The Return of Lilietta - Chapter 119

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 119

“I already shared this with the others. You’re the last one.”

“…What did everyone say?”

“Well, they accepted it, saying so that bastard really was the culprit.”

He replied with a twisted smile. Rita empathized with her comrades’ feelings.

Even while speculating that beings capable of summoning monsters in a world where mana contamination hadn’t begun—especially those who could perfectly recreate Ash-covered Era monsters like Kraken, Doppelganger, and Crawler that Beacon knew—would only be returned Pascals like themselves, everyone had kept some possibility or hope in a corner of their hearts that it might not be him.

That had now become almost certain.

Rita said quietly.

“So we really will end up fighting Pascal.”

The mastermind who had kidnapped and summoned them, making their childhood years roll across battlefields, and an unknown archmage whose abilities were immeasurable.

“What could his purpose be for summoning named monsters? The Crawler he summoned this time makes no sense if it’s just a show for Duke Adickl.”

“That’s actually the topic for the next Garden Salon. Everyone’s supposed to speculate what Pascal’s purpose might be, then we’ll gather and discuss it again.”

“Oli’s idea?”

Somehow it seemed like Oli’s opinion, so she asked, and Ethan nodded before grumbling.

“Fuck, my head hurts. How the hell would I know what that crazy bastard’s purpose is? Why do I have to think about it too?”

“What did Gid say when he heard this?”

Suddenly remembering something he had said in passing, she asked impulsively. His words about Pascal returning because he had killed him in the Ash-covered Era.

Ethan shrugged.

“He wasn’t really surprised. Like he expected it to be him all along. Well, he’s always been a man of few words so I don’t know the details… Oh, he said Pascal seems to consider Hanna’s existence more important than expected, so we should investigate that properly.”

“…Come to think of it, from what you told me… it seemed like Pascal prevented someone presumed to be Baroness Naporoa from investigating Hanna’s bloodline through genealogy by switching hair samples. But why…?”

Rita muttered this while recalling the moment when Hanna had knelt by the bedside and looked up at her.

“Please make me your limbs and spy.”

Should she really entrust this task to that child?

She had been looking down, then shifted her gaze to Ethan. The one recorded in history as a ‘ghost,’ an expert in infiltration, assassination, and covert intelligence gathering.

“Ethan.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Would it be possible to send an untrained civilian as a spy into enemy territory?”

“If it’s just staying briefly and picking up information, it should be possible? If they need to infiltrate enemy territory long-term, training would obviously be necessary.”

“If you trained them?”

“As long as their Oath aptitude isn’t garbage level, I’d make them an Oathbinder and work them to the bone. If it’s not assassination but just information gathering and reporting… I could probably make them function as a spy in about 2 weeks.”

Ethan answered while frowning in thought, then asked back.

“Why? Is there someone you’re considering making into a spy?”

“…Hanna asked to do it. She said she’d infiltrate Adicl using her blood relation.”

“What?”

Ethan’s eyes widened, then he shook his head.

“She’s impossible. She has no venom and no guts. When I told her to come at me with a knife once, she couldn’t even do that.”

“Hmm…”

Rita made a thoughtful sound, then opened the nightstand drawer beside the bed and took out a small box.

“Ethan, deliver this to Gid for now.”

“What is this?”

“Hair I received from Hanna.”

“…!”

“Ask Gid to verify her bloodline using the Imperial genealogy. I’ll decide what to do after seeing the verification results.”

Ethan silently took the box and pocketed it. Rita said to him casually.

“Since I thought of it, Ethan, telling someone to stab you with a knife isn’t a proper apology.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do about it?”

“You didn’t apologize properly, so if you’re aware that you wronged Hanna, I’m saying you should apologize again.”

“…”

He closed his mouth with displeasure. She didn’t say anything more and gestured to him.

“Well then, please deliver it properly.”

* * *

Gideon walked across the garden with an expressionless face.

It was a garden so crude and modest that it was hard to believe it existed in the Imperial Palace.

A small clearing full of untrimmed trees growing wild and wildflowers scattered and blooming like a field. If not for the tall black walls surrounding it, one might mistake it for being in a meadow of some rural village rather than the Imperial Palace.

Inside it was a small, cozy cottage and vegetable garden that suited the Imperial Palace even less than the garden did.

Nina’s Cottage.

