Chapter 13

It was a very cautious touch.

He stepped back from the painting, creating some distance, and then, with slow, lingering steps, he turned around.

After that, he walked out of the room with steady, unhesitating strides, as if there was no longer any attachment.

Was that it? Was his business done?

Kanis listened to the fading footsteps before slipping out from under the cloth.

She walked over to where Michael had just been standing.

Grabbing one corner of the cloth, she pulled it back.

And Kanis saw the painting within the frame.

The painting depicted someone standing upright, looking back at her. It was someone Kanis recognized.

To be precise…

“That’s me.”

Her cloak and hair were billowing in the wind.

The light armor she wore was exactly as Kanis remembered it.

Though it was worn and faded in places and the night made it hard to see clearly, Kanis remembered that time.

It was the final battle of a series of endless skirmishes.

During a brief lull before a massive confrontation, her master, Felix, had suddenly asked for her permission.

He had asked if he could paint her portrait.

Kanis hadn’t understood what he intended to do with it at the time but had nodded in agreement.

When she asked him to show her the completed portrait, Felix had promised he would.

Once, she had even caught a glimpse of him sketching it as she passed by.

When she asked if he was really drawing it without a model, Felix had laughed, saying it was all in his head.

But after that, she never got to see the finished painting.

Felix had died, and Kanis Riventi had become a criminal, forced to leave the palace.

She hadn’t expected the completed painting to remain somewhere in the Crown Prince’s Palace.

Why hadn’t Felix shown me the finished painting?

Was it truly as perfect as he had claimed…?

The painting captured her image flawlessly, down to the smallest detail—even her eyebrows.

It was almost laughable.

The image Felix had tried to preserve through the painting—Kanis herself—was still alive and walking this earth.

Yet the man who had painted it had left no trace behind.

He had often painted even during the war.

In a world where dyes were hard to come by, he rarely had the chance to add color.

Perhaps, on that day, when Felix had asked for her permission to paint her, Kanis could have made a request of her own.

She could have asked him to paint a portrait of himself.

He had left no portraits behind during his lifetime.

After his younger brother ascended to the throne, a painter had been summoned to create a posthumous portrait based on descriptions alone, but it wasn’t an easy task.

Whenever Kanis happened to see that portrait hanging in the Imperial Hallway, she always felt it looked like a stranger.

And so… when she first saw Yenen, she had doubted her own eyes.

Relying on her memories for so long had made her wonder if she was mistaken.

Because Yenen’s face…

At that moment, a searing pain shot through her throat, and her body began to heat up.

Kanis staggered, clutching the frame as she collapsed to the floor.

This familiar sensation came when she burned through all the mana in her body.

Her body began to shrink.

Her hands, which had been gripping the frame, slipped away as her arms shortened, and she collapsed onto her hands and knees.

Kanis had reverted back to Kanna.

But the aftereffects of mana depletion were only just beginning.

Kanna grimaced in pain.

Her entire body trembled as it expelled the agony of being drained of mana.

Younger bodies were less capable of handling the strain of mana.

She hadn’t realized this while temporarily in her adult form.

Kanna curled up on the floor, trembling, waiting for the pain to subside.

It had been about ten minutes.

The aftermath of being in her adult form for just ten minutes was this severe.

Even though transformation magic was a type of advanced magic, she hadn’t expected such a backlash, considering other mages could use it too.

If she ever needed to transform into Kanis again, she knew she couldn’t stay in that form for the full duration.

While in Kanis’s body, it might feel like her body could handle it, but in reality, Kanna’s body was bearing the full burden of the magic.

Moreover, while in Kanis’s form, she couldn’t sense how much strain her body was under.

As her mana slowly regenerated, the pain began to subside.

Kanna carefully sat up, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

Sweat beaded on her forehead.

“What the—am I bleeding?”

She wiped the blood from her nose onto her pants without much thought and was just beginning to catch her breath when a sudden realization struck her like lightning.

If Michael had been here, it meant… he had finished his workday…?

Which meant he was probably heading to the room where I was staying!

Kanna scrambled toward the window but tripped and fell.

The lingering aftereffects made her head spin, but there was no time to waste.

She got up, exhausted, and pushed the window open, sticking one leg outside.

Damn it, this was going to turn into a habit.

***

Fortunately, the room was still empty.

It seemed no one had noticed her absence yet.

With one foot on the roof and the other on the railing, Kanna hurriedly pulled the window open, only to hear voices outside the door.

“Your Highness, where have you been?”

“You’re still here, Jehel?”

It was Michael and Jehel.

The moment Kanna realized this, she panicked and quickly ducked back into the room.

But her shoe got caught between the railing bars, and her foot wouldn’t come free.

“Well, of course, I was about to leave, but then an urgent message came from the border regarding that matter from before—”

“Let me check on Kanna first.”

Kanna yanked off her stuck shoe, threw it out the window along with the other one, and jumped into the room, slamming the window shut just as the door opened.

She turned around quickly, standing in front of the window with a guilty look plastered across her face.

Jehel raised an eyebrow at her suspicious expression, but Michael showed no reaction at all.

He didn’t even ask what she was doing there.

Michael called for a servant to ask if anything unusual had happened to Kanna today, then approached her.

“Did you have a good day?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Pretty much.”

Michael ruffled Kanna’s hair as if to tease her, then turned to leave.

“Well, time to get ready for bed.”

“….”

Kanna hadn’t intended to say anything, but she instinctively grabbed the hem of Michael’s coat.

“Kanna?”

Why had you gone to that room and looked at the portrait?

What do you know?

Why had you kept that portrait?

“Kanna. I’ll be back. I need to change too.”

“…It’s not like that.”

“Alright, if you say so.”

Michael left the room.

Kanna let out a long, complicated sigh.

“So, Jehel, you’re not off work yet?”

Jehel approached her, looking her up and down suspiciously.

“You look exactly like my nephew when he tried to bury his wet sheets in the backyard and act like nothing happened.”

“I’m not a kid.”

“You’re totally a kid.”

Kanna had plenty to say but no words to express it, so she sighed again and climbed onto the sofa.

***

However, things did not go as expected.

The servants bustled in to prepare the bed, and Kanna, who had absentmindedly accepted a cup of lukewarm milk, was halfway through drinking it under their insistence when—

“Kanna, what is this?”

Michael, who had quickly changed into lighter attire, pointed at the hem of Kanna’s pants.

There was a clear stain left from when she had hurriedly wiped away her nosebleed earlier.

Michael examined Kanna closely, his expression troubled.

“This? Blood.”

Kanna, who answered nonchalantly, tilted the milk cup to finish it.

Michael knelt down in front of the sofa where Kanna was sitting.

Kanna seemed genuinely unaware of why the servants were always stationed around her.

“I didn’t ask because I didn’t know what it was.”

“Then why did you ask?”

Michael let out a sigh through his nose and silently took the milk cup from Kanna, placing it on the table.

Looking at Kanna’s indifferent expression, Michael was reminded of someone else.

The Master of the Mage Tower was also someone who didn’t let others get close.

No matter who was with her, she always seemed alone.

It was only after seeing Kanna that Michael realized that even that person must have had a childhood.

After all, no one starts out fully grown.

According to the history books, a lone young girl had suddenly appeared before the first Emperor one day, asking to join in the fight against the Demon King.

That was the first recorded story of Kanis Riventi in history.

As for what came before that, even folklore could only offer speculation.

“Kanna, so you don’t have anything else to say to me?”

“Are you seriously scolding me for ruining my clothes right now?”