“There’s no way to hunt right now.”

When the butler shook his head as if it were nonsense, Kaian flared up.

“You dare speak of impossibility before me?”

He was like a living god in the Rowen estate.

“Find it.”

“My lord.”

“Find it by any means necessary.”

The doctor fidgeted uncomfortably.

“Even for medicine, there’s an appropriate time for treatment.”

“Are you saying it’s already too late to cure her? Is that how you care for patients? My subjects in my castle?”

“Ah, no! No. Absolutely not.”

In fact, although Claude was intimidated and overwhelmed by Kaian’s tone, he wasn’t particularly harsh to her.

The young lord, who lacked for nothing, was aggressive and cynical in everything.

There were some older women who sympathized, thinking he must be like that after suddenly losing his parents and becoming the head of the family, heading to the battlefield. The rest admired even Kaian’s personality, saying “As expected of our lord.”

Anyway, the doctor felt afraid that if he couldn’t get the medicine, if he couldn’t cure Claude, he might be driven out of the lord’s castle like this.

“The illness is so deep and time is short, but you ask me to find ingredients that can’t be obtained.”

“You’ve been talking for ten minutes in front of me without even trying.”

“You’re being too harsh! Didn’t even you, the lord who was closest to her, not know until the lady became so visibly ill!”

Unable to bear the injustice, the doctor cried out, looking at Kaian with resentful eyes.

“She’s so weak there’s not a bit of flesh on her body, how could you not know that.”

Kaian pressed his lips tightly together.

He had sometimes pushed the woman, who was weak to the point of death, until there was nothing left to squeeze out.

What he felt unjust about was that he had never seen other women naked, so he had no particular thought that Claude’s body condition was bad or strange.

He had just thought ‘She’s thin, she’s slender’ when he first saw her, and that was it.

Kaian, whose mood had worsened due to the doctor’s criticism, glared at him.

“I’ll have to look for a new resident doctor for the lord’s castle.”

“Gasp!”

Finally, worn down by Kaian’s thorny urging, the doctor weakly stumbled out of the office.

“What will you do?”

“It might be in the royal castle.”

The capital of the Oberon Kingdom was about a week’s journey by horse and carriage from Rowen.

“They said she’d cough up blood and die in a month.”

Claude never revealed when she had started suffering.

But since she had been hiding it and was caught, it seemed like there weren’t many days left before the disease progressed.

It takes two weeks to go to and from the royal castle.

Maybe Kaian could shorten it to about ten days.

He was lost in such thoughts when suddenly.

“Kyaaaa!”

A woman’s scream rang out in the quiet castle, causing a sudden commotion.

“What’s going on? It’s noisy.”

While he was frowning, a servant came and hurriedly whispered something to the butler.

“My lord. They say the lady has collapsed.”

Before the words were finished, Kaian headed towards Claude’s bedroom like the wind.

“Miss. Miss.”

As if they had been trying to give her medicine, liquid was spilled messily on the floor along with shards of glass.

Hannah, who had been patting Claude’s cheeks while holding her in her arms as she lay collapsed on the floor in panic, crawled on her knees over the broken pieces as if they didn’t matter at all and clung to Kaian’s trouser leg.

“Please save her. My lord. Please save our miss. Don’t let her die like this. Even if I die, I’ll be a servant of Temnes to my very soul. Please.”

The blood flowing from Claude’s mouth was different from when she had coughed up blood before.

It wasn’t the dark red blood clots that had been gnawing at her insides.

It looked like the warm, vivid blood that gushed out when you first stabbed someone’s heart.

Not blood that had pooled and gathered inside over time, but the raw liquid containing her life flowed from her small unconscious body with a red color every time she coughed slightly.

“Claude.”

Kaian called her calmly.

“Open your eyes.”

She didn’t move at all.

“Claude!”

Even when he called her name louder, the woman who had been irritating Kaian until just now by saying things like “We can’t change the grave site, can we?” or “It’s okay to move rooms” was silent.

The doctor, who had rushed out of the office only to be called back, hurriedly felt Claude’s pulse.

“Ah. Oh no.”

At the ominous murmur, Kaian glared at him fiercely.

“One week. At most one week. There’s no way to…”

Kaian carefully lifted Claude. Even while unconscious, her body that weakly inhaled and inevitably coughed out breaths might shake, so he slowly laid her down on the bed.

“I’ll go.”

“…What?”

“Pardon?”

The doctor and butler questioned simultaneously.

“The water buffalo. I’ll go catch it.”

At Kaian’s words, the butler jumped up.

“Absolutely not, my lord.”

“There’s nothing that can’t be done. If I can’t catch it, no one in all of Oberon can.”

His words couldn’t be refuted, but the butler, unable to watch the precious head of Temnes charge at a herd of wild water buffalo, tried to dissuade him.

“You don’t have an heir yet.”

“Of course not. With my only wife in that state, it would be stranger if there was an heir, wouldn’t it?”

Kaian’s eyes, which persistently looked at Claude, were red as if bloodshot.

“I’m going right now.”

