VL 02

Chapter 2

The conclusion Mokyeong reached, piecing together the fragments that made up Rowan Oult’s life, was biting.

‘……Such a foolish woman.’

Abuse by a stepfather who suddenly showed up at Oult one day.

An older brother who abruptly vanished without a trace.

Her mother, who collapsed while searching desperately for her brother, and her younger sister, who was packed off to a monastery without a word.

Cradling all of those misfortunes on her back, the young woman had shouldered the family all by herself. Then, taking the safety of her light as a hostage, she had entered the imperial palace under the Empress’s orders.

To kill the Third Prince—her own husband—in accordance with the Empress’s command…

And yet, because she couldn’t actually bring herself to harm him, she ended up swallowing every single drop of poison sent by the Empress instead.

Truly naive, and profoundly tragic.

Suppressing a dull ache, Mokyeong opened her eyes and winced slightly.

A sudden sense of incongruity struck her.

‘Wait, today isn’t the day?’

The teacup Rowan remembered last had contained poison.

However, today was not the day the Empress was scheduled to deliver poison.

In that case……

Mokyeong’s gaze drifted toward the man lying on the floor.

‘Why on earth is this man passed out?’

Mokyeong tried to retrace Rowan’s final memories, but frustratingly, only the most crucial parts were obscured, blurred as if hidden behind a thick, white mist.

Perhaps because her soul had not yet completely fused with this physical vessel?

Massaging her throbbing temples, Mokyeong stepped closer to Carden.

When she grabbed the man’s chin with one hand and forced his jaw open, white teeth flashed between rose-tinted lips.

Without a single shred of hesitation, Mokyeong shoved her finger straight into his mouth.

There was still warmth left. His mouth was also slick with the tea he hadn’t fully swallowed.

Bringing the saliva stained on her fingertip to the tip of her tongue, she tasted a faint sweetness followed by bitterness and a lingering numbness.

‘It’s poison.’

However, it was not a lethal poison.

Given this degree, it was closer to a draught meant to plunge someone into a deep sleep rather than take a life.

Mokyeong immediately reached out to check Carden’s pulse.

It was slow and faint, but it was definitely beating.

‘Just as I thought……’

He was not dead.

If she simply managed the demonic-like residual poison properly, he would be able to regain consciousness before long.

Reflexively, Mokyeong went to press his acupoints and channel her internal qi. Then, her hand came to a dead stop.

“……Damn it.”

She had no internal qi.

No, there was a problem far more serious than that.

She was merely holding onto a man’s neck, yet her wrist was trembling so badly she lacked the strength.

Her body felt feverishly cold, her head still throbbed, and her fingers were so thin the finger-joints stood out starkly.

‘Good grief. The body is so rotted it’s practically burning up.’

Back at the Tang Clan, anyone would have forcefully stopped a person in this condition from wandering outside their bedchamber.

Clicking her tongue, Mokyeong was scanning her surroundings to search for alternative detoxification methods when—

Crash!

Without even a hint of a warning, the door flew open.

A man with pale hair rushed inside, his eyes darting between Carden collapsed on the floor and Mokyeong, whose hand had been resting near his lips.

Without even taking a breath to steady himself, he bellowed at the top of his lungs:

“The Imperial Consort has poisoned His Imperial Highness to death!”

Mokyeong’s eyes narrowed to slits.

It seemed things had royally gone to hell right from the start.

Clank!

The moment the iron door was pulled open, Mokyeong’s body was flung unceremoniously onto the cold stone floor.

“Refrain from making a commotion.”

With the imperial captain of the guard’s icy reprimand, the door slammed shut.

Mokyeong remained sprawled on the ground without moving for a while.

Throb.

A dry chuckle escaped her at the pain rising from her shoulder.

Just being tossed onto the floor once had managed to dislocate her shoulder.

“Hah.”

Her body was truly, excessively weak.

Grind.

Using one hand, Mokyeong grabbed her shoulder and snapped the popped bone back into its socket.

For a split second, a flash of white light exploded across her vision, but not a single groan escaped her lips.

Leaning her back against the wall, she surveyed her surroundings.

“Is this…… the East Tower?”

It was a place etched into Rowan’s memories.

Where high-ranking nobles or members of the royal family were imprisoned when they committed a grave crime.

At least they hadn’t tossed her down into a subterranean dungeon just because she was an imperial consort, it seemed.

‘How terribly considerate of them.’

She had died and come back to life only to find herself branded a poisoner, landing herself in a prison cell within a single shichen of waking up.

She had endured all sorts of bizarre trials throughout her life, but this was a first.

Still, she didn’t have the luxury of being flabbergasted.

Mokyeong crossed her legs in a lotus position on the chilly stone floor.

‘Let’s sort things out first.’

She was Tang Mokyeong.

However, her physical body belonged to Rowan Oult.

If so, where had the original Rowan of this body gone, and what had happened to Soye’s soul that she had grabbed and pulled along at the very last moment?

There was also no way of knowing what had become of Tang Baekcheon.

Mokyeong closed her eyes.

The violent headache she’d had while being dragged to the tower had subsided considerably, and simultaneously, Rowan’s scrambled memories were slowly falling back into an orderly sequence.

The most absurd reality of all was that this place wasn’t even the world she used to live in.

Sichuan, the Central Plains, and the Murim Alliance did not exist anywhere within Rowan’s memories.

Instead, this world possessed things Mokyeong had never once heard of: divine power, aura knights, and beings known as Inversio, whispered to be the guardians of the continent.

