ICSF 06

CHAPTER 06

“It would have been over if he’d just admitted from the beginning that he was wrong, bowed his head, and apologized.”

Who could have imagined that the man’s family had been living in the capital while he was going around fathering an illegitimate child? I had intended to settle things amicably, but seeing how they were behaving now, I couldn’t help but find them utterly infuriating.

I had been willing to leave them at least a little room to breathe.

But if they were choosing their own punishment, who was I to desperately try to stop them?

In the end, the Sachsen family had to pay a huge settlement.

Pedro was the one at fault, but since the engagement was not merely between Pedro and me—it was effectively between the Sachsen and Estarotte families—such a settlement had been possible.

Besides, even if I squeezed compensation out of Pedro himself, who was obviously going to end up completely broke, I wouldn’t get much. So this was even better for me.

I heard that they had sold off all the luxury goods they had purchased with the money they had earned by leeching off our family, selling everything at rock-bottom prices. They had barely managed to preserve their estate while scraping together enough money for the settlement.

From their perspective, it must have felt unfair and infuriating.

But to me, this finally brought things back to zero.

I had simply recovered all the benefits they had gained through me and my family.

And Pedro was completely ruined.

You might think there was no way he could fall any further, but there was.

He was expelled from his family.

“You stupid bastard! You couldn’t even keep your own damn body under control, and look what you’ve done!”

“Exactly! How could you, as the eldest son, be so spoiled and ungrateful that you’d pull something like this?!”

Even after paying me the settlement and reaching an agreement, there was still one problem left.

The lawsuit for seduction under the pretense of marriage and fraud.

The Sachsen family realized that if they continued protecting Pedro, they would also have to pay the compensation awarded in that lawsuit.

So they disowned him.

In other words, he became a commoner.

He had already lost the tiny bit of property he possessed to the lawsuit’s damages, and now he was thrown out with nothing but the clothes on his back.

He couldn’t come crawling back to me, so he tried going to his mistress.

But did he really think she would accept him?

She had already left after closing up her house in the capital and using the letter of recommendation I had written for her to find a job.

He didn’t even have the chance to beg her.

In the end, Pedro went to a monastery.

There weren’t many places where a nobleman who had become a commoner could seek refuge. So even if the conditions were poor, he should have been grateful that the monastery accepted him at all.

After all, unless you made a considerable donation, even being admitted to a monastery was difficult.

Naturally, I was the one who had arranged it.

It wasn’t because I felt sorry for Pedro.

I wanted him to spend the rest of his life suffering there, constantly reflecting on everything he had lost.

‘He was a knight in name only. He had absolutely nothing to show for it. If he had at least been good with a sword, he could have made a living as a mercenary, but…’

Pedro was better than someone who had never learned swordsmanship, but he was still a complete amateur who had never experienced a real battle properly.

If he foolishly went around acting like he could make a living as a mercenary and ended up dying by some stray sword, that would practically have been a lucky death for him.

Anyway, that was how things ended for Pedro.

I didn’t know whether he would manage to endure life at the monastery or eventually run away, but either way, it didn’t matter to me.

If he ran away, he would never be able to return to the monastery.

And if he kept making the wrong choices until he lost even the one place where he could lay his head at night, what better fate could there be for him?

In the end, I managed to get my hands on the engagement annulment papers.

“Ha ha. That took a while.”

I received the engagement annulment papers in the spring of the following year.

I had originally been planning to marry Pedro around this time.

Who would have thought I would end up breaking off the engagement instead?

At least I should consider myself lucky that I never had to step into that hellish marriage.

Being able to peek into the gods’ conversations had truly been a stroke of divine luck for me.

To complete the annulment process, I visited the government office inside the Imperial Palace.

I watched as the approval seal was stamped firmly onto the documents before stepping back outside.

It was finally, completely over.

“……The weather is nice.”

My heart felt unsettled after the end of such a long unrequited love, but the weather was absolutely beautiful.

Even though the day was so bright and clear, there were hardly any people around, probably because everyone was busy working.

I walked through an Imperial Palace corridor with one side completely open to the outside.

Eventually, I leaned against one of the pillars supporting the roof and looked up at the sky.

The weather really was beautiful.

“……Sob!”

It wasn’t that I regretted breaking off the engagement or was sad about losing Pedro.

But someone who had been part of my life since I was ten—someone I had spent nearly half my life with, someone I had always assumed I would spend the rest of my life with—was suddenly no longer part of my future.

That alone was enough to make me emotional.

Even if the ending had been a terrible one.

Since there was no one passing by, I thought no one could see me.

And so the tears simply wouldn’t stop.

Just as I stood there pathetically letting my tears fall, someone appeared in front of me.

The person had pulled a black hood so deeply over their head that only the very tip of their chin was visible.

It was pulled so low that I wondered how they could even see where they were going.

Yet somehow, their appearance helped me.

I was so startled that my tears stopped.

One tear that had barely managed to escape rolled down my cheek when I blinked, and the man suddenly reached out his hand.

I flinched at his suspicious appearance, but what he offered me was nothing particularly strange.

“……A handkerchief?”

It was a neatly folded white handkerchief.

