Abandoned Empress's Survival Manual Beside the Male Lead - Chapter 64

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 64
How could this debt-ridden estate dare present itself before her eyes?
It must have looked pitiful and contemptible, of course.
And so she’d begged the sun of Parsa, again and again, until she wrested a gold vein from it.
Not a sun spirit, but the sun itself couldn’t ignore Lorelthiana’s pleas.
There wasn’t a soul in the world who could refuse her requests and still draw breath.
Sherkan clenched his teeth.
The Great Temple’s territory held Extraterritorial Status.
If one made a lavish donation, the Great Temple embraced anyone—no questions asked.
A regicide, a fugitive empress—it mattered nothing.
Present sufficient tribute, and the Great Temple would shield that existence with stubborn finality.
His innards writhed without mercy, as though he might vomit everything within him at any moment. Every inch below his throat twisted with revulsion.
It was the same horror he’d known at the end of ten years in the Great Temple’s Purification Ritual as a child—when he’d completely shed the beast-kin’s hide.
Memory of violence swept through him like a flood, wrapping around his entire frame.
He was contemptible beyond measure.
Beneath beasts, beneath monsters—a wretched mongrel cur.
Who wouldn’t wish to flee from him?
What use was his title of Grand Duke?
He was nothing but a low-born bastard mongrel.
This was a truth no amount of struggle could alter.
“Your Highness, Your Highness!”
Suddenly, Sherkan began tearing through his belongings like a madman.
His tent was nearly packed for the journey to the Imperial Palace that would come soon.
The armor he’d oiled and arranged, the bundles he’d tied neatly—all of it was useless now.
“Prepare Holy Water. Get two hundred vials—no, make it two hundred—from the priests.”
“…Pardon?”
“I’ll destroy the Bannro of those beasts we found recently. Have it ready upon my return.”
“Your Highness! You cannot!”
Asran’s face drained of all color.
Bannro was the term for a mass of clotted monster spawn.
Confronting a Bannro was no simple matter.
“We cannot even properly gauge how many of those beasts swarm within that Bannro!”
Those beasts.
It was a term of contempt, spoken only by knights, that denoted monsters.
Knights hated monsters in their very dreams. So many comrades had fallen, and more would follow them.
Hatred, rage, terror…….
And so knights spoke of monsters as “those beasts”—a ritual utterance.
It was a epithet that both shook off the dread of death and honored the fallen.
“The Gonet Knight Order has nearly completed their withdrawal, Your Highness. Please, do not go……!”
Asran trembled at the thought of Sherkan entering that land of death alone.
“How much did Duke-King Zackiel offer as bounty for clearing that Bannro? Ah, twenty thousand Ribe, wasn’t it? Have the horses saddled at once. Finish preparing the Holy Water.”
“Your Highness!”
Asran seized Sherkan’s leg and clung to it, but he was no longer that powerless boy.
Even then, Sherkan had already far exceeded human strength.
Asran knew all too well that no knight order in the world could stop him now!
“Your Highness—ugh!”
Sherkan kicked away the clinging Asran, swept up the vials of Holy Water himself, and strode onward with long strides.
Asran scrambled to gather himself and rushed after Sherkan, crying out.
“Your Highness! The sun has already set—it’s truly perilous!”
Asran’s mind was in chaos.
The dreadful image of Sherkan in his beast-kin form flashed suddenly before him, and Asran felt himself slipping into panic.
* * *
Asran remembers clearly the first time Sherkan killed a man.
Sherkan was three years old.
The man he killed was none other than the commander of the Gonet Knight Order.
At that time, the knight commander had been a trusted retainer of the Previous Grand Duchess, and he would not suffer an illegitimate child with beast-kin blood to live.
That commander never knew.
He never knew his neck would be broken by the small bastard child he’d so savagely abused.
Even as his breath ceased, the former commander’s eyes held only bewilderment.
Me? Dying?
To a mere three-year-old monster?
Everyone fell into shock.
Asran was no exception.
Only when he saw Sherkan wiping away the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth with his fist did Asran grab him in terror and flee to the Annex.
This appalling incident became the catalyst for the Previous Grand Duke to take even greater interest in Sherkan.
Barbarian Half-breed.
Bastard mongrel.
Yet despite it all, Sherkan was terribly strong.
At that time, the Previous Grand Duke was still cycling through women in hopes of producing a new heir.
Back then, he still harbored hope.
Hope that he might father a new son.
Sherkan was, all things considered, an unexpectedly acquired, fierce, and rare hunting hound.
Once raised to a certain degree, he could be sent to the Subjugation Ground to bring no small amount of income to the Grand Duke’s House.
