The Empty Room
The black residue clinging to her fingertips was no longer sticky. The moisture had long since dried, crumbling into fine powder.
Elena could not draw a breath.
Her crimson eyes, frozen in place, stared at the narrow drain hole of the washbasin as if they could pierce through it. The iron stench was thick enough to paralyze her sense of smell. There was no doubt about it — this was a fragment of the Black Magic Sword.
The night in the black forest of the northern continent, where the ground had been stained with the blood of demonic beasts.
The ancient evil spirit's malice embedded in the magic sword had climbed up Elena's right arm and crushed her heart wall. As her bones turned black to the core and her body spilled blood, the military medics had shaken their heads and recommended her isolation. A knight corrupted by a magic sword had nothing left but madness and self-destruction.
That night, Elena had lain alone in her quarters, resigned to death.
But when she opened her eyes at dawn, the pain that had been tearing through her heart was gone without a trace.
There had been a man beside her bed.
A low-ranking healer in a shabby brown robe, setting a decoction kettle over the fire. A pale-faced man clutching a dry linen cloth.
It was only now that Elena remembered he had kept his sleeves drawn long, hiding his hands. The sound of him gasping for breath and stifling dry heaves throughout the night — she had dismissed it then as the weakness of a lowborn man and moved on.
It had not been her own willpower and mental fortitude that had suppressed the magic sword's malice.
That weak man had.
A porter with no family name, no martial power — he had scraped the magic sword's curse entirely into the sacred stigmata on his own palms and driven it deep into his own heart.
···
Elena's jaw trembled finely.
She could hear something enormous shattering inside her chest. She parted her dry lips. A heavy name surged up from the depths of her throat.
But it would not become sound.
Her throat muscles had gone rigid, as if paralyzed. A pain as though her vocal cords were burning choked off her breath. The moment she spoke his name aloud, the cruel reality that she had survived by trampling his life beneath her feet would drive itself in like an irreversible wedge.
Elena staggered backward.
She looked around the room.
On the bed, the rough blanket he had slept under was folded neatly with sharp creases. On the dresser, the platinum medal and pouch of gold coins granted by the imperial family as reward for the expedition's success sat untouched, side by side.
He had taken nothing.
He had abandoned all the glory, wealth, and reward that should have been his in this very room, and vanished into the darkness alone, coughing up rotting blood.
Thump.
Elena's heart hammered violently in the center of her chest.
A bursting pain crushing her heart.
The magic sword's malice that should have been inside her body was pulsing, pointing south. The curse was recognizing its original master's magical power and sending a signal. It was moving away. With every step that man took, his remaining breath was being shaved away steeply.
Elena strode back to her own room.
She roughly snatched the pitch-black greatsword that hung firmly on the wall. The scabbard mount shattered and fell to the floor, but she didn't care.
Still in her silk nightclothes, she didn't look back once as she stormed out into the corridor.
The silence of the corridor was broken by rough footsteps.
The second room down the corridor — Saintess Seraphina's room — had its door half open, but the interior was empty. Following her habit of heading to the Grand Temple every early dawn, not even a cool warmth remained inside.
Then the door of the third room, lined up further down the corridor, opened.
A woman with neatly braided silver hair stepped out. It was Veronica, the First Imperial Princess and the one who had commanded the expedition's magical forces.
She had not slept. She was already dressed in her blue formal uniform, prepared for the imperial banquet. Her cold eyepatch gleamed above a collar buttoned perfectly to the top.
"Noisy this early in the morning, Sword Saint."
Veronica's voice was as dry as ice.
"The victory parade is scheduled for noon today at the Imperial Capital's central plaza. Maintain your dignity as the Knight Commander."
Veronica's gaze fell on Elena's attire. The rumpled nightclothes, the bare feet, and the ominous black magical energy seeping from the magic sword in her hand.
Above all, what lay in Elena's eyes was not the pride of a victor.
