I Became My Ex-Boyfriend’s Concubine - Chapter 22

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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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Episode 22

Hyeon stared blankly at the shadow stretching long across the bookshelf, wavering in candlelight, then closed the book.
When he covered his heavy, fatigue-laden eyelids with his palm, a familiar voice reached him from beside him.
“Your Highness.”
“How much time has passed?”
“The Yin Hour is nearly spent, Your Highness.”
“Your Highness!”
Over Yun’s worried voice came Lang’s plaintive interjection.
Hyeon removed his hand from his face and lifted his head. His eyes met those of Lang, who looked anxious enough that something might go wrong at any moment.
“Your Highness, it has already been two days since you retired to the Chimjeon. If this continues and your health truly suffers, what will you do then? Please, you must go to the Chimjeon now.”
“Lang.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“What of Lady Yeo?”
At those words, Lang’s lips tightened for a moment before she bowed her head.
“As you commanded, she has been moved to the Cold Palace. Moreover, I have ensured that all the Imperial Guards who witnessed the situation have been thoroughly silenced.”
“I see.”
Hyeon slowly closed his eyes.
The conversations he had shared with Yeo Danbi at Uisanggo the night before kept circling through his mind, making sleep impossible.
“Your Highness.”
Lang’s voice called again. Still with his eyes closed, Hyeon asked quietly.
“Why do you keep calling me?”
“Do you truly intend to leave the Lady in the Cold Palace as she is?”
Hyeon slowly opened his eyes. When he turned his head, he met the anxious gaze of Lang.
Lang gripped the sword at her right hip as she continued.
“Surely Your Highness saw it yourself. That was no ordinary woman’s handiwork.”
Hyeon gazed quietly at Yun, who lowered his head in agreement with Lang’s words, and swallowed a sigh within.
Lang’s words were entirely correct.
In that instant when her blade met his, Hyeon had grasped it instinctively.
This was not the sword of a woman who had picked up a blade once or twice. Clearly it was the handiwork of someone who could not have achieved such skill without severing countless lives before.
And that pale blade had been aimed directly at him.
“She must surely be an assassin who infiltrated the palace to harm Your Highness.”
Hyeon reclined lightly against the floor with his arms crossed. The moment he lay down, a wave of accumulated fatigue washed over him.
A thin smile soon played across his lips.
“Usang will throw a fit. Calling his own daughter an assassin, no less.”
It was not strange that Lang would suspect her so.
Of late, the air within the palace had grown increasingly heavy and ominous. Though the palace was supposed to be the safest place under heaven, Hyeon found his life threatened at unpredictable moments.
He had dodged arrows that arrived without warning more than once. Oddly enough, the point at which these threats became overt coincided with Yeo Danbi’s entry into the palace.
And had she not crossed swords with him directly at Uisanggo just last night?
Usang’s daughter, who had handled nothing sharper than an embroidery needle, wielding such Swordsmanship.
It was difficult to dismiss as mere coincidence a spectacle witnessed by so many.
Yet there remained one fact that troubled Hyeon.
“Lang.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“What do you make of what she said?”
“You mean that claim about being an Outsider?”
Yeo Danbi, crying out that this was a virtual world and that she had come from reality.
Truth be told, Hyeon understood scarcely half of what she had said.
It made no sense from the start. How could anyone believe that this tangible world was false?
Yet he could not dismiss her claims as mere nonsense either. The strange things he himself had experienced aligned perfectly with her testimony.

“You know. That dream you had—it was no mere dream.”

In a dream no one else remembered, Hyeon had been fully alive. Or rather, he had believed it to be reality.
Until the moment when, as he was about to execute Lady Yeo, the scene suddenly shifted to the Byeonjeon in the blink of an eye.
Just moments before, he had been at Sajikdan. He had clearly seen the Imperial Guard’s blade descending toward her neck.
Then his vision rippled suddenly, and the scene was cut away as if on film, replaced by a new image.
Before the Byeonjeon, officials lined up in their familiar places, discussing state affairs.
They spoke without a care, moving and acting exactly as they always did, utterly free of suspicion.

