My Insolent Shadow (22 Chapters Left to Complete) - Chapter 16
Cassian, staring at Yuriciel who had gone pale as a sheet, pulled her hand down with an expressionless face.
The net that had been holding Yuriciel’s hair in place slipped off, and her fiery red locks cascaded down smoothly.
Not stopping there, Cassian gently swept Yuriciel’s red hair to one side.
His touch, though slow and gentle, was oddly tender yet forceful.
Caught completely off guard, Yuriciel’s body trembled uncontrollably.
“What… what are you doing right now?”
“From now on, wear it like this. Stop putting on that ridiculous thing.”
With a sharp snap, his hand crushed the net without mercy.
Only when her alluring red hair draped over one shoulder did the Young Master return to his seat, seemingly satisfied.
After that, he picked up his pen again and resumed sketching.
As if nothing had happened at all.
It was absurd. She felt once more confirmed that she was nothing but a doll moving exactly as the Young Master wished.
She was filled with the urge to immediately tuck her hair back into the net and hide it away from sight.
But… as always, Yuriciel couldn’t move a single inch.
[This is the timeline separator]Cassian shifted his gaze from Yuriciel’s now-empty spot to the sketch he’d been drawing.
As that woman had said, calling it a sketch was a generous stretch.
It was nothing more than a collection of rough lines forming a geometric shape.
No one else would ever look at this and recognize that girl—only she herself might.
And that fact pleased Cassian quite a bit.
Now, whenever she saw the countless lines composing the world, that girl’s face would surely twist in disgust.
Because this drawing would come to mind.
And each time, wouldn’t she think of him?
Then her pure, innocent expression would surely contort even more.
Today too, she couldn’t bring herself to say she’d leave, even as she stood trembling before him, still clinging to the last shred of hope in that fake medicine.
A deeply satisfied smile spread across Cassian’s lips.
Since she’d given him such a joyful day, he felt obliged to repay her generously.
Taking a pair of scissors in hand, he plucked the most beautiful flower from among those the butler had personally arranged for him today.
Snip. His face remained utterly blank as he cleanly severed the stem.
[This is the timeline separator]On her way back, Yuriciel asked Uncle Tom, who ran the herbal shop, to prepare one last dose of medicine.
Her steps as she headed home carrying it felt strangely weary.
Just as she stepped outside again, someone urgently grabbed her arm.
Turning her head, she saw Hael.
“Yuriciel, something terrible’s happened.”
As urgent as his voice was, anxiety clouded his usually graceful features.
An ominous premonition sharply pierced through Yuriciel’s mind.
“What happened?”
“Uncle Litorn’s been taken to the Lord’s manor. A whole bunch of knights showed up.”
The appearance of knights meant something serious—after all, it meant the Lord had mobilized his knight order just to arrest a mere commoner.
He must have committed some grave crime.
“You mean that doctor?”
Although there was only one person in the village with that name, Yuriciel asked again, unable to believe it.
After all, to the villagers, he was practically their only physician.
She herself had also consulted him when diagnosing her mother’s medicine.
“Yes.”
Yuriciel stared straight at Hael, doing her best to suppress her dread.
“What’s the reason?”
“Fraud. Apparently, every diagnosis he’s ever given was a complete lie.”
“Then my mother’s medicine too…?”
Hael sadly nodded, looking at Yuriciel’s tearful expression.
‘So Mother’s medicine was fake…’
Her vision darkened as her consciousness blurred.
Yuriciel barely held herself upright and walked out aimlessly,
desperately praying for someone—anyone—to say it was all a lie.
Predictably, the people of Alphonse were bewildered by this unprecedented incident.
Yuriciel’s voice, as she aimlessly asked again and again if it was really true, held no strength.
Yet the already noisy villagers, stirred by the rumors, gave half-hearted confirmations before returning to their places.
Left alone, Yuriciel sank to the ground with a despairing cry.
‘That’s impossible.’
Truthfully, she’d suspected it for some time already.
That the medicine had no effect.
Still, she’d believed it might at least offer some pain relief.
But now, even that hope seemed to be just her mother pretending not to be in pain to ease her daughter’s burden—and that realization brought tears to her eyes.
Her mother’s voice came back to her, saying even then that the medicine looked expensive and telling her to return it right away.
Even while watching her mother continue to cough up blood, Yuriciel had still clung to the faint hope that perhaps a miracle remained.
But now—
‘All of it was a lie…’
Did that mean she’d been wasting her time all this while, foolishly believing that nonsense and squandering her mother’s final moments?
The utter devastation of having even that last sliver of hope trampled into dust was indescribable.
Hael caught her as she staggered and collapsed.
“Don’t worry. There must be another way.”
But Yuriciel heard nothing of Hael’s reassurance.
Her hollow eyes only made her look more fragile.
When words finally escaped her lips, they were soaked in tears.
Uncle Brown—the man who, despite her young age, had given her the highest wage in the village—briefly flashed through her mind.
“Uncle Brown’s family too….”
Yuriciel’s eyes reddened, unable to finish her sentence.
Uncle Brown’s daughter had also been diagnosed by that quack with an unknown illness and had died shortly after.
Worse, that fraud had warned the villagers it might be contagious and urged everyone to be cautious.
Because of that, the villagers had avoided Uncle Brown, who had lost his daughter.
And that wasn’t all. The more the people of Alphonse dug through their village’s long history, examining every diagnosis and outcome he’d given, the more their suspicions hardened into certainty.
