Chapter 45

In the middle of the night, Kevin awoke to a sore throat and a cough.

It was a common occurrence.

With such a sickly constitution, even the slight drop in temperature between day and night was enough to take a toll on him.

Rubbing his throat, Kevin pushed himself up from the bed with sluggish movements.

‘Hmph. Slow-witted servants, not even noticing when their master is coughing.’

He masked the suffocating pain in his chest by swapping it for irritation, cursing them under his breath.

Being so frail that he was forced to stay shut up in the mansion reading books had granted him a vocabulary beyond his years and a rather spiteful personality. Or perhaps the fact that he believed he could gain the upper hand by speaking insolently to others was, in itself, proof of his immaturity.

In any case, sitting here waiting on the bed wouldn’t make the butler or the servants bring him water.

Between a father who was an eccentric Margrave and a sister who was a hated shrew, the number of servants in this mansion had been dwindling year by year. If he wanted water, he had to move himself and make his voice heard.

Kevin dragged his feverish body out of bed and headed toward the door.

Usually, a servant was supposed to be stationed in the adjoining room since Kevin was prone to collapsing. Provided they hadn’t been pulled away for other duties due to the staffing shortage, someone should be there to bring him a pitcher.

‘—Wait, or have they all been diverted to look after that guest?’

The image of Lucas crossed Kevin’s mind.

The most famous heartthrob of the Luten Kingdom.

A prince of the blood and a sharp, valiant knight of exceptional martial skill.

Kevin was envious that Lucas had a beautiful blonde girl waiting on him, but even more so, he was jealous of the man’s robust health.

Word had it that while Prince Lucas was a bit of a skirt-chaser, he was a friendly, popular man who wandered freely across the land, unburdened by his status. He was the polar opposite of a sickly young lordling who was whispered about behind his back and rarely stepped foot outside the territory.

With a sour mood, Kevin reached for the door handle, but his hand froze at the words that drifted through.

“—And honestly, it was a total shock! I mean, who would’ve thought that ‘the Ugly Daughter’ would end up like that!?”

“The Ugly Daughter.”

They were talking about his sister.

It seemed the maids in the adjoining room were in the middle of a gossiping frenzy. Kevin decided against stepping out immediately and pressed his ear to the door to listen.

To summarize the speaker’s story, Deborah had rapidly lost weight and become beautiful over the course of a single day. The maid claimed the transformation was so extreme that one would doubt they were even looking at the same person, but Kevin inwardly dismissed it as typical female exaggeration.

The listener seemed to agree, offering a dry laugh. “Come on now, surely you’re overstating it.”

At that, the speaker’s voice grew even more heated.

“You don’t believe me, do you? Ugh. You should just go to Lady Deborah’s room tomorrow morning yourself. If you do, I guarantee you’ll be prostrating yourself before the sacred hands of Elmael, the Apostle of Beauty!”

“What on earth is an ‘Elmael, the Apostle of Beauty’?”

It was a ridiculously grandiose title. As Kevin frowned in confusion, the maid continued proudly.

“I’m talking about the cult leader who performed the miracle for Lady Deborah! I added the honorific ‘El’—meaning ‘shining’—to Elma’s name to make ‘Elmael.’ Sounds like an angel, doesn’t it? …Oh, wait, did I forget to mention that part first?”

Apparently, this maid was the type who struggled to tell a story in chronological order. Her naming sense was also a bit questionable.

She wound the story back to the point where Deborah had harassed Irene, and then launched into a detailed account of the miracles that had befallen Deborah and the girl named Elma who provided them.

Supposedly, a beauty capable of stopping a man’s heart was hidden beneath those glasses.

Supposedly, she possessed a level of skill where a flick of her finger could accomplish the work of ten people.

Supposedly, she possessed ‘sacred hands’ that could restore life to all things and bring them into full bloom just by touching them.

“I’m telling you, it was incredible. It was too fast for a human. She whipped up this thing called ‘Enzyme Juice’ made from miasma-tainted pond scum, and then the metabolism went all ‘Dosha’ and ‘Ama.’ I thought she was just giving a gentle massage at first, but then she opened the Chakras and everything went ‘Sattva.’ The result? Our arrogant, plain mistress was ‘magically remodeled’ into a pure-hearted beauty in an instant! Get it?”

“I don’t get it at all.”

Kevin didn’t get it at all either.

However, there was information in the maid’s story that he could not overlook.

Speed beyond human capability.

Miasma.

Demonic.

The people of Frenzel were those who had carved out their land after a long struggle against the kin of the Demon Race, such as the Demon Moths.

Even though the extinction of the demons meant fewer people held a pious hatred for ‘the demonic’ compared to the old days, the closer one was to the center of power, the more they tended to exclude anything abnormal or linked to that dark power.

As the son of the Margrave, Kevin felt an instinctive revulsion toward this girl named Elma, who had displayed “non-human” movements.

The maid listening, who seemed to be a long-time veteran of the staff, appeared to share a similar sense of unease.

Rather than joining her excited colleague, she asked in a voice laced with caution.

“Is that really okay? Even if the young lady did become a beauty with the help of a maid from the Royal Capital—if the change is that extreme, won’t people start whispering that she made a contract with a demon or something?”

She even let out a disdainful snort.

“We have a gloomy Lord who wanders around every night, a haughty daughter who’s a shut-in, and a spiteful, unreliable son. This family is already unpopular enough with the people as it is. If rumors start spreading that Lady Deborah made a deal with the demonic, we won’t even be able to go down to the town anymore. This is no time to be giddily calling someone an ‘angel’.”