“……Lang.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“You truly remember nothing at all?”
“Your Majesty? What do you mean?”

It felt as though he alone had become an outsider in this world.
Strangely, no one questioned the way the world repeated itself identically to before.
As if everything were happening for the first time, only Hyun remembered what had come before.
Ah, yes. He must have been dreaming.
That was Hyun’s conclusion. Or rather, it had to be.
Otherwise, there would be nothing but rumors that a king had gone mad.
Hyun acted in direct opposition to what he had experienced in the dream. He did not allow Yeo Danbi into his bedchamber, and he refused outright to consummate their union.
Yet watching her throw herself at him with such abandon, Hyun found himself half-convinced of the dream’s meaning—that it might be some sort of premonitory warning from heaven, urging him not to repeat the same catastrophe.
But that conviction did not last long before it was brutally shattered.

“The concubine took her own life……?”
“Indeed, Your Majesty. I witnessed her jump into the Lakeside with my own eyes, but I was too late to stop her. Forgive me, Your Majesty.”

The news that Yeo Danbi had attempted to take her own life was something Hyun found utterly impossible to believe.
The cold, piercing gaze of that woman who had tried to kill him in the dream remained vivid in his mind.
He could not forget the searing intensity she had shown when she dueled the Queen over the robes for the Ritual of Praying for Rain.
Yet such a woman had attempted suicide.
Only then did Hyun understand.
Even as he denied it, he had been placing complete faith in that dream.
Deep beneath his consciousness, he had already accepted it as fact.
It had been too vivid a dream—so vivid that he could overlay fragments of it onto the real woman before him.
So Hyun needed certainty.
Proof that it was no longer reality, that it was merely a dream.
But the moment he crossed blades with her at Uisanggo, Hyun sensed it instinctively. This was undoubtedly the same Yeo Danbi from his dream.
When he realized they shared the same memories, Hyun felt a strange joy before any shock could take hold.
The relief that perhaps he alone was not askew in this world seemed to lift a burden from his shoulders.
That was why he could not simply deny what she said.
To deny her was to deny everything he had experienced—everything still vivid before his eyes.
“She was defenseless.”
“Your Majesty?”
“The concubine. Her eyes were different from before.”
Hyun clearly remembered that cold gaze that had clashed with his own.
But though the sensation of crossed blades had been the same, her eyes were entirely different.
Last night, when he faced her, her eyes had shown clear confusion, wavering without purpose.
Her movements against him, while familiar, were mixed with hesitation.

“This is all a game! It’s a game, I tell you!”

Hyun rose from his seat, recalling the voice that had echoed through his mind. Lang lifted his head to follow.
“I must go to the Cold Palace.”
“Your Majesty!”
“Show me the way.”
Lang hesitated a moment, biting his lip, then turned to lead the way ahead. Yun followed after.
Hyun traced the words she had left behind as her footsteps faded away, turning them slowly over in his mind.
A game. So it was a game.

***

Hyun entered the familiar six-digit code into the Keypad. With a cheerful beep, the entrance door swung open.
Stepping inside, a peculiar silence untouched by human warmth brushed across his skin.
Hyun swallowed a heavy sigh and removed his shoes. The cold emanating from the floor traveled up through his soles, spreading through the frigid room.
As he moved into the Living Room, his eyes caught on the scattered empty Beer Cans lying about. It matched exactly the scene Soma had described seeing when she first discovered Danbi.
Hyun stared at the crushed cans for a long moment, then slowly shook his head. A flood of unanswered calls on his Mobile Phone flashed through his mind.
Without meaning to, my grip tightened on my fist.
“Fool.”
Why had it been so difficult to pick up that one call?
If I’d known it would come to this, I should have just pretended to lose back then.
As regret and self-recrimination flooded in, a dim light pierced my vision.
I lifted my head, following the offending glow. Then, as if entranced, I moved slowly toward the source of the light seeping through.
Light was flickering across the top of the Helmet-shaped Device.
I picked it up carefully. My brow furrowed as I examined it thoroughly from every angle.
“What is this?”
A sickly red glow pulsed in the palm of my hand.

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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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