Chapter 2

Deep in the night, Lea quietly opened the door to her bedroom.

A middle-aged man with ash-gray hair, who had been waiting outside, bowed his head. He was Kasim, the captain of the royal guards.

Lea and Kasim quietly slipped out into the corridor.

Thanks to Kasim knowing the guards’ patrol routes by heart, they made their way to the sanctuary deep within the royal castle without being noticed by anyone.

“We’ll watch from here.”

Lea settled into a secluded corner where they could see the entrance to the sanctuary.

After a while, someone approached the guards stationed at the sanctuary.

Kasim frowned. It wasn’t time for a shift change, and the person wasn’t dressed like a soldier coming to replace them.

Hmm?

When Kasim saw the man leave together with the two guards, the space between his eyebrows twitched.

“Not yet.”

Lea whispered.

Kasim nearly rushed out to confront them, but restrained himself.

Before long, someone else was approaching.

The person had a slender build that looked almost feminine.

She looked around in front of the sanctuary before taking a key from her clothing and unlocking the door.

Kasim’s brow twitched again.

The key that locked the sanctuary was kept in the royal castle’s treasury and could not be taken out without the king’s permission.

The moment the woman opened the door and stepped inside, Lea spoke.

“Now.”

The two of them ran forward.

As Lea opened the door and entered, she shouted,

“Stop, Neria!”

The woman spun around in shock.

The veil covering her head slipped down, revealing a familiar hair color and face.

Neria hesitated, a flustered expression on her face.

She bit her lip tightly, then ran onto the altar in the center of the sanctuary, gripping a crystal dagger.

Floating above the altar was a round orb about the size of a human head, emitting a soft glow.

Neria raised the dagger high with both hands.

Just before she brought it down on the orb with all her strength, Lea stretched out her hand.

Stop her!

A powerful gust of wind summoned by the spirit struck Neria.

“Eek!”

Neria’s body was lifted momentarily into the air by the powerful wind before she tumbled down from the altar.

Lea kicked the crystal dagger away, then grabbed Neria by the collar and pulled her upright.

“How dare you.”

Fierce hatred burned in Lea’s eyes.

At the same time, her heart was cheering.

How long had she wished and prayed for this day to come?

“How could you!”

With a blazing gaze, Lea put all her strength into slapping Neria across the face again and again without mercy.

“Ah! Aah! Stop!”

Smack! Smack! Smack!

Blood streamed from Neria’s nose, staining her collar red, while her face quickly swelled.

Even as Lea realized how cruel she was being and how she was taking pleasure in another person’s pain, she could not stop her hand.

Only after Neria fainted did Lea finally stop beating her.

“Haa… Hah.”

She must have been holding her breath while hitting her, because her ragged breathing came rushing out afterward.

Kasim stood there with a half-dazed expression.

P-Princess?

He had known Lea since she was a child.

The kind and gentle princess who had seemed like the heroine of a fairy tale suddenly felt like an entirely different person.

“Sir Kasim.”

“Y-Yes, Princess!”

Without realizing it, Kasim straightened into attention.

“This is treason. The culprit attempted to destroy the kingdom’s sacred relic, and…”

Lea searched Neria’s unconscious body and found a signal flare. She smiled coldly.

After destroying the sacred relic, Neria had intended to climb the tower and fire the signal flare. The enemy forces waiting outside would then have scaled the walls and invaded the royal castle.

No.

It had already happened once.

That tragedy would never happen again.

“She intended to call the enemy into the royal castle. You are a witness, Sir Kasim.”

Kasim straightened his posture and nodded solemnly before taking a whistle from his clothes and blowing it.

A deep, heavy sound echoed throughout the surroundings.

Soon, people would wake up and lights would be lit throughout the royal castle.

Lea looked down at her red, swollen palms before clenching them tightly into fists.

Nella’s voice echoed in her ears.

“You have only one chance. I’ve staked everything I have on this.”

I did it, Your Majesty!

Her tightly clenched fists trembled.

Joy, relief, fear, and countless other emotions were all tangled together inside her.

“The moment you prevent the destruction of the sacred relic, a new timeline will begin. A new crisis will arise.”

Yes, Your Majesty. I know. Today isn’t the end. It’s only the beginning.

She could not become complacent here.

She had to protect her brother, her nurse, Penny, and everyone else precious to her whom she had saved today.

The mastermind behind the fall of the Kingdom of Zephiros.

The person responsible for taking away all of Lea’s hopes.

And the sworn enemy of King Nella of Nortia.

Enoch, the future Emperor and the current First Prince.

Preventing his ascension to the throne was the greatest goal of Lea, who had returned to the past.

King Aren of Zephiros ordered a thorough investigation, and the entire truth was eventually revealed.

Behind Neria stood the former queen, Jaran.

One after another, the members of Jaran’s faction who had participated in the conspiracy were also exposed.

Aren was deeply shocked.

