“How?”

The doctor remained silent. Had her arm been broken, and yet no doctor was called? Ethan, in his confusion, shook his head and discovered more shocking signs.

Half-dead hands and feet. He could recognize the state just before necrosis. He stared wide-eyed at his wife, who had been utterly ruined in just a few months.

She was skeletal.

A flower crushed and withered, completely different from when she was in Tyche…

Nausea welled up, and Ethan hurriedly covered his mouth with his hand. He couldn’t close his eyes, crushed under the weight of his guilt. His lungs burned. Breathing felt difficult. While he witnessed his sins, the head maid and maids wailed behind him.

“Take them away.”

His voice cracked. He turned sharply towards the door and repeated the command.

“Take them away!”

The knights standing at the door with conflicted expressions began to move quickly. Those who dared to neglect the Duchess, he…

Did he have the right to punish them?

As if to answer that question, the woman on the bed woke up, convulsing. Her eyes, scanning her surroundings, locked onto him and filled with a fierce, murderous intensity.

Ethan instinctively whispered.

“Hyacinth…”

“Shut up. My baby. Where is my baby! My baby!”

“You can’t hold…”

Hyacinth violently threw off the splint and hurled the wooden piece at his face. The strength from her frail, broken body was surprising.

Ethan caught her as she half-fell off the bed.

“The baby is safe…”

“What right do you have to say that!”

“…”

“Just shut up and prepare for the divorce. Get out! Get out of my sight, away from my baby. Give me back my baby! Where is it!”

At the mother’s cry, the baby in the cradle began to wail. Hyacinth, turning her head quickly, almost fell off the bed as she got down. She crawled on her knees. Unable to bear the sight, Ethan tried to help, but as soon as he touched her, Hyacinth had a fit.

“Get away!”

“Hyacinth…”

“How dare you call my name with that disgusting mouth. Get out.”

Finally reaching the cradle, she used her broken arm to caress her baby. Her haggard face blossomed into a smile.

The woman, who had been smiling at her child, turned to glare at everyone with cold contempt.

“Get out! All of you, get out!”

“…”

“What, what is it? Are you going to take my baby away now? How much more are you going to destroy me? I understand that you hate me, but do you have to go this far? It’s my baby! You were the one who doubted that!”

“You need to calm down…”

Her eyes, filled with searing hatred, cut into his face. Ethan bit his lip and turned his head away.

Yes. No matter what, he had no right to tell her to calm down.

At the Duke’s signal, the servants began to leave one by one.

As he left the room last, Ethan looked back with a troubled expression.

Hyacinth was crying.

She couldn’t hold her baby with her broken arm. That’s why.

***

“The Duchess needs to show the baby.”

Despite the doctor’s earnest plea, Ethan had no solution.

Hyacinth was firmly convinced that Bremlin intended to kill her and her baby. It was half true.

“Your Highness. There is no life more vulnerable than a newborn. And the Duchess… her hygiene…”

Hyacinth even refused to be bathed.

She looked like a madwoman. Her hair disheveled, eyes bloodshot, clothes torn and dirty. That was everything.

“The baby’s cries are getting weaker.”

It was absurd that after crushing her soul, he now hesitated. Ethan acknowledged that he had to trample her again.

So he entered the Duchess’s bedroom and took the baby from his sobbing, struggling wife, handing it to the doctor.

Hyacinth scratched at him with her nails.

Ethan silently endured the scratches, but it was Hyacinth who was injured. Her malnourished nails broke easily. Blood streamed from the broken ends, staining both of them red.

“Hyacinth.”

Slap. Her hand struck his cheek.

It didn’t even hurt.

“You need to be healthy to hit me.”

“…I will kill you, no, just go. Please go. Get out of my sight. My baby, my baby…”

“The baby is sick.”

“…”

“You know it too.”

Hyacinth paused for a moment, then spat out venomously.

“You’re going to kill that sick baby!”

“No. I will save it. I will definitely save it.”

And Ethan Erentis even failed to keep that promise.

Three days later, the baby, who still hadn’t been named, quietly passed away. The doctor said it was a miracle the baby had been born alive.

It was so weak that it wouldn’t have been surprising if it had been stillborn.

Yet it was miraculously born, proving its mother’s innocence.

And so the baby stayed in this world for just a brief moment before leaving.

