The Grand Duke caught me as I fell. I buried my face in his chest, enveloped by his large hands around my shoulders.
“…Your Highness?”
I knew I should move away, but I couldn’t.
His heartbeat echoed in my ears, pressed against his chest. Thump, thump. It was hard to tell whose heart was beating so fiercely – mine or the Grand Duke’s?
His scent, like a forest of pine, overwhelmed me, making me feel almost delirious. Inside his warm embrace, I felt incredibly tense yet comforted.
‘What’s happening here?’
Suddenly, the Grand Duke’s hands fell from my shoulders.
“You’re cold, staying out in the night air for too long isn’t good.”
He stepped back from me.
Crackling.
The sound of the burning flames in the Pechka brought me back to reality. It felt as if time and space had momentarily vanished.
‘What is this feeling?’
I felt embarrassed to look up at the Grand Duke. He had turned his back to me, gazing at the Pechka.
I spoke softly, head bowed.
“Your Highness, I have brought the recording from the Magic Stone of Medea’s Messenger. I also found out what’s happening to a woman named Cecilia. It’s critical evidence of the wrongdoings in the South.”
My voice faltered without realizing.
“Bring Arcadia here.”
“Yes.”
“No, I’ll go.”
The Grand Duke walked towards the door without looking at me.
“Sit by the fire and rest for a while, it’s an order.”
He paused briefly, leaving those words behind before stepping out.
Soon after, Arcadia entered the office, following the Grand Duke. He didn’t say a word to me, as if he had already heard something from the Grand Duke.
Nervously, I clutched the Magic Stone from my pocket.
The Grand Duke sat on a black velvet sofa, staring at a white wall next to the Pechka, with Arcadia sitting beside him.
As I was about to command the Magic Stone as I learned from the diviner’s shop owner,
“Ventus.”
“Esdel.”
The Grand Duke called me.
“Yes?”
“Sit by the Pechka as well.”
Following his suggestion, I sat on a small sofa near the Pechka, slightly away from them.
“Then I’ll show what I’ve recorded. It’s my first time, so I’m not sure if it will work well…”
I wasn’t sure how the recording turned out, keeping me on edge.
I placed the semi-transparent green stone on the table.
“Ventus, can you show it?”
As soon as I spoke, the Magic Stone gradually became transparent and then shot a bright green light towards the white wall next to the Pechka.
Inside the light, there I was, sitting in a shabby tavern. I was fiddling with a butterbeer glass, seen through someone else’s perspective.
Sitting on the sofa, I glanced at Arcadia and the Grand Duke. The live recording made me feel a bit embarrassed.
‘When will the red caterpillar appear? Did I start recording too early?’
But the Grand Duke seemed entirely engrossed in the scene. He had probably forgotten the earlier incident.
‘He must’ve been surprised, thinking I had run away. That’s all.’
I suddenly found his indifferent demeanor right now somewhat harsh. A confusing emotion I couldn’t understand.
I quickly averted my gaze from the Grand Duke.
My heart was still fluttering.
Soon, the red caterpillar appeared, captured in third-person perspective.
[Still as arrogant. To speak of him in such a place.]The red caterpillar’s growling at me appeared as vividly as if he were sitting in front of the Pechka.
‘I need to keep watching more closely…’
The flames in the Pechka were so warm.
Why… do my eyes keep closing?
Sion Belphegor couldn’t take his eyes off Esdel in the recording.
In a corner of a cheap tavern, away from the noise of drunken men’s babble, sat the silver-haired lady, Esdel. She idly fiddled with a butterbeer, her hollow sky-blue eyes staring at the untouched drink.
‘Why such a forlorn expression?’
“Did the black beetle die so you could take its place?”
“I see, you took over since I was gone.”
In the footage, she provokes a red-haired man – obviously a swordsman – one of Medea’s minions.
Her words suggest that she, Esdel, could have succeeded the black beetle, revealing she was once an assassin herself.
‘You’ve just revealed to Arcadia and me that you were an assassin. Aren’t you afraid? Arcadia might misunderstand. Is gathering evidence more important to you than your own safety?’
Sion Belphegor looked at Esdel, curled up on a small sofa beside the Pechka, her face turned towards the wall and barely visible.
‘Does she accept even being misunderstood?’
The Grand Duke glanced at Arcadia, whose face was stern, learning facts he already knew but Arcadia did not.
Esdel, who could have succeeded the black beetle assassin that tried to kill him in the previous life.
Arcadia’s expression hardened further when Medea’s messenger in the footage said:
“When you return to the North, make connections with Julia Nugent.”
Julia Nugent.
Sion Belphegor was startled.
Arcadia’s sister Julia, who hated him for their father, Hern Nugent’s death.
Arcadia’s brows twitched in anger at the mention of his sister.
Male lead is a Divorced Husband
She said to him: “Tell me, what makes you like me? I’ll change it!”
Liu Changning transmigrated into a female cannon fodder character in a female-dominant novel.
After reading the first half of the novel’s plot, the first thing she did upon transmigration was to divorce the Pan Jinlian-style male protagonist she had just married.
She indulged herself, pretending to be ugly and poor.
But as time passed, the way that man looked at her became more and more unusual…
Liu Changning was dumbfounded: Tell me, what makes you like me? I’ll change!
――
This lifetime, Pei Yuanshao was rejected by the same woman twice!
The first time, she drove him away. Forced by the situation, he endured the waves of anger in his heart, yielding and humbling himself.
That person lay slanted on a rocking chair, her sallow face emotionless: “If you don’t want a divorce, go cook!”
Pei Yuanshao’s face was dark and gloomy: “You!”
The second time, after the crisis in Jinling City was resolved, the new emperor sent someone to pick him up. He turned around, stammering: “I… I have to go. If you keep me…”
That person lay on the kang bed, her back to him, as if she had long anticipated this day, crisp and clear: “Goodbye!”
Pei Yuanshao was so angry his fingers trembled: “You… you!”
The mission of family and country made him restrain himself, averting his eyes and turning to leave this broken household.
Two years later, they met again. Seeing her ethereal face, his body shook like a sieve.
“She was originally a ‘she’!”
At the Qionglin Banquet, the top scholar of the imperial examination, a talented person with exceptional speech and conduct, all the unmarried young gentlemen from aristocratic families looked at her with shy and timid eyes.
The peerless imperial official Pei Yuanshao felt the anger in his heart erupt. He pointed at the woman surrounded by the crowd at the Qionglin Banquet, his thin lips slightly curled: “Little sister, I wants that person to be the wife-master of my Mingde Prince Manor.”
[Touch the gear icon in the bottom right corner of the screen to move to the next chapter if you want.]
