Since It's My First Time Being a Lady, I'll Cause Some Trouble - Chapter 31

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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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A Lady’s First Time Causing Trouble — Episode 31
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Bang!
With a violent sweep of his hand, documents and writing implements scattered across the desk clattered to the floor in a deafening cacophony.
“You insolent fools! Do you have no sense of your station?”
The Crown Prince’s face, which had once been beautiful as carved jade, was now twisted into something grotesque and hideous. His features were contorted mercilessly, and a web of burst capillaries crept across his eyes like gathering fog.
“How could this happen? How could it?”
In his youth, he had earned praise for his diligence and wit, but the Second Prince had since surrendered to indolence, squandering his days in idle pleasure.
Arka reflected that at least the man had the sense to behave according to his station.
But then the rebellion had been exposed.
And of all people, to the Second Prince—the very one the Emperor had long dismissed as contemptible.
The Emperor himself had been the first to receive word of the rebellion. He had treated it as nothing more than the blathering of a failure seeking his father’s attention.
Yet Jereon had not given up. He had sought out Arka with absolute conviction.
‘When you see a minister who displeases you, one might suspect him of harboring treasonous ambitions. I know relations between you are strained. But would it not create problems to brand someone a rebel without any evidence whatsoever?’
Despite the tone of a patient elder brother gently chiding a thoughtless younger sibling, Arka had been seized by bewilderment and agitation bordering on madness.
‘How did that damned fool discover it?’
He was well aware that Marquis Penri was recklessly plotting rebellion—because Arka himself had engineered the entire affair from the shadows.
Arka had positioned his own people to approach the discontented nobility.
It had been child’s play for his seasoned operatives to infiltrate their ranks and draw out their grievances as deftly as one filleting a fish.
He had never stepped into the light. He had merely woven truth and falsehood together with cunning precision, cast dry kindling upon the smoldering flame, and vanished.
After allowing the shortsighted nobles to believe they were using Marquis Penri for their own purposes, Arka had waited with satisfaction for the great fish to take the bait.
He had been orchestrating toward a climax.
At the moment when raised taxes brought the people’s anger and despair to a peak, the Crown Prince would expose the criminal behind the levies—the traitorous architect of the empire’s ruin.
Who would refuse to follow a hero who had saved the empire and all its subjects at such a dramatic hour?
It would be his achievement to expose the rebellion and claim the glory. He would be the one immortalized in epic verse, celebrated by all.
Not that incompetent buffoon who had stumbled upon the secret!
Arka felt a murderous hatred so overwhelming that he wanted to strangle Jereon on the spot, to tear him limb from limb while still drawing breath.
But Arka forced himself to regain composure.
The Second Prince had already been rejected by the Emperor. Now he had come seeking Arka. If the Crown Prince turned his back as well, no one would lift a finger to help the Second Prince.
‘The fact that he didn’t go to his mother first suggests he calculated that the Empress, with her nature, would be unable to suppress the rebellion and would only create confusion.’
Without the Imperial Family’s backing, how could he possibly uncover evidence of the rebellion?
Arka had chosen to ignore him, just as the Emperor had.
Jereon’s expression had been worth seeing—the face of someone shocked to discover that two people would actually dismiss a report of rebellion.
‘Then I shall stop it alone.’
As the Second Prince departed with those words, Arka had laughed him to scorn.
Arka didn’t know how Jereon had learned of the rebellion or who had let slip such crucial information, but things would not unfold as the Second Prince wished.
The subordinates serving under such an incompetent and contemptible prince could hardly be exceptional.
Even if Jereon managed to employ someone of genuine talent, they would never find evidence. Men bold enough to dream of rebellion would not be foolish enough to leave traces behind.
Still, to be safe, Arka had conducted searches of the conspirators’ residences and estates, looking for anything that might serve as evidence.
He had ransacked even Marquis Penri’s personal chambers, yet nothing remotely incriminating had surfaced.
‘Even an idiot regains his wits when faced with something like this.’
But Arka’s carefully laid plans had collapsed in ruins mere days before their culmination.
And it was Jereon—the very man he had mocked—who had torn it all down.
Not only that, but Jereon possessed evidence that Arka himself had failed to find.
