Chapter 57. Misunderstanding

“I’m asking why you ate it all the way to the end when you knew it contained peanuts.”

Ailexia’s expression visibly hardened. However, she quickly changed her furrowed expression. She now fully understood the current situation.

‘That old woman said it. When shocked, the soul gets ejected.’

Ha, damn it. A curse erupted from within. She had thought it would be fine since it wasn’t even acknowledged in the secondary palace, but she never expected the woman occupying her body would stupidly eat peanuts.

‘No. In this case, is it the Emperor’s fault for forcing it?’

No wonder the Emperor was in her bedroom. It was all because of the trouble he had caused.

‘Even though he knew I have a severe peanut allergy……’

Ailexia’s eyes sharpened. The Emperor’s intention was obvious. He wanted to suppress her. At the very least, he wanted to get on her nerves.

However, he certainly hadn’t expected this situation to unfold.

‘He really didn’t think I’d eat it. Because I wouldn’t do something suicidal.’

But there was something slightly odd.

She understood that the Emperor had encountered an unexpected situation. But was that enough to move him like this? The Emperor was someone who always considered whatever happened to her unimportant. This time would surely be no different.

“What, are you amazed I’m alive and not dead?”

Ailexia spoke with a voice that seemed to contain sharp thorns. A conclusion was quickly reached in her mind.

His attempt to irritate her had instead irritated him.

‘He probably thought it was just a rebellious act until I put it in my mouth. But when I ate it all knowing I could die, he thought differently. As a defiant action to defeat him.’

Ailexia’s lips suddenly curled upward. While she felt utterly unpleasant about eating peanuts and nearly dying, thinking that she had gotten one over on Helios made it somewhat bearable.

“You must have been greatly distressed. What if I died? Right?”

“……”

“It must be troubling for a wench under Your Majesty’s control to try to escape on her own, ugh!”

With an elevated mood, Ailexia recklessly provoked Helios. Her voice, which had been cackling as if mocking him, was abruptly cut off when a large hand firmly gripped her neck.

Ailexia frantically clawed at the strong arm that was gripping her neck with both hands. Her forceful grip slid over the sleeve of Helios’s jacket, leaving marks.

But Helios didn’t move an inch.

“You misunderstood.”

“Kuk, ugh……”

“You should have just died. I saved something that doesn’t know its place because of a needless misunderstanding.”

Emotionless, cold eyes stared at Ailexia as she struggled beneath his hand. A pitch-black mass writhed enough to make one frown. It truly looked like something that would induce vomiting.

‘To confuse that thing with her.’

He frowned with one eyebrow in disgust and applied more pressure with his grip. A sound filled with pain, as if she might die at any moment, escaped through Ailexia’s lips.

He watched this sight a bit longer before releasing his hand.

“Huk, kehek……”

As her blocked airway suddenly opened, her breathing burst out roughly. Ailexia held her neck and continuously coughed. Saliva she couldn’t swallow dripped from her chin onto the bedspread.

As her coughing subsided slightly, Ailexia regained her senses and glared at Helios with bloodshot eyes. She looked almost like a demon.

Helios, without avoiding her gaze, wiped the hand that had gripped her neck with a handkerchief. As if wiping off something dirty.

“I thought you had changed like someone else and belatedly gained some sense, but it seems I expected too much.”

Then he dropped the handkerchief to the floor as if discarding it and trampled it thoroughly with his shoe. Without taking his red eyes off Ailexia, he stomped on it devastatingly. As if he were trampling on her.

Ailexia’s face flushed with humiliation.

“You son of a b*tch……”

A hoarse voice flowed through her trembling lips. Helios sneered at her appearance. Her curses had no impact on him whatsoever.

Ailexia, irritated by this, shouted as if throwing a tantrum. Her deep pink eyes seemed unfocused, momentarily appearing as if she had lost her mind.

“You hypocritical bastard! You coward! You always talk big, but in the end, you can’t even kill me!”

“……”

“Haha! Look even now, you couldn’t kill me in the end! Why? Because I still have value to you!”

Ailexia, who had crawled to her knees, suddenly yanked Helios’s cravat. At the shortened distance, intense displeasure spread across his face. Ailexia didn’t back down.

“Just wait. Someday, I’ll definitely pay it back to your brat.”

Her eyes, gleaming with hatred and vengeance, were eerie. However, Helios didn’t even blink. Instead, he laughed mockingly and shook off Ailexia.

Her body, pushed away weakly, fell face down on the bed.

“It would be easier if you just accepted the mercy given to you, but you’re still stupid.”

Helios roughly untied the cravat that Ailexia had grabbed.

