Not A Regressor - Chapter 203

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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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I Am Not a Regressor Chapter 203
Satiated Hypocrisy and Starving Virtue (7)
When had it begun?
The moment her tender father underwent such a drastic transformation.
Was it when she was forced to send away her Elder Sister?
Or when she returned as an awakener?
Or perhaps.
Had his twisted true nature been concealed beneath the mask of tenderness from the very beginning?
Just as she had performed the role of Rome’s saint to hide that she was the Leech Queen.
“…Why.”
Isabella forced her lips apart, moving them with difficulty as she spoke.
Squeezing out the words.
She asked.
“Why… did you do that?”
It was true that after she had seized real power within the family, she had significantly reduced her father’s authority.
But Paulo, who had never been an awakener to begin with, had been crushed beneath the power of the branch families even before Isabella arrived, living with nothing but a nominal title of family head.
Rather, after Isabella returned and trampled all the branch families, he was finally able to wield considerably more power than before.
And yet.
Why.
“Was I such an eyesore to you? Enough that you’d pull in the Seven Stars to kill me?”
“….”
“Say something, Father. You were always good at talking, at least.”
Isabella regarded him with a weary expression.
Paulo kept his head bowed, silently clenching his fists.
“Why… did I do it?”
His clenched fists trembled faintly.
“You really… don’t know why?”
“No. No matter how much I think about it, I don’t understand.”
“Because of you… because of you alone! Don’t you know how pathetic a life I’ve lived?!”
Paulo cried out as if wailing.
“The authority of a family head? I would have preferred it before you came! I would have preferred living as a puppet of the branch families, without any hope!”
Back then, at least his heart was at peace.
Since he hadn’t been chosen by a Constellation, he could console himself that he simply lacked the fortune to become an awakener.
Though the title of family head was hollow.
At least it wasn’t pathetic.
But.
“After you… after you returned… everything fell apart.”
Isabella was capable.
Extraordinarily capable.
Regardless of whether she was an awakener or not, she possessed an innate talent for handling people.
She, who had been hiding the fact that she was an awakener of the Leech Queen, had not trampled the heads of the Branch Family using her power as an awakener.
First, she stirred up conflict among the Branch Families by dangling the lands and enterprises that only the direct line of the Colgrand Family could possess as bait.
It was like throwing a lamb into a pack of wolves.
The Branch Families, blinded by greed, lunged at the bait with fervent eyes, and she sowed discord among them, escalating the conflict into something far more vicious.
And in the midst of that chaos, she approached awakeners who displayed exceptional talent and formed a personal guard loyal to the Colgrand Family.
‘And then.’
Everything proceeded with lightning speed.
She quietly absorbed the enterprises of the Branch Families, weakened from their mutual struggles, expanding her power, and then subdued them all by force.
That’s right.
All of it.
Was something that Paulo Colgrand could have accomplished as well.
“You will never know how utterly wretched I felt!”
Isabella had achieved what he himself had abandoned as impossible.
Calmly, matter-of-factly.
As though it were nothing at all, with such effortless ease.
The wretchedness he had felt then.
Had become a sharp blade that pierced him through.
“Do you remember what you made them do after subduing the Branch Family heads? Hmm?”
“…You told them to apologize to Father.”
“Yes! You made them apologize to me!”
Ah.
How could I ever forget that nightmare?
The sight of them forced to bow their heads and bend their waists!
The contempt and mockery blazing in their eyes as they looked upon me—one who had achieved victory without lifting a finger, merely by virtue of having a capable daughter!
“If only… I had been as capable as you, if only I possessed the same talent you do.”
Then.
Had I been.
“I could have saved Cassia too… that poor child….”
Paulo curled up on the floor and wailed.
When pressure came pouring from all sides demanding that Cassia be exiled under the guise of ‘tradition.’
If only Isabella, not he, had been the family head.
“I didn’t want to know… I didn’t want to know such things.”
If only I had remained ignorant of everything.
That happy future I had thought unreachable, like a towering evil beyond my grasp.
If only I had lived without knowing it was actually a future I could have climbed to with my own two legs.
It would not have been so wretched.
It would not have been so devastating.
“I… I despise you. I despise you more than anyone, for making me face this reality.”
Paulo glared at Isabella through his tears.
“….”
Isabella stared down at Paulo, her lips pressed firmly shut, as he whimpered below her.
It hurt.
Her chest. Her heart.
As if a sharp blade were carving through her, as if a white-hot iron were searing her flesh.
It ached unbearably, relentlessly.
“…Ah, Papa.”
The words that spilled from her lips were the childhood name she had once called Paulo.
She clutched the blood-soaked hem of her dress, her teeth grinding against her lower lip.
“I… I didn’t…”
This was never what she had intended.
She had never imagined her actions would reduce him to such despair.
She had simply.
‘wanted to return to that time.’
When the entire family laughed together.
To those faded, luminous days.
She had only wanted to go back.
“Ah, ugh.”
Isabella stumbled backward, clutching her chest, her steps faltering.
