I Possessed The Immoral Empress

“Becoming friends seems difficult, after all.”

In the days that followed, Leopold resolved to clarify his actions should he encounter Ermedeline again, yet she remained elusive.

“She’s not dead, is she?”

“No, she’s alive.”

“Should I try climbing the tree again?”

“So you’re planning to officially declare yourself a voyeuristic pervert this time?”

“That’s not it! Her face was just so pale! She looked like she could be dead.”

Listening to Leopold’s sigh of worry, Langen asked in a somewhat cold voice.

“So, what do you want to do? It’s their family matter. You might just make things more difficult for the lady if you meddle without thought.”

“Yeah, I know that. But still, it bothers me.”

“What does? What bothers you so much?”

“Terrible fathers. Fathers who couldn’t care less about their children’s lives.”

Seeing Leopold’s bitter face, Langen rolled his eyes in resignation and sat down beside him.

“She likes reading.”

“What?”

“That’s about the only hobby she has. Being cooped up all the time, she particularly enjoys travelogues from foreign lands.”

“Really?”

“Yes. So, why not write her a letter? Clarify that your intentions were not malicious and share stories about the countries you’ve visited.”

“Huh? That’s a brilliant idea! Really brilliant!”

Leopold excitedly put his arm around Langen’s shoulder, shaking him back and forth in his enthusiasm.

“But, Prince.”

“Hmm?”

Leopold’s voice lowered in response to Langen’s suddenly serious tone.

“If this is just a fleeting curiosity, please stop.”

“…”

“If you’re leaving this place soon anyway, don’t give the lady pointless hope. She’s already accustomed to despair.”

Langen’s words quickly dampened Leopold’s buoyant mood, who had been brainstorming ideas for the letter.

Leopold remained silent for a long while, his hand still on Langen’s shoulder, lost in thought.

After nearly half an hour of contemplation, Leopold finally spoke.

“I’ve decided! I’ll save her.”

“What?”

“If the lady wishes, I’ll rescue her from this hellish castle.”

“Huh?”

Langen snorted disdainfully, looking at Leopold with skepticism.

“Do you really think that’s possible? Given that you’re already marked as a coward and a peeping Tom?”

Despite Langen’s straightforward observation, Leopold smiled confidently, tightening his arm around Langen to pull him closer.

“Who am I? The charming Prince Leopold, right? Once the lady knows what kind of person I am, she won’t be able to dislike me. Heh.”

Langen gasped and wriggled out of Leopold’s embrace, startled by the breath brushing against his cheek.

“Aaah! Let’s see who falls first, the prince or the princess. But whatever you do, don’t breathe on my face!”

Langen shivered as he wiped his cheek, which had been breathed on by Leopold, with his sleeve.

***

The room was still dark.

Sitting in a corner, a man looked up at the empty air with a self-deprecating smile as he peered into a pendant.

‘I should never have given up on you, no matter what happened or what I heard. I should have saved you.’

Leopold’s laughter continued as he thought about how pitiful he was for giving up on Ermedeline’s harsh words, which were colder and sharper than the north wind blowing from the ice mountains.

‘I knew better than anyone in the world. I knew you were someone who speaks without holding back!’

Leopold sighed deeply, a sigh that seemed endless as he put the pendant back into his pocket.

‘What happened? How did you become a witch?’

***

“Phew! Finally, it’s over!”

What a long day it had been.

As soon as Ermedeline was left alone, she headed straight to the basement.

She wanted to read the dense love stories written in her diary.

“Nothing is as interesting as someone else’s love story.”

Since she only skimmed through them yesterday, she planned to spend the night learning more about the relationship between the two.

The diary entries from when Ermedeline fell in love were markedly different from the earlier ones.

Even the handwriting felt different.

The beginning of the diary recorded a history of abuse, with the ink so heavily pressed that it smeared, making it hard to read in places.

But after Leopold appeared, her heart began to lean towards him, and even her handwriting became lighter.

And the love letters, worn out from how often they had been read.

To anyone, they would look like letters and diaries of a girl deeply in love.

How the original Ermedeline, with such innocence, became the worst witch.

***

Ermedeline felt a strong curiosity that made her forget about sleep.

It was indeed a strange day.

Aside from the aftereffects of being used in curse experiments, it was an unremarkable day until she ended up wandering the garden because she felt unwell.

No matter how much cold wind she faced, Ermedeline couldn’t settle her stomach and ended up vomiting in the bushes of the garden.

“Ugh, uweeek.”

Ermedeline had come to consider it normal to be collected for hair and blood, under the pretext of developing magic that the weakly magical Ermond could use, and to be involved in such dreadful experiments.

‘After all, it would have been better if I hadn’t been born.’

After a while of vomiting, Ermedeline felt a bit better and stood up to return to her bedroom. That’s when she encountered a strange man.

Even in the dark garden at night, a man with noticeably red hair tied back neatly, wearing a fine uniform, was swinging a dagger like a madman at her.

