The Poisonous Princess Who Successfully Infiltrated the Enemy as an Employee - Chapter 38

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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 38.

Following the sharp metallic scent of blood, I arrived at the rear of the Western Villa.
A towering, decrepit tower stood like a black window frame beneath the Twin Moons.
‘This place…….’
The words Celin had spoken not long after my arrival at the Grand Duke Manor came back to me—she had been pointing at something beyond the window.
“Your Highness, that building you see there is the Western Villa. And the tower behind it is still under repair, so you mustn’t go near it. Also, um—.”
That’s right, she’d said it was under repair.
But the tower before my eyes looked neither mid-repair nor recently finished.
Moss clung thickly between the bricks, and most of the windows were boarded over, casting the whole structure in an eerie gloom.
Yet what struck me as most suspicious was that the great rusted Iron Door—which ought to be sealed—hung slightly ajar.
Just enough for my body to squeeze through.
I swallowed hard and cast a quick glance around me.
There were no knights patrolling the tower’s perimeter, nor any posted as sentries.
I stared through the gaping aperture of the Iron Door and hesitated.
Every instinct screamed danger; the very air seemed to reek of wrongness. The silence was unnaturally complete.
And yet…….
‘I’m dying to know what’s inside.’
That familiar, relentless hunger—the same urge that seized me whenever I encountered a rare poison plant—coiled up my spine and took hold of my mind.
Of course, I knew this curiosity could drag me into mortal peril.
But I had never turned away from a toxic bloom growing beneath a cliff, no matter how treacherous the descent.
Night and day, I had navigated harrowing mountain passes and scaled sheer precipices, weathering countless brushes with death.
In doing so, my bestial instinct for survival had honed itself sharper than anyone’s I knew.
And that instinct spoke.
Something inside this tower would reshape my fate entirely.
The deliberation did not last long.
I drew the Sleep Powder Drug from where I’d hidden it in my glove and squeezed my body through the narrow gap in the Iron Door.

***

“The final patrol unit has returned, I gather.”
At that same moment, Reina, the head maid, entered Hendrick’s study with the news.
Hendrick set down the documents he’d been reviewing and rose from his chair.
“There must be no one remaining in the direction of the Western Villa.”
Reina nodded carefully.
“Yes, they said they checked the area thoroughly before withdrawing. There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing has happened this entire time, after all.”
All the newly hired staff had been sent outside the Grand Duke Manor on the pretense of holiday.
The longtime servants, without fail, locked themselves in their quarters long before midnight whenever the Twin Moons rose, holding their breath.
The princess had been confirmed asleep, and just to be safe, knights had been posted outside her bedchamber.
Now there was nothing left but to wait for dawn.
The other knights at the Training Grounds and in the quarters would remain on high alert throughout the night, and Hendrick and Reina themselves planned to keep vigil with open eyes until the sun safely returned.
Always. Every time the Twin Moons rose, it was the same.
At Reina’s reassurance, Hendrick gave a thin smile.
“Every time this season comes, I feel my own helplessness laid bare. I am ashamed.”
Hendrick gazed up at the night sky through the window, his voice edged with a sigh.
“When I think of him bearing this Curse alone, my heart grows heavy…….”
At that, Reina’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“He’s been like that since childhood. Thinking about it now, I sometimes wish he’d never become the head of the house at all—that he’d simply fled instead. Then he wouldn’t have inherited that Curse.”
“……Even if you pushed him away, he would have returned.”
“……I suppose you’re right.”
Reina sighed and, like Hendrick, turned her gaze toward the night sky.
“Though he has no faith in the divine, ……I can’t help but wish that a Saintess might appear like a miracle and break his Curse for him.”
“…….”
Hendrick did not answer, yet his heart was not so different from hers.
But it was a hope with no real chance of coming true.
To hope for a Saintess who had not appeared in centuries was absurd, and even if one did emerge, the Temple had already allied with the Imperial Faction—they would never send a Saintess to break the curse of the Grand Duke House.
Rather, they would turn that very Curse against them, using it to exert pressure on the House.
Hendrick and Reina gazed resentfully at the Twin Moons illuminating the night sky.
Thinking of Varcan, alone beneath that moon, enduring his pain.
Hoping that this time, too, everything would pass safely, without incident.