It was the killing intent of a beast driven to the edge of a cliff, having lost all reason.
"Move."
Elena spat the word out as if chewing it.
"Sheathe your sword. Drawing a weapon within the imperial palace dormitory is a violation of military law."
Veronica narrowed her brow and stepped forward to block her path. A blue spark of magical power flickered lightly from her fingertips.
"Has the madness taken hold? The magic sword's malice should have been completely extinguished when the expedition ended."
"Extinguished?"
Elena stopped walking. The corners of her mouth twisted upward in a grotesque smile.
"Is that the extent of your precious magical expertise, Princess?"
"Watch your tongue."
"Look at that room."
Elena pointed with her chin toward the empty room at the end of the corridor.
"The room of that man you treated like a porter and made boil decoctions. Pour your precious magic into the washbasin. See what's dried and caked there."
Veronica's gaze shifted past Elena's shoulder, toward the healer's room standing wide open.
Elena strode past Veronica toward the stairs. The tip of her magic sword scraped the marble floor, sending red sparks flying.
"Where do you think you're going?"
Veronica asked quietly, turning to look back.
"To find him."
Elena did not look back.
"The thief who stole my life and ran."
Elena sprinted down the stairs and roughly snatched a leather coat from the coat rack at the first-floor entrance, throwing it over her shoulders. With a thunderous crash, the mansion's front gate burst open as if shattered, and her presence vanished into the dawn mist.
Veronica watched the direction Elena had disappeared for a moment, then slowly turned and walked toward the room at the end of the corridor.
Her gaze, upon entering the room, fell first on the desk.
The traces of a map roughly erased with charcoal, and the black ash remaining on the iron tray.
Veronica picked up a bit of the ash from the tray with her ungloved hand. The texture of high-grade imperial parchment. A fragment of a document that had burned completely in less than an hour.
Her steps turned toward the washbasin.
The residue Elena had scraped from the drain.
Veronica extended a finger and injected her magical power. The moment the clear blue magic seeped into the gaps of the drainpipe, the dark red residue reacted violently, spewing out pitch-black smoke.
The magic sword's magical energy.
And tangled beneath it, another fluctuation.
Veronica's breath cooled and settled.
The residual heat of the Divine Punishment seal.
And.
Creak.
White frost instantly froze onto the brass pipe surface of the drain.
Veronica's finger stopped.
The absolute-zero cold that had driven her own magical circuits into a frenzy and frozen her heart.
The permanent freezing curse she had acquired as the price for casting high-tier magic beyond a mage's limits — why was it mixed into this man's blood, clogging the drainpipe?
A passage from an ancient text sealed in the forbidden zone of the imperial archives flashed through Veronica's mind.
The Sacred Stigmata of Atonement
An heretical healing art that transfers another's wounds and catastrophic curses entirely into one's own soul to bear them in their stead.
There had been no miracle.
That healer had taken all three heroes' curses upon himself alone, concealing the fact that his own flesh was collapsing from within.
Veronica slowly left the room.
When she reached her own door, she looked down at the doorknob.
On the surface of the brass doorknob, frost had bloomed in the shape of an intricate snowflake.
In the temperatures of early summer, the probability of frost forming on metal converges to zero. It was a distinctive crystalline structure left only when someone could not control their own magical power and pressed their hand against it.
It was the healer's handprint.
Even in the brief instant he touched the doorknob, he was so broken that he could not control the cold packed inside his body.
"Fool."
A cold monologue slipped from between Veronica's lips.
"He doesn't even know what he's done."
She showed no emotion on her face.
No tears, no screaming like Elena. Instead, vast amounts of information and numbers began turning coldly and precisely in her mind.
The maximum lifespan when three conflicting curses fused within a single body.
At most, a few months.
The types of medicinal herbs he would necessarily need to suppress the pain.
Poisonous herbs, painkillers, and heat-based minerals to suppress the cold.