‘What?’

Ermedeline, barely able to gather herself, had no energy to deal with the madman before her.

‘Is he drunk? Should I just curse him away?’

Ermedeline was about to cast a weak curse on the man and pass him by, but when the man saw her and immediately lowered his dagger and bowed his head, she withdrew her magic.

“Ah, there. I thought… I thought you were, you know, a wild animal.”

‘A wild animal? He thinks I look like a wild animal?’

Ermedeline, who had always been confident about her appearance, was inwardly incensed by the man’s words but didn’t show it outwardly.

After all, she was just a tool to be used for her brother Ermont and discarded when no longer needed.

What did it matter if she was seen as a beast or a human?

After that strange and brief encounter, weeks of normal days passed by.

Days stained with experiments and torture.

‘It seems this might be the last time.’

That was the last thought before losing consciousness.

Waking up in a dark, empty bedroom in the middle of the night, Ermedeline felt despair at being alive and was drawn to the window as if possessed.

‘I thought I would surely die this time? I survived again? To suffer that pain again?’

Without the Merciful Eyes, no matter how many experiments were performed on her, her brother could never become a magician surpassing those with the Merciful Eyes.

Didn’t his curse require too much blood from the sacrifices?

‘If this is how it’s going to be, they might as well use all my blood.’

It was an experiment without a solution.

Ermedeline repeated to herself countless reasons why she must die as she took steps towards the window.

She hesitated for a moment.

‘But to really die like this? To die suffering in confinement, is that what my life is meant to be?’

However, the hesitation was brief, and the pain she had endured was strong enough to sever any attachment to her own life.

Taking a deep breath, Ermedeline opened the curtain of the window, ready to face death.

“Uh?”

‘What’s this?’

While she should have been the one surprised, the man hanging from the tree seemed even more startled, his golden eyes shining.

‘Golden eyes? Could this man be the prince from the Ballius Empire?’

There had been that strange first meeting in the garden, but at that time, Ermedeline wasn’t in a state to closely observe Leopold’s appearance.

So, she hadn’t seen his face in detail until now, realizing his eyes were golden.

‘Those are the eyes the maids were always talking about. They are indeed fascinating.’

Ermedeline wanted to take a closer look at Leopold’s mysterious golden eyes, furrowing her brows slightly.

But it seemed the prince misunderstood her frown as anger, hurriedly explaining through the fogged window.

‘I had no ill intentions.’

‘No ill intent? What?’

Caught up in the mystique of his eyes, reminiscent of a sharp predator’s, Ermedeline only then realized that the prince from Ballius had been peeping into her room upon reading the words on the window.

‘He was spying on my bedroom?’

This time, truly angered, Ermedeline’s brows furrowed deeply, prompting Leopold to hurriedly write on the window again.

‘I was just worried about you.’

‘Worried? Why would he worry about me? We only met once in the garden. What does he think he is?’

It was hard to believe that a stranger was worried about her, especially for Ermedeline, who grew up isolated and was more sensitive than an ordinary girl.

Seeing Ermedeline now biting her lip in frustration, the prince made an embarrassed face, shrugged his shoulders, and seemed to be trying to descend from the tree.

And at that moment,

“Whoa!”

Ermedeline was startled, thinking the prince was about to fall, but he merely smiled strangely, as if pleased about something, and took one arm off the tree, assuming a pose as if making an archway.

‘Crazy! If he wants to die, he should do it somewhere else!’

Startled, Ermedeline, no longer wanting to witness his precarious and bizarre behavior, quickly closed the curtain.

‘Phew. What was that? I thought my heart was going to drop.’

Ermedeline, who had momentarily forgotten she herself had been about to die just a while ago, cautiously approached the window after a while and peeked through the curtain slit at the tree.

The man was gone.

‘He couldn’t have fallen, could he? It would not be this quiet if he had.’

Hesitant to open the curtain again, Ermedeline thought about going back to bed, indifferent to whether the man was dead or alive, but she couldn’t bring herself to move.

‘Right. It would be weird if he died right under my window, wouldn’t it?’

Given that the Duke of Francoise had forbidden Ermedeline from making her social debut, claiming that the successor to the Merciful Eyes must not be born from a daughter’s body, she didn’t want the man to get hurt under her bedroom and cause strange misunderstandings with her father.

Slightly opening the curtain and looking down, she saw nothing unusual.

The bare branches allowed visibility to the ground, but it was still a dark night.

‘No, he must have gone safely. If he had fallen, there would have been some noise.’

Yet, Ermedeline felt uneasy and secretly left her bedroom.

Tiptoeing quietly through the hallway and down the stairs to the second floor, Ermedeline encountered the prince with golden eyes just as he was entering indoors.

Fortunately, he appeared unhurt.

‘Hmph. Lucky he didn’t die in front of my bedroom.’

Ermedeline felt an odd relief in her heart but ignored the feeling and returned to her bedroom.