Chapter 3

“Mmm.”

Feeling the warmth of sunlight falling on her, she struggled to lift her heavy eyelids. The ceiling she had once known so well came into view.

“……Where is this?”

What on earth happened. I was certain I had died.

Ellen reflexively ran her hands over her body. The body that should have been shattered was completely unharmed.

“I’m in one piece.”

That can’t be right. Was it all a long dream? But it was far too vivid for that.

She pushed herself upright on the bed. Still nothing wrong. Ellen slowly turned her head and looked around the room.

It was the place she had lived in before entering the imperial palace.

A cramped little attic room.

“Stop checking. It’s your room, all right.”

“What?”

A voice came from the corner of the room. Ellen pushed herself up from the bed and turned toward where it came from.

“Why are you here?”

“What a thing to say. To the great Spirit King who turned back time itself, praise and reverence……”

“Stop talking nonsense. Why are you here.”

“Ha. I doubt there’s anyone else in existence who speaks to the master of time and space like that.”

“And I doubt there’s anyone else who would leave their savior abandoned like this.”

“You really never let anything go. Pretty face, same old temper.”

Ellen’s expression hardened as she looked at the unwelcome presence. She reached back into old memories.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

She had first met the Spirit King at nineteen. The day Ellen had slipped out of the manor in secret.

It had happened because she overheard a conversation between her father and the chief chamberlain and learned a shocking truth. Her father, Count Nockton, was planning to sell her off to an aged duke more than fifty years her senior.

That day, she found a man drenched in blood, his complexion so ghastly it was hard to believe he was human.

The man, who introduced himself as Deriel, claimed to be the one who would become the Spirit King, master of time and space, and said he had sustained grave injuries in a succession struggle.

“What I need is the pure energy of a human. I have no time to spare.”

Deriel’s words weren’t easy to believe at first. But something felt strange. She was speaking with a person, yet it felt like conversing with something else entirely.

‘The translucent skin? Or maybe the voice that resonates through the air itself?’

“Fortunately, your soul is pure. So give me your energy quickly. If you save me, I will repay you without fail.”

He spoke urgently to the hesitating Ellen.

Her deliberation was brief. She couldn’t turn away from someone dying, whatever the circumstances. Ellen decided to take the man at his word for now.

“What’s your name.”

“Ellen Nockton.”

A flash of light burst from Deriel’s body along with a languid voice.

“Ellen.”

The colors were as brilliant as a rainbow. Ellen stared at the light in a daze.

It was then. A beautiful wave of light washed over her. She felt her energy being drawn out through it. Ellen braced herself against her body as it kept tilting sideways, barely holding on.

But it was too much. The sky spun. Panic rose in her chest.

“The repayment, I want it now.”

“That’s difficult right now.”

He had already drained all her energy, and now he was saying it was difficult.

She gasped for breath, her eyes full of indignation.

“My power hasn’t fully returned yet. I need to win the succession struggle and become king before I can properly use my abilities.”

“So you’re saying there’s nothing you can do for me right now. I need help immediately.”

“There’s nothing to be done.”

“Then what. You said you would repay me without fail. Did you swindle me?”

Ellen’s eyes filled with resentment. On top of leaving home with nothing, she had been swindled.

Her situation was utterly wretched. But there was no one to even complain to.

“I will repay you. I owe you my life, so I will repay you with something equal to that. With interest.”

A hollow laugh escaped her. If that was how it was, he could have told her before taking her energy.

There was plenty more she wanted to say. She had no idea how much energy he had absorbed. Every time she opened her mouth, the sky above her spun in circles.

“You awful……person……”

Her vision lurched badly as she spoke. Ellen’s upper body began to tilt toward the floor where she sat.

Just as she thought she was about to hit the ground, Deriel caught her lightly.

“I absorbed a bit too much because I was in a hurry. You’ll probably struggle to hold yourself upright for a couple of days. So be careful.”

“You have the nerve to say that……”

Swindled by a spirit. I really can’t catch a break.

The last thin thread of hope she had placed in him snapped apart. She was furious, yet she couldn’t lift so much as a finger.

Ellen let her heavy eyelids fall slowly as she lay in his arms.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

She collapsed then and there, and when she came to two days later and opened her eyes, she was back home. Her secret escape had come to nothing. Thanks to that, she had lived a hellish existence until she finally left this manor.

