“To think that the Karyan Clan I had been searching for all this time was so close at hand!”

The thing he had longed for his entire life was right before his eyes.

The voice of Emperor Wyressel, unable to contain his excitement, spittle flying unattractively, filled the audience chamber.

The old emperor, who had long since lost any thrill in the power he wielded from atop the throne, now had eyes clouded and dim with age, yet flooded for the first time in a long while with the light of agitation.

The Karyan Clan, who had even been called the representatives of a holy god, for they could grant the wishes of all without limit, at the cost of their own lives.

The Wyressel imperial family had been covertly tracking them across generations, in pursuit of a stronger empire, though they had long since faded into the stuff of distant myth.

And at last, today.

The emperor, forgetting all decorum and dignity at the knowledge that this long-held wish could finally be fulfilled, could not suppress the elation swelling within him as he shifted in his throne.

Like a beast that cannot hold back its appetite, drooling at the sight of tempting prey set before it.

“Are you truly of the Karyan Clan?”

The emperor’s rough voice, tangled with ragged breaths of joy and excitement, drove into Evelyn’s ears with a wet, heavy weight.

‘Why must I be facing again the terrible face of the one who brought misery upon me?’

Faced with a reality too vivid to be a nightmare, Evelyn was draining of all color as fear closed in on her.

‘This can’t be. This shouldn’t be happening.’

Wanting to deny everything she could see, hear, and feel in that moment, Evelyn could not produce a single sound between her finely trembling lips.

The expensive red dress she had laced tightly at the waist out of a young girl’s desire to look her best for the crown prince who had first shown her favor.

The new shoes she had endured wearing despite the worsening pain of feet not yet broken in.

And the golden eyes of the Wyressel imperial father and son, who laid bare their arrogant superiority and blind ambition without restraint, crushing those before them without mercy.

Evelyn had fallen neatly into the trap carefully laid by the imperial family and her parents, freely displaying her clan’s power and proving her worth.

She had been brought back to that time around the age of nineteen, when she had been deceived by those who promised her eternal, unchanging happiness, and had marked her life with a grave and irreversible stain.

‘I died. I was certain I had died.’

Believing that without a shadow of doubt, Evelyn drew in short, trembling breaths and traced back her last memories before she had ended her own life.

On the day of a wedding, when everyone celebrates a new beginning in life.

Evelyn had climbed to the top of a bell tower in her pure white wedding dress, intending to put an end to everything.

To take revenge on her parents and her betrothed, the crown prince, who had whispered sweetly of false love and happiness in order to gain wealth and power through her abilities as a member of the Karyan Clan.

They had once truly loved her, so not everything could have been a lie from the very start.

Even betrayed and wounded, Evelyn had not been able to be cruel, and until the very end she had clung to a thread of hope and could not let go of those dear to her.

But the reason her parents and her betrothed had come rushing after her, desperate to stop her, was only one.

Not out of guilt or remorse for their wrongs, however late, but out of fear that they would lose their grip on wealth and power.

With even her last remaining heart broken, Evelyn flung the tiara delicately adorned with hundreds of large and small jewels to the floor, then threw herself from the top of the bell tower and ended her life.

‘It was all over. It truly was.’

Evelyn remembered everything about that day she had leapt from the tall bell tower with her own two feet.

The perfectly clear weather without a single cloud in the sky, so unlike her own wretched state, with no will left to go on living.

The sensation of falling, plunging endlessly downward, spreading through her entire body.

The strange, inexplicable sense of relief that washed over her in the face of the approaching fear of death. All of it was etched into her body and mind as clearly as if it had happened yesterday.

‘So this must be a dream. It has to be a dream.’

For someone who had chosen death to escape from hell, to have another terrible hell unfold before her.

Evelyn kept refusing to believe that any of this before her could be real, and she soothed her frantic self, desperately praying it was nothing but a dream.

That she was going through this absurd ordeal even in death because she had been tormented by these people so terribly while alive.

