Chapter 5

“Fortunately,” Riat did not die that day.

To be honest, when she had said those words, she had been half-prepared to die all over again.

But the Emperor merely let out an exasperated sigh, as though he found her words utterly absurd, and released her wrist. He did not immediately throw her into prison.

However, perhaps he had felt somewhat humiliated by her words about preferring a “younger partner,” because his eyes had widened.

Yet rather than being angry at Riat’s attitude, he seemed strangely fixated on the word young.

Things did not go as far as the worst-case scenario Riat had imagined, but the aftermath continued to bother her just enough to be annoying.

The Imperial Palace had sent servants and an aide directly to the Count Pshikia residence.

The place that had once been Count Vortus’s territory had been bestowed upon Riat and renamed the County of Pshikia, while the mansion within it had likewise become the Count Pshikia residence.

The mansion was still a complete mess after the Imperial Palace had conducted several investigations there, but Riat continued to use it as it was.

Building a new one would simply take too long.

However, every servant who had been involved in the rebellion had been arrested, and the Imperial Palace filled their vacant positions instead.

They claimed it was to help Riat manage the territory, since she would obviously need people to run it immediately.

Riat had been able to refuse the Crown Prince’s offer to manage the mana stone mine, but it was difficult to reject servants sent by imperial decree.

As she looked at the countless eyes of “watchers” entering her mansion, Riat quietly thought to herself.

This energy flowing from you… This is…

Stay by my side. You must remain in this palace. Until I find out, you must continue…

The Emperor had excitedly muttered those words and spilled out one sentence after another, but Riat clearly remembered hearing the word god somewhere in the middle of them.

He had said that some sort of energy was flowing from her.

But Riat had absolutely no talent for magic. She had even been told that she possessed no mana at all.

Then did that mean some kind of energy had begun flowing from her after her regression?

“Something related to that ‘god’?”

Riat murmured to herself absentmindedly, then suddenly realized that she did not even know the god’s name.

The great god who had made her regress time and time again, taking huge chunks of her lifespan as the price.

Come to think of it, even the building she had entered when she faced her first death had not looked like a temple at all.

Riat had only realized it was a temple because of the altar and ritual implements she had found inside.

“Still, I should at least know the name… Should I offer a sacrifice or something?”

Until now, she had been too preoccupied with struggling to survive to think about it.

But now she had enough time to spare a single day.

Of course, she had only one year and three months left.

Still, to Riat, who had repeatedly died at one-month intervals, one year and three months felt quite long.

On the first day after returning from the Imperial Palace to her mansion, Riat ventured outside for the first time in search of the temple.

She could easily guess why the servants wanted to follow her, and briefly considered shaking them off.

But she did not want to create unnecessary friction, so she allowed them to accompany her.

The aide with short red hair that fell to her shoulders walked beside Riat with an extremely businesslike expression.

Riat glanced at her and asked,

“Aide. You inspected this territory before I did, didn’t you?”

“Yes, Countess.”

“Then do you know where there’s a temple in this territory?”

When Riat had entered that temple, it had been deep in the night, so she could not remember its location properly.

All she remembered was running frantically to escape the knights chasing her from behind, crawling along the ground while suffering from such terrible dizziness that her head felt like it would split open.

She thought she had collapsed against the altar and shouted that it was unfair to die like that.

Riat slightly furrowed her brows as she searched through her hazy memories.

The aide calmly told her where the temples were located.

“There is one temple on the opposite side of the mansion within the county. And, as far as I know, there is also a small temple in the mountain range leading outside the territory.”

“How far away are they? On foot.”

“On foot… the first temple is about two hours away, and the second would take three or four hours.”

That far?

Riat did not dare say the thought aloud, but the aide seemed to notice her bewilderment and gave her a puzzled look.

The closest temple to this mansion is two hours away?

She had been running frantically back then, yes, but two hours?

Even if she had arrived quickly because she was running, she felt as though she had hidden inside that building in less than an hour.

“The temple two hours away is beyond the square in the County. Would you like to go take a look? I can notify them in advance.”

“Beyond the square?”

“Yes. It’s a temple of the Church of Sirdium, but…”

Sirdium was the state religion of the empire.

Riat let out a sigh, feeling even more bewildered.

If it was a temple belonging to the empire’s state religion, there was no way it could be the shabby temple she remembered.

And if it was near the square, that was also completely different from the location she remembered.

“Is there no temple farther off? One in the woods.”

“Pardon?”

“A place with thick vegetation… I think there was a strong smell of grass. Perhaps because it was so late at night? There weren’t many people around… The path hadn’t been maintained at all, so it was uneven. And I could hear the sound of water from somewhere in the distance.”

Riat muttered absentmindedly as she began walking, relying on her memories.

She knew the aide was looking at her rather strangely, but she had no room to worry about that gaze.

All that remained was an intensely abstract feeling, but Riat decided to follow that sensation.

“The mansion was over there…”

On the night one month after she had been sold to Count Vortus’s mansion, countless knights had suddenly stormed into the residence.

The noisy scraping of their armor.

The horrifying sounds made by swords as they mercilessly cut down the servants.

