The Abandoned Prince’s Ghost Bride - Chapter 128

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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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The Forsaken Prince’s Phantom Bride — Episode 128

Lia had come to check on Leopold’s condition as usual, only to be held captive for about an hour of conversation.
“Ahahaha! Really? Lucian said that? So what happened next?”
Knock-knock.
As Leopold laughed with delight, a knock sounded at the door.
“Your Majesty, the Duke’s daughter, Lirlis, has arrived.”
Upon hearing Lirlis’s name, Leopold broke into a broad smile.
“Lirlis is here, I take it.”
“……Your fiancée comes by often, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah. Almost every day. And mind you, I never even asked her to come—she just shows up on her own. Pretty good sign, wouldn’t you say?”
Lia had no choice but to laugh in response.
Meanwhile, the door opened and Lirlis stepped inside.
“Leopold, I heard you can eat regular food now, so I brought some dessert you like…….”
Lirlis, who had entered with a comfortable expression, froze the moment she caught sight of Lia.
“Lirlis, welcome! I’ve been missing desserts. Lia, you should have some too before you go.”
“No, I should get going. Enjoy your time together.”
Lia smiled at Leopold and turned to leave without hesitation.
Lirlis began with a look of surprise, but soon her eyes narrowed with a venomous glint as she watched Lia’s retreating figure.
‘I thought she’d given up since she visits every day, but it seems that’s not the case.’
The two women exchanged a measuring look for a moment before turning away and parting ways.
As Lia left, Lirlis approached Leopold with a smile on her face.
“How are you feeling today?”
“Absolutely wonderful! What dessert did you bring?”
“Are you saying the dessert is better than me right now?”
“Never, absolutely not!”
Lirlis, who had pouted for a moment, let out a soft laugh and showed off the dessert she’d brought.
It was a slice cake—Leopold’s absolute favorite.
“I brought several different flavors. The cheesecake is what’s been selling best lately.”
“……Are there no scones or biscuits?”
Lirlis, who had been so confident, was taken aback by Leopold’s disappointed response.
“I brought cake because I thought you liked it…… Has your taste changed?”
“I suddenly aged five years, so I’ve been craving less sweet things. Still, it looks delicious.”
Leopold instructed an attendant to plate the dessert Lirlis had brought.
As Leopold hummed while looking at the cake, Lirlis tilted her head in confusion.