***

Inside the Tower, the torches hanging on the walls provided just enough light to see by.
So I found the staircase leading downward without difficulty, and I descended.
As I stepped down further, the red glow of the torches gradually dimmed, and my vision filled with deep darkness.
But the smell of blood grew stronger. It was proof I was heading the right way.
How far had I come?
Just as I was wondering whether to turn back—
The staircase finally ended, and I stepped out onto level ground.
In that moment, the sight before me froze me in place.
‘What on earth is this?’
The lowest level of the Underground.
In this deepest, most secret chamber of the Tower, massive iron prison cells lined both sides of the corridor.
Most of the cells were empty.
But the one at the far end—the largest—was different.
I found myself walking toward it as if in a trance.
The person bound in thick iron chains in the center of that great cell was, against all expectation, someone I knew.
‘The… Duke?’
My jaw trembled lightly.
My mind went white for a moment, emptied of all thought.
Was I seeing things after walking down those dark stairs for so long?
Or was I dreaming?
‘Why is that man there?’
And covered in blood, his neck and limbs bound in iron chains.
How much had he struggled? The stone floor beneath his feet and the stone wall where the chains were anchored were cracked all over, surrounded by debris and rubble.
Naturally, Varcan too was caked in blood.
Ha!
My shock at the sight was brief, replaced by exasperation, and I let out a gasp.
‘Here I thought he was supposed to be having some touching reunion with a hidden lover, and instead he’s chained up here?!’
I rushed to the cell and grabbed the cold iron bars between us with both hands.
“What is this? What on earth happened to you? Who did this?!”
“…….”
Then Varcan slowly raised his head.
He responded to my urgent questioning.
“Grrrrr…….”
“……What?”
Grrr?
I blinked rapidly and asked again.
“Did you just make that sound? Growling like that?”
Good heavens…….
“What are you imitating? No matter how angry you are, people shouldn’t bare their teeth and growl like beasts. It sounded exactly like a wild animal—it startled me.”
That was when—
Crash!
Varcan, glaring at me savagely, suddenly lurched forward with violent movements, lunging toward me.
The iron chains, firmly fixed to the wall, snapped taut and violently wrenched his massive frame back.
Thanks to that, Varcan couldn’t reach me despite his bared teeth. But the recoil caused the entire Underground to shudder violently.
Dust cascaded down from the walls.
I reflexively stepped back several paces.
“Goodness, you frightened me! Are you insane? I would never do something like that!”
Then Varcan bared his teeth through the iron bars and glared at me savagely.
Something was wrong…
The look in his eyes was different from usual.
In those black eyes that had always been so coldly composed, there was no trace of what one might call reason.
How to describe it……
‘Yes, it was exactly like the eyes of the starving beasts I’d encountered in the forest.’
The instinctive hunger of those beasts.
The savage intent to tear out my throat and sever my breath without a moment’s delay.
I swallowed hard and opened my mouth again.
“So right now… you’re not pretending to be a beast—you genuinely don’t recognize me?”
Predictably, no arrogant, mocking reply came back.
Only the ragged sound of breathing and the deafening clang of iron chains echoed through the dungeon.
“This… this isn’t right. I need to go upstairs and find Roan, or—”
I’d been backing away when I suddenly stopped.
‘No, wait…’
Roan had said Varcan would be away from the Grand Duke Manor for a week.
‘But the Grand Duke is locked in the dungeon beneath the Tower right now.’
Could Roan really not have known?
The staff had suddenly taken leave en masse, and the number of knights standing guard had increased.
Was this really coincidence?
‘No, it couldn’t be coincidence.’
Then perhaps all these changes were meant to conceal exactly what Varcan had become.
‘The head of the Grand Duke House is suffering from this kind of madness…?’
Then again, if that were true, he couldn’t have told me—a foreign princess, no less—and would have had to hide it.
This knowledge would be a prize piece of meat dangling before any faction hostile to the Grand Duke House.
But still.
‘The original story never mentioned anything like this…’
It was just how every other male secondary lead in novels acted—instantly falling head over heels the moment the heroine appeared, then eventually sacrificing his life for her and dying.
‘He was such a simple character back then…’
I stepped toward the iron bars again.
I gazed pitifully at Varcan, bound in chains, glaring at me.
‘…What story are you really hiding?’
Like the tale of Evelyn, living in that Southern Village.
The real story of Varcan Eskar—one that never appeared in the original work.
I had the strange feeling I was glimpsing a fragment of that true story.
I stared at Varcan through the iron bars for a moment, then slowly unfolded the paper packet of Sleep Powder Drug I’d been holding.
“I need to look at your wounds. If you die here, I become useless.”
Of course, according to the original story, Varcan wouldn’t die here.
But in a situation where so much had diverged from the source material, didn’t the possibility of the unexpected exist?
‘If Varcan really dies here, the Guild won’t let me live any longer.’
I haven’t even made the Hellvein Antidote yet, so that would be a problem.
Grrrrr…
As if he didn’t understand my words, Varcan continued making savage sounds.
I brought the paper packet toward my lips and murmured softly.
“Sleep deeply. When you wake, we’ll talk with clear heads, yes?”
Then I took a deep breath—whoooosh!
I blew hard on the powder in the packet.
The fine white powder took flight on the air and drifted toward Varcan’s face.
Varcan, who had been raging in fury moments before, soon lost focus in his eyes and began to lose strength gradually.
Not long after, the massive man bound in iron chains collapsed lifelessly to the floor with a clang.
Whew.
‘Potent stuff. Very potent.’
I shook my head as I stared at the unconscious Varcan in disbelief.
The Sleep Powder Drug I’d prepared for Varcan was an ultra-potent formula that I’d personally calibrated, something impossible to obtain on the open market.
‘Magical beasts themselves collapse in a single second of inhaling this custom sleep drug, and this man endured it?’
It felt like ten minutes had passed.
How was he even built for this to last so long?
‘Anyway, people from the Northern Region are creatures that defy all logic.’
At this rate, I might need to develop a sleep powder specifically designed for northerners.
I clicked my tongue and examined the iron door of the cell.
Instead of a lock, a thick iron bar was fastened to the door—they’d apparently deemed Varcan’s chains binding his limbs to be sufficient.
I pushed the heavy bar upward with both hands, and the rusty metal groaned softly.
Creeeeak—!
The prison door swung open.

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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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