VL 06

Chapter 6

Mokyeong bowed her head even deeper toward the Prince.

“Your Highness, are you truly not going to wake up? Even when everyone is waiting so desperately for you?”

At her voice brushing against his ear, the muscles in the Prince’s face twitched minutely. It almost looked as though he were gritting his teeth.

He was awake, after all.

And yet, seeing that he refused to open his eyes until the very end, it seemed he meant to wait for her to give up first.

‘His stubbornness is truly something else.’

Well, of course. This was a man who had tried to complete his master plan even at the cost of killing his own wife; he certainly wouldn’t yield so easily just because of this little trick.

Quietly observing him, Mokyeong cupped the Prince’s cheek in her hand.

Whether his body temperature had returned to normal or not, the skin beneath her palm felt burning hot.

That conversely meant Mokyeong’s own body temperature was chillingly cold.

As if startled by that cool contact, tiny goosebumps sprouted along the back of the Prince’s neck.

With a soft smirk, Mokyeong tilted her head down even further.

“Ah!”

“What in the world is…………!”

As their lips met, the Prince’s mouth twitched frantically, looking thoroughly caught off guard by the unexpected turn of events.

Seizing that exact opening, Mokyeong forced her tongue past his tightly sealed lips.

‘He should consider it an honor that even though he tried to kill this body, I am resorting to a kiss just to keep him alive.’

Swallowing back a sneer, Mokyeong channeled the internal energy she had painstakingly gathered over the past day—precious as a single bushel of rice scraped from the very bottom of an almost empty jar—onto the tip of her tongue and pushed it deep inside his mouth.

At that instant, like a miracle, the Prince—who had been keeping his eyes closed as if dead—snapped them wide open.

Their gazes locked at a distance so close their breaths mingled.

She could see the sky-blue irises trembling and fluttering in shock.

A storm of sheer bewilderment and blinding fury instantly flashed through those azure eyes.

It was a gaze far too vibrant to belong to a man who had been playing dead just moments before.

How lovely.

When Mokyeong slowly pulled her head back, a long, glistening thread of silver saliva stretched between them, snapping as their connection broke.

Curving the corners of her eyes into cheerful crescent moons as if it were nothing at all, she whispered brightly.

“You’re finally awake, Your Highness.”

With his eyes open, the Prince was blindingly, breathtakingly beautiful.

His brilliant golden hair was slightly disheveled from lying down like a corpse, but rather than looking unkempt, it added a bizarre, intoxicating allure that contrasted sharply with his usual immaculate composure.

Add to that those vivid blue eyes carved like precious gemstones, a sharp bridge of the nose, and the rose-colored lips that had just been pressed against her own.

‘Truly worthy of being called the finest beauty in the empire.’

While Mokyeong admired his face with genuine appreciation, those lovely blue eyes mirrored Rowan’s features completely.

And then, the man’s expression chilled with terrifying speed.

‘Well, I expected at least this much.’

In her memories, Carden had never hidden his utter revulsion, not even when mere fingertips brushed against Rowan Oult.

Even when he was forced to spend time with her out of mere obligation, he never lost his polished grace and decorum, yet the gaze he cast her way was always laden with hostility and wariness.

That was never the look of a husband gazing at his wife.

He had treated Rowan merely as a political obstacle that needed to be pruned away when the time was right.

Thus, the poisoned tea he had finally handed her must have been his final blade aimed straight at Rowan’s heart.

If everything had gone according to his plan, the moment Carden ‘miraculously’ opened his eyes, Rowan Oult’s head would already have been severed from her shoulders.

But look at this.

Rowan hadn’t died.

She was even alive and well, having utterly derailed Carden’s grand scheme.

Strictly speaking, it was ‘Dang Mokyeong’ who had done it, but she already considered herself to be Rowan now, so it hardly mattered.

“You.”

His deeply muffled voice scraped against her like jagged glass.

“What on earth……… did you just do to me?”

Even just hearing his voice made it obvious how furious he was.

Without a shred of fear, Mokyeong smiled faintly and released her hand from his cheek and neck.

“Nothing at all.”

Perhaps because she had truly died and come back to life, or perhaps due to the residual venom left inside her body, her temperature right then was as cold as a corpse’s.

A fresh ripple of goosebumps broke out across Carden’s skin where her chilly fingertips had just brushed.

Watching him with complete nonchalance, Mokyeong quietly added.

“I simply woke our sleeping Prince a little ahead of schedule.”

