This Emperor Is Running a Marriage Scam - Chapter 225

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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 225

Nelloa checked her reflection in the mirror.
For a brief moment she had looked young and beautiful again, but now her true face had returned—worse than before. Deep wrinkles etched her face, and a handful of dull white hairs caught the light.
Rapid aging. That’s what was happening to her.
She knew the reason.
Once Nelloa realized she could recover mana from Hailey’s cooking, she’d gathered every dish and left Snoril, then spent all her effort creating Derivative Gate Seeds in vast quantities.
‘Bloden will interrogate me about Hailey’s marriage fraud soon.’
Nelloa had never harbored any hope that Robinson would keep his mouth shut. The moment Bloden questioned him, he would spill everything he knew.
But no matter how infatuated Bloden was with Hailey, when monsters ran rampant his priorities would have to shift.
So she needed to create many Derivative Gates—the bigger the better—to keep Bloden occupied and overwhelmed. That way she’d have a chance to slip away.
At the time, she’d thought Hailey’s cooking would still be available and that using her ability to this degree was manageable, but the more she looked at her reflection now, the more she regretted being so reckless with her power.
“I shouldn’t use my ability for a while.”
Not until she could get her hands on proper food from Hailey again.
With that resolve, as she reached up to cover the white hairs with darker strands, Nelloa gasped in alarm.
She hadn’t even pulled hard, yet the hair came away in her grasp without resistance.
“What? What is this? Why is this happening?”
Unable to believe what was occurring, Nelloa ran her fingers through her hair, and more strands fell away like rain.
“Hair loss?”
Panic seized her, and she gritted her teeth.
Crack.
In that instant, one of her upper canines snapped and fell from her mouth. Alarmed, she cautiously touched another tooth with her fingertip—and recoiled in horror.
“Oh gods! I’m falling apart!”
Her teeth were loosening. It felt like the slightest touch would dislodge them all.
Gripped by panic, Nelloa squeezed her eyes shut and drank three gulps of the soy sauce Hailey had made.
Gulp. Gulp. Gulp.
“Ahhhhh!”
What followed was a different sort of scream entirely.
Intense saltiness flooded her mouth and throat; it felt as though her throat was burning away. The saltiness shot up into her sinuses, and she began coughing uncontrollably.
“Cough! Cough! Gasp!”
Even as tears and mucus streamed down her face and coughing racked her frame, Nelloa frantically gulped down water to chase the taste away.
The concentrated salt made her head throb and her stomach roil. Soon the soy sauce she’d consumed threatened to come back up alongside the water, and she clamped both hands over her mouth with all her strength.
‘This is miserable!’
Breathing hard, Nelloa looked in the mirror again.
Her face was a mess—tears and mucus streaming, eyes bloodshot and inflamed—but the wrinkles had vanished without a trace. The upper tooth she’d already lost didn’t return, but the teeth that had been loose moments before now felt firmly rooted once more.
Nelloa sipped more water to steady her breathing, then covered her face with both hands.
“I can’t possibly consume these things as they are.”
After some deliberation, she diluted the soy sauce in water. Rather than heating it, she dissolved it in cold water and drank—slower to work, but the effect remained. Though now she’d need to drink far more of it.
“I’ll have to make do with this for now.”
Grumbling, Nelloa packed the condiments and what little food she had into her satchel, shouldered it, mounted her horse, and rode toward the nearby guild.
The guild Nelloa was heading to was located in the upper levels of the Town Square Clock Tower—an inconvenient location and diminutive in size, so people rarely visited it.
But in truth, it was one of the communication outposts the Kelite Kingdom had hidden throughout the Empire.
‘I need to consign the Cold Mana Stones for sale and contact my brother.’
Just then, an eagle appeared overhead and dove toward the clock tower.
‘That messenger bird heading in there must be from Kelite.’
The fact that they’d sent an eagle rather than a pigeon in broad daylight troubled her.
‘Is the message that urgent?’
Tilting her head in uncertainty, Nelloa hurried to the guild and took the message capsule from the eagle first thing.
And the moment she read the contents of the letter Stanley had sent, her blood ran cold—she rushed to the window to look outside.
In the distance, a beast was bounding across the rooftops at an unnaturally rapid pace, drawing closer.
‘Good heavens! Bloden’s tracked me down!’
Nelloa didn’t even have time to leave the Cold Mana Stones in safekeeping; she bolted from the guild and leaped onto her horse.
“Hyah!”
She wheeled the horse away from the direction Bloden was approaching and galloped frantically across the fields, abandoning her domain, her teeth grinding audibly the whole time.
Stanley’s letter had said that the Kelite Ability Book had fallen into Bloden’s hands, and if she were interrogated, she should feign ignorance and deny everything.
Stanley’s assessment was that since the book was written in ancient Kelite script, its contents wouldn’t be comprehensible immediately. But Bloden wasn’t just anyone—he was the Emperor of Ilpein. Surely he would have people capable of deciphering it.
Stanley didn’t know this, but Nelloa was well aware that Bloden had already deciphered the Ability Books of both the Ortix Kingdom and the Kingdom of Meridon.
At that time, Bloden had put Raven to work on deciphering them, but when High Priest Meltears brought in a linguist to assist, both books were decoded in less than two months.
Which meant it was only a matter of time before Bloden knew exactly what her ability was.
‘I need to figure out a way fast. First, I’ll put as much distance between us as possible.’
But Nelloa soon realized that the very thought of escaping from Bloden was a mistake.
“Found it, caw!”
The moment the raven appeared suddenly in front of the running horse and unleashed a wave of black energy, the startled animal couldn’t even cry out—it simply toppled sideways and lost consciousness.
Thrown from the horse’s back, Nelloa struck the ground and tumbled over twice, while the raven vanished without a trace.
“Ugh…”
Nelloa pushed herself up, her body aching. The impact hurt, but nothing seemed broken. The bag slung across her back had acted as a cushion.
“Found it! Fell! There!”
The raven’s loud cries echoed closer and closer, and a massive wolf appeared in Nelloa’s vision, with Hailey and Bloden riding upon its back.
Bloden dismounted from the wolf’s back and helped Hailey down.
Even from where she watched, Nelloa could see just how romantic the look in his eyes was as he gazed at Hailey—it made her insides twist until she thought she might die.
And in the moment she met the cold gaze of both Hailey and Bloden, she knew she was finished.
Hailey would never forgive her for orchestrating the marriage fraud.
Soon enough, it would become obvious that she wasn’t a saint but a Derivative Gate Creator.
Forgery of official documents carried a prison sentence under Imperial Law that was difficult to escape—though as royalty, she calculated that if she paid reparations and feigned remorse, she might at least avoid the harshest punishment.
Before Bloden and Hailey could say anything, the raven issued a warning to Nelloa.
“All known. Made Derivative Gate. Kelite Princess. Law’s judgment.”
Nelloa’s heart lurched at those words, and she clenched her teeth.
‘She’s figured everything out!’
Now that her Derivative Gate Creation had been exposed, the outcome was obvious.
‘If I’m going to die anyway.’
She could never die alone. She couldn’t bear to see those two living comfortably after she was gone.
“So what if you know?”
With a venomous sneer at Black Libia, Nelloa pulled a pouch of Derivative Gate Seeds from her breast and dumped them all at her feet.
“What are you going to do about it?”
The seeds transformed into gates one after another, devouring each other. With each newly derived passage swallowing another seed, the chasm grew wider and deeper in an instant.
Nelloa plunged into it, and seeds that fell with her began opening passages from below. With each new gate spawned from a seed, Nelloa sank deeper still.
When she lifted her head, she could see Hailey and Bloden peering down into the gate from above.
Both of them looked utterly bewildered, so Nelloa laughed aloud and shouted.
“Do you really think I’d die alone? From now on, you’ll both live in the hell I created!”