Generally, Mr. Litorn only treated patients whom other village physicians had deemed difficult or incurable.
He gave them hope—hope of a cure.
Of course, not a single one, including Yuriciel’s mother or Jane, had ever been fully cured.
Yet once a patient fell under Mr. Litorn’s care, they never escaped his grasp.
After all, he was the only doctor in Alphonse who called them “incurable.”
So everyone had simply clung to him as their last hope.
Blindly.
The people of Alphonse were in constant uproar over this affair, lost in confusion.
Meanwhile, being summoned repeatedly by the constabulary for questioning became an unending routine.
As victims, the villagers gave statements, drawing closer to a truth they might have been better off never knowing.
Mr. Litorn, who had entered the village with a modest appearance and kind words to claim Alphonse’s title of chief physician, had now fallen completely—exposed as a deceitful quack.
Rumors quickly spread that not long after being dragged to the Lord’s manor, Mr. Litorn had received an order of banishment.
The enraged villagers, who had been seething in anticipation, rushed over at the news—but he was already gone.
With no one left to vent their fury upon, the incident swiftly faded away.
Some villagers even declared it fortunate they’d finally caught the fraud.
Today, as usual, they gathered at the pub before dawn.
Located near the wharf, this place was where travelers often came to grab a meal before boarding a ship.
After their usual idle chatter about how many fish they might catch, the weather, and water temperature ended uneventfully, they fell into silence.
Yet, as always, there was someone eager to break the silence by making others’ business their drinking topic.
“Who on earth reported Mr. Litorn?”
“Does it matter? He’s gone now anyway.”
“But doesn’t the person who drove that fraud out deserve our thanks?”
“That’s true. The accuser was probably someone Mr. Litorn recently wronged.”
“But I don’t recall anyone like that recently.”
“Could it have been Mr. Brown, after losing his daughter?”
The pub echoed with the villagers’ engrossed speculation.
Inside the kitchen, Yuriciel scrubbed plates as usual, listening to their chatter.
Unlike the villagers’ guesses, the person who reported Mr. Litorn must have been someone of high status.
After all, for the Lord’s knights to move so swiftly suggested immense pressure had been applied.
From what she’d seen, the Lord of Alphonse never involved himself in matters beneath him—
unless it benefited him personally.
The only person in this domain capable of compelling Alphonse’s Lord.
Her thoughts naturally drifted toward that Young Master.
Cassian Di Blanchet.
That name always surfaced unexpectedly from the most unforeseen places.
‘But why would he…?’
Would he really go so far just to drive out a physician who had nothing to do with him?
Recalling his desert-dry gaze that observed everything with detached coldness, it seemed unlikely he’d care about others’ affairs.
But then again, remembering how he’d enjoyed propping her up and drawing bizarre sketches…
To that Young Master, banishing a single person might be nothing more than a passing amusement.
During the past days, while undergoing questioning and listening to the villagers’ rumors, she’d been too numb to consider it—but now a question rose clearly in her mind.
After finishing the dishes and exchanging half-hearted goodbyes as usual, she walked toward the old mansion where Cassian waited.
Her mind was completely filled with swirling thoughts.
In truth, the person who’d suffered the greatest loss from Litorn’s actions recently was none other than Yuriciel herself.
After all, she was the only one in this village living in constant anxiety with a terminally ill patient at home.
At worst, the villagers’ losses had merely been taking stomach medicine instead of cold medicine—nothing more.
That was why, unlike the others, Yuriciel couldn’t easily accept that Litorn was a fraud.
Even when the constabulary officially branded him a criminal after the investigation, she still couldn’t bring herself to believe it.
Because admitting that medicine was fake meant she could no longer save her mother.
Someone might argue that since her mother was still alive, they could find another physician or somehow manage.
Hael had even promised to use every contact he had in the capital to find proper healing remedies.
But even Hael still wore a sorrowful expression before her—which meant he’d found nothing yet.
And if he couldn’t…
There was no hope.
Should she resent the accuser who’d extinguished even that last thread of hope?
Or should she thank that person for saving her from wasting more time and effort?
In truth, Yuriciel felt it no longer mattered.
Now, whoever that accuser was—what did it matter?
Yet that thought shattered the moment she opened the door and stepped inside.
Male lead reborn without memories — but he still falls for her.
The person he finds displeasing in this life turns out to be his cherished wife-master in previous life…
Xie Zhi and Fang Xianxing who had known each other for less than three days through a blind date sat in the same car in front of the civil affairs bureau. They had a disagreement and failed to get married.
Xie Zhi immediately took out his phone, slid through his contacts, and randomly selected the next marriage candidate.
The woman snatched his phone and hung up. Looking at his phone wallpaper, she awkwardly changed the subject: “An ancient painting, eh? It looks pretty good, it’s just that the person in the painting looks a bit like me.”
When he heard this, he sarcastically mocked her for being so delusional, completely unaware that, the person in front of him was the reincarnation of Wen Ru, the famous prime minister of Yuan Shun whom he most admired…
The female CEO who doesn’t want to get married with a divorce agreement in hand × The male archaeological researcher who will only get married if he’s sure he can get divorced
Damnnnnn why is this so interesting am I a masochist for liking this haha
I feel like the young master is probably going to get her back one way
I feel bad for Hael, he likes her so much but I feel like it’s hard for the FL to return that type of love