Strangely, it was just plain cotton, without even a single piece of embroidery.

Was he not a noble?

I stared blankly at the handkerchief, wondering why there wasn’t even a simple initial embroidered on it.

The man moved his hand slightly, as though urging me to take it.

Apparently, he wanted me to use it to wipe my tears.

I had a handkerchief of my own, of course……

But somehow, I didn’t want to reject his kindness.

Even though I didn’t know who he was.

I carefully reached out to take it, and my fingertips brushed against his.

It was nothing more than a brief touch, but for some reason, the man recoiled as though he had been startled by something and quickly pulled his hand back.

“Uh……?”

I was startled too and let out a small sound without realizing it.

The man seemed confused and fidgeted awkwardly before hurriedly running away.

I stood there dumbfounded, still holding the handkerchief and staring in the direction he had disappeared.

Then I let out a helpless little laugh.

“Ha ha…… What a strange person.”

He was obviously a kind person if he couldn’t simply stand by while a stranger cried and had offered me his handkerchief.

But the way he had shyly run away despite looking suspicious overall was rather funny.

His strange behavior stayed in my mind as I smiled faintly and wiped my face with the handkerchief.

‘Hmm…….’

I didn’t know what the scent was, but it smelled fresh.

There was a coolness to it, almost like peppermint.

Without thinking, I sniffed the handkerchief a few times before my face suddenly flushed.

It was rude to so blatantly smell the scent of a stranger.

“I should return this……”

Who was he?

Would I ever meet him again?

Even if I happened to encounter him again, I wasn’t sure I would recognize him.

The clothes he wore beneath the hood were plain and ordinary as well, so I couldn’t even tell what social class he belonged to.

They said that as many as ten thousand people came and went through this enormous Imperial Palace every day.

Searching for one person among all of them would be nearly impossible.

And since the handkerchief was made of completely ordinary material without any pattern, perhaps he hadn’t expected me to return it in the first place.

‘……If we’re meant to meet again, I’m sure we will.’

I shook off the lingering traces of regret in my heart and continued walking down the corridor.

[Golden Family’s Golden-Surname Siblings Obsessed Fan]

Wow, so the mysterious medicine that cured the disease three years ago was seaweed.

No wonder the Emperor was so furious.

The Empire controls half the seas on the continent, lol. If she’d been Korean, she wouldn’t have died lol.

By now, every citizen would’ve been seasoning that seaweed, making soup with it, coating it in oil and grilling it lol.

└ [Please Look at Evil Whitewaterㅠㅠ]

As a Korean, I ate rice wrapped in seaweed today too.

Tomorrow I’m going to have seaweed soup.

A rice thief worth 200 years in prison♡

└ [The Hupjip House Is the Most Perfect House]

No, but lol, even if I were Korean, I think that would be pretty hard to eat……

Seaweed that looks like purple veins?

Maybe if there were absolutely nothing else to eat, but still……

I heard the texture is slimy and not very pleasant either ㅠㅠ

└ [VS Death’s Easy Two-Choice Villain]

What if the male lead you love imprisoned you, but served only that seaweed side dish at every meal?

Endure being imprisoned vs. escape.

└ [The Hupjip House Is the Most Perfect House]

Are you crazy?

A year passed after I broke off the engagement.

After the prophecy had saved my life, it had stopped appearing altogether, so I had begun to wonder if the miracles were over.

Then, suddenly, another window containing the future appeared before my eyes.

“Gods above……”

At the shocking mention of an epidemic, I covered my mouth and hurriedly took out some paper to write down the information.

Thankfully, since the gods could see the future, this was something that had not yet happened in the time period I lived in.

‘Still, we’re running out of time. It’s next year.’

After looking over the information I had summarized in my notes, I stood up.

Everyone was surprised when I suddenly announced that I was going on a trip, considering that I had spent the entire year after breaking off my engagement shut away on our family estate.

“Yes…… A year should be enough time to get over it.”

They probably thought I had secluded myself because I was suffering from heartbreak.

It would be a lie to say that I hadn’t been hurt at all, but I had struggled for about a month before getting over it long ago.

I didn’t particularly have any friends, and thanks to the huge mess I had made of Pedro, news of my broken engagement had probably spread everywhere.

I simply stayed on the estate because I didn’t want to attend social events and hear people gossiping behind my back.

As I awkwardly wondered how I could explain that to my family, my parents spoke to me.

“If you don’t want to marry, you don’t have to. You can stay with us for the rest of your life, so don’t worry too much.”

“Exactly. If I inherit the family someday in the distant future, I’ll take care of you for the rest of your life. So don’t worry.”

My eldest brother, Shinsier, the heir to the family, said the same thing to me.

Hearing them tell me that I could simply live however I wanted with the wealth they would leave me, I gathered my courage.

“I want to go into business.”

“Business? What kind of business?”

“Just…… anything.”

My parents offered to give me a position in the family’s merchant company, but I shook my head.

What merchant would be happy to have the young lady of the family suddenly parachute into their organization and announce that she wanted to buy and sell some strange-looking seaweed that no one had even heard of?

If I wanted to act freely, it would be better to use money that I could spend however I pleased.