme to force you to stay by her side?"
Raymon offered a dry, bitter smile.
"You truly need not worry about that."
'Find someone you truly love and marry them.'
When Titania had spoken those words, looking directly into his eyes, there had not been the slightest tremor of deceit or longing in her gaze.
People everywhere love stories.
Sensational, dramatic tales. My parents back in my past life were utterly obsessed with extreme makjang soap operas. I never once won control of the TV remote.
The stepmother and the ex-husband were actually secret lovers; the child they adopted and then abandoned grew up to be the current husband's mistress; the current husband had a child with that mistress, except he was sterile all along, so the child was actually the product of the mistress sleeping with her own biological father...
Watching dramas with ridiculous premises like that, you cursed the sheer absurdity of the writing, yet you couldn't take your eyes off the screen.
In short, people are suckers for a compelling narrative.
This was especially true in the imperial palace, where nobody could lift a finger without grand justifications and saving face.
And even more so with a shameless, self-serving Emperor who possessed neither fairness nor a shred of decency.
The tale Consort Cleo had spun was delightfully plausible, thrilling enough to turn the entire palace upside down, and tailored precisely to the Emperor's taste.
I had assumed Cleo would tread carefully for a while, given that my life was hanging by a thread and House Castrein had become entangled. I was wrong.
She had reigned supreme over this palace for years, outmaneuvering even the Empress.
Cleo had carefully avoided pointing fingers at House Castrein as the culprits of the curse, framing me—bedridden and half-dead—as merely an innocent victim.
Even if I came forward now and accused her of giving me a cursed sword, she could easily brush it off with mock pity: 'The poor thing. Having barely survived death's door and suffered the trauma of that dark magic, her mind has clearly unraveled!'
She had delivered the blade through maids, but those servants would already have been silenced by now.
Once you have stepped into an opponent's trap, playing by their rules is suicide.
So, I decided to flip the board and set up a whole new game.
The snippets I had read from the restricted imperial archives proved immensely helpful. I had assumed those books would be lost in the chaos, but Raymon had recovered and brought them to me later. Confined to bed with nothing better to do, I had spent my free hours thumbing through their pages.
The imperial court had been so obsessed with sanitizing history that even the reigning Emperor knew little about the empire's early days.
Only someone like me, armed with knowledge from the original novel, knew the hidden truths.
Of course, even I still had no idea why Gloriana's Insignia had ended up abandoned in an old mine, but the Maze Garden inside the palace grounds was undeniably a relic of that forgotten era.
My Emoticon Sword possessed secondary functions: a demonic beast encyclopedia and a navigation system.
Back before I crossed paths with Bibi, when I was killing time in the Rose Palace, I had tested the sword's features by casually asking it about demonic beasts hidden within the imperial palace.
That was when I discovered the Maze Garden wasn't the only place in the palace harboring a dormant beast.
When I first toggled the navigation feature on a whim and saw the results, I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Of all places, it was sleeping right inside the Hall of Glory.
According to the sword, that particular beast was conditioned to prioritize hunting down and slaughtering any royal blood relatives—sparing only the legitimate, crowned Emperor and Empress of the era.
The Hall of Glory was strictly forbidden to everyone except an Emperor and Empress who had undergone the formal coronation rites.
The implication chilled me to the bone: in the event of a rebellion or a coup threatening their lives, the reigning monarchs were meant to retreat into the hall and release the beast to tear their own siblings and relatives to shreds.
Ancestors, just how many landmines did you bury in this palace? No wonder a civil war breaks out later and blows the entire palace to rubble...
For people who built an entire system to exterminate demonic beasts, why on earth did they hoard so many monsters in secret?
"How audacious of you, daring to use me."
When you unearth a secret unknown even to the reigning Emperor and Empress, what do you do?
You use it to your advantage, of course.
Better yet, this beast happened to resemble a majestic wolf with a magnificent golden mane—an entity so graceful it could easily pass for an exotic imperial pet. What finer bait could there be to lure a vanity-blinded idiot craving glory on the hunt?
I merely shrugged.
"I assumed we were in the same boat for this venture, Your Imperial Majesty."
The Empress regarded me with cool, calculating eyes.
She looked remarkably composed for someone who had just slipped into the Hall of Glory behind her husband's back and rung the blue bell beneath the First Emperor's portrait three times to unleash a demonic beast.