VL 03

Chapter 3

Slap!

Her head jerked to the side.

A neatly manicured hand ruthlessly struck Rowan’s pale cheek. Before Mokyeong could even straighten her face, a second hand came flying.

Slap!

Even the opposite cheek stung fiercely.

Because the ring the Empress wore had scraped across tender skin, blood welled up, and a salty taste of blood coated the inside of her mouth.

“How dare you act on your own accord? When did I ever tell you to kill the Prince in such a manner!”

Mokyeong kept her head bowed, sweeping the inside of her torn cheek with the tip of her tongue.

A slap.

When was the last time she had taken a blow from someone without fighting back at all?

Just as a very old memory threatened to surface, Mokyeong cleanly severed the thought without a shred of lingering attachment.

More importantly, what the Empress had just spat out sounded strange.

‘……Dead?’

That couldn’t possibly be.

Admittedly, her brief check before losing consciousness was all she had to go on, but the poison that had entered Carden’s body was not the kind that killed a person instantly.

She couldn’t be certain since she didn’t know every single poisonous herb in this world, but at least when she checked last, Carden was not someone on the verge of death.

“……Has His Imperial Highness the Prince truly passed away?”

“What?”

The Empress’s face twisted in sheer absurdity.

“You’re the one who fed him the poison, and now you’re asking me that?”

“It is not the poison I administered. I have never given the Prince poison.”

The Empress’s eyebrows arched viciously.

“Whether you fed it to him or not, does that matter right now? The Prince drank poison and died while he was alone with you. And who is the one who planted you right by his side?”

When Mokyeong didn’t answer, the Empress stepped closer, locking eyes with her as she spoke.

“It was me.”

Cold, violet pupils flashed ferociously.

“Because of a wretch like you, I’m about to become the target of uncalled-for suspicion. When did I ever tell you to kill the Prince right this instant? Do you think I’d pull off something so stupid?”

The Empress’s voice grew sharper by the second.

“Do you have any idea how much effort I poured into the past two years waiting for the right moment……? Because of your arbitrary actions, all of that has gone down the drain!”

Two years.

Mokyeong chewed over those words in her mind.

At that moment, scenes scattered in a corner of Rowan’s memories abruptly popped up.

A small medicine vial secretly handed over by the Empress’s maid.

Instructions to mix a few drops into meals or tea every day.

The frequency had grown especially high whenever Carden was about to set out on a military expedition or a hunt.

However, Rowan had not been able to feed the poison sent by the Empress to the Prince, and instead, she had swallowed most of it herself.

‘No way.’

Only then did all the pieces click together.

The Empress had intended to gradually ruin Carden’s body by poisoning him bit by bit over the past two years, and then kill him when the right moment arrived.

Yet, since Rowan had ended up ingesting most of that poison herself……

‘So the Empress wouldn’t know.’

She wouldn’t know that Carden’s body, which she believed she had spent two years painstakingly poisoning, was actually completely fine.

‘If that’s the case, this makes even less sense. There’s no way the Prince could have died from mere sleeping poison.’

After grinding her teeth for a long moment, the Empress pulled a black bottle from her bosom and tossed it in front of Mokyeong.

“No other words are needed. I will demand responsibility with your life. Drink.”

She didn’t need to ask what this was.

It was poison, no doubt. Since she was a woman who knew Rowan’s constitution, it would be an excruciatingly potent toxin.

“If you die here, I will announce that you committed suicide, unable to bear the guilt after assassinating the Prince. That way, this matter will end as your reckless, individual crime.”

Ultimately, it meant pinning the crime of royal assassination entirely on her and cutting off the tail to save herself.

When Mokyeong silently looked down at the bottle, the Empress sighed and added in a slightly softened tone.

“If you simply die quietly, I will write off Oult’s debt to Desart.”

A life valued at one hundred million gold.

Should she be honored that she wasn’t treated like cheap trash?

Swallowing a bitter smile, Mokyeong picked up the bottle the Empress had thrown.

Seemingly pleased by how obediently she took the bottle, the Empress’s gaze softened minutely.

A woman who did as she was told, shrank back when frightened, and ultimately bowed her head whenever family and the family name were brought up.

The Rowan the Empress knew must have been such a woman.

Mokyeong uncapped the bottle.

The moment a sweet, alluring scent of poison grazed the tip of her nose, her eyes snapped open.

‘Green-Scaled Snake Venom?’

It was a poison Mokyeong knew extremely well.

A lethal toxin harvested from poisonous snakes bearing blue scales, strong enough to burn the esophagus and stop the heart even if just a single drop was swallowed.

‘This exists in this world, too?’

Mokyeong unconsciously brought the bottle a little closer to her nose.

The scent was unmistakable. The purity wasn’t bad, either.

Suddenly, the image of the Oult mountain range from Rowan’s memories flashed through her mind.

Countless poisonous herbs and venomous creatures.