* * *

I’d already known that Nelloa possessed the ability to create Derivative Gates.
But I could never have imagined the sight of her detonating dozens of seeds in sequence, boring passages so deep that their end was nowhere in sight.
“She’s absolutely insane! How does someone like that even exist?”
Appalled, I couldn’t contain my anger and hurled curses down into the gate at Nelloa with all my might.
“You stubborn idiot! Don’t you dare live your life like that!”
At that, Bloden was startled and wrapped an arm around my shoulders, pulling me backward.
“Calm down. If you fall into the gate, what will you do?”
I huffed indignantly but stepped back as Bloden advised. Once he’d caught his breath and exhaled in relief, he tugged at his collar slightly before speaking.
“You’re absolutely right, but for now, the best we can do is contain this without civilian casualties.”
Bloden immediately sent Black Libia to explore inside the Derivative Gate.
But not long after, Black Libia shot upward like a bullet, her wings tattered and frayed, whimpering.
“Battered. Black Libia. Monsters attacking. Writhing. Cannot enter. Very deep. Difficult. If go again, might die.”
Black Libia’s distress was so great that even her speech became longer than usual.
“The Princess?”
In response to Bloden’s question, Black Libia shook her head from side to side.
“Likely dead. Not visible.”
It was an anticlimactic ending.
She’d caused all manner of chaos and then simply died alone. And now the Empire was left with a Derivative Gate of unprecedented scale.
Bloden rubbed his brow, troubled, then called for Raven and summoned his entire Demon Lord’s Army, including Kimarise.
“First we need to clear out the monsters around the entrance and deep in the passages. That way we can replenish the mana and close the gate.”
After explaining this to me, Bloden moved forward, leading the Commanders.
.
.
.
How much time had passed like that?
After quickly establishing a position and setting me down inside it, clearing out the monsters, and returning, Bloden received reports from the other Commanders and pressed his hand to his forehead.
“Even if we pour in debris, it falls endlessly… At this rate, we won’t be able to collapse the passage.”
Normally, if you collapsed part of the passage to reduce its scale, the Mana required would drop significantly. But this gate was bored straight through like a vertical cliff face, leaving nowhere worth collapsing.
‘If the problem is that I can’t reduce the Mana needed….’
As I stepped forward wondering if there was anything I could do to help, Raven and Dantarion returned from their probe of the gate bearing good news.
“We found a section lower down where the passage curves slightly. It’s some distance away, so it won’t be easy, but I believe we can collapse it there.”
After Raven’s report, Dantarion added his own findings.
“There’s no trace of the Princess at all. If a monster had consumed her whole, some sign would remain even without a corpse.”
Dantarion, whose eyes had been thoughtfully scanning the passage, shrugged.
“My instinct tells me she’s still alive.”

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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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