As an illegitimate child, it hardly mattered if he died facing Monsters.
From that point on, regular meals and medicinal herbs were delivered to Sherkan’s Annex—nominally an Annex, but in truth little more than a Warehouse.
But that too was brief.
The Grand Duke quickly forgot Sherkan, and the Previous Grand Duchess seized the opportunity to pour out the rage she had been holding back.
Everyone tormented Sherkan to win the Grand Duchess’s favor, crushing him with cruelty.
Once the Grand Duke’s attention waned, the physician who had been treating Sherkan regularly withdrew his support.
He simply left behind a young healer as an act of charity and departed from the chaos.
The young apprentice knight and the young healer of the same age feared their master Sherkan.
It was not long after that the Barbarian Half-breed, who surely would have frozen to death come winter, committed an unexpected act of violence.
“Your—Your Highness! You must return to the castle at once!”
It was the day Sherkan, giggling playfully, had killed all five servants who’d tried to cut off his ear as a jest.
Upon hearing the full account of the incident, the Previous Grand Duke grew excited.
“Such strength! If only I could make him obey my commands, I might reap far more spoils from the Subjugation Ground than I ever imagined!”
He could scarcely contain his joy at the prospect of creating an unparalleled instrument of slaughter.
If only that beast could be made to heed human words!
If only that could come to pass!
The Grand Duke of Gonet immediately began inquiring into methods. With his rank, there was scarcely a person of note in the world he could not meet.
The Great Temple provided the answer.
They said Sherkan’s savage violence stemmed from the Beast-kin blood flowing through him with an almost uncanny ferocity.
Thus, if the Purification Ritual were performed for ten years—three days each month, as was done at the Great Temple—he would come to understand human speech.
It was a ritual bordering on torture, yet the madness in Sherkan’s blood-red eyes truly did seem to settle, little by little.
The Grand Duke kept it strictly secret, but it could not escape the Grand Duchess’s notice.
The moment she heard the news, she grew uneasy.
The Previous Grand Duke claimed the ritual was merely to render him useful as a weapon, but what if that were not the case?
She did not trust her husband one whit.
What if that bastard mongrel truly became human through the ritual?
Then what would become of her own son?
The Grand Duchess made her decision swiftly.
As mistress of the castle, she was well-informed.
She discovered that during the Great Temple’s ritual, the Grand Duchess had secretly demanded that the Grand Duke abstain from his mistress and maintain physical purity.
It was not difficult.
The Previous Grand Duchess sold a particularly treasured Jeweled Necklace and procured a strikingly seductive woman, whom she then ushered into the Grand Duke’s Bedroom.
The Grand Duke, ever enslaved to carnal appetite, could not refuse the beauty who climbed into his bed.
The priests erupted in fury and abandoned the castle.
They even notified him that the amount of Holy Water allocated to the House of Gonet would be reduced!
Consumed by extreme shame and rage, the Previous Grand Duke immediately lashed Sherkan with his Whip.
There was no logic to it.
“Had you not been born a beast, those priestly insects would never have set foot in my castle! What I do in my own Bedroom is no one’s concern! It is all because of you, you wretch!”
The Grand Duke was a man who harbored not the slightest hesitation in blaming Sherkan for deeds of his own making.
Sherkan was sent to the Great Temple covered in blood.
The Grand Duke ordered Sherkan to complete all the rituals by any means necessary.
The Great Temple withdrew when their conditions were violated, but as the Previous Grand Duke continued to apologize despite his lofty station and even sent Sherkan himself, they relented somewhat.
Besides, Sherkan of Gonet was to their eyes nothing less than a demon requiring purification, so the Great Temple ultimately decided to continue the Purification Ritual.
The Purification Ritual was cruel and agonizing.
Each time the ritual ended, Sherkan was carried in unconscious.
After a year, he crawled in on all fours of his own accord, and after another year, he walked in on two legs like a human before collapsing into sleep as if dead.
The Beast-kin blood coursing through young Sherkan’s body grew steadily lighter.
Sherkan grew accustomed to the violence masquerading as the Purification Ritual.
Asran’s young master slowly became human.
Ten years.
After ten years, the final ritual ended.
In the deepest altar of the temple.
Smoke curled from the incense burner, filling his lungs. As it had each month, the Beast-kin blood screamed and tore itself free from his body.
Being the last, that day proved particularly long and vicious.
As the ritual drew toward its end.
Sherkan began to expel everything inside him, as though he were an inverted bottle with its cap removed.
Even his own hide was shed completely.
Only then did Sherkan, who had been born like a grey monster from the moment of his birth, take on the form of a human.
Yet.
Even the High Priest had not anticipated that Sherkan’s human form would be so beautiful…….

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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