‘First, let me check what I look like. To confirm whether this is really real.’

Ellen got up from the bed to look in the mirror. A wave of dizziness hit her and her head throbbed.

“It would be better to lie down a little longer. I turned back time to two days after the day you saved me. So your body probably isn’t fully recovered yet.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She brushed aside Deriel’s warning and staggered to stand before the mirror, which had a long crack running down its center.

“……It really is me.”

Through the gap in the cracked glass, she saw herself, looking far younger than she had when she closed her eyes at the cliff’s edge. She raised a trembling hand and touched the mirror.

“I really came back.”

Creamy skin visible beneath long waves of wine-red hair. Emerald eyes that called to mind a deep blue sea. Beneath a straight, delicate nose, lips like small red berries.

All of it was her. That single simple fact made her chest swell until she could barely contain it.

“Ellen Nockton. I welcome you back, sincerely.”

“Hic.”

Her legs gave out at Deriel’s words. Ellen sank onto the worn-out chair and broke into sobs.

“If you cry like that, everyone outside will hear.”

“Sob.”

“Dear, dear.”

Even as he said it, Ellen wept and wept. Deriel snapped his fingers in the air. A transparent barrier enclosed the small space.

Inside it, Ellen poured out all the grief she had been holding back for so long.

“Feel better now?”

“……What happened? I was dead.”

“Repayment for saving my life.”

“You could do something like this?”

“It isn’t a simple thing. Due to the law of cause and effect, it’s only possible to turn back time to after the moment you saved me, and even that can only be done once.”

“Only once……”

“Yes. Because you saved me at the moment I needed it most, I turned back time to the moment you needed it most. Returning what was given is the law of my world.”

“The moment I needed it most?”

Ellen tilted her head. Deriel crossed his arms and answered.

“Yes. Before you were sold off to the duke.”

“Ah……”

Even before that, she had never been treated like a human being in her own home, but the turning point that led to her most wretched years was learning about the marriage talks with the duke.

She had resisted with everything she had to avoid being sold to that old duke.

But if she had known the duke’s future back then……

Deriel’s voice reached her as her thoughts continued.

“By the way, how is it that a count’s daughter, no less, ended up in a state like this?”

Deriel let out a sigh and shook his head. Then he reached into his coat and produced a book.

It was bound in deep green velvet with a gold trim. Ellen took the book, which had no title at all, and asked with her eyes what it was.

“A book I made by sending out spirits.”

“What?”

Deriel heard her question and curved his lips in a meaningful smile. Then he draped himself across the rock-hard bed.

“I did some investigating into Leonid. Put in the legwork, so to speak. I sent spirits out far and wide to gather information. Investigating things that already happened in the past is well within my ability.”

“Why would you……”

“Because you couldn’t forget him even in the moment of your death. Foolish thing.”

“How did you know that?”

“Because I was there when you died.”

Deriel’s eyes grew deep and still. Anyone who had seen Ellen’s gaze in the moment of her death would have known without being told.

Those eyes, so achingly tender, had been fixed on only one person.

“The debt I owed you drew me there as the time for repayment approached.”

“But I didn’t see you.”

“You must have forgotten. I am the Spirit King. Concealing my presence is nothing to me.”

“I see. So you turned back time right after I died?”

“No. After watching a little longer.”

“Watching who?”

“Leonid.”

Deriel snapped his fingers in the air. Light began to swirl around his body.

“But why are you giving me this book?”

“Interest. I promised to repay the life debt with interest.”

“Ah……”

“It should be quite worthwhile. It contains everything you so desperately wanted to know about him.”

He pointed at the book and gave a wave. Then he vanished without a trace.

Ellen ran her fingers over the book with trembling hands.

A record about Leonid. She wanted to read it at once, and yet she didn’t.

Just like the feeling she’d had while running from him.

Could his feelings for her be somewhere in this book. The one thing she had never once heard from Leonid’s own lips, perhaps here……

Her heart lurched with a hope she hadn’t meant to feel.

She carefully opened the cover. And began, gently, to turn the pages.

“Why on earth……”

Ellen’s eyes shook as she read. With every page she turned, there was nothing but things she could not bring herself to believe.

After reading for a long while, Ellen’s hands began to tremble as though seized by a tremor.

“Sob, you awful man. After all of this. When you could only ever manage this much.”

Before she knew it, Ellen was clutching at her chest and crying out.