The sharp sound of blades slicing through flesh and ending lives.

Riat had run from them, gasping for breath.

Every so often, she had looked back to see how far the knights had chased her, screaming in terror whenever she caught sight of the torches they carried.

Riat retraced those sensations one by one as she walked.

The Riat who had once fled from death and the Riat who had finally obtained a chance at life were walking the exact same path.

As she followed the unmaintained road, Riat became certain.

This was definitely the way.

Even though the afternoon sun was shining brightly now, there was no doubt.

Even the mansion she occasionally glanced back at was in exactly the same place.

So this was where she had grabbed the hem of her dress, run, fallen, crawled along the ground…

She had definitely entered the temple here.

“…It’s not here.”

There was nothing.

Riat looked around blankly and let out a hollow sigh.

No matter how many times she turned her head, there was not a single building anywhere nearby.

“Are you looking for something?”

Even the faint sound of water in the distance was familiar, as though confirming that this was exactly the same place as before.

Yet there was no temple.

Riat blinked blankly before asking in a fading voice,

“Wasn’t there a temple here? Or… perhaps some old building that didn’t look like a temple?”

“It wasn’t in the information I received… but I’ll look into it again. You mean somewhere around here, correct?”

“Yes. Somewhere you can hear… water.”

“There is a lake nearby, but there has never been a building around it… Still, I’ll investigate and report back to you.”

The aide looked extremely puzzled, but fortunately, she had only recently been assigned to this territory herself, so she did not look at Riat as though she were strange.

She merely seemed to think there was something here that she did not know about.

Riat quietly nodded.

She had no intention of stopping the matter even if a report about this reached the Emperor.

If anything, she would be grateful if the Emperor investigated it more thoroughly.

There was no temple.

There was not even a trace that a building had ever existed here.

“…”

Riat clenched her hands tightly as she struggled with an inexplicable sense of dissonance.

Just who was the god who sent me back?

Is the temple really not here because I remembered it incorrectly?

Perhaps because she had been sent as someone who was not only good at keeping watch but also competent at her actual job, the aide gathered all the information about every building constructed near the Count’s residence within just a few hours.

She had even listened carefully to Riat’s highly abstract description and searched the areas where the sound of water might be heard.

And yet…

“It doesn’t exist?”

“No, Countess. There are no records of any building ever having been constructed near the clearing at the edge of the forest that you described. I even searched outside the outer walls, but any old buildings there were rebuilt at least five years ago. And you cannot hear the sound of water from their locations.”

“There really isn’t one…?”

“There isn’t. I even checked records dating back to when this territory belonged to the Kingdom of Irmak. That covers roughly five hundred years of history.”

“Really…?”

“There truly is nothing. No matter how thoroughly I search, I cannot find anything. If you send me back five hundred years, I’ll investigate it again.”

After being asked the same questions repeatedly, the aide finally answered with a deep furrow between her brows.

There was even a slight trace of irritation in her voice.

But Riat did not notice.

She could only stare blankly and let out another hollow sigh.

Now she knew for certain that it was not a mistake.

The temple dedicated to the god who had sent her back in time had disappeared.

There was not even the slightest trace that a temple had ever existed nearby.

And yet Riat had unquestionably traveled backward through time.

She had endured death again and again and finally reached this point, living out the new span of life she had been given.

Moreover, Riat had not been searching for the temple merely to offer a sacrifice.

“If someone offers their time in your place, I’ll let you live.”

When Riat experienced her first regression, fragmentary information had entered her mind.

She did not remember actually speaking with a god, but the information had surfaced in her mind as though the god itself had told her.

The strange bargain was simple.

In exchange for regressing through time, the god would take half of her remaining lifespan.

But if there were someone willing to take her place, the god would save her.

Riat was satisfied with the one year and three months she had left and had no intention of finding someone else to sacrifice.

Still, having the temple disappear entirely felt rather unfair.

“…Is something wrong? Is there some reason you have to find a building that may not even exist?”

The aide had spoken coldly at first, but perhaps Riat’s dazed expression made her feel somewhat guilty, because she cleared her throat and cautiously asked again.

Riat leaned back in her chair and blinked slowly before opening her mouth.

“There’s someone I received help from. No, someone I… made a deal with. They offered me a bargain: in exchange for taking something I possessed, they would return it to me if I gave them something else of equivalent value. But now that person who made the deal has completely disappeared.”

“Don’t you know that person’s name?”

“No…”

“Do you know where they live?”

“I only knew one place. But they’re not there.”

“So, at present… you don’t know the name of the person you made the deal with, and you have no way of contacting them either.”

“That’s right.”

At Riat’s breezy answer, the aide let out a brief, incredulous laugh.

She quickly covered her mouth with the file in her hands, but Riat clearly saw her baffled expression.

Riat had wondered whether the aide might connect this to the temple, but apparently, once the word “deal” came up, she did not think of a god at all.

Even if she did make the connection, she seemed to assume that Riat had met and made a deal with some person at a temple.

The aide moved her lips several times as though carefully choosing her words.

Then, in the end, she simply sighed honestly.

“…I think you were scammed.”

Huh?