A mountain where outsiders wouldn’t dare set foot carelessly.

If a poison like the Green-Scaled Snake Venom existed here as well, then any number of toxic substances she didn’t know about could also be out there.

Things that were already extinct in the Central Plains or impossible to find even if she spent a lifetime searching might be living quite comfortably somewhere in those mountain ranges.

‘It’s a goldmine.’

At that thought, Mokyeong’s heart beat wildly of its own accord.

“……What are you doing?”

Mokyeong snapped back to reality at the Empress’s icy voice.

Ah. Right.

Now was not the time to be drooling over the smell of poison.

She had to survive first if she wanted to even think about going to Oult.

Mokyeong instantly changed her expression, bowing so deeply that her forehead slammed hard against the floor as she spoke.

“Your Imperial Majesty the Empress! I am grateful for your merciful proposal, but please, I beg you to also consider the countermeasure I have in mind!”

Seeing Mokyeong suddenly prostrate herself flat, the Empress narrowed her eyes.

“……A countermeasure?”

“I am not afraid to drink the poison bestowed by Your Majesty. But even if I die right now, will Her Majesty the Empress’s false accusation of trying to assassinate His Imperial Highness truly vanish?”

Mokyeong slowly lifted the forehead she had pressed against the ground.

She had struck the rough stone floor so hard that a droplet of red blood was pooling where the skin had scraped off.

“Everyone already knows the fact that it was Your Majesty who sent me to the Prince’s side. If I die, rather than suspicions disappearing, there may very well be those who think I was simply silenced to cover it all up.”

The Empress’s gaze shifted minutely. Mokyeong did not miss that reaction.

“On the contrary, what if I prove my own innocence?”

“The moment it comes to light that I did not poison His Imperial Highness, Your Majesty the Empress—who sent me to his side—will also gain the legitimate justification of having no connection to this incident.”

Silence hung inside the prison cell for a moment.

“Therefore, please grant me a chance, Your Majesty.”

The Empress stared quietly at the woman prostrated before her.

Unfamiliar.

Her face was definitely Rowan Oult’s, and her voice and body were identical.

Yet, her eyes were different.

‘Did she always have eyes like that?’

The Empress hadn’t only known Rowan for a day or two.

Three years of summoning her to her maternal home of Desart and working her to the bone like a maid, followed by another two years of seating her in the position of Imperial Consort to use her hands and feet.

A total of five years.

She had prided herself on knowing better than anyone else what kind of human Rowan Oult was.

She would grow weak if family was mentioned, and she would cower if yelled at. She was a woman who, even if struck across the face just once, would bite her lip and bow her head to avoid crying.

As if to verify this, the Empress took a step closer to Mokyeong.

“Your mother, left behind in Oult, is still on a sickbed, isn’t she?”

Mokyeong’s eyes flickered slightly.

“And your younger brother is in a monastery, too. You really are a child with so many things to take on.”

In the past, Rowan would have turned pale at words like those.

However, the woman before her merely looked up at her for a moment and tilted her head slightly.

“That is why I have been loyal to Your Majesty thus far.”

“However, isn’t it a completely separate matter to take the blame for a crime I did not commit and die because of it?”

The Empress’s gaze hardened coldly.

Mokyeong scoffed inwardly.

‘Testing me, are we?’

She was deliberately poking at the spot where Rowan was most vulnerable.

Her mother, her younger brother, and her family.

To check her reaction.

Mokyeong smiled faintly, pretending not to notice.

After gazing at that expression for a long moment, the Empress suddenly reached out.

Her chin was roughly grabbed.

“You.”

The Empress dragged Mokyeong’s face closer.

“Are you truly Rowan Oult?”

Mokyeong’s gaze wavered for a split second, but it was fleeting. Fortunately, the Empress seemed to take that as mere fear on her part.

“How can a person change this much in a single day?”

Mokyeong didn’t bother to answer, simply biting her lip quietly.

Sometimes, a resolute gaze was a more definitive response than a hasty reply.

A faint sneer hung on the corners of the Empress’s lips.

“Hmph, it seems you’ve even lost your mind now that your time to die has come.”

Roughly letting go of her chin, the Empress turned around.

“Don’t try any half-baked tricks. The cleanest outcome is for you to die right here, right now.”

Just as she was about to take a step,—

“His Imperial Highness the Prince is not yet dead.”

Stiffly, the Empress’s footsteps halted.

Mokyeong continued speaking, looking at that back.

“If it is the same poison I drank, then His Highness is still alive.”

The Empress slowly turned around.

In those freezing purple pupils, an emotion other than annoyance or contempt surfaced for the very first time.

“……Are you certain?”

“Yes.”

This time, too, Mokyeong replaced petty pleading with clear, steady eyes.

“Please grant me this chance. I will prove it.”

The Empress’s eyes narrowed as she looked down at Rowan.