‘Gods……? A world where such things actually exist?’

Entities that directly lent their power to humans who believed in them.

To Mokyeong, who had lived her entire life believing that strength could only be accumulated through personal discipline and endurance, it was a profoundly bizarre concept.

‘As for internal qi…… It’s regrettable, but I’ll have to build it up slowly. Physical stamina comes first.’

Taking a long, deep breath and focusing her mind, the events of her final moments surfaced with sharper clarity.

At that realization, Mokyeong’s eyes snapped wide open.

“I see……”

The poison she had drunk together with Carden.

That had been the final detonator.

Certainly, it hadn’t been a fatal poison.

However, hundreds of types of poisons were already accumulated within Rowan’s body.

Individually they might have been survivable, but they had lingered unrefined, piled one on top of another over a long period.

It was no different from a cracked ceramic vessel barely maintaining its shape shattering into smithereens from one final impact.

‘She died from drinking that poison.’

Mokyeong’s expression darkened for a moment.

She had taken charge of a barren territory out of sheer responsibility, entered the imperial palace for the sake of her family, and ended up drinking the poison meant to kill her husband herself—ultimately dying in a place where no one would ever acknowledge it.

‘……A pitiful woman.’

At the same time, it felt a waste.

This body was not a bad vessel.

In fact, it was a constitution that people of the Tang Clan would have licked their lips and coveted.

Mokyeong checked the meridian points on her wrist, slowly assessing the venomous energies flowing through her body.

There were dozens, no, well over a hundred different types.

Yet, despite taking in all those poisons, the meridians themselves were not completely ruined.

While her body had grown weak to the extreme, her inherent capacity to endure poison was bizarrely formidable.

‘Immunity to all poisons might be a stretch, but if properly cultivated, aiming for a resistance to a thousand poisons would be entirely achievable.’

Born in the Sichuan Tang Clan, this body would have made quite a name for itself.

As she was entertaining such thoughts, an unfamiliar presence made itself felt deep within her Danjeon.

“Hm?”

It was the complete polar opposite of venomous qi. It was clear, pure, and mysteriously refined.

Though it felt similar to an inner core, it wasn’t entirely identical.

As Mokyeong regulated her breathing and gently enveloped that presence, a fragment of Rowan’s memories suddenly surfaced.

Every morning at dawn, a young Rowan would wash her body clean, change into neat clothes, and kneel before a small chapel.

After finishing an hour of prayer and meditation, she would slowly walk around the castle walls alone to steady her mind.

‘Oh Lord. Our family is not a household of demons.’

Oult had been called the “Land of Demons” for a very long time.

The mountain ranges swarmed with poisonous herbs and creatures, and outsiders who wandered in recklessly almost always ended up returning as corpses.

With the territory itself treated that way, even the Oult family, who had protected it for hundreds of years, eventually found themselves pointed at as descendants of demons.

The young Rowan seemed to want to erase those worldly prejudices.

She wanted to live more faithfully than anyone else to prove that she and her family had nothing to do with demons.

‘Divine Core.’

Through those memories, Mokyeong learned the name of the energy dwelling within her Danjeon.

A clear energy that manifested in an extreme minority of humans who maintained a pious life for a long time.

‘She didn’t even know something like this was inside her body.’

Mokyeong clicked her tongue.

Only then did she feel she understood why Rowan’s body had broken down in such a bizarre fashion.

A constitution specialized in accepting poison and a pure divine core attempting to constantly push it away were clashing violently within the same body.

With the poison given by the Empress continually forced into such a body on top of that, there was no way she could have stayed healthy.

Mokyeong immediately altered her breathing technique. Though she lacked internal qi, the method of operating mental cultivation arts was deeply ingrained in her bones.

When she cautiously drew out the pure energy contained within the divine core and let it flow between her blood vessels, the haphazardly scattered venomous qi boiled up in defiance.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’

Mokyeong focused her mind more deeply.

Instead of forcibly expelling the venom, she separated their properties one by one, guided their currents so they wouldn’t harm her meridians, and settled them within her body.

How much time had passed?

When she opened her eyes again, the world outside the window had already grown completely dark.

“Hoo……”

From head to toe, she was soaked in sweat.

It was only natural, considering she had forcefully operated a body that had something similar to an inner core, but entirely lacked internal qi.

Still, the results were unmistakable.

Her pounding head had cleared up, and the swirling memories had been neatly organized as well.

And only then could Mokyeong understand her current predicament with absolute clarity.

‘If I don’t clear my name within a week, I die.’

The crime of assassinating royalty carried a minimum punishment of public flogging and a maximum punishment of the annihilation of three generations of her family.

Since the prince wasn’t actually dead yet, it might not go as far as wiping out three generations, but escaping the flogging would be impossible.

Call it a flogging, but on her current physique, it was tantamount to being beaten to death.

Mokyeong raised her arm and looked down at her frail wrists.

Rowan’s delicate body would certainly not withstand those blows, which meant that the moment she had managed to survive, she would be needlessly sent to an unjust death all over again.

In that case…… she had to clear her name first.

‘But how?’

At that exact moment.

Along with the sound of the iron door opening, arrogant footsteps echoed across the corridor.

Mokyeong slowly lifted her gaze from the floor.

Immediately afterward, the door to the cell where she was confined swung open, and the most noble yet ugliest existence in this empire stood before her.

The woman who had placed Rowan Oult in the seat of the Imperial Consort……

The Empress.