VL 08

Chapter 8

The moment Carden rubbed the back of his hand across his lips, the sweet fragrance that had brushed against them rushed back to his mind.

An addictive scent he had never experienced before…………

As that moment flashed through his memory, Carden found himself frowning without even realizing it.

He didn’t bother to analyze whether it was out of disgust or for some other reason.

Wiping away his expression in an instant as if he had never been lost in thought, he turned to Taylor and asked.

“Taylor, while I was dead, what happened to the Consort?”

“She was dragged straight to the East Tower, and the Empress visited her last night. Aside from that, nothing happened.”

Both the fact that she would be dragged to the East Tower and that the Empress would visit were well within Carden’s expectations.

Then why had the outcome turned out completely different from what he anticipated?

‘No.’

It wasn’t just the outcome that had changed.

The Consort’s attitude was different, too.

Those strange, mesmerizing eyes that had shone so vividly amidst the cascade of silver hair falling like a waterfall.

The pale-faced woman smiling as brightly as the sun lingered stubbornly in Carden’s vision.

“You’re finally awake, Your Highness.”

Could that woman even make an expression like that?

It had been so unfamiliar that, despite watching her for years, he hadn’t recognized Rowan Oult at a single glance.

And this was a man whose sharp eye and memory allowed him to remember the face of everyone he passed by even in a fleeting glance.

It wasn’t that her face had changed.

Her voice, her tone—it was all Rowan Oult.

Yet it felt strange.

As if only the empty shell had been left behind while whatever was inside had been entirely swapped out…………

Tap, tap.

Carden tapped the desk with his empty cup.

Having his plan derailed was undoubtedly a defeat for him.

He had planned to eliminate the Consort—a mere pawn of the Empress—even at the risk of death, and use that as leverage to shake the Empress’s faction to its core, but that entire scheme had completely unraveled.

Yet, strangely enough, he didn’t feel all that bad about it.

Was it because the lingering venom still hadn’t cleared from his head?

“Please confine me to the Oult estate until the culprit is caught.”

Or was it because he had seen the Empress’s face instantly sour at those very words from the woman?

The corners of Carden’s mouth curled up just a fraction.

‘What on earth is she planning?’

Judging by the expression on the Empress’s face as she watched Rowan request her own confinement, it certainly didn’t seem like something they had pre-arranged.

Of course, it could have been an act put on by the Empress, but his gut told him it wasn’t a manufactured expression.

Above all, the Empress had no reason to send the Consort—whom she had gone out of her way to plant right by his side—back to the Oult territory.

That alone was bizarre enough, but…………

Rowan, who had just demanded an antidote to save herself and protested her innocence, had gone ahead and volunteered for confinement.

Claiming innocence meant she wanted to survive.

If she wanted to survive in this imperial palace, flattering the Empress should have been the easiest path.

Yet today, Rowan had openly defied the Empress’s will.

Ever since he married Rowan Oult, this was the first time he had ever been genuinely curious about what was going on inside that woman’s head.

Of course, it might amount to nothing. She might simply be terrified after cheating death and desperately seeking to hide away in her hometown.

However.

‘A terrified woman forces my mouth open and shoves her tongue down my throat?’

Carden’s eyebrows twitched.

No matter how he thought about it, nothing added up.

“……………Still, I need to figure it out.”

She was still his wife, if only in name.

At least until the thought crossed his mind to kill her again, he felt like he wouldn’t be satisfied unless he peered into whatever was ticking inside her head.

“Taylor.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“Assign new people to the Consort. Right by her side. A double agent pretending to be the Empress’s person would work nicely, too.”

“Pardon? New people? We already have plenty of staff assigned to her, but……”

“Because of this poisoning incident, we’ll need to completely replace the internal staff of the Prince’s palace anyway. When we do, swap out the people surrounding the Consort, too. It would be ideal to place them close enough to follow her into confinement.”

At the Prince’s words, Taylor immediately bowed his head.

“Understood.”

And that very night.

The internal personnel of the Prince’s palace were completely replaced under the pretext of tracking down the true culprit behind the poisoning incident.

Down to all seven of the Consort’s direct personal attendants.

What is the one thing a dead man must never do?

As everyone knows, it is resurrection.

Because the Prince had pulled off that forbidden feat—and a ‘fake’ one at that—the entire nation was turned completely upside down.

The Third Prince’s public standing, which was already high enough to threaten the Crown Prince, skyrocketed overnight, and the Emperor openly favored Carden Rubert.

Absurd talk began to spread across the capital that this day should officially be designated as the ‘Day of Carden’s Resurrection.’

The Empress was reportedly scrambling desperately to correct the rumors, insisting it was ‘detoxification’ and not a ‘resurrection,’ but to the common folk, whether it was a genuine resurrection or mere detoxification didn’t really matter.