With that, Kaian hurriedly summoned the knights.

The elites who were suddenly assembled didn’t understand what the lord was doing.

“We’re being called out now to get medicine for the Vermonte woman?”

“Nah. It can’t be. Just a false rumor.”

“Our lord does love hunting so much.”

“Are you crazy? Why hunt wild water buffalo? Ugh. I think I got caught up in something bad.”

Ignoring their chatter, Kaian put on heavy armor all over his body for the first time in three years since returning from the battlefield.

It was late at night, and the gatekeepers who had closed the castle gates were busy lighting torches and lowering the drawbridge at the lord’s order.

“I, I’ll go too.”

Hannah approached hesitantly with a tear-stained face.

She was wearing pants that male servants would wear, with a bundle of possessions neatly tied to her back with a wrapping cloth.

“Miss’s medicine. I’ll get it. Sob.”

At Hannah’s appearance, the knights who were lifting shields as big as her body onto their horses looked at Kaian with bewildered eyes.

That’s when Kaian did something unexpected.

Thud. Thud.

He gently patted Hannah’s shoulder with his hand wearing heavy gauntlets.

Hannah looked up in surprise.

“Stay by your miss’s side. In my place.”

Then Hannah, who dared to face Kaian, bowed her head deeply and hurriedly retreated back to the castle.

As soon as the drawbridge fell with a thud, Kaian led his subordinates out of the castle gate.

The place where wild water buffalo lived was quite close to where Rowen Castle was located.

Should that be considered lucky?

If you rode a horse for about a day, there was a wide grassland area where herds of water buffalo were spread out widely on the open plains with their imposing black bodies, so there was no need to search for them.

Kaian observed the buffalo herd with cold eyes.

If someone had hunted these for medicine before, of course Kaian could do it too.

If he set his mind to it, if he wanted to do it, there was nothing he couldn’t do.

Even if it was to save a woman whose life was slipping away.

“My lord. They say all the traps have been dug.”

A knight appeared, covered in yellow dust, and reported breathlessly.

“Get in formation.”

The elite knights who had moved as one body with Kaian on the battlefield for five years fell into their positions in an orderly manner.

“Shoot.”

The archer standing next to Kaian, who looked like a giant, nocked a huge arrow as thick as an adult’s wrist to his massive bow and drew the string towards the sky.

Swoosh.

The arrow that flew struck the middle of the buffalo herd with a thud. It seemed to have luckily hit one buffalo in one shot.

As the one pierced by the arrow started to thrash about, the startled ones began to run in one direction. The ground shook behind the footsteps of the running beasts, raising yellow dust.

“Let’s go!”

Kaian spurred his horse towards the cloud of dust swirling on the prairie.

‘Is this heaven?’

That was the first thought that came to Claude’s mind.

She had read somewhere in a book.

An eccentric had counted out of curiosity and found that a person breathes over 20,000 times a day.

Since Claude’s chest felt like it was being scraped with a knife every time she inhaled and exhaled, that meant she had hurt more than 40,000 times every day.

It hurt so much that she really wanted to stop.

Though not long, her life had been successful.

She had become a noble duchess, and though she hadn’t been able to properly see it due to her illness, she even had a grave site beneath an incredibly magnificent castle.

Part of the reason she hadn’t toured the castle was also because she was worried about getting into trouble if she wandered around.

And she was able to send food to the starving children in the Valmont estate.

Kaian had promised to buy her, promising ten carriages each time, so he had to send 300 carriages to Valmont.

After she consummated the marriage, the thirty carriages that Duke Vermonte had taken were enough to feed all the people of the estate for a month, so 300 carriages would be enough to support the people for ten months.

She thought this was quite a good life.

She hoped Hannah wouldn’t cry.

The thought slowly occurred to her that she should have properly told her that she didn’t have to take her to Valmont as Duke Vermonte wanted.

The lady’s place in the underground cemetery here had a gravestone made of pale pink rose quartz, which was quite pretty. This place wasn’t bad either. In the end, she hadn’t even gotten to see the blue diamond.

“…If only he would keep his promise. To the children…”

Then she felt she could close her eyes in peace without wanting anything more.

“This is ridiculous.”

At the coldly rebuking voice, Claude opened her eyes.

“The first thing you say when you wake up is doubting whether I’ll embezzle that measly food?”

Her eyelids trembled.

She thought it was heaven, but is this hell?

Kaian, dressed in all black from top to bottom in a way that was impossible to imagine as a heavenly image, was frowning at her with a displeased look.

Hiccup.

Claude was so startled she started hiccuping.

“It doesn’t hurt.”

It must be certain that she’s dead since it doesn’t hurt, but why is Kaian…

“It’s good that it doesn’t hurt.”

As he stood up from the chair, the door to the room opened and Hannah entered with a bright face when she saw her.

“Miss! You’re awake!”

“Uh. Uh…”

Claude felt dazed. It seemed like her head wasn’t thinking properly.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m… fine.”

I’m alive?

Kaian’s cold voice came from above her head.

“You look disappointed that you couldn’t die.”