Moreover, he had unraveled a chain of serious crimes centered on Toglo Street, exposing them in meticulous detail.
The people had showered the Second Prince with passionate support and acclaim as the hero who had saved the nation. Even the indifferent Emperor had turned his gaze upon him.
“How did that wretched fool manage it? Could it be the Empress has played some hand?”
Arka refused to acknowledge Jereon’s capability. That dull, lazy creature could not possibly have become competent simply by changing his mind.
Yet at the emergency council, the Second Prince had displayed a side of himself no one had seen before.
He answered every question as though he had prepared in advance, and he even dared to rebut the Crown Prince.
In his desperation, Arka had fallen prey to Jereon’s provocation and made a fatal error—revealing his true intentions.
The cold stares of the nobility directed at him in that moment were a first: in all his years as Crown Prince, he had never been met with such contempt.
‘How could a mere matter of one obscure noble family’s death in prison spiral into something so vast?’
When Arka had received a letter from Gorden in prison, asking him to keep the secret in exchange for a lighter sentence, he had nearly fainted.
How had that wretched commoner discovered that the rebellion orchestrated by Marquis Penri was Arka’s own contrivance?
It was only yesterday that Arka had felt relief, thinking that because he had disposed of the matter swiftly, disaster had been averted. Had he hesitated even a moment, all would have been lost.
Gorden. Netzer. Jereon.
These men—who ought to have remained meek and obedient beneath his heel—had dared to raise their heads and act against him!
“Damn them! Damn them all! Damn them!”
Unable to contain his rage, he roared aloud and brought his fists down upon the desk with savage force.
To all appearances, Arka was flawless—yet he harbored a fatal flaw.
Arrogance.
It blinded him to what he should have seen and heard clearly, and it led him to underestimate the capabilities and judgments of others.
‘If this continues, my position will crumble.’
Thanks to the Second Prince’s dissolute ways, he had gained high regard without lifting a finger, and he had spent his days counting down to his coronation.
But now that Jereon had won such favor among the people, the nobles who supported him might fracture into factions.
‘No—they will fracture.’
The Empress, who distrusted him and doted on her own son, would seize upon this incident as a pretext to make her move in earnest.
And if he wasn’t careful, they might uncover that he was the one who orchestrated the treason.
Arka clenched his teeth.
No one would dare steal his glory. Never.
* * *
Baron Netzer’s Estate was absolute chaos.
There had been no floods or wildfires, yet it resembled a disaster zone nonetheless.
Ever since the broadsheet, letters of inquiry had poured in—not just from relatives, but from acquaintances of acquaintances, from people they’d chanced to meet once in passing.
Some had written out of genuine concern, but half of them had sent their letters simply to learn details that hadn’t made it into the newspaper.
Interview requests came down in torrents from the Newspaper Office, and both the Baron’s wife and I were summoned to Count Rosetti as witnesses.
After the Imperial Family announced a formal investigation into the deaths of the Gorden family, the Baron sent back Count Batori’s private soldiers to his domain.
No matter how unavoidable the circumstances of the loan, a Baron harboring private soldiers—a privilege granted only to a select few of the great houses—was a liability in itself.
As a result, the Baron and his wife hastily summoned a lawyer to draw up a statement justifying the loan of soldiers, then threw themselves into the search for skilled bodyguards to replace them.
And I had to answer a mountain of condolence letters.
“My fingers are killing me! Who’s going to take responsibility if I catch hay fever?”
I’d thought that once I stopped the treason, all my troubles would vanish and life would run smoothly. So why does disaster keep piling on?
“What kind of life is this, anyway?”
When I worked as a maidservant, my body ached, but at least my mind had peace.
Still, not everything was terrible.
My reputation had begun to climb after the failed treason.
The reason was a commentary on Marquis Penri’s rebellion that had appeared in the newspaper.
The critic named my duel with Penri as one of the reasons for his failure.
[……How could trust and cohesion flourish beneath a man who lost to Lady Netzer and became a laughingstock? In the end, it was the Lady’s noble filial piety toward her parents and her courage that shook the rebels and exposed their weakness.]
It wasn’t entirely accurate, but I decided to let it stand.
You’re all welcome to thank me.

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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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