Sister-in-law of the Heroine in a Childcare Novel - Chapter 229

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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 229

“What exactly are you planning to do?”
The Castrain Duke’s face had transformed entirely from moments before.
When addressing Titania, he looked for all the world like a kindly grandfather.
The man who had spent a lifetime with a face hard and cold as stone might—to any observer—have seemed capable of becoming a grandfather who merely laughed with delight at his grandchildren’s antics.
Yet toward Raymond, his eldest son, whom he had treated throughout his life less as a child than as a successor to inherit his duties and his house……
He had maintained dignity, though he had not deliberately made himself cruel. He had felt some measure of pity for a son who, even in earliest childhood, accepted his obligations without complaint.
It is said that death and resurrection change a person, and the Castrain Duke himself was no exception to this old wisdom.
The sharp, blade-edge intensity he once carried had dulled, and he no longer grew agitated when events displeased him.
The Castrain children had keenly felt their father’s transformation, and they had deemed it a good thing.
Or so they had thought.
“I am merely grateful that Father has recovered his health.”
Raymond was smiling.
The opposite of the stern Castrain Duke’s expression. Black hair and pale skin, and between the eyes narrowed by laughter, a sickly gleam of gold.
“I asked what you intend to do.”
“Has the High Priest already told you, Father? Though I must say, you’ve always been quite devout.”
“…Illian is the High Priest. He has devoted his life to saving people. Yet you mock such a man.”
“Since you ask, then yes. I intend to summon the true god of Chernobog.”

“What?”
The Castrain Duke was aghast.
“If a Magic Beast can don human flesh and rise to the surface world, why not a god? Killing and sealing an illusion accomplishes nothing—this stalemate will persist, and the Magic Beasts will never be eradicated.”
“We can hardly defeat a single Magic Beast! You mean to drag the entire Underground World into the surface?!”
“You’re not asking how I intend to summon that true god?”
The Castrain Duke fixed Raymond with a hard stare.
“Moreover, I did not expect you to entrust it to the Princess Titania. I had assumed you would keep it until……until you passed.”
Raymond’s tone was peculiar—as though he had once witnessed the Duke dying while clutching that very object.
And more than that: Titania had departed hurriedly with Bibi’s hand immediately after finishing her private meeting with the Duke, yet in that brief span, Raymond had somehow already confirmed what the Duke had given her.
Or perhaps he had already guessed the object’s purpose?
The Castrain Duke drew in a sharp breath without quite meaning to.
Before, yes.
The Castrain Duke had once held himself to be the strongest in the entire Empire. Even wounded, he had believed it.
But not now.
His eldest son—the one he had believed most trustworthy—had fallen silent at some point, become erratic, and would sometimes vanish without word of his whereabouts.
Yet he still trusted him.
Because he had no choice but to trust.
But seeing that face turned toward him, smiling with such parched malice, filled him with dark foreboding.
‘Is that truly my son as I have known him?’
“…Your mother thought that the Power of Darkness need not always be wielded for evil. That is why she entrusted you and your siblings with……”
“Yes. Perhaps someday a new method will emerge. Just as when the First Emperor established the structure of the Northern Barrier, none of those present foresaw the problems that would arise from it.”
There had been no rebellion, no collapse of the Empire, no rise of a new Imperial house.
Yet decay had crept into the Imperial Family itself—the very family that had maintained its throne generation after generation—and who could have predicted they would grow negligent toward the Northern Barrier, their lifeline?
True, Chernobog’s faithful had subtly infiltrated everywhere, forging rumors and fanning the flames of gossip, but people—the masses—tend to believe what they wish to believe.
The Empire’s politics had become chaos.
Rivals of Prince Brian were being murdered.
More precisely, those who had begun to sense something amiss.
Had they confirmed Titania’s absence? Or was it that, since she was officially presumed dead, Brian could no longer present himself before the Emperor as someone stained with Demonic Energy? Perhaps he had simply grown weary of restraint and no longer saw the need for patience. The Emperor openly threw his weight behind Brian while simultaneously watching for an opportunity to eliminate Adrian.

