My Body Has Been Possessed By Someone - Chapter 121

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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 121
* * *
Just before departing for the Divine Temple, Silvien Valentino wandered through his mansion with heavy, deliberate steps.
His first destination was Kanna Adis’s bedroom.
As he stood gazing into the room, Kanna’s figure wavered before his eyes—her body curled tight, her words tumbling out hesitantly.
“I… I’d like to go out for a bit, but… my clothes are dirty.”
“Then wash them yourself. What are your hands for?”
That was what the maid had said, or so he’d heard. Of course, it was nothing.
“There was… there was an insect in my meal…”
“And?”
“…”
“Don’t leave a single grain. Really, you have no appreciation for food.”
What was more absurd was that Kanna had actually chewed and swallowed the insect along with everything else.
A foolish woman.
He couldn’t fathom what she feared so greatly that she would consume vermin.
“Get up this instant! It’s already morning!”
He could almost hear the sharp crack of a slap across Kanna’s cheek. Of course, it was merely a hallucination. He knew it was a hallucination.
But for her, it would have been far more than that.
“As punishment for violating visiting hours, the lady has imposed a sentence. You are not to leave this room for the next week.”
This was a bedroom, not a prison.
Yet that woman couldn’t even leave of her own volition.
The suffocation returned.
A pressure, as if someone were pressing down upon his throat. Silvien fled the bedroom.
But the corridor offered no reprieve.
“Kyaaah!”
Kanna slipped and crashed.
She had stepped upon a section the maids had deliberately oiled. Her head struck hard, blood streaming down her face. The maids who witnessed it erupted in cruel laughter.
Kanna’s eyes welled with tears, yet she laughed along with them in a hollow, broken way.
And then the Dining Hall.
“Where did you learn such abysmal table manners! Remove her plate at once!”
Josephine’s sharp cry rang out, and a wicked smile suddenly crossed her face as an idea struck her.
“Better yet, mix all the food together in one bowl. I think that would be more convenient for Kanna.”
“Yes, madam.”
Fruit, vegetables, steak, stew, water, sauce—everything blended together. Mixed like slop and hurled before Kanna.
“What are you waiting for? Eat.”
Kanna trembled as she forced the mixture into her mouth. But she couldn’t bear it, and soon she was retching violently.
“Such a graceless creature.”
Josephine watched the spectacle alongside her maids.
Kanna heaved alone, her shoulders shaking. She vomited again and again until only bile remained.
“My appetite is quite spoiled. Since you made this mess, clean it yourself.”
I clicked my tongue disapprovingly and added, “What a brute.”
“This beast of a thing.”
A beast. Yes, a beast.
Now that I thought about it, hadn’t I used those very words myself? At a party one evening, in the garden at night, to a disheveled Kanna Adis.
“You’re worse than a beast.”
Silvien Valentino stopped in his tracks.
When I came to my senses, I had somehow wandered into the Garden. He stood motionless, then turned his head.
To him, it was merely a beautiful garden.
Yet even this place had not been safe.
“C-cold, so cold. Please, let me inside. Mother, I’m sorry.”
On a day when snow fell in sheets, Kanna Adis stood barefoot in the Garden, pleading. Once again, she had failed to make her scheduled visit on time.
Three times a day. Morning, afternoon, midday. If she was even a minute late, Josephine would rage like wildfire. She would punish with thunderous severity.
She had lived that way for seven years.
“I don’t understand how the House of Adis educates their daughter.”
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“Am I asking something difficult of you? Simply keep to a schedule, that’s all. Is that truly so hard?”
Josephine, draped in a fox fur stole and fur coat, looked down at Kanna Adis with mockery.
“When I was young, I thought all the children of noble houses were perfect, but looking at you, Kanna, they clearly aren’t. Or perhaps it’s because you’re a bastard?”
She revealed her own petty inferiority complex, twisting Kanna Adis, pressuring her, squeezing her relentlessly until not a drop remained.
“I was wrong.”
“That’s enough. Reflect here until I give you permission to leave.”
Josephine snorted and turned away, disappearing into the warmth of the Valentino Mansion. For hours, trembling Kanna Adis wept in the Garden, tears mixing with snowflakes as she cried.
“M-mother, mother, mother….”
I closed my eyes. The voice that echoed like a phantom hallucination scattered.
I opened them again. I quickened my pace. Only when I entered the Carriage did I breathe freely.
“We shall depart, Your Excellency.”
Silvien Valentino did not respond. The Carriage moved. It pulled away from the Valentino Mansion. He gazed coldly out the window at the shrinking structure.
In that moment, Kanna Adis’s voice echoed once more.
“The ostracism a woman like me endures, the suffering experienced in such a beautiful Mansion—surely it meant nothing to you.”
It was true. Painfully true.
I knew Kanna Adis was not faring well.
I had known.
I had known, and yet….
Why hadn’t it struck me as it did now?
The answer lay in her words as well. Perhaps I had unconsciously deemed it insignificant compared to my own work, the battles I fought with my life on the line, the struggles, the protection—all of it.
Perhaps I had thought of her suffering as merely one among countless others in this world, as tediously commonplace.
That was why I had shown no interest.
Silvien Valentino had shown her no interest whatsoever.
A memory surfaced—long ago, very long ago, when I had caught a girl attempting to run away.
