I Accidentally Resurrected My Dead Husband - Chapter 52
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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 52
“Wait. Is that the day the Rebellion broke out?”
When Ern nodded, Marquis Mosley’s face went even paler than before.
The Marquis recalled the day of the Rebellion, when the current Empress had fled bleeding, unable to even properly apply Hemostasis.
“I thought she was wounded escaping from those vermin, but it was you?”
“If I hadn’t intervened, the Empress would still be in the Followers’ hands. You should be thanking me.”
The Marquis suddenly swept his face as if exhausted. Ern was right. Even the current Emperor, who was then Crown Prince, and the Imperial Knights had no idea where the Empress was. Had they gone to rescue her, they could never have extracted her intact from that place. There were no madmen there insane enough to put a blade to the body of the Crown Prince’s pregnant lover.
“But now that insect is targeting me? Who’s incompetent enough to still not catch the Rebellion remnants hiding in the Capital?”
“Are you blaming me for that?”
The Marquis protested, but Ern fixed him with a cold stare.
“Then who’s to blame? You were supposed to bring in Cliff, fetch Ceres, deliver intelligence. Yet you’ve let those vermin run rampant all this time. Who did that?”
“That is to say…”
Marquis Mosley had nothing to say to that.
“Tell me honestly, Cain Mosley. Are you a Follower?”
“How could I possibly be?”
Marquis Mosley jumped up indignantly.
“You know better than anyone how much I despise them!”
The accusation of being in league with the Followers clearly infuriated him—his face flushed crimson.
“After what happened to my mother….”
With darkened features, Cain opened up about his childhood.
* * *
The House of Mosley had once been as wealthy as the current Baron Mosley’s line. Cain was the third son of Baron and Baroness Mosley.
Then one day, the Baron—Cain’s father—took a mistress. Naturally, the marriage deteriorated rapidly from that point. But the real problem began when she became pregnant.
The moment the woman conceived, Cain’s eldest brother died. As her belly swelled, his second sister succumbed to some nameless illness. His mother grew more wasted with each passing day. Then came the time when the father’s mistress neared full term. His mother killed that woman.
“Forgive me, Cain, for making you live as the son of a murderer. But this was the only way to save you. I have no regrets.”
His enraged father reported her, and his mother was imprisoned. She left incomprehensible words at their final meeting and died in prison. It was years later that Cain learned the truth behind his mother’s actions.
The year Cain came of age, a certain noblewoman who had been his mother’s friend gave him his mother’s journal. She said it was a dying wish—when Cain reached adulthood, he was to receive this diary.
In its pages, his father’s mistress was written to be Shar’tin, though she bore no outward mark of it, and she was also a member of a group called the “Followers.”
She had deliberately seduced his father to seize the House of Mosley, and she had cast a curse called the Golden-Hour Curse upon both the Baron and herself. Those who lay with someone under the Golden-Hour Curse and conceived would see all of their other children die—except for that one child.
If a man had no other children, he would never have children with another woman. In essence, a man would be left with only a single child born from a Follower woman.
“The Followers absorbed Houses one by one through such methods.”
At the Marquis’s explanation, Udith nodded as if hearing the story for the first time, but in truth, Udith already knew.
In the original work, before falling in love, the Female Protagonist had used the Golden-Hour Curse on the male protagonist, who was the Crown Prince. Later, when the Female Protagonist came to love him, she tried to lift the curse, but unfortunately there was no way to break it. In the end, she confessed the curse to him.
The male protagonist replied that he had no intention of taking another woman anyway, so it didn’t matter. So probably even now, the male protagonist and the Female Protagonist remained under the Golden-Hour Curse. They claimed it was no problem since they loved each other, but that was far from universal.
“A child with Follower blood becomes the House’s heir and eventually its head. Since the mother is a Follower, the child is naturally brainwashed from youth.”
It took time, but there was no surer method of assimilation. The Followers thus quietly built their power in this way. That was how they had been able to stage the Rebellion.
“That woman tried to kill me. She sent me to the battlefield as well.”