It would likely be soon.
And when it erupted, well—everything would change.
Raymond recollected this and laughed in a low voice—a voice that sounded as though it had risen from hell itself, hollow and damp.
“It would have been better if such a foolish method had never been chosen from the start.”
“…Raymond, you……”
“The Emperor made a living sacrifice of a woman I cherished beyond measure. And he took another woman as his Empress instead, allowing her descendants to flourish abundantly. Great purpose for the Empire? Sacrifice?”
A bitter laugh escaped him.
The saintly woman who loved the Emperor truly, the woman chosen alongside him by the God of Light—she left behind only a name in history and became the linchpin of the Barrier. The only trace of her existence is the Curtain of Gloriana.
The Emperor, so the old tales say, spent his life pining for a woman.
But what of such tales?
“Such things mean nothing.”
Raymond’s voice, contrary to his usual manner, was riddled with fury.
I should have died instead.
When Raymond thought of the First Emperor—who had cast his beloved into the depths and taken another woman as Empress, fathering many children and remaining remembered as a great ruler—an impulse rose in him to slash open the man’s throat.
I should have died in her place.
And did he truly expect that my children, born hereafter, would faithfully guard the Barrier, would harbor no envy or resentment toward my subordinates, would preserve the Divine Power—for decades, centuries, forever—ensuring the Empire’s light would never extinguish?
Such arrogance was unbearable.
The fissures in that arrogance had widened like a snowball rolling across a snowfield, until finally they became an avalanche poised to strike the Empire itself.
And whenever Raymond thought of Titania throwing herself beneath that growing mass of snow without hesitation, his vision would go black.
Raymond knows what it is to watch something precious collapse before his eyes.
No matter how many times—dozens, hundreds—he endures it, the sight does not numb.
He has watched love, regret, everything drain from her eyes as she dies. In those repeating moments, each time his hands close around her wasted wrists, his own breath catches with hers.
He lived, he had always lived, to protect them all—his family. That was the only thing, he had thought, that he might as well do. His appointed task, and he could not fail at it.
Yet in the final hour, a single fragment of that small woman’s smile—even a laugh as quiet as a whisper—made him willing to walk again the blood-soaked path he had already trodden, a willingness he had denied himself a hundred times before, and now, at one moment of realization, it consumed him entirely.
Even if his whole body were submerged in that foul, suffocating sewage and he drowned living and breathing……
If solid ground were to break through that sewage and spring came and new shoots budded, and that woman walked upon them with bare feet, then Raymond would not care if he never left that sewage even as bleached bone, for all eternity.
That is why Raymond, as he stood in the Castrain household that Titania had walked into of her own accord, gazed at her clumsy, uncertain smile from one step back as though to preserve it forever in his sight.
There was no need to speak such truths aloud.
Titania had indeed seized control of the Barrier and afterward distanced herself from the Castrain household for years with studied coldness, feigning death and disappearing—but he did not know how much of the past she truly remembered.
All of it? Perhaps. If it were all……
“…The Princess Titania will come to no harm.”
The Castrain Duke’s vigilance toward Raymond was only natural.
In fact, it was better this way. Even if Raymond were his own blood, the Duke would not hesitate to kill him if he became a monster.
Lisianthus would not hesitate either. And perhaps Titania would……
Weep.
Would she weep like this again because of me?
‘I—I love Raymond more than anything in this world……’
Once, remembering that sight would feel like someone piercing his chest with needles. Now it was similar, but just slightly different.
‘Anyone, anyone……’
He recalled the image of her curled in on herself, weeping. Teardrops fell onto the sand.
He wanted to hold her. He wanted to comfort her.
He wanted to tell her that he would save her, that no matter what the world became, he alone would remember her.
But it was impossible.
So Raymond donned a crocodile’s hide and shed false, deceitful tears. He himself considered it sufficient deception.
Now, though, a different thought occurred to him.
If he were lost, would Titania weep as though she had lost the world itself?
…Perhaps not.
In Titania’s eyes, now that all her memories had returned, Raymond could only be a cold man who had used her as a tool, over and over, merely to save his family.
Regardless, the beginning could not be changed.
He could not return to that moment when a young, innocent betrothed and betrothed first met, clasp hands with pure hearts, and promise a future together.
But even if that filth consuming and rotting him nauseated him beyond measure, if it contained even a few of Titania’s tears, it would be bearable. More than bearable—a bargain.
“Then what of you?”
Raymond instinctively marveled. This was truly his father. He could discern the essence anywhere.
With an incomplete smile fading from his face, Raymond looked back at his father before turning to leave—at the old man with a contorted face, as though confronting an opponent whose weaknesses could never be found.
“I consider it rather profitable.”
Creeeeak. The door shut with a lingering, elongated sound.

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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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