Chapter 19

More importantly—how on earth was she going to handle Baron Elvin.

What kind of treatment would land him a legendary reputation?

The fire in Iberin's eyes was roaring full blast.

She looked more incensed than she had with the six nobles, and it was starting to seem like the man wasn't going to walk out of this estate with all his limbs intact.

---

The urge to kick him out right that second was almost overwhelming, but if she didn't lock this down properly, the same thing would happen all over again.

And the imperial family wasn't going to give up easily either.

"We need proof."

"How?"

Iberin tapped at the table with her fingers, thinking.

She'd had servants quietly search his room from the moment she'd first felt something off about Ether, but nothing had turned up.

The pressing thing was getting the lessons stopped.

"Hmm."

She racked her brain hard enough to feel it.

But nothing came together into a clean that's it.

She had no grounds, in the immediate sense, to halt the lessons.

The fact was that Lecashe had been the one to send word asking for an education in the first place.

Now she was going to turn around and call it off?

Nobles cared about justification for everything they did, no matter how small.

If the justification was thin, even genuinely important matters often couldn't be pushed through, supposedly.

What an exhausting way to live, but what could you do.

"What if I sneak into the room and hide there?"

Tami offered.

"Who, you?"

"I'll do it!"

"Mm. But just seeing and hearing won't cut it. Elvin can just deny it."

"What if I bring a recorder in?"

"We do have one of those."

"Um…."

That was when Rotte spoke up, her tone weighty.

"Yeah?"

"There's a more reliable way. But it's a little dangerous."

"What is it?"

"You know I'm from a fallen noble house, right?"

"Yes."

"My family's fall came down to the recipe for a secret elixir. Drink it, and you'll pour out every truth you've been trying to hide. Doesn't matter if you've got the will to resist."

Iberin's eyes went round.

"You know how to make it?"

"…Yes. But like I said, it's dangerous."

A grin spread across Iberin's face.

"Hey, when the plan is shaking down someone the imperial family sent, what part of it isn't dangerous? Worst case, we go down swinging."

{She'd wring Elvin dry, right down to the color of his underwear.}(#qiyc6iwr4xef)

---

It made sense that Rotte had been cagey about bringing this up—it wasn't going to be easy.

Or rather, the ingredients themselves were actually easier to come by these days.

Easier being the right word—before the Forest of the World Tree was corrupted, they would've been hard to find.

The Eshib family had been around for a very long time.

Strictly speaking, they'd been one of the founding houses when the first Holy Empire was established.

You'd have to go back generations and generations, but Rotte was now the only direct-line member of the family left.

"At first it was fine. But the ingredients needed for the elixir…."

"They grow on tainted ground, soaked in demonic energy."

"Yes. Exactly. After the Forest of the World Tree appeared, the Eshib family was branded as witches. We got driven out to the margins, barely hanging on, and settling anywhere wasn't easy."

The Eshibs maintained they weren't witches, declared their innocence, and swore they'd never make the elixir again, but no one believed them.

Of course, if they'd just relocated straight to Lecashe, people would've muttered I knew it.

In the end, Count Eshib—who was now a distant ancestor of Rotte's—had been forced to wander from place to place.

Until eventually people forgot the Eshib name altogether.

But the Eshib house never gave up on the elixir.

Someday, surely, someone would recognize their loyalty—and when that day came, the elixir would be put to noble use. That was what they'd told themselves.

Then Rotte's father had, by chance, caught the eye of a fairly powerful noble and ended up living in the capital.

And that noble had known about Eshib's elixir.

"Who was it?"

"…I never met him personally, so I don't know. But he was high-ranking, that's for sure. Our family hadn't been formally stripped of our status, but we had nothing to our name either. For a brief stretch back then, we lived like proper nobles. A house, dresses, money. According to my father, that gentleman backed us completely, said he trusted my father. After that, my father built connections with a fair number of nobles, but the ending wasn't a good one. He was discarded."

Rotte's expression dimmed bitterly as she spoke.

She seemed to be reliving the moment her father's hope of reviving the house in his lifetime had been thoroughly shattered.

"Don't tell me?"

"That's right. What they were after was the elixir."

"So he gave it to them?"

"Yes…. He gave it to them…."

After being cast aside, Rotte's father couldn't take it and lost his mind.

"At least he didn't hand over the recipe itself. Later I got worried they'd come kicking down our door demanding even that, so I memorized it ahead of time and burned the original. Then we ran for Lecashe."

"…You still don't know who that gentleman is?"

"I was young at the time. And unlike my father, I had no interest in the family."

Her father, now mentally gone, had told her to throw away the Eshib name—and then he died.

But Rotte knew how much Eshib had meant to her father, and she couldn't bring herself to do it.

Even though it had been his last wish.

So she always introduced herself with the Eshib name, even if it was Eshib in name only.

Of course, since that gentleman was presumably still in the capital, she couldn't go anywhere near it.

In any case, the twenty-year-old Rotte had ended up serving Lecashe—who'd taken her in knowing everything—and that loyalty had carried her all the way to old age.

"Honestly, at first everyone felt like the enemy, and I kept expecting Lecashe would eventually come asking me for the elixir too. But no matter how many years passed, there was just no interest. Not when the previous Grand Duke died and not when the current Grand Duke inherited the title. They simply didn't care about me as a person."

The reason Rotte called this elixir dangerous wasn't about how hard the ingredients were to source.

It was that gentleman—who might still be in the capital.

He was the man who'd ripped the elixir out of her father's hands.

She was probably worried about getting tangled up with him again.

Both Iberin and Pons sat with grim expressions, neither sure what to say while Rotte finished.

Nothing they could say was going to comfort her, and they couldn't begin to imagine how it had felt to tell that whole long story.

When she finished, silence stretched on for a while.

Rotte gave a brittle little laugh, looking awkward about the heavy mood.

That was when Iberin spoke up, quiet.

"Thank you."

"Don't be. I'm telling you I might be putting you in danger here."

"So we make sure they don't find out. Lecashe is cut off from the world—whatever we cook up here is none of their business. And even if they do find out, we'll be fine. Anyone wielding that kind of power in the capital is central nobility, sure, but it'll still be fine. My enemy is bigger than yours, Rotte. Right now Baron Elvin is just a minnow, but as long as I'm breathing, the final target is the imperial family."

Rotte's mouth dropped open.

So did Pons's beside her, where he'd been quietly listening the whole time.

{But he came around fast, falling in line with her and cackling that the imperial family was his target too.}(#op7z3jfvgiyf)

"…You're really reckless, you know that