All they wanted was a juicy new piece of gossip about the imperial family to chew on and debate.

Taverns buzzed with the story for days, and farmers sat on the ridges of their fields eating midday snacks while discussing the Prince’s resurrection.

Young maidens in the villages piled on layers of romantic longing for the handsome Prince they had only ever seen in paintings, embellishing the tales with all sorts of flourishes—that the Prince with dazzling golden hair and gemstone-like blue eyes had revived right out of his coffin, or that God Himself had bestowed a direct blessing upon him.

Whatever the truth was, you couldn’t ask for a better story.

Consequently, the person whose mood soured the most as a result was the Empress, though as luck would have it, she was currently too busy nursing the Crown Prince—who had fallen ill with a mysterious, high fever—to spare any attention for anything else.

For Mokyeong, it was a profound stroke of luck.

At least until she departed for her confinement, she could focus entirely on recovering her physical condition without anyone disturbing her.

“Hoo.”

Waking up somewhat late, Mokyeong quietly regulated her breathing as she lay on the bed.

Sitting cross-legged and slowly operating her internal cultivation art was the most standard and proper method, but neither the time nor the place permitted her such luxury right now.

Fortunately, she had developed her own specialized cultivation method tailored solely for herself, far removed from standard orthodoxy.

Mokyeong let go of all tension in her body as if falling asleep, breathing in long and slow.

As her inhalations and exhalations gradually slowed down, her consciousness sank deep within her body, and before long, the various residues of poison clinging to every corner of Rowan’s physique began to register in her senses one by one.

‘…………Good grief, she ingested just about every poison under the sun.’

Counting the venomous qi sluggishly congealed along her meridians and blood vessels, there were easily more than one or two varieties.

Some had lost their toxicity long ago, leaving behind only faint traces, while others were still stubbornly clinging to the corners of her internal organs, flaunting their continued existence.

It was a miracle she was still alive.

Yet, ironically, those very poisons that had driven Rowan to death were now serving as the raw material to bring this flesh back to life.

The Venom-Reversing Art.

It was a cultivation method she had devised by turning the accumulated poisons in her body backward, using them as internal energy instead.

Who would have thought that a technique she developed while using her own body as a test subject would come in handy like this? Life was truly full of irony.

Mokyeong practiced her cultivation method at every spare moment, and every time she woke up, she had her attendants bring her body-nourishing foods.

After devouring meat, porridge, and rich medicinal soups alongside fruit—whatever she could get her hands on—she would take a brief nap, return to her cultivation, and dedicate the entire day solely to tending to her body.

Even so, the recovery speed wasn’t picking up as fast as she wanted, testing her patience.

‘Slow. Way too slow!’

Back in the Murim, gathering this much internal energy would have taken her half an hour at most.

Yet right now, even after struggling all day long, barely a shallow pool sloshed at the very bottom of her danjeon.

By this point, she desperately missed the countless rare herbs and medicinal pills she had stockpiled in her secret cave.

The Ten-Thousand-Poison Paste of the Namgung Clan, the Great Rejuvenation Pill of Shaolin, the Purple Mist Pill of the Huashan Sect, and even the Millennium Snow Ginseng she had brought back from Kunlun.

Just thinking about them made her mouth water as those miraculous medicines danced before her eyes.

‘No. Surely this world has miraculous herbs like that, too, right?’

This was a world where knights manipulated aura, priests wielded divine power, and dragons openly existed.

There was no way pharmaceuticals capable of nourishing the human body or boosting one’s energy didn’t exist here.

No doubt the imperial treasury was packed to the brim with things like that.

The only problem was that the current Mokyeong lacked the capability to raid the imperial treasury.

‘A pity.’

A genuine pity.

If she had those, even something like the Blue-Phosphorous Snake Venom the Empress had held earlier would come in handy.

Poison and medicine were separated by a mere thread.

Just as one could not craft medicine without understanding poison, nor handle poison without knowing medicine, miraculous herbs could easily become deadly poisons, and poisons could likewise become miraculous herbs depending on the capability of the person wielding them.

‘Should I ask the Empress to hand some over for me to eat at this stage?’

Just as she was chuckling to herself over such an absurd fantasy, the sound came.

Tap, tap.

The Emperor’s attendant delivered the message she had been waiting for from outside the door.

“Your Imperial Highness the Consort. It is an order from His Majesty.”

Mokyeong’s eyes snapped open.

“You are to prepare to depart for the Oult estate by tomorrow morning.”

The time she had been waiting for had finally arrived.

At the thought of being able to leave the imperial palace, the corners of Mokyeong’s mouth curved upward of their own accord.