“Go ahead and try. But you’ll have to do it before your usefulness runs out.”

With those final words, he left the bedroom and threw the loosened cravat to the floor. Simultaneously, a frantic scream echoed from inside. The servants of the secondary palace waiting in front of the door flinched and bowed their heads even lower.

“Take it away and dispose of it.”

Helios, the only one with an irritated expression, swept back his hair and ordered a nearby maid. Then he left the secondary palace without looking back.

However, even long after leaving the secondary palace, his mood worsened.

‘How could I mistake her for that.’

He was so angry that his fists clenched involuntarily. Who did he dare mistake her for?

‘She must have used some trick again.’

Even when she ate the financier topped with peanut cream at the tea party, unable to withstand his pressure, he hadn’t thought much of it. He just felt that her attitude seemed more compliant than usual, her sharp edge seemed weakened, and the atmosphere somehow felt different.

Contrary to his expectations, when he saw her swallow the financier entirely, he thought she was just being stubborn, refusing to lose. Though it wasn’t enough to kill her, she wouldn’t have known that, so it could only be seen as a reckless act.

But when his hand, extended to remove the fork, brushed against her, something impossible happened.

In his monotonous, colorless world, a brilliant light pink color appeared and painted it with color.

Helios stopped his brisk stride. It still made no sense no matter how he thought about it. Why?

That had only happened with one person.

“Damn it.”

He habitually reached for his waist. But nothing was there. He had left it behind, distracted by the sensation he felt.

Feeling his mood sink even further into the mud, he covered his face with one hand. He tried to suppress the seething impulse. Otherwise, he would have to go hunting again.

‘Damn it all.’

With his exceptionally superior physique, abilities, swordsmanship, and innate special powers, everyone praised him as the reincarnation of the first Emperor.

But those foolish people wouldn’t know. What he had lost in exchange for such abilities. What he suffered from.

The first Emperor could distinguish evil people by seeing their souls. Through the color of souls. The darker and dirtier the color, the more evil the person was.

He was the same.

Born into a colorless world, all he could see were souls of darker colors and souls of less dark colors.

Because of this, he didn’t see others as living beings. They were just categorized as less bad people, worse people, and terribly bad people.

His parents, who should have embraced this, failed to fulfill their roles properly.

Helios’s father, the previous Emperor, had seized the throne from his younger brother Chase, and until his death, he remained wary of him. Even after he ascended to the throne, many still supported Chase as the next Crown Prince rather than one of his ordinary children, which made him even more cautious.

In the midst of this, Helios, born like the reincarnation of the first Emperor, became a good comparison to trample Chase. Therefore, Helios’s father focused only on Helios’s achievements and prominence. He didn’t care about anything else.

The Empress was the same. Even seeing that his world appeared colorless and that he deviated from childlike behavior because of it, she thoroughly ignored this point, silenced him, and strictly guided him. She too was wary of Chase becoming Emperor because her position would become ambiguous if that happened.

This intensified when Helios’s father brought in Ailexia’s mother. From then on, rather than checking Chase, she became obsessed solely with the throne.

Around him, there were only people whose soul colors darkened day by day.

Thanks to this, the world quickly became boring and meaningless to him. Though he had high abilities and faced no difficulties, he wondered what was the point of living in such a filthy world like this.

That’s when he met a little girl. Thanks to her, he saw a world painted with color for the first time.

But that wasn’t Ailexia.

‘…Could she have noticed something?’

He lowered the hand covering his face and frowned quite seriously.

‘No, that’s impossible.’

Few people knew that he had been tracking the whereabouts of the girl he met as a child for a long time. Only Vilt and a few of the shadows knew. Besides them, only the head of Aether would know, but they couldn’t spread it due to the confidentiality contract.

The reason he deliberately frequented Aether himself, besides not wanting others to handle it, was largely to proceed as secretly as possible. If it reached someone’s ears, nothing good would come of it.

‘She wouldn’t have sensed anything from my uncle either. Even if she did, the side effects are different, so it would be hard to notice.’

His uncle, who stupidly mistook his opponent, also strongly inherited the blood of the first Emperor. That’s why, despite being born late, he was appointed Crown Prince at a young age, and before Helios was born, he was mentioned for the Crown Prince position again.

This was why Helios’s parents were wary of Chase.

But Chase didn’t see a colorless world like Helios. His abilities were different too. So even if Ailexia had noticed Chase’s side effects, it had no particular connection to him.

‘It’s unsettling.’

The unresolved question gave him an uneasy feeling. Helios turned his head to stare at the secondary palace building.

There was something he was missing.