How had it come to this?
How had everything fallen apart so completely?
“Ha, ha!”
Her breathing came in ragged gasps.
The bloodlust that had vanished after she drank Kwon O-jin’s blood surged forth once more, boiling within her.
Isabella raised her arm, her lips trembling violently.
A sharp, crystalline sound.
Crimson blood pooled at her fingertips.
“…Yes.”
Paulo looked up at her with hollow eyes.
“End this wretched existence with your own hands.”
As if no lingering attachment remained within him.
Paulo spoke in a flat, emotionless voice.
.”….”
Isabella trembled faintly, her blood-stained hand still raised.
Killing Paulo would be as effortless as crushing an ant beneath her heel.
All she needed to do was lower her raised hand in a single, gentle strike.
And Paulo.
would die.
“Ha, ha, ha.”
Yet why was it.
that her raised hand would not move?
Whoosh.
At that moment, a photograph swept toward her feet on the wind.
‘This is…’
The photograph she had secretly kept hidden in the drawer.
A picture taken in her childhood with her family.
“…Ah.”
Perhaps the collapse of the mansion had dislodged the contents of the drawer.
At this twist of fate—as if orchestrated by the gods themselves—a low sigh escaped Isabella’s lips.
‘I have to kill him.’
She trampled the photograph that had blown to her feet and stepped closer to Paulo.
Her breathing ragged, she raised her hand high.
‘If I don’t kill him now…’
She couldn’t fathom how he’d discovered it.
But Paulo had somehow learned that she was the Leech Queen.
‘It will bring harm to Kwon O-jin as well.’
If word leaked that Kwon O-jin had sided with the Black Star Society’s enforcer.
It was obvious as day that it would become a grave stain on him—the man now called Noe-rang and lauded as a hero.
She could not allow Paulo to leave this place alive.
That was right.
The hope she had cherished in her heart had now become an impossible dream.
“Sob, sob.”
Tears welled up in Isabella’s eyes.
“Why, why, why, why.”
The shattered fragments of her shattered hope became tears that streamed down her cheeks.
“…Our princess.”
“Don’t call me that!”
Isabella glared at Paulo and cried out.
“Don’t call me that way!”
She concentrated her mana into her raised arm as she wept.
The dark crimson blood pooling at her fingertips transformed into the shape of a massive scythe.
A scythe that resembled a vampire’s fang descended toward Paulo’s crown.
Paulo gazed up at the weeping Isabella with a faint smile.
“I’m sorry.”
“….”
“I’m sorry for being such a pathetic father.”
“Shut up, please. I have no intention of sparing you.”
Paulo had forcibly caused her dragon veins to rampage so she would be compelled to use the Leech Queen’s stigma.
With Kwon O-jin and Ha-eun’s help, they had managed to minimize the damage.
Yet at least hundreds of people had lost their lives in that monster’s assault that day.
Innocent people who had simply come to the sea to enjoy a vacation.
“Do you even realize what you’ve done?”
The image of the bereaved families wailing vividly surfaced in her mind.
Among the victims were a pregnant woman who had just conceived, newlyweds on their honeymoon, and people traveling with their parents on what they called a filial piety trip.
She herself hadn’t lived a life of only righteous deeds either.
But she knew well that she couldn’t overlook what Paulo had done simply because he was her father.
“….”
Paulo closed his eyes slowly, as if he had said all he needed to say.
“Ha, ha, ha!”
Isabella exhaled rough, ragged breaths that rose to her chin as she lifted the blood-red scythe.
‘I’ll just bring it down like this.’
Yes.
This would be the end.
If I just lower my hand thirty centimeters.
Then I would no longer have to struggle desperately, chasing after those faded days that would never return.
‘It’s not difficult.’
It’s easier than stepping on an ant crawling along the street.
‘I, I, I…!’
Isabella squeezed her eyes shut.
Tears rolled down her cheeks and dripped onto the floor from her chin.
And then.
Whoosh!
Thud, thump-thump-thump.
Paulo’s severed head rolled across the floor.
“…What?”
Isabella opened her tightly shut eyes and stared at her own arm with a bewildered expression.
The blood-red scythe gripped in her hand remained suspended high in the air, perfectly still.
“What just… how….”
As she turned her head with confused eyes, she saw.
Kwon O-jin standing impassively, a blood-stained spear gripped in his hand.
Kwon O-jin, who had been looking down at Paulo’s severed head on the ground, slowly raised his gaze.
“I killed him.”
Kwon O-jin approached the trembling Isabella and carefully embraced her.
“Kwon O-jin…?”
“It wasn’t you. I killed him.”
“Why… why would you do that?”
Isabella asked in a trembling voice.
Kwon O-jin gently patted her back and continued in a low voice.
“You didn’t do anything.”
That’s right.
She had preserved the hope she held dear in her heart, the happiness she had desperately longed for.
I didn’t destroy it with my own hands.
“It was I.”
Her hope—I crushed it.
I trampled it utterly beneath my feet.
“I killed her with these hands of mine.”

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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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