Without realizing it, his kingdom had been rotting from within.

“Your Majesty. The Princess requests an audience.”

“Send her in.”

Aren, who had been sitting at his desk, raised his head.

His eyes were bloodshot after barely sleeping for several days.

“I just can’t understand it, Lea. Why would the former queen do such a thing?”

Aren had treated his stepmother with the utmost respect.

He had given her a residence in the eastern part of the royal castle and provided her with more than enough funds to maintain her status.

He had also cherished his two half-siblings, the former queen’s children, as though they were his own siblings.

“I know why.”

“What?”

“Rami isn’t Father’s biological child.”

Aren’s mouth fell open.

The youngest, Rami, was the posthumous child of the previous king. He was five years old this year.

“The sacred relic won’t respond to Rami.”

Members of the royal bloodline had to receive the sacred relic’s blessing before their seventh birthday.

Until then, Jaran had used her grief over the previous king’s death as an excuse to postpone the blessing ceremony.

If the former queen’s infidelity were exposed, she would be expelled from the royal family and branded with such disgrace that no one would take her in.

That was why Jaran had tried to borrow outside forces to kill Aren and place her young son on the throne.

Once she seized power, there would always be some way to escape the consequences.

Aren let out a long sigh and covered his face with both hands before raising his head again.

“Did your prophetic dream tell you that too?”

“…Yes.”

Lea concealed the fact that she was living a second life.

Instead, she claimed that she had received a divine revelation through a prophetic dream.

She did not want Aren to know about the painful life she had lived after his death.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you, but we should confirm it.”

He turned to his aide.

“I’ll take Rami to the sanctuary this afternoon. Prepare everything.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

Lea descended into the underground dungeon.

“Neria.”

Neria, who had been curled up on a wooden bed in the corner of her cell, suddenly sprang up and rushed over.

She gripped the bars and burst into tears.

“Sister. Sister, please get me out of here. I—I only did what Mother told me to do. I couldn’t have destroyed the sacred relic. I would have failed, and nothing would have happened to the kingdom.”

No. You succeeded.

The thousand-year-old Kingdom of Zephiros fell because of what you did.

“Did you really think betraying your country would make you the Crown Princess of the Empire?”

Neria’s eyes trembled.

“W-What are you talking about, Sister?”

“The Imperial First Prince isn’t so free that he would sneak all the way into this distant desert kingdom just to win over one woman. The man you met was merely an errand boy. And when things went wrong, he already ran away.”

“…He was truly a refined and kind man. He was wise and honest. There’s no way he could have deceived me.”

Lea snorted mockingly, and Neria’s expression twisted.

“You must pay the price for your foolishness. The day you leave this place will be the last day you ever see sunlight.”

Lea turned away coldly.

When she heard Neria scream, “Aaaah!” Lea slowly looked back.

“You always looked at me with those eyes. You pretended to be kind while smiling hypocritically, but deep down, you despised me!”

Neria clung to the bars and screamed.

Looking at Neria, who glared at her resentfully while crying, Lea let out a hollow laugh.

Inferiority complex. That was all it was.

“Right. So that’s how it was.”

Was I the only one who thought of us as sisters?

Lea turned away again.

Even when Neria desperately called after her from behind, her voice sounding almost like a scream, Lea did not look back this time.

Neria and Jaran were executed.

It was also revealed that the five-year-old prince was not the previous king’s child.

Those who had to die were killed, and those who deserved to live were spared.

Aren publicly announced that Princess Lea was the hero who had saved the kingdom from disaster.

Later, during a private tea gathering after he summoned Lea to his personal reception room, Aren said,

“It’s all thanks to you.”

“You believed me and made your decision quickly. You were the one who took care of everything, Brother.”

“It really is thanks to you. Don’t belittle your own contribution. That is a royal command.”

“Yes…”

Aren looked at Lea proudly before his expression grew serious.

“We removed the rotten branches, but the roots are the problem. I don’t know whether we can afford to provoke the Empire.”

Lea placed her teacup down.

“Brother. There’s something we need to make absolutely clear. The Empire itself isn’t behind this.”

“Not the Empire?”

“It was Enoch, the First Prince of the Empire.”

“Lea. Isn’t that basically the same thing?”

“It’s different. More precisely, the First Prince acted on his own. He used us as sacrifices so he could gain merit and strengthen his own position. The Emperor was not involved.”

Ever since the day Lea had claimed to have received a divine revelation, Aren had noticed that something about his younger sister had changed.

She still smiled often, but it was no longer the carefree, innocent smile of the princess she had once been.

Her gaze had become hard, like a piece of flint shaped and polished by countless hardships and suffering.

It felt as though he was no longer looking at a young sister who needed to be protected, but at a person who had endured the weight of life herself.

“Brother. You need to face reality. We aren’t prey valuable enough for the Emperor to go to the trouble of hunting us down.”

Aren sighed and nodded calmly.