Chapter 86
Chapter 86. The Return of Sefitiana
Vinea lifted her heavy eyelids.
It seemed she had collapsed right in front of the door after checking on Tatar’s condition. Since no one but herself was to blame for overworking her body, she could only press her faintly throbbing temples.
With effort, she raised her upper body and leaned back against the headboard. Her body felt limp, indicating that fatigue had thoroughly accumulated.
As she turned her head, she could see the sun just rising outside the window. She remembered the sun had fully set just before she collapsed, so it seemed she had slept through the entire night.
After gazing at the unfailingly dawning sky, she turned her head away.
The sunlight breaking through the darkness didn’t please her much. Another tedious day, repeating time. The situation was approaching the worst, and nothing had been properly resolved.
She was tired. It had been like this for a long time, but this regression was particularly severe.
“Should I die and regress? Maybe starting over from the beginning would be better.”
What could be simpler than regressing? Just hurling herself off the terrace balcony might improve the situation from what it was now.
Yes. A familiar death. So it wasn’t even frightening.
Suddenly, she thought it might be good to plan the seventy-eighth regression more meticulously. To prevent such troublesome tragedies from repeating…
As Vinea absent-mindedly got up and was about to walk towards the terrace, her steps were halted by someone opening the door and entering.
“—Your Majesty!”
Discovering Vinea standing up, Lineue closed her eyes tightly in relief.
“Oh my. Thank you, Lord Urogia…”
Lineue, who had suddenly started praying to the god, soon examined Vinea’s body thoroughly.
“Are you alright? Is there any discomfort anywhere?”
Looking down at Lineue, Vinea relaxed her shoulders.
The thought of jumping off the balcony to her death in front of Lineue, who had gone through so much trouble to deal with a series of unexpected events, felt like a cruel thing to do. Even if she were to actually die, it seemed she should at least have the consideration to do so out of Lineue’s sight, so Vinea turned her body away from the terrace.
“What’s today’s schedule?”
At Vinea’s words, which sounded as if she might go to handle work immediately, Lineue shook her head with a resolute face.
“Your Majesty is in a state that requires absolute rest.”
At that moment, a doctor with a complex expression walked out from behind Lineue. From his gaze that seemed both joyful and regretful, Vinea intuitively sensed that something was wrong with her body.
“Is there a problem?”
“Well…”
His reluctance to speak easily suggested that she must have fallen seriously ill. Her body had been fine until now, up to the point where her heart would stop a year after regressing, so had she unknowingly ingested poison?
Thinking that she might really need to end the seventy-seventh regression, Vinea waited for the doctor’s next words.
“It seems you are with child, Your Majesty.”
* * *
After the doctor and Lineue left the room, Vinea, who had been sitting alone in a chair, stood up.
As she reflected her image in the large mirror placed on one side of the room, the curved silhouette hidden by the thin indoor dress boasted a beautiful line.
“A child…”
Could there really be a life existing beneath this thin belly? It was unbelievable. It was even more so because she had never conceived a child despite spending countless nights with him until now.
Endless regression, what could she possibly do by carrying a life that would never see the light? How could she dare think of having a child?
Although the Tessibanian imperial family was known for its scarcity of heirs, she had made efforts not to forget contraceptives to leave no possibility.
‘…Wait.’
Wasn’t there just one time recently when she didn’t take contraceptives?
The day she had relations with him in the library, intoxicated by the elation of finding traces of the first person to make a wish on Sefitiana.
Lineue had worriedly reported that she couldn’t prepare it because His Majesty had spilled the last remaining medicine on the floor.
Could it be because of that one time, just that one moment of carelessness.
“Ah…”
Suddenly, her breath caught.
Did she have the ability to take full responsibility for this life? If she regressed again, what would happen then?
Vinea placed her hand on her flat stomach. A kind of fear she had never seen before flashed across the blue eyes reflected in the mirror.
The weight of the suddenly arrived life pressed down on her body, too much to bear. Even in the midst of this, she felt terrible for worrying about the fact that she could no longer wield death and regression as weapons.
“The normal pregnancy period is ten months. Yet the maximum time allowed before the heart stops and regresses to the next cycle is just one year…”
Moreover, even that didn’t have much time left now.
She had never wanted a child. Even before the regressions began, she had judged that a child would be too much before the political situation of the two empires stabilized, let alone after the regressions started.
She hadn’t dared to even think about it. She had never thought about having his child even in the future after the regressions ended, so how could she handle this unfamiliarity?
The thin dress crumpled in Vinea’s hand.
“Why, why of all times…!”
Under her tightly closed eyes, painful regret washed over her.
She had killed countless people during the repeated regressions, but she couldn’t bring herself to do anything to this life in her womb.
Even if she were to have a child after the regressions ended, it was clear that it wouldn’t be this child now in her womb.
Oh God. Although she didn’t believe in you and had not the slightest intention to believe in the future, this reality ultimately makes her deny you.