That was the very battlefield where Cain had met Ern. Three campaigns were fought in total, and the Eastern Snow Mountain where Ern served was a place where ten who entered returned as eight—essentially a death sentence. By fortune’s grace, Cain met Ern there and returned alive.
Meanwhile, Baron Mosley, who had lost three during the war—his wife, the mistress, and the unborn child—secluded himself in his manor and never emerged. The House naturally began its decline.
“Once the House became useless, the Followers stopped paying attention to me. That’s how I survived.”
And Cain had sworn vengeance. For his mother, for the elder brother and sister whose faces he barely remembered, he honed his blade of revenge. And in the end, he halted their Rebellion and exacted that vengeance—or so he thought, until the Follower remnants escaped from prison.
“In any case, madam, how could I possibly become a Follower? Is there anyone with more reason to hate them than I have?”
The Marquis insisted on his innocence, that he was absolutely not in league with the Followers. Udith nodded in acknowledgment. But what did it matter if Udith understood?
“Yet you hate them so much—why can’t you catch them?”
Ern’s mood had not improved one bit.
“I heard you were going to use Ceres to make contact with the Red Liquor Medium. How did that go? Why haven’t there been any updates?”
“Well, about that…”
The Marquis trailed off again.
“We were trying to maintain contact through Ceres, but there’s been no response from their side at all.”
Ceres and the Red Liquor Medium exchanged letters. Ceres would bury the letter under a promised tree and break a branch, and the Red Liquor Medium’s side would retrieve it.
But this time, for some reason, several days passed since the letter was buried, and they never appeared.
“It seems information leaked from the inside…”
At the Marquis’s words, veins stood out on Ern’s neck.
“How are you doing your job? You just had to take what people brought you—information, people, everything—chew it for you, and still you can’t manage that? Or shouldn’t you at least have grasped some clue? But what? You can’t even catch the Followers’ tail, yet you’re leaking information?”
“It’s not as if I leaked it intentionally. Still, the fact that they approached you at all suggests they haven’t left the Capital yet. That’s all thanks to my thorough checkpoints—”
“Oh, very thorough indeed. So thorough that those vermin are walking around openly in the Capital’s town square, is that it?”
Ern thrust his bandaged arm at the Marquis.
“How did you ever receive a marquisate, doing your job like this? The Emperor has no eye for people. That’s why you gave a marquisate to someone like this—now the Followers are running wild in the Capital’s heart. At this rate they’ll infiltrate the Imperial Palace.”
Who knows—maybe they’ll stage another Rebellion? Looking at the state of this so-called Marquis, we’ll lose next time. Ern laughed bitterly, his gaze fixed on the Marquis, whose face had crumpled as if he might weep.
Unable to bear it any longer, Udith quietly grabbed Ern’s unbandaged arm and shook her head as if to say he should stop.
“What, are you taking the Marquis’s side now?”
When had she ever taken his side? Ern felt a fresh wave of displeasure at Udith for siding with him again. Udith shook her head and pulled Ern toward herself.
“Why would you even like him?”
“That’s not it. Haven’t you noticed something strange since we entered the Marquis’s estate?”
“Strange?”
“Yes—Miss Herington’s scented candles are all the rage in the Capital right now. And yet this is the Marquis’s residence, and there are none.”
……So what? A question mark seemed to materialize above Ern’s furrowed brow.
“He’s a potential customer of ours. I have to sell candles to the Marquis’s wife later, so be reasonable about this.”
Ah, so that was it. In the midst of all this—the Marquis protesting his innocence at the top of his lungs, rebel sympathizers prowling the Capital, a situation rife with danger—she wanted to sell candles. Truly consistent. Ern had to admire it. But he had no choice but to relay the bad news to Udith.
“The Marquis is unmarried.”
Oh no. Udith’s pupils trembled with shock. The Marquis, who had been quietly eavesdropping on their conversation, seized the moment.
“Is there a law that says men can’t buy candles? I was actually thinking of stopping by a scented candle shop anyway.”
Udith’s pupils, which had been wavering, finally steadied. She placed her hand on Ern’s forearm once more and whispered.
“Please don’t say anything more to our customer.”
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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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