And the geographical hiding places within the empire where he might slip out of the Imperial Capital and go into hiding.
"Three days."
Veronica muttered while looking at her watch.
"In that condition, the maximum distance he can push through the Imperial Capital's surveillance net and head south is a hundred li in three days."
Without hesitation, she drew out the imperial communication magic device from her bosom. Blue magical power passed through the device's magic crystal, connecting directly to the imperial palace communication tower.
"Nada."
Veronica's voice had not a single tremor. It was the perfectly refined tone of an administrator.
"Your Highness, the preparations for the victory parade are all complete···"
"Cancel the victory parade."
"Yes? Your Highness, what do you mean? His Majesty the Emperor has already departed for the central plaza."
"I will report to His Majesty the Emperor myself. Immediately issue the Class 1 State of Emergency to the imperial administration and the royal guard."
Veronica brushed the frost on her doorknob away with her gloved hand as she continued.
"Close all checkpoints on the southern highway immediately. Detain and conduct full identity checks on all caravans, carriages, and individual travelers heading south."
"Your Highness! If you seal off the entire southern highway, the logistics of the empire's southern region will be completely paralyzed. The lords will revolt fiercely."
"Those who revolt shall be treated as traitors and executed on the spot."
Veronica's blue eyes exuded a piercing coldness.
"Also, place total control over all alchemy guilds and herb distribution merchant guilds across the empire. Prohibit all trade of painkillers, cold-suppressants, and poisonous herb extracts. Report the likenesses of anyone attempting to purchase these items to the imperial palace in real time."
"W-who exactly are you tracking? Remnants of the demon clan?"
Veronica's gaze turned toward the empty room at the end of the corridor, left abandoned without its master.
"A major national asset."
Veronica whispered coldly.
"Secure the highest-priority recovery target — imperial property that has been smuggled out and is currently at large."
After cutting the communication, Veronica adjusted the collar of her blue uniform. From her fingertips, an urgent blockade proclamation written in blue magical power etched itself into the air, rapidly producing copies.
She opened the door and crossed the corridor at a quick pace toward the imperial palace office.
The Imperial Capital's South Gate.
Before the massive stone gate, where the dawn mist had not yet fully lifted, caravans heading toward the southern territories were lined up in a long queue.
One of the guards stationed on the wall yawned, then spotted a solitary figure walking along the South Gate road and rubbed his eyes.
"Wh···?"
A woman in white silk nightclothes with a worn leather coat thrown carelessly over her shoulders. Her platinum hair whipping roughly in the wind, her bare feet pressing into the dirt ground, and in her hand — not the ceremonial sword symbolizing the imperial knight order, but a greatsword radiating a grotesque black magical energy.
"T-that's··· Lady Elena?"
The soldiers muttered and hurriedly raised their spears.
"Sword Saint! The imperial victory parade is scheduled for noon today···."
The gate commander could not finish his words.
The very air around the gate froze as sharp as a razor's edge at Elena's approach. Soldiers, their breath cut off by the killing intent she radiated, staggered and retreated.
Elena didn't even glance at the guards.
Her crimson eyes fixed only on the dirt road of the southern highway stretching endlessly beyond the gate.
"Open the gate."
Just three words.
"B-but, Your Excellency, we require a passage permit verification procedure."
Clang!
The magic sword jumped two finger-widths out of its scabbard.
A pitch-black blade of sword energy cleaved through the air and shattered the South Gate's massive iron bolt in a single strike.
CRASH!
The heavy gate screamed as it flew open wide to both sides. Fragments flew in all directions, and the guards rolled on the ground, screaming.
Elena pushed her sword back into its scabbard.
Click.
With the cool metallic sound of the blade locking into place, she strode unimpeded through the wide-open gate.
Abandoning all ceremony, all honor, all the Emperor's gifts.
Using only the direction of the chest-crushing pain in her heart as her compass, the empire's strongest Sword Saint began her lone gallop toward the southern highway.