***

Hyacinth fainted.

Ethan buried the baby in the garden alone.

Returning after burying the small body in the winter ground, he couldn’t form any coherent thoughts. It felt as if someone was controlling his already dead body with strings.

Bremlin was as quiet as a tomb. The heavy silence strangled the living.

He quietly ascended the castle stairs. Having beheaded all those who humiliated Hyacinth, the castle was nearly empty.

He stood in front of his wife’s bedroom for a long time.

Hyacinth surely wanted to tear him apart. He wondered, should he just hand her a knife and let her kill him?

If he really did that… would it bring her some comfort?

Knowing that Hyacinth hated his very existence, Ethan had no choice but to knock on the door. He had to tell her where their son was buried.

He also needed to check if she was still unconscious.

Her already thin body had now wasted away to the point where it was a wonder she was still alive. He had to keep her alive somehow. He had no right to hold onto her, nor did he dare think of doing so, but he had to keep her alive.

After a short knock, Ethan entered the room.

He thought she would be crying on the bed—or unconscious—but the scene was entirely different.

A fierce cold wind blew.

Despite the biting cold, the red-haired woman paid no mind. With a pale face and deep, contemplative eyes, she sat precariously on the windowsill.

A truly eerie silence. Only the silence connected to death lingered.

Ethan Erentis quietly watched his wife. The woman who had once bloomed like a spring flower had withered in less than a year.

It was his original sin.

The man did not deny it. It was a cross he had to bear until his dying day.

Hyacinth slowly began to speak. Her voice was quiet but clear, not drowned out by the wind.

“I apologize.”

“Hyacinth.”

“It was my stubbornness. I was nothing to you, could never be anything to you, but I foolishly hoped and deluded myself.”

“…”

“I apologize now. I’m sorry.”

The man remained silent in his despair.

“So you too, please don’t ever forget.”

“…”

“That you drove a woman who loved you to her death. Don’t forget, even in death.”

Her frail body swayed greatly on the windowsill.

“Hyacinth—!”

Ethan reached out and rushed forward, but he froze at the last moment, seeing her cold smile. She smiled as if to make him witness her death clearly.

As if she was casting a curse. Like a witch.

By a hair’s breadth, Hyacinth fell out of his grasp. Downward. As she fell down… her red hair fluttered like petals.

The frozen ground cruelly rejected her.

Thud. A small noise, and then the landscape slowly turned red. Even the ground on either side of her hair began to turn completely red.

It was a truly miserable fall.

The sinner collapsed to the ground, unable to even wail.

***

The baby died.

The Duchess committed suicide.

And one night, the Duke disappeared with a horse.

When he did not return by morning, the North sent people to search. The white horse wandered around the snowy field, waiting for its master.

…Even when spring came, the Duke did not return.

[Intermission]

People often come to resemble those they most despise.

Ethan Erentis was no different.

The person he most despised and resented. His father. An irresponsible man who abandoned his child in the mire over a mere misunderstanding and left leisurely. Ethan hated his father’s second wife, who had cruelly mistreated him, but he hated his father even more for abandoning him and committing suicide…

But now, did he have the right to resent his father?

No. Ethan Erentis was more wretched than his father. His father had thrown his child into the mire, but he had outright killed his child.

A bastard who drove his own blood to death over a mere misunderstanding.

Not just his child. He killed his wife too. A woman who deserved to live in the spring sun and summer flowers all her life was broken and killed by him. A woman who lived praising life left him in utter misery at the last moment, having lost all will to live, cursing him.

It was his original sin. He did not deny it.

‘You killed me…’

Even if Hyacinth Hener hadn’t said it directly.

‘You killed my baby too.’

A silent will screamed through her entire soul.

Ethan Erentis stood in the middle of the snowy field, facing the blizzard rushing towards him. He thought he heard the sorrowful wailing from somewhere.

Maybe this kind of death was extremely selfish.

Perhaps true atonement would be to live and die hating himself in a hellish moment for the rest of his life…

But you must live.

You must live and be happy. Just like you were before you met me.

He finally understood why the hero chased the treasure chest at the end of the rainbow. There was a wish that he wanted to fulfill at any cost.

As the cold gnawed at his hands and feet, finally freezing his heart, Ethan Erentis quietly closed his eyes.

Hoping for a miracle.

And then he woke up exactly five years in the past.