“Why are you so cruel? Why, why only to us…!”
Misfortune piles upon misfortune. Tatar, fallen into hallucinations and caught in Eurene’s schemes, wouldn’t wake up, and a life she couldn’t take responsibility for had arrived amidst the chaos.
Regret overlaid all the choices of the seventy-seventh regression, which had finally seen light after efforts to end the regressions.
If only she had been a little more careful. If only she had made fewer enemies. Her uncle, the Emperor Emeritus, Eurene Castallo.
This life was never safe enough to fight them while protecting the child, and also find a way to end the regressions.
If she were to lose the child, could she bear that sense of loss? She might be indifferent, but what if she wasn’t?
There was nothing she could be certain of. Because it was the first time.
The inside of her mouth was torn where she had bitten down hard, spreading a dull pain and a fishy scent in her mouth.
Vinea looked down at her still-flat belly and then raised her head. The blue eyes reflected in the mirror shone clearly, pushing down the anxiety deep inside.
“You must wake up, Tatar. You have to.”
The concern that his mind wouldn’t endure as the regressions lengthened had become a reality. It was clear that if she were to regress again to wake him up, and he learned that she had given up their child because of it, his mind would crumble even faster.
No. She couldn’t lose him too, along with the child.
“…This time, we must end the regression.”
No repetition. No seventy-eighth regression, no death.
That was the only way to protect this unfamiliar life that had arrived in the seventy-seventh regression, and Tatar.
* * *
Inside the Central Temple, Nemil closed the heavy door and let out a low sigh. He could still hear the angry voice of the High Priest ringing in his ears.
‘Tell me exactly what happened with the Emperor and Empress of Tessibania, Priest Nemil!’
The trembling wrinkles of the High Priest, who had pressed him asking if he didn’t fear God’s wrath, had so captivated his gaze.
Nemil could do nothing but bow his head deeply to avoid fixing his gaze on those wrinkles.
He ultimately didn’t open his mouth. However, the High Priest, unable to torture a priest within the sacred temple, seemed to have decided to isolate him from the temple.
After all, he was being ordered to do manual labor that one would typically bring in outside workers for.
Though he had become the priest he had dreamed of, Nemil slightly missed the peaceful days at the orphanage.
The place he arrived at was a prayer room where construction had recently begun. It was a prayer room that had been closed off since he first entered this Central Temple.
From what he heard, they had built a basement to store the temple’s precious sacred objects, but due to a design error, they had placed a statue on top of the entrance and forgotten about its existence, only recently starting construction to fill the space.
Although construction had begun, it was excruciatingly slow as they only called in workers for brief periods during the early morning hours when worshippers weren’t around.
They had just barely removed the original tree-shaped statue, so it was hard to guess how much longer it would take.
His job today was to carry out the dust and stones that had flowed into the basement while removing the statue.
“Haah… This too must be God’s will.”
He could have told the High Priest everything he had seen through the artifact that day, but somehow he felt that he shouldn’t.
He thought there must be a reason why the late Priest Barmando had kept it to himself instead of handing it over to the temple, and had passed it on to him separately.
Though there was a burden of bearing such a great secret alone, he felt somewhat at ease knowing that the great Emperor and Empress also knew the same secret.
‘I was worried about what would happen if they disposed of me to keep me quiet, but…’
Fortunately, his head was still attached so far.
Nemil, who arrived at the prayer room at night past dinner time when the temple was almost empty, rolled up the sleeves of his loose priest’s robe.
“If I want to attend prayer time tomorrow, I’ll have to finish everything by morning. Cheer up, Nemil. This is nothing compared to doing the children’s laundry for half a day at the orphanage.”
He illuminated the dark prayer room with a small lamp in his hand. Due to the dark night that had fully settled, the sacred prayer room somehow felt eerie.
Trying to erase the blasphemous thought, Nemil hung the oil lamp in the groove on the basement stair wall.
After carrying stones that had fallen on the stairs for a while, relying on the dim light, dawn was breaking through the glass window above.
Nemil raised the back of his hand to shield his eyes from the bright light.
“Has it already gotten this late…”
He had roughly taken out all the stones. It seemed he would have to carry the stones outside the temple tomorrow morning due to lack of time, but he was worried whether the High Priest would allow it.
To check one last time, Nemil picked up the lamp he had hung on the wall and moved down the stairs.
Not knowing how far the stone fragments might have rolled, he reached the end of the basement, where a wooden door removed for construction caught his foot.
As he was about to turn back after roughly surveying the interior, something caught Nemil’s eye.
A square pedestal erected in the middle of the room to place something on. On top of it, a transparent crystal boasting a perfect spherical shape.
Though it appeared to be merely a decorative object at a glance, not emitting light, Nemil had seen something exactly like this before.
Through someone else’s memories, inside the artifact.
“Sefitiana…”
