It was, without question, far too shabby a send-off for the funeral of a war hero.

Feron Difon Valstar. The man they had called the shield and sword of the empire.

He had joined the knighthood at twelve, succeeded in assassinating the leader of an enemy nation, and safely brought the Lüziyang Mountain Range under the empire’s wing after centuries of fierce conflict. A once-in-an-age figure.

He went on to become the true center of the imperial sword, subjugating the southern tribes that had plagued the empire with their raids. And on that momentum, he wiped out the Romantus, the long-standing scourge of the east.

The man who had swept back to the imperial capital time and again bearing the banner of victory finally set foot on the inland soil of his home country, the Girian Empire, in what they say is a man’s most glorious years.

The year he turned twenty-seven.

He had spent fifteen years of his youth entirely on the battlefield, on the harsh and brutal frontier.

And for all of that, what the emperor gave him was a cursed land where strange creatures were said to occasionally appear. The Valstar region, a fortress carved out of a rocky mountain.

It was a damp and cold land year-round, where thick fog never lifted even when the sun sat directly overhead.

There was not a single stretch of the Girian Empire’s borders that Feron’s sweat and blood had not soaked into.

And yet the emperor saw fit to hand Feron this worthless cursed land as a reward. Along with the hollow title of Margrave, a shell of a rank with nothing behind it.

It was no different from saying: you’ve dealt with all the enemies outside, so go shrink into that corner of the frontier and guard the house. Not one person raised their voice for Feron against this unjust treatment.

“A fitting death.”

The small space, far more cramped than the funeral halls of most nobles, made even quiet voices carry easily. With so few guests, even a small murmur resonated loudly off the stiff walls.

The ones holding their places with such displeased expressions were there because they were local dignitaries from the areas near Valstar, attending out of obligation.

‘A fitting death. …That’s right.’

Karin Difon Valstar, who had been staring blankly at the rectangular coffin, closed her eyes.

Beneath the black veil that fell over her face, her eyelids were an angry red from the spices she had rubbed into them.

To anyone watching, it looked like a wife mourning her husband’s death from the depths of her heart.

‘If you were going to die like this anyway. Did you really have to drag me down into the mud with you?’

But what bloomed in Karin’s chest was not heartfelt grief. It was a rage that made her teeth clench.

Feron Difon Valstar died bearing a noble’s surname, but when he was born, he had no surname and no name. He was a barbarian.

Feron had been a beggar of the Romantus tribe, the very people he later destroyed. He was an abandoned vagrant, born and raised in a destitute region. The reason a man like him was able to become the head of the imperial sword and a hero of the nation was because of one elder who had been planning the recapture of the Lüziyang Mountain Range at the time.

The strategy was to capture the foreign tribes near the border, use them as shields, and strike the enemy nation from behind once their strength had worn down.

And Feron stumbled into it.

On the promise that he could eat as much good meat as he wanted if he survived, Feron cut down enemies whose names he did not even know with a single stroke.

It was the beginning of a hero’s tale, and the foreshadowing of a wretched death.

The man who could level an entire forest with sword energy alone had come back like this, a headless corpse.

He had not even died in battle. He had gone out hunting alone as usual, and something had torn his head clean off, leaving only his body rolling on the ground.

When he did not return after several days, she issued a search order, and her retainers came back carrying his body.

At first, even seeing it with her own eyes, she could not believe it and checked again and again.

That man. The man who had cut down enemies like slaughtering dogs and pressed down on her with that relentless, suffocating desire.

Was it truly him lying before her eyes now?

The clean, neat cross-section of the severed neck was suspicious. The clothes without a single drop of blood were questionable. The imperial court’s refusal to investigate his death was doubtful.

She had wished more than once or twice for her husband to go out and die somewhere far away, but now that he had actually come back as a corpse, she could not bring herself to believe it.

‘You’re pulling something again, aren’t you, Feron. Aren’t you?’

It was not a leap for Karin to think so.

Feron may have built up merit on the outside, but his savage and base nature had withered her, once so radiant, down to nothing.

He had been a thoroughly rotten man from the start. A brute who knew nothing but cutting people down. How could a man like that have ever understood what it meant to be a noble, or what a woman felt?

Karin hated the way he shoved food into his mouth. She was disgusted by the way he occasionally turned violent toward the servants. She was sick to death of his obsessive fixation on spending every single night with her without exception. She was fed up with the sight of him taking contraceptives so that a pregnancy would not keep him out of her bed.

And that was not all.

Whether it was ignorance or a lack of self-restraint, his greed was immense as well. Not for material things, but for the most basic human appetites.

Gluttony. L*st. The hunger for dominance. These were where his nature showed most clearly. If Karin had to sum up Feron in a single phrase, she would have chosen, without hesitation, “a raving madman.” Because his jealousy had grown more severe with each passing day.

In the bedroom, he would fly into a rage if she so much as wore a single thread of clothing, yet whenever she went out, he tried to cover her up to the very tips of her fingers. Whenever she removed her hat to greet nobles, his expression would darken sharply. Even so, he seemed unable to unleash himself at the banquets they attended together, and so he held it all in and brought it home, where he made his possessiveness known.

“You’re mine. Do you understand? No matter what you try to escape me, I am the only man you will ever let under your skirts. Even if you look at me with that disgusting expression…!”

Feron knew all too well that Karin did not merely dislike him but held him in contempt. Whether that made his cruelty worse, or whether his vicious nature simply deepened over time, Karin could not have cared less.

Just thinking about Feron felt like it was poisoning her mind.

‘But you die like this?’

At least the Feron she had come to know over five years of marriage made it feel far more plausible that he had found some body resembling his own somewhere, cut off its head, and laid it before her as a corpse. And then watched her from a distance. Waiting to see when she would betray him and take another man into her arms.

If Feron had truly died, and it seemed almost certain that he had,

then even so, this man would have been yearning for her in the very moment his breath left him. He might have cursed her with everything he had, hoping she would climb into the coffin alongside him.

‘Ugh. Infuriating. Am I actually going to get sick from this?’

Karin rubbed her arms, which had gone strangely cold, and stepped back.

She had moved out of a vague unease that some curse might crawl out of the coffin, but her guard took it as her swaying from grief and reached out to steady her shoulder.

He thought she had staggered from sorrow.

“My lady. Are you all right? Your color looks very poor.”

Of course it does. I rubbed all those spices in.

Even after five years of living side by side with her husband, not a single tear would come, so she had asked her maidservant for spices. She had worried that asking on the day of the funeral itself would invite unnecessary talk, so she had tucked them into a drawer in advance while the funeral was being prepared.

‘See how sincere I am about your death. Do you know that?’

She mocked Feron to herself and lifted her head, and found the face of her guard looking even more sunken in grief than she was. His reddened eyes and solemn expression made it clear he was genuinely mourning Feron’s death.

And with good reason. This guard, Zenon, had fought alongside Feron from the time Feron first began leading the knighthood. The two of them had spent more time together than she and Feron ever had, even though she was the one who had married him and shared his nights.

‘Feron. Your real wife is right here. Better than me.’

She was barely holding back a sneer and was about to tell Zenon she was fine.