Carden’s expression shifted into something unfathomable.

To claim she had done nothing right after forcing something into his mouth—

The newly awakened husband wore a look of utter disbelief, but Mokyeong was no mind reader.

Besides, she didn’t even have the luxury to dissect his reactions in detail.

“Oh, Carden! My son!”

The Emperor came rushing toward them.

As the Emperor pulled Carden into a tight, tearful embrace of pure joy, the frozen nobles and guards finally snapped out of their stupor and began to buzz.

The Prince had truly come back to life.

And he had done so like the legendary First Emperor of old!

Originally, the ‘grace period’ was merely a ceremonial custom.

No one actually expected someone to rise from the dead like a legend just by waiting a week.

They only observed it because it was written in the imperial code of etiquette.

Tales of divine blood returning from the clutches of death were little more than ancient fairy tales by now.

Yet that very impossibility had just played out right before their eyes.

“Absurd!”

“D-Did a dead man really come back to life?”

“Her Imperial Highness the Consort said it was a death-like sleep earlier, didn’t she? I guess it was true!”

“What? Then he wasn’t actually dead?”

“But the imperial physician explicitly declared him dead…………”

The murmurs swelled rapidly.

Some crossed themselves with pale, disbelieving faces, while others dropped to their knees before the Prince as if witnessing a genuine divine miracle.

The Emperor wept in triumph, the Empress wore an expression of carefully masked relief, and the crowd whispered amongst themselves, utterly confused as to whether this was a true miracle or not.

Ironically, the only person put into an awkward position by all of this was the ‘resurrected’ Prince himself.

Clutched in the Emperor’s embrace, Carden glanced toward his elite guards and shrewdly figured out what course of action he needed to take next.

The plan had failed.

However, everyone already believed he had died and returned to life.

If that was the case, there was no reason for him to correct them.

“Your Majesty………… Have I truly returned from the dead?”

His face was pale as he pressed a hand to his brow, faking a trembling voice.

He looked every bit like a man who had genuinely clawed his way back from the grave.

“Why am I in a coffin…… I distinctly remember drinking the tea the Consort poured for me and collapsing…………”

Her husband glared at Mokyeong with a twisted, disbelieving expression.

Will you look at this man talk?

Strictly speaking, the tea leaves had been brought by the Prince himself, and Rowan had merely poured the water.

Yet listening to him speak like that made it sound as though Rowan had deliberately prepared poisoned tea and fed it to her husband with a straight face.

‘He tries to turn the tables on me the second he’s revived.’

If it were the original Rowan, she would have been too intimidated by the Empress and the Prince to mount a proper defense, but Mokyeong was different.

“Your Highness! Your mind must still be scattered because the poison hasn’t fully cleared your system! Think back carefully. It was the Prince himself who brewed the tea leaves. I merely poured it for you.”

When Mokyeong openly and in full detail brought up the events of that day, a look of profound disbelief flashed across Carden’s face.

Their gazes clashed violently in mid-air.

One side was blue and icy, while the other shone with unyielding grit.

In a battle like this, momentum was everything.

That was the very secret that had allowed her mother—who barely knew how to handle even a single poison properly—to rise all the way to the position of Second Wife in the Tang Family of Sichuan.

With a voice that sounded as though she were about to burst into tears, Mokyeong threw herself flat onto the floor and sobbed.

“I am merely overwhelmed with guilt for waking up alone, Your Highness. I know not whose doing this was, but it seems someone attempted to assassinate both you and me. Therefore, Your Majesty! I beg of you, thoroughly uncover the truth of what happened today!”

Snapping her head up, the corners of Mokyeong’s eyes were already flushed red.

For someone trained in martial arts, regulating her blood circulation or manufacturing tears on command was hardly a difficult feat.

Though her internal energy was currently bottomed out, this much was more than enough.

Thick tears immediately welled up and spilled over her reddened eyelids.

“I wouldn’t have cared if I had died right then and there, but what about Your Highness? You are the precious bloodline of His Majesty and the noble pillar who must assist the Crown Prince; I am simply terrified as to how such a horrific thing could occur! Therefore, Your Majesty, please catch the culprit! Make absolute certain this never happens again!”

She wailed like a woman who had miraculously recovered a lover she thought she’d lost forever, appealing to the Emperor with a pale, frantic expression as if a war had just broken out.

It was a stellar, highly convincing performance from someone who, just moments prior, had been using Carden’s very life as leverage to save her own skin.