I had been a boy being raised as the next Divine Spirit of the Grand Temple when I heard that he had defected to the Empire, and I was conducting a covert search.
At that moment, I saw fourteen-year-old Kanna Adis.
The Kanna of those days was astoundingly ignorant. She walked the streets without even realizing she had become a target for bandits.
I considered leaving her be, but then I recalled the aid Duke Adis had rendered me during combat. Thinking of the Duke who had helped me on multiple occasions, I seized his daughter and delivered her to House of Adis.
The way that girl glared at me with such sorrowful eyes. She looked at me as though I were a murderer driving her toward a steep cliff.
Rage, hatred, sorrow, and despair—a gaze that churned like molten lava.
After meeting that stare, I found myself recalling it once or twice a year. It was an intensity that lingered.
In truth, even now I could summon that image vividly if I wished. Perhaps that was why, when I encountered Kanna Adis again years later and received her proposal, I gave it serious consideration.
“You wish to avoid the engagement with Princess Lilienne, don’t you?”
Of course I did.
But I knew dozens of ways to evade that engagement.
There was no real need to resort to such a clumsy sham marriage….
“Very well.”
Yet Silvien Valentino accepted. After all, it was not an unfavorable proposal.
And at that moment, I was curious—how had that girl with such fierce eyes grown up?
But why was it? Silvien Valentino soon forgot those eyes from back then.
When I met Kanna Adis again, I felt remarkably little. No interest stirred within me.
Whether she lived or died.
I had no desire to know what suffering she endured in the Valentino Mansion.
Silvien Valentino let out a low laugh.
Yes, that was certainly true—so why was I investigating her now?
I had even tortured my employees to extract every scrap of information.
What kind of life had Kanna Adis lived in this mansion? What suffering had she endured? Now I was consumed with curiosity.
Now, of all times.
* * *
“Hm?”
On the first night at the Divine Temple, just before sleep claimed her, Kanna Adis started in surprise. Silvien Valentino had come to find her.
“Were you sleeping?”
“No. I was just about to retire….”
Kanna Adis looked him up and down.
Standing in the dark corridor, he was impeccably dressed. Even the cravat at his neck bore not a single wrinkle. His appearance was as breathtakingly beautiful as always, almost tediously so.
‘What is this?’
Yet something felt subtly amiss. Kanna Adis tilted her head in puzzlement.
“What is the matter?”
“A moment.”
“Ah….”
A moment.
With only those words spoken tersely, he pushed the door wide open and stepped into the room.
“…?”
Why was he doing this? I was bewildered, but I did not turn him away.
‘Could there be something we need to discuss beforehand?’
Tomorrow is the annulment ceremony. I hadn’t even known if there were any details to align before then. Perhaps that’s why he came on this late night, so unlike himself.
“What brings you here? Please, sit down.”
But he didn’t sit on the sofa.
Instead, he leaned his back against the wall. His head tilted at an angle as he gazed at her.
“…?”
Kanna Adis met his stare. After studying him for a while, she finally noticed it.
What was strange. What was different from usual.
His face, bathed in moonlight, was far too vivid. Silvien Valentino’s face was far too clear.
The expression that had always existed behind his hazy mask and dazzling smile was now strikingly sharp in this moment.
“What’s the matter?”
Why was he doing this? Why had he come with such an unguarded face? An ominous premonition crept up the back of my neck.
“Why are you acting like this all of a sudden?”
“I couldn’t say.”
A blunt answer. Utterly lacking in sincerity.
“I don’t know myself.”
He lacked even basic courtesy. Kanna Adis glared at him in exasperation.
He was looking down at her with a crooked, disrespectful gaze. Absurd. What was with that insolent expression?
“Didn’t you come here because you had something to say?”
“Ah, yes.”
Silvien Valentino tilted his head back languidly. His disheveled silver hair fell across one eye. The glimpse of his blue eyes seemed weary.
“It seems like I might.”
“….”
“Or perhaps I don’t.”
What is this….
Had he been drinking? Was he actually intoxicated?
No, there was no smell of alcohol on him. Besides, alcohol wasn’t forbidden at the Grand Temple, was it?
“If you have no business here, then leave.”
Kanna Adis composed herself. She was startled by how unlike Silvien Valentino this was, but she had no intention of being swayed.
“The annulment ceremony is tomorrow morning. I need to wake up early, so I should get some rest.”
“The annulment ceremony.”
He repeated the words in a hollow voice. His face looked like a doll with only the shell remaining. That was what made Kanna Adis feel an eerie chill.
A Silvien Valentino who didn’t smile….
“I sent Josephine Elester away that very day.”
“I know. I heard.”
The news had spread quickly.
Josephine, who had been acting as the mistress of the Valentino Mansion, had been driven out to the countryside. And to Cletin, no less—a place so cold and filled with barbarians that it was practically a wasteland!
“Did you hear?”
“Yes.”
“So.”
“Yes?”
“So what will you do now?”
“….”
I blinked rapidly.
What do I do? How could I possibly follow the thread of this conversation?
Silvien Valentino exhaled a long sigh.
Then, with a rather irritable gesture, he swept his hair back. Finally, his eyes were revealed. And he asked again.
“What will you do?”
His blue eyes pierced through me with their gaze.
“Will you come back?”

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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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