“Well, when you put it that way…”

The first maid finally seemed to realize the gravity of the situation.

“But demons don’t even exist in this day and age. Besides, the transformed Lady Deborah looks really wonderful—”

She tried to offer a small counterargument, but she was immediately cut off by a more serious tone.

“It’s not a question of whether demons exist; it’s the fact that such suspicious rumors will start. You’re assigned to Lady Deborah and rarely leave the mansion, so you probably don’t know, but the dissatisfaction in the territory is quite high. Specifically, there’s a lot of distrust regarding the recent lack of countermeasures against the Demon Moths. To be honest, if even a single Demon Moth egg were found in the vineyards, I wouldn’t be surprised if a riot broke out.”

Kevin took a quiet, sharp breath.

He considered himself to be slightly more interested in the affairs of the territory than Deborah was.

However, in the end, he too tended to hide away in the mansion using his sickly nature as an excuse, and he couldn’t say he had a full grasp of the situation outside.

Forgetting the pain in his throat, Kevin clenched his fist tight.

‘Is it possible that Prince Lucas came here to investigate this…?’

Given the Prince’s personality, it was perfectly plausible that he’d visit a rural territory for fun with a girl he liked, but there was still a lingering sense of inconsistency in a member of the Royal Family traveling all the way to a borderland known for being at odds with the capital.

But if he was inspecting the territory under the guise of a pleasure trip, it made sense.

‘He came to investigate… or rather, is it possible he came here to stir the pot…?’

Kevin, who had grown accustomed to viewing everything through a cynical lens, narrowed his eyes as he pondered.

Because of its history, Frenzel had a poor relationship with the Royal Capital.

The people of Frenzel took pride in having repelled the demonic to protect their vineyards, and they lived by their own unique rules.

It was clear the capital wasn’t pleased with this, evidenced by the meager subsidies and the presence of the prison—built on the edge of their territory almost as if out of spite.

On the other hand, the demand for the high-quality wine produced in Frenzel had been rising steadily in recent years.

‘For example… maybe they want the wine, so they’re trying to drive a wedge between the people and our family, then take advantage of the chaos to annex the territory.’

He didn’t know what kind of person the new King, Felix, was, but during the reign of the previous King, Werner, such meddling had occurred frequently.

The capital was greedy.

—Though, as his father Jonas never bothered to teach his son about such political maneuvering, Kevin didn’t actually know the internal details.

Regardless, Kevin tightened his grip.

In the way only a ten-year-old boy could—or perhaps because he was ten—he became convinced of his own sense of justice and responsibility, resolving that he must protect the territory.

‘I won’t let the people start a riot…’

He was a boy who collapsed frequently from illness and was slow to grow.

He was short; despite being ten, he looked no older than eight, and he knew those around him found him unreliable.

But, if he used his wits.

If he used this brain of his, which was somewhat superior to boys his age, he might be able to soothe the people’s dissatisfaction and ward off interference from the capital.

No, as the son of the Lord, he had to be able to do at least that much.

‘I’ll be the one to suppress the anxiety regarding the Demon Moths. I won’t let rumors of demons or whatever else disturb the hearts of the people.’

First, he would have to probe Lucas’s true intentions and keep him in check.

Actually, before that, it might be best to strip the mask off that maid—Elma—who had displayed “non-human” movements and tried to spark strange rumors about the Frenzel family.

“Sacred hands,” my foot.

She probably just sucked up to his sister and used some clownish makeup to make her look a little better.

His sister was aggressive, but she was also incredibly gullible.

Kevin reached for the collar of his nightwear and squeezed the fabric.

Hanging there was a ring, a memento of his mother.

The mother who had died giving birth to him.

Her ring was a symbol of original sin to Kevin, but it was also the only thing in this mansion that made him feel the existence of love.

—Because around Kevin, there was only a distant father, a sister drunk on her own misery, and servants who looked down on him.

‘Actually… “hating me” might be more accurate than “distant”.’

Feeling the rough texture through the cloth, Kevin suddenly had that thought.

In the Frenzel territory, it was tradition for the heir to inherit their mother’s wedding ring as proof of lordship.

Even though she died during childbirth, tradition was tradition.

The ring wasn’t buried; instead, it was kept by his father, Jonas, until Kevin was old enough to understand, and was finally handed over a few years ago—but that silver ring was horribly rusted, to the point where the engraved letters were illegible.

Kevin had been shocked by its state.

After all, this ring was supposed to guarantee his status as the next Lord and be his greatest treasure.

Even if it didn’t shine like new, he thought it would have at least been kept with care.

In reality, the ring was rusted as if it had been intentionally mistreated.

He read his father’s hostility toward him in that rust—yet, his desire to keep the only link to his mother won out. In the end, Kevin didn’t wear the ring on his finger; instead, he threaded it onto a chain and wore it around his neck.

The small fact that he couldn’t openly show the proof of the next Lord to those around him was unbearably painful, and that had contributed to him shutting himself away in the depths of the mansion. But he decided that the situation no longer allowed for that.

‘Tomorrow morning, I’ll go inspect the territory. And then, I have to interrogate that maid called Elma.’

His father, Jonas, hated it when his son appeared in public or tried to help with the Lord’s work.

His father might make a sour face because he was meddling this time, but he didn’t care.

Kevin pulled the chain close, dropped a single kiss on the ring, and—deciding not to bother asking for a pitcher after all—returned to his bed.