That if she held on just a little longer without giving in to fear, she would soon wake from this dreadful nightmare.

“Why do you not answer?”

But the emperor’s threatening voice, thick with irritation, forced Evelyn at last to accept the cruel reality.

“I will ask again. Are you truly of the Karyan Clan?”

The emperor, who despised repeating himself, extended his great generosity and gave Evelyn one last chance.

Uneasy about her clear reluctance to speak, he stroked his full beard and looked Evelyn over slowly, as though she were broken, a screw loose somewhere.

A n*ked gaze that declared he would bring her under the imperial family’s control by any means and wring use from her to the very last, even her dead soul.

His golden eyes were too vivid to dismiss as an illusion, and forced to accept that this hell was real, Evelyn felt her blood run cold.

‘Dear God. How can you drive back to the cliff’s edge one who threw herself from it in order to survive?’

Was this punishment for cutting short the life she had been given, before living it to its end?

Evelyn felt nothing but bitter resentment toward a god who had not considered the circumstances that had left her no choice but to take the worst possible path in order to sever completely the wretched ties binding her to these people.

And more than that, a god who, out of all possible moments, had brought her back to the very moment her life had begun to unravel.

Now that everything had come to nothing and she was back at the beginning.

No different from having her throat seized by them once more, Evelyn was swallowed by a crushing sense of helplessness.

She had been through it once, so there was no need to fear it anymore, and surely there was a way to get through this crisis.

But her mind, growing hazier by the moment as though fogged over, could not produce a single sharp solution right now.

No matter how many times she turned it over, she could see not even a crack of an opening to escape the trap, and soon nothing but anxiety and fear rose plainly onto Evelyn’s face.

She knew that impatience was of no help whatsoever in this situation, but her body, reacting contrary to her will, only unsettled her further.

Thud, thud. The sound of her heart pounding faster and faster filled her ears.

And then, cutting clearly through it all, came one very familiar voice.

“If it’s true, you should say so, Evelyn. What’s gotten into you all of a sudden?”

Countess Milston, doing her best to keep the impatience from showing in her voice, placed a light hand on her daughter’s shoulder and pressed her.

“There’s nothing to be nervous about. Just do as you always do.”

“That’s right. Show His Majesty the Emperor your ability, the same way you showed us. It’s against all propriety to keep someone of his standing waiting, so go on and show him your power.”

Whether she was nervous, or had suddenly fallen ill.

The count and countess, watching their daughter’s unusual state with careful eyes, patted her on the back and nudged her with an elbow, urging her along.

The emperor would without question take their daughter as the crown princess in order to bind the power of the Karyan Clan to the imperial family forever.

It was the moment their only daughter’s worth shone brightest, and a golden opportunity to forge a bond with the imperial family itself.

Yet for some reason Evelyn would not budge, and Count and Countess Milston, watching her with anxious eyes, were burning up inside.

Unable to bear their urging any longer, Evelyn slowly turned her head to the side and came face to face with her parents, struggling to hide their desperate expressions.

‘Ah. I had forgotten about them. The parents who played their part so thoroughly in selling me off to the imperial family.’

Evelyn had grown up deeply loved by parents who had taken in an orphan by chance and raised her as their own flesh and blood.

The power of the clan, which had awakened from her desperate desire to repay them, had one day brought the count and countess an unexpectedly enormous windfall.

She could feel clearly, with each use of her power, that her body wore down a little more each day, but Evelyn had never once regretted it or resented them for it.

Because seeing the happiness of people who had willingly embraced a stranger as family and loved her was her own happiness as well.

Because it was a sacrifice for people she would not begrudge giving everything to, even at the cost of her own life, and so it was simply meaningful and joyful.

‘But I never imagined that the care I gave so foolishly would return as a sharp blade laced with poison.’

The guilt Count and Countess Milston felt over the wealth and honor gained through their daughter’s sacrifice lasted only a fleeting moment.

As time passed, they came to regard it as something they were simply owed, and beneath the greed of the count and countess, her heart and body were trampled and broken without mercy.