The Mansion Awaits Spring - Chapter 15

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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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Episode 15
“What?”
April rose to her feet and looked toward where Hanna was pointing.
Hanna was right. Fog was rising from the direction of the sea—that same dark, oppressive mist April had heard about countless times during her police questioning.
Once she’d grudgingly accepted that the fog would return each year, the question that lingered was always the same.
April stared at the fog and murmured aloud.
“Why does something like this happen?”
At her whispered words, Hanna’s eyes widened in surprise.
“You don’t know either, miss?”
“No.”
At that answer, Hanna’s expression shifted to one of dawning realization.
“So you didn’t do it, then……”
“Right. I didn’t do it.”
April had endured this fog herself.
For three or four days at a time, a thick black mist so dense the light couldn’t penetrate had engulfed the Lunos Mansion—day and night alike.
April too had been terrified, thinking it some kind of curse.
One particularly cold year, she’d brought the chicks into her bedroom to sleep beside her, only to find the chickens she’d left outside dead. It had been a dreadful night.
After three years of this recurring cycle, she’d grown accustomed to it; now when the fog began, she brought the chickens and chicks inside the house.
Once the fog passed, everything—the house, the fields, all of it—turned pitch black.
“Let’s get inside.”
April spoke and led Hanna toward the bedroom.
She was using one of the few rooms that still had unbroken windows.
Just as she had done the year before, April sealed the windows thoroughly with damp cloth and drew the curtains shut. Then, after herding a chick and a chicken into the adjoining dressing room, Hanna quickly forgot her fear of the fog and began stroking the chick.
“Oh, how adorable.”
With everything sealed, April stepped into the corridor.
She wouldn’t be able to venture far from the bedroom for a while, so she meant to gather supplies.
As April rushed down to the first floor, she froze at the sound of someone knocking at the door. The presence of an unwelcome visitor arriving with the fog felt cursed.
Gathering her courage, April approached the door and called out.
“Who is it?”
“Me.”
“Me?”
Despite her fear, she found herself thinking—who introduces themselves like that?
“Me, I said.”
He even sounded exasperated now.
By the second attempt, she recognized whose voice it was—and she had no desire to let him in. But since the fog was coming, she couldn’t let him die outside, so she opened the door.
The moment she did, she unleashed her anger at the infuriating face she’d suspected from the voice.
“Are you insane? Who wanders about in weather like this?”
Pejin, who had ridden hard to get here in one breath, loosened the Cravat at his neck as he spoke.
“Of course I had to come. I need to confirm whether you’re actually performing some curse ritual.”
“There’s no such thing.”
“Exactly. Which is why I need to confirm there isn’t one.”
At Pejin’s sarcastic remark, April glared at him, and soon after, several police officers arrived.
April spoke.
“I hear there’ve been many accidents. Do you even have the manpower to station here? Isn’t that a waste?”
“Good point. We did lack sufficient police force for a permanent detail. That’s why His Majesty dispatched me ‘additionally’ to determine the cause. So we’re personnel dedicated solely to this task.”
“……”
“I’d prefer it if you were a witch and that was a curse. Then I’d achieve my quota, and the fog would be solved.”
“I don’t want that.”
“Why? You seemed to dislike waste.”
“Because I’d be dead.”
“That’s truly regrettable, but if your death solves things for everyone, that’s ideal, isn’t it?”
The tone didn’t sound regrettable at all, and April faltered, but then she clenched her fists and pressed on.
“I won’t die. I have to restore my family’s honor.”
At April’s words, Pejin looked at her. Then, as if her words were absurd, he let out a soft laugh.
That mockery finally struck the nerve April had been holding back, and without a moment’s hesitation, she tried to slap his cheek.
Pejin caught her arm before she could, and his burning gaze tangled with hers.
Pejin studied the light in her eyes.
That grand duke, Miller, was a gentle person, but occasionally his expression turned unbearably cold.
And that same expression appeared quite commonly on his younger brother Pejin’s face.
What would she lose next?
Was there anything left to lose?