* * *

“Ah, you’re both here.”
Having slipped away from Leopold’s chambers, Lia had come to a room on the first floor of the Emperor’s Palace after asking for Lucian’s whereabouts.
Kaiser was there as well.
Upon spotting the two men, Lia paused as she glanced around the room.
A large portrait of Lucian hung nearby, and beside it, in a row, were figures in identical attire with different faces.
“This is a gallery where portraits of the past emperors are kept,” Lucian said, approaching.
Lucian had come closer.
“So your face is among them?”
“Well, I am an emperor, and my face isn’t that different from my brother’s anyway.”
“Still, it’s you in this one.”
Lucian’s eyes widened for a moment, then he laughed softly.
“Leon and Odel mentioned the same thing. Lia, you have a sharp eye. Kaiser here kept wondering whether this portrait was of me or Leopold.”
“I’m the normal one—he’s the one being strange.”
Kaiser grumbled, asking why he’d been brought into this.
“Then, since you’re the most recent, the one right next to you would be…….”
Of course, it was Ruber’s face that hung there. Seeing the portrait of his face in younger years, Lia paused.
“You twins really are the spitting image of your father.”
How could they resemble him so closely? When she’d first seen Ruber, she’d thought they were alike, but his youthful visage was uncanny enough to warrant being called brothers.
Next to him was the likeness of Julius—the body that had once housed the first emperor before Leopold.
“……This person was sacrificed as well, I imagine?”
“Probably.”
The thought that more than half of the portraits here had all been victims of Leon weighed heavily on her.
As she moved along, the figures in the portraits changed. Some were elderly, others young, and not all had white hair.
“…….”
“……What a terrible creature.”
She had finally reached the end of the gallery, where the portrait of the first emperor hung.
The man in the portrait had aged far more than she remembered, his once-brown hair now streaked heavily with silver, and his golden eyes that had once gleamed with curiosity had grown sharp and cold.
This portrait must have been painted shortly before Leon’s death.
Looking at Leon, so utterly changed from the person they had known, left her with an unsettling feeling.
Kaiser, having recovered some of Carserin’s memories, regarded Leon with eyes full of hatred, but Lia, who hadn’t yet recovered all her memories, could only gaze at the portrait with conflicted emotions.
“Tsk. This is when past lives get on my nerves.”
Kaiser had fully accepted Carserin’s memories, but he didn’t identify his own existence with them.
So he tried to view the situation dispassionately from Kaiser’s perspective, but fragments of Carserin’s emotions kept surfacing, clouding his reason.
“If the awakened Leopold’s spirit turned out to be Leon, I’d burn the bastard to ash on the spot. How is he today? Still looks like Leopold?”
At Kaiser’s question, Lucian flinched in reaction. Lia, unaware of Lucian’s response, spoke.
“Yeah, he looks even more refreshed than yesterday. Sigh…… For three weeks now, there’s been nothing to suggest otherwise, and honestly, I don’t even know if what I’m doing is right anymore.”
There was nothing awkward in their conversation, and he still showed that foolish affection for Lucian. Most of all, his spirit didn’t seem dark at all.
If Leon had truly vanished, then the horrors of the past wouldn’t repeat themselves, which should be reassuring. Yet somehow she couldn’t stop suspecting, couldn’t let down her guard.
“What did you talk about with him?”
Lucian’s voice from beside her brought Lia back to her senses.
“Nothing major. Just how we met by chance, fell in love by chance, what he likes about you—all very much the portrait of a doting older brother, really.”
It was a bit annoying how he kept probing with detailed questions, but on the whole, he seemed genuinely interested in their love story.
“I suppose it’s strange to him that his little brother is in love. Just before you came, he asked me…….”

‘Do you have any thoughts of marrying Lucian?’

