I’m in Trouble Because The Emperor Thinks My Time is Limited - Chapter 67

“Answer me. Are you saying Lindel is a half-blood?”

“Get out.”

“You!”

“Right now. Leave here immediately, Melaine Crostan.”

The deep anger in Sionel’s voice was palpable. He pushed Melaine’s hand away and glared at him.

“Say nothing, think nothing, just disappear quietly from here. Unless you want to die by my hand.”

“Sionel!”

“Lindel is just Lindel!”

Melaine’s eyes wavered at Sionel’s forceful declaration.

“So get out of here now.”

“You bastard, really!”

“Sionel.”

The moment I called Sionel’s name, everyone froze. I rejected Hasina’s hand trying to restrain me and stood up.

Sionel’s back was turned towards me, so I couldn’t see his face. Melaine’s trembling eyes met mine, but I looked only at Sionel’s back as I spoke.

“What do you mean that I’m a half-blood?”

“……”

“Sionel, please tell me. What does that mean?”

Sionel stubbornly refused to look at me.

Instead, I looked at Hasina.

“I don’t understand what you two were talking about just now. Hasina, you recognized it right away, didn’t you? You knew why I was like this. So why did you say that…?”

“Yes, I recognized it. I couldn’t not know. I could see exactly what condition you were in.”

“Then why?”

Hasina’s face, as she looked at me, was sorrowful. The look in her eyes, as if she pitied me, felt strange.

Why was she looking at me like that? My mind couldn’t process anything, but my heart was pounding uncomfortably.

“Please calm down for now. You need to rest. Later, I’ll tell you everything.”

“I need to hear it now.”

“Your stability comes first. You shouldn’t be getting up now.”

“I’m fine.”

Rejecting Hasina’s support, I shook my head firmly.

I’m fine. I only look like this, but I am okay.

Hasina, who should have known that, kept making that expression, and it filled me with anxiety.

Then Sionel’s voice interrupted my thoughts.

“You say you’re fine?”

The one who had refused to answer me, with his back turned, finally turned to face me. But his expression, his eyes, were not what I had expected.

Neither sadness nor anger. Sionel looked at me with nothing but pure despair.

“Are you still saying you’re fine to us now?”

“It doesn’t hurt. It’s all just a misunderstanding.”

“Your heart stopped. Not once, but twice. And yet, why…”

“That’s…”

“…Then why. Why do you always say you’re fine?”

Unable to finish his words, Sionel looked as if he might burst into tears.

A sharp pain throbbed in a corner of my heart.

I kept remembering Sionel’s face, crying because of me, from the dream I had.

In that dream, as he cried like a child, the ‘me’ from that time kept saying it was okay.

What did that achieve? Watching him cry harder, the dying ‘me’ could do nothing.

Just a dream, a hallucination that never actually happened, yet it kept overlapping with the Sionel before me now.

I felt as though I was standing on a cracked glass box. I didn’t know when I would fall below.

In place of the two of us, who had lost our words as we looked at each other, Hasina spoke up.

“Lady Lindel.”

“Hasina.”

“I didn’t want to say it like this. There’s nothing good about knowing, so I thought it would be better if you never knew.”

“……”

“Do you remember when I said not telling the truth is the same as lying? …I lied to you.”

Hasina took both of my hands in hers. The moment her warm touch reached my hands, I realized that my hands had gone cold.

What had I felt, that I was now so afraid of her words?

“The priest’s words weren’t wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your soul is already twisted, and your body, which barely endured it, has also been slowly deteriorating. I could see it all when you walked through the temple doors.”

It was because of the contract.

My body had undergone temporary changes to fulfill my wish. My soul, my body, had changed because of that influence. Once my wish was fulfilled, once this contract ended, everything would return to normal—

“The curse was real.”

It would return.

But Hasina was saying something different from what I had known.

“But you looked at me with such an innocent expression, knowing nothing. So I couldn’t say anything.”

Because sometimes the truth can be poison. She whispered to me with a face devoid of her usual mischief.

“You weren’t fine.”

“…Hasina.”

“You are really dying.”

***

Hasina and Melaine left, and now only Sionel and I remained in the room.

Neither of us spoke.

I didn’t know how to accept this situation, and Sionel just sat by my bed with his head down. I blankly thought about how foolish I had been.

