Villain, Let Me Touch You! - Chapter 54
“You said you wanted to go to the World Fair. I’ve arranged for you to go this afternoon. And you don’t need to meet up with the Emperor anymore—Demyr handled things quite well and His Majesty had sent word that he has no objections to our engagement.”
What a dysfunctional family.[1]
Was it okay to just agree without even seeing the face of the person who will be his daughter-in-law? Let alone the one who’s going to be the future Crown Princess? I wonder if Terman has any interest in Helios at all.
Perhaps, as Helios said, the Queen just did a really good job at convincing him.
Considering their strained relationship, Demyr had almost no credibility.
So I hope she did handle it well on her own.
I entrusted the engagement-related matters to Demyr and focused on the World Fair. My intention was to find a proper inscriber at the fair.
In a world where people return to the destiny given by the gods, they were those who openly defied fate.
Inscribers were absolutely forbidden. They challenged the system created by the gods, defined as heretics, outlaws, embodiments of evil. So, they hid, making the night their friend and using the underground as their shelter.
However, there was always a demand for inscribers, and calling a renowned and skilled inscriber came at a price.
The inscriber I sought was more special.
He claimed he had never failed to imprint a name. The effects of his imprints lasted quite a long time.
And he was famous for being able to rectify the mistakes made by novice inscribers.
He can even erase names.
Of course, the names he could erase were only those engraved by other inscribers.
Just in case, with a faint hope, I wanted to meet him. It was natural for me to seek him out like a person in the desert who couldn’t imagine complaining about the temperature of the water in an oasis.
Unfortunately, there was little known about him. This was because inscribers were known for their secrecy.
Most inscribers grew up despised from a young age. They distrusted the social system and disliked the society that hated them.
It was difficult for them to demand accountability and justice.
The results were grim.
There were instances where names were inscribed without considering the other party’s consent, forcing one-sided imprinting, often resulting in fatalities.
Persecution led to crimes, and crimes, in turn, led to more persecution.
The societal atmosphere developed a view of them as criminals, stamped with the stigma by inscribers who would carve any desired name onto someone else’s body for the right price.
Inscribers retreated into the shadows, only venturing out if they had a strong conviction.
Encounters between ordinary individuals and inscribers were not common. However, there were brokers connecting supply and demand.
The largest broker in the Empire was the Steel Merchant Company.
While the Steel Merchant Company appeared to be a very reputable business on the surface, it was, in reality, a group of scammers preying on people manipulated by fate.
To meet a specific inscriber, one had to go through the Steel Merchants
And today, Steel Merchants were operating a booth at the World Fair.
Perhaps there, I might find a solution to break free from destiny.
Just thinking about it made me laugh involuntarily. While chuckling to myself, I felt a warm gaze.
It was Helios.
“Do you like going out with me that much?”
I paused for a moment, then nodded with a smile. I was in such a good mood that I could even graciously accept his silly misunderstanding.
***
As soon as he closed the door to Rienna’s bedroom and came out, Helios’s expression turned cold.
“Vincenzo, did you look into what I asked for?”
“The Steel Merchant Company is indeed a broker. How should we proceed to secure a meeting?”
“Can you make it happen without Rienna knowing?”
“Without her knowing?” Vincenzo asked, surprised. “Of course.”
They would ensure she remained unaware.
If Rienna knew that they were looking for an inscriber to imprint her name on Helios’s body, she would surely oppose.
“She must never know.”
Helios and Rienna, both keeping secrets from each other, were searching for the same person.
¹ In the Korean text, she says “콩가루 집안이 따로 없다” [kongkkaru jibani ttaro optta] or “That family has no soybean powder that’s kept separate.” The more common idiom is “콩가루 안 섞인 집 없다” [kongkkaru an sokkin jip optta] or “There is no house where soybean power is not mixed”. The former is often used to say how nobody’s perfect and everyone has their faults. However, using 콩가루 to refer to someone’s family is not something you’d ever say to their face in polite conversation, as it means “dysfunctional” with a connotation that they are, in the modern online vernacular, messy. Rather than dismissing it as every family having their faults, Rienna uses the idiom in a way that’s more disapproving of Helios’s father.↩