Such thoughts crossed her mind, but there was no help for it. Beyond restoring her family’s honor, she had no reason left to keep living.
So if that honor were damaged, she could only respond immediately.
Wondering what was on his mind, Pejin even bent down as he studied April’s eyes.
After staring thus for a moment, Pejin spoke.
“Why are you so angry?”
“You mocked me.”
“I’m sorry.”
When Pejin apologized so readily upon hearing the reason, April’s expression only worsened. Pejin spoke challengingly.
“I’m apologizing, so why does your face look like that?”
“Why are you apologizing?”
“Because you were angry.”
“You’re apologizing without even understanding why?”
“I understand. Because I mocked you.”
At Pejin’s words, April’s entire face betrayed her exasperation. The conversation seemed simultaneously impossible and complete.
Though come to think of it, Pejin had grown up just as he was as a child.
From April’s memory, the young Pejin had been so beautiful that even people catching a glimpse of him in passing would marvel.
His jawline had matured into that of a man, but those almond-shaped eyes still rose slightly at the corners, with pupils so unusually large that they still commanded half the impression of his beauty.
Along with that, adults had made an exception in doting on that unruly troublemaker in a way everyone would understand, partly because of that habit of his—the way apologies spilled out so easily from his lips.
Pejin knew that if he looked directly at someone and said he was sorry, he could be forgiven for almost anything he’d done.
So he would apologize without feeling even remotely sorry, then pull the situation back to his side.
April had despised that side of Pejin throughout their childhood as well.
She would have preferred it if he were consistently arrogant like other accomplished men. She hated that cunning way he leveraged everything he possessed.
April continued speaking.
“You didn’t just mock me. You mocked my words about restoring my family’s honor.”
“It sounded like nonsense to me. I must have misheard.”
Normally, by this point she would have landed another blow, but at Pejin’s confident expression—as if to say, ‘I already apologized, so it’s fine, isn’t it?’—her words caught in her throat.
Confirming that April had lost the will to engage and had crossed her arms, Pejin turned to the officers.
“Seal the windows as best you can. If any of you die, it’ll be more troublesome for me than anything, so hold the line no matter what.”
“Yes, Inspector.”
The officers answered in unison and moved with practiced efficiency.
Pejin, his expression mixing shame and anger, asked about the figure standing nearby.
“Who’s that?”
At his question, April turned around.
Hanna was standing at the stair railing, gripped by fear.
“Someone who works here.”
“She doesn’t have hands.”
“That’s why she works here.”
April didn’t add the rest—’She can’t find work anywhere else, and I can’t find help either’—but Pejin’s expression made clear he understood.
His understanding was written plainly across his face.
Shortly after, the officers sealed the windows as much as possible and installed the Manual Fans they’d brought layer upon layer throughout the mansion.
As they moved through the Lunos Mansion to carry out this work, the officers felt a crushing weight from the sheer scale of the enormous estate.
“What a dreadfully massive mansion.”
His words were apt.
The mansion, having lost the grandeur of its long history and fallen into disrepair, commanded an eerie scale.
The Grand Banquet Hall in particular, once filled with merchants from all walks of life enjoying parties of diverse cultures, was so impossibly vast that they had to give up sealing it against the fog and simply locked the enormous velvet-draped doors.
The more the officers wandered through the mansion, the more several of them—especially Logan, who had a habit of observing his surroundings—felt unable to hide their bewilderment.
“How could such a massive family fall to ruin in a single moment?”
At his question, Paul glanced upward at the ceiling.
He was thinking something similar.
Ceilings of extraordinary height, windows beyond counting.
Even if thieves had stripped everything away, the absolute oppressive grandeur of a space with such enormous history remaining left the question of why its owners would have chosen so easy a death.
“Couldn’t we say there was no political retaliation?”
At Logan’s overly blunt remark, Paul tapped his back.
Logan made an exaggerated show of being knocked away.
It might have been a collapse that was already written.
Even without considering that far, all the officers bearing the weight of this mansion’s grandeur felt some degree of unease.

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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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