Come to think of it, Hasina had never said I wasn’t cursed. She had only spoken about the contract, and she had held back all other words since then.

Yet she had stayed by my side, constantly channeling divine power into me. She came to me whenever she had the time, mumbling meaningless words while repeating that act several times a day.

I had thought it was just to deceive others, but it had truly been treatment.

‘I really wasn’t thinking at all.’

Before I heard Hasina’s story, my heart had been pounding wildly, but after hearing that I might die soon, it had become incredibly calm.

Rather, I felt drained.

I wasn’t sad or angry, just dazed.

A question arose. So when and how did I become cursed?

No matter how much I thought, I couldn’t pinpoint a suspicious moment, so it didn’t feel real.

I still hadn’t heard a detailed explanation about being half-blooded. I didn’t know whether I should ask first or wait for Sionel to speak.

Thankfully, his lips parted before I had to decide.

“Why aren’t you asking anything?”

“Because I don’t know where to start.”

“That makes sense. I don’t know where to begin either.”

Sionel’s voice trembled. Though his head was bowed, I knew.

He was crying.

“When I first heard that your soul was twisted. I used everything at my disposal to find out about the curse.”

I nodded, recalling how he had said he took the curse instead of me.

“The Empress favored the sorcerer. It was odd for someone who held herself as the noblest to keep a lowly person by her side. She had already been preparing to curse me.”

The Empress.

I remembered the woman who always glared at me with a venomous expression. And the sorcerer beside her, cloaked in a black robe and giggling.

“And I understood why you were cursed instead of me when I saw the sorcerer’s heart at the Empress’s tomb.”

As he spoke of the dead sorcerer’s heart, still moving, Sionel clenched his fists tightly.

“The heart bore an incantation to curse a dragon. He chose a target with dragon’s blood instead of leaving any trace pointing to me.”

I placed my hand over his trembling fist. Hot tears fell onto it.

“The curse was meant to target the one with the strongest dragon’s blood.”

Since Sionel, who was born with the strongest dragon’s blood in the palace, had been the target, it was possible.

Everyone had known that.

“But.”

Sionel’s shoulders trembled. Resting his forehead on my hand, he barely managed to continue.

“But you were by my side.”

I closed my eyes tightly.

“You, a half-blooded dragon, just happened to be by my side. That’s why the curse affected you instead of me.”

Sionel said it was because of him.

His broad back was slumped in defeat. Seeing him looking so vulnerable, my breath caught.

“I was supposed to be the one to die. It should have been me.”

The sight of him sobbing like a child wasn’t unfamiliar. I thought only of how much I made him cry.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Lindel.”

It wasn’t Sionel’s fault. He had done nothing wrong. So why was he apologizing to me?

“It’s not your fault, Sionel.”

“You’re wrong. I should have died. I shouldn’t have had such selfish desires.”

“Sionel.”

“It’s because I desired you! I should have let you go from the start. Even if it killed me, even if it drove me mad, I should have endured it! I shouldn’t have been selfish enough to want you by my side.”

His face was soaked with tears when he looked up.

His eyes were already red, and his lips were bleeding.

How much had he bit down while his head was lowered? My heart ached as I reached out to him, but he avoided my touch.

“You didn’t know. How could it be your fault, Sionel?”

“I had a chance. I had an opportunity, Lindel.”

“Sionel.”

“But I threw that chance away. I wanted to stay with you. I promised to pretend not to know, to protect you. But I couldn’t keep that promise.”

Sionel poured out his despair. I couldn’t understand what pained him so much.

I didn’t know enough. I knew so little that I couldn’t understand what burden he was carrying. And now, that result was right in front of me.

“I made the same choice again. Foolishly.”

“Sionel.”

“Even across time, I hadn’t changed at all.”

“…What?”

“This wasn’t the first time for me. I thought I was doing well, that everything would be okay now. But that wasn’t the case.”

The truth, one I had never dared imagine, stood before me.

Too many truths I hadn’t known poured out all at once.

Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe.

In his blue eyes, I saw a long, immeasurable time that I couldn’t fathom. It was endless despair that grabbed hold of my ankles.

“I have already. Lost you once.”

He seemed to ask me to fall into ruin together.