Leopold’s words suddenly came back to Lia, and she froze. Kaiser and Lucian exchanged puzzled glances.
“What was that? What did he say?”
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
Unable to bring herself to mention marriage, Lia brushed it off vaguely.
She hadn’t even managed to give Leopold a proper answer to his question.
‘What do I even want?’
Ever since the subject of marriage had come up the other day, she’d been vaguely thinking about marrying Lucian, but it still didn’t feel real.
It was a different feeling from when she’d been agonizing over whether to accept his heart.
‘For now, I should focus on confirming Leopold’s state.’
Embarrassed, Lia pushed the thought aside. It had been three weeks since she’d started verifying Leopold’s condition. So far, there had been no cause to suspect he was Leon.
‘If only there were some surer way to confirm it.’
As Lia was contemplating this, Kaiser’s ears perked up.
He heard an unfamiliar sound—not the ordinary noise that typically echoed through the Imperial Palace, but something distinctly out of place.
And that sound…….
Kaiser’s eyes gleamed, and in an instant, he pulled both Lia and Lucian behind him.
“Kaiser, what’s wrong?”
“There’s an intruder.”
“……What?”
Kaiser gestured for them to retreat backward, and both of them had no choice but to follow suit.
Soon Kaiser conjured flames in one hand and pointed at the portrait in front of him with the other.
The portrait he indicated was that of the first emperor.
At Kaiser’s touch, the portrait shuddered. The painting soon came away from the wall, and something emerged behind it.
“Good heavens……!”
“It’s a door, isn’t it?”
A hidden door lay behind the massive portrait. Soon both of them detected the sound Kaiser had heard.
The noise was coming from behind that door.
Just as Lia began to wonder if someone was breaking in through that door, Kaiser suddenly froze and lowered his guard.
He strode toward the door without hesitation and opened it.
“As expected.”
“……Kaiser?”
What emerged from behind the door were Habier and a group of priests.
Habier, startled by the sudden opening, was preparing to use Dark Magic.
Soon he glanced around with a bewildered expression before understanding what had happened.
“……I see what’s occurred.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I was investigating the underground tunnel under Your Majesty’s orders.”
At those words, Lucian understood the situation at once.
“Could it be……!”
“It wasn’t on the blueprints, but it seems the Emperor’s Palace and the underground tunnel are connected.”
Habier and the priests emerged from the door and explained what they had found in the underground tunnel.
“There were no forks in the path. Since we haven’t fully explored it yet, there may be other places connected to the tunnel besides this one.”
“……If we hadn’t investigated the tunnel, we’d never have known such a thing existed in the palace.”
“Those bastards really dug their burrows in the creepiest way possible. True to form for filthy creatures like that.”
“It could serve as a shelter or an ambush route in case of emergency.”
“We’ll do our best to verify every passage as quickly as possible.”
Lucian fell silent in thought.
“Habier, the Dark Sect already knows Leopold has awakened, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, which is why they’re currently planning contact with Leopold.”
“If Leopold turns out not to be the first emperor they followed, what will the Dark Mages do?”
The connection between the Imperial Family and the Temple Organization was, in essence, a connection between the first emperor and the Dark Mages.
But now that it had become almost certain that Leon was not in Leopold’s body, how would the leaderless Temple Organization act going forward?
“I wonder. The Dark Mages followed the first emperor all this time because it allowed them to hide their identities and blend in with ordinary people. But if they lose their anchor…….”
Habier, imagining the future, swallowed hard.
“It would come down to one of two things. Either they remain silent, concealing their identities so as not to be exposed, or they seek revenge for their lost leader.”
The latter was a horrific outcome that must not come to pass.
After a brief exchange, Habier and his party returned to the underground tunnel.
They couldn’t wander about the palace without authorization to enter.
As the priests disappeared into the distance, a chilling cold hung in the tunnel. Kaiser, who had been staring at it intently, spoke.
“You said there’s only one path here?”
“Yeah, straight forward from the underground tunnel to here, they said.”
“Then…….”
Imperial White Flame bloomed in Kaiser’s hand—a yellowish flame, a lesser version of the White Flame. It lacked the power of true White Flame, but it possessed the strength to purify profanity.
He then extracted fire from the Imperial White Flame and created a magical circle. He placed these circles at various points inside the entrance, toward the tunnel.
“What are you doing?”
“Setting traps. This tunnel was used by the Dark Mages and Leon. If those bastards try to sneak into the palace through here, I can block them to some degree. I specifically made it respond only to Dark Magic.”
If an ordinary person passed through, the trap would have no effect, but if even a trace of Dark Magic was detected, the magical circle would activate of its own accord.
“Oh, I should tell Habier about this later.”
If Habier happened to pass through here, he’d trigger the trap.
Lucian, curious about how it sensed only Dark Magic, asked how it was made.
Unfortunately, rather than a detection ability, it utilized the nature of the purification power reacting to Dark Magic, so it wouldn’t respond if no Dark Magic was used. That was the disadvantage.
Moreover, this power was an ability passed down through generations within the Red Dragon clan, so no mere human could learn it.
As Lia watched all this, something occurred to her.
“Kaiser, did Leon study Dark Magic?”
“Huh? Leon? He had no talent for magic. Dark Magic, of all things…….”
Kaiser was about to speak casually when something came back to him, and he fell silent.
The vision he’d seen in the basement. Leon had definitely used Dark Magic there. Moreover, he had managed to approach Carserin, who was burning with White Flame.
“Could it be that Leon learned Dark Magic?”
“Even Habier, who has no talent for magic, learned it, so Leon could certainly have become a Dark Mage. Kaiser, I’m asking a favor of you.”
What Lia asked was for him to install a spell similar to the one just placed in the underground tunnel throughout the Emperor’s Palace.
“All right. I’ll set it up around the Emperor’s Palace.”
Now Lia had one week to properly verify Leopold’s state. During this week, she intended to conduct a more thorough investigation into whether Leon’s spirit still existed.
“And come with me to the Mansion for a bit.”
“Why there?”
“There’s something I need to prepare.”
To do that, she had one more item to gather.

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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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