No Regression for the Victor - Chapter 11
The reason was obvious. With so few children, the Emperor would never easily allow the prince to go out unless there was a legitimate reason. The only time the prince could leave the palace was when a subjugation order was issued for a task that only the prince could undertake.
“We do have to use a gate, but…”
“But? Why? Can’t I come too?”
Marcel replied firmly to the prince’s eager voice, full of anticipation after being cooped up in the palace for so long.
“No. Your Highness absolutely cannot accompany me.”
He really shouldn’t have said it like that. Ten minutes later, Marcel would be sending countless warnings to his past self, but the present Marcel didn’t understand any of them.
“A place I can’t accompany you? Where is that supposed to be?”
Marcel hesitated for a moment, thinking, ‘If he knows who I’m going to monitor, he’ll be too scared to care,’ and so, completely miscalculating, answered honestly.
“It’s Duke Transis. Apparently he’s been acting strangely lately. I’ll be staying at the frozen lake for a few weeks to observe him as part of the investigation.”
At those words, the prince’s shoulders twitched.
Isaac Thion Transis. The man who had nearly swallowed the entire empire—Mikhail had heard plenty about him. Strictly speaking, he was also the one who created the opportunity for Mikhail to be recognized as a prince.
Because Isaac, knowing Mikhail’s identity, tried to use him as a bargaining chip to negotiate his return to the imperial family after kidnapping him, Mikhail’s secret birth was finally revealed.
‘He was exiled, wasn’t he?’
Even though Isaac was a villain who had once tried to kill him, like many overly good-natured protagonists, Mikhail still worried about him. He wasn’t hoping for someone who tried to murder him to live comfortably, but every time he heard the infamous rumors from the frozen lake, he sometimes naively thought it might be better to just lock Isaac up in a prison in the capital.
‘To be stuck in a place like that… it must be suffocating…’
The frozen lake of Frigid had always been an infamous place of exile where high-born criminals were locked away until death. Once trapped inside, you could never leave until you died. It was so old that over ten convicts had already breathed their last there, and there were even rumors of ghosts haunting the place.
On top of that, Isaac had even received the ‘Crown of the Slayer’ for attempting to kill Mikhail. Mikhail found himself bothered by Isaac’s fate, even though he’d done nothing wrong.
The Crown of the Slayer—also known as the Curse of Lumitas—was the cruelest punishment the imperial family could inflict in place of execution.
The method of bestowing the curse was very simple: an imperial mage would plant a Lumitas seed in the criminal’s heart. The seed would then feed off the person’s vitality and begin to sprout thorny brambles. As the sprouts grew, they would wind around the heart, and in the end, when the thorns pierced and burst the heart, the criminal would die.
The time it took for the brambles to destroy the heart could be as short as three years or as long as ten. For all those years, the criminal would suffer, writhing in pain as the thorns stabbed their organs from within and slowly died.
‘…It must be excruciating.’
That wasn’t all. What made this curse the most miserable punishment wasn’t just the pain. There was a way to stop its progression and suspend the curse: the imperial treasure known as Emil’s Heart.
Emil’s Heart, left behind by the empire’s guardian beast Emil, was a jewel in the shape of a massive beast’s organ. Even a small fragment of it could kill the Lumitas. By bowing to the imperial family or negotiating, one might receive a pardon. The hope of possible survival made this punishment more horrifying than execution itself.
No matter how much Isaac had once tried to kill him, Mikhail did not want someone to die such a wretched death because of him. But control of the national treasure belonged to the Emperor and the Crown Prince, and Mikhail was hardly ambitious enough to vie with his brother for their position just to save Isaac. So he’d always turned a blind eye to anything related to Duke Transis.
And now, to hear that Isaac had suddenly changed? Mikhail felt a sudden impulse.
“Why? Did something happen to him?”
At the prince’s question, Marcel scratched his cheek and replied.
“Who knows? I don’t know either. I’ll only find out when I get there…”
And if he had noticed the way the prince’s eyes briefly glinted at that moment, the disaster that followed might have been avoided.
Three days later, Marcel would be frantically signaling for help, but for now, there was no way the present Marcel could have realized what was coming.