The space the Emperor had gifted to his beloved maid Nina. The place where Gideon’s birth mother had lived and died.

Nina, who had been a maid doing menial work in the Imperial Palace rather than a lady-in-waiting who dealt directly with nobles, had no interest whatsoever in complex political situations or power.

She lived and died her entire life as if she were simply the ordinary lover of a man named Lorenz. She engaged in no activities as the Emperor’s concubine or as the Crown Prince’s birth mother.

Emperor Lorenz perfectly fulfilled Nina’s wish to not worry about anything, not want to think or study, and just live peacefully tending to her vegetable garden and chickens.

For an emperor who had long been tormented by the Previous Emperor for being incompetent, living un-emperor-like in Nina’s Cottage might have been liberation and happiness.

‘But neither you nor mother should have done that.’

If they truly wanted to live simply and modestly, they should have abdicated the throne, left the Imperial Palace, and departed for the real countryside.

Not doing so and instead creating a place decorated like a model garden within the Imperial Palace to live comfortably meant, in effect, abandoning the duties that come with status and position.

When the Previous Emperor tried to interfere with her son Gideon’s education, Nina simply gave up on him. She completely handed him over to the Previous Emperor and lived as if she had no son.

To her, a life of knitting by the fireplace and feeding chickens was more precious than the son she had borne.

The truth that this was only modest on the surface, while actually enjoying safety and abundance in the middle of the Imperial Palace, turning a blind eye to all other matters and pretending to live an ordinary life, posed no problem whatsoever for Nina.

So whenever Gideon came to Nina’s Cottage dressed as the Crown Prince, she would feel awkward and flustered.

“Your clothes are too burdensome for me… Won’t you change into these?”

When he changed into shabby, small clothes she had gotten from somewhere, mother would serve him home-cooked meals and talk at length about how the vegetables in the garden were doing and the health of the chicks and chickens.

She never asked about how her son was doing. If he ever talked about what he was learning and what etiquette and duties he lived by.

“Why do you live so complicated and difficult? You should just live here too.”

“Mom doesn’t understand such difficult things even when she hears them. I don’t want to hear it!”

“Come, let’s just eat delicious soup. I made it with things I grew myself. Isn’t that amazing?”

In the crude wooden bowl of soup were ugly potatoes and carrots that Nina had grown herself, along with Chateaubriand and lobster—ingredients commoners could hardly access—all chopped up haphazardly.

As if they were mushrooms picked from the forest or fish caught personally. Treating precious ingredients as if they weren’t precious at all.

Young Gideon had thought that soup bowl was extremely bizarre.

His feelings weren’t much different now.

Gid stopped near the wall surrounding the garden and looked back.

The Emperor, who spent much time in Nina’s Cottage even though Nina was dead, was watering the vegetable garden in fancy attire.

He touched the soil contentedly, not worrying at all that such clothes and accessories would be difficult to clean if they got dirty.

To Gid, that scene looked like Nina’s soup bowl.

He glanced once more and went outside.

The Emperor had thrown away and ruined many things to maintain Nina’s Cottage. He absolutely never forgave those who made demands of Nina or voiced complaints about her.

His love was sincere and true. Lorenz could do anything and abandon anything for his beloved Nina.

Therefore, he was someone who should not have been Emperor.

Gideon did not want to live like his father.

‘That’s probably why Pascal set such an oath for me.’

He had never properly told his comrades, not even Rita, about his oath.

Gid Pascal, who had been a 10-year-old boy in the Ash-covered Era, didn’t understand the content of his oath when he first heard it and was somewhat embarrassed by it, so he lied to young Rita when she asked about oaths. That lie had continued for over 10 years.

‘I swear not to be blinded by love.’

Sometimes Gid Pascal would suddenly receive punishment from the Oaths and have seizures.

Each time, he would say as he had made excuses since childhood, that he had broken his oath to ‘not avoid given responsibilities.’

Back when he was just a teenage boy, he didn’t really understand why he was suddenly being punished, but looking back, it was mostly because of Rita.

When he felt like he could do anything for her. When he twisted even his own plans and ideals in the direction she wished.

For example, during that winter filled with tombstones.

“Alright, if that’s your dream, then let’s make it mine too.”

“Was your original dream different?”

“A little. But it doesn’t matter.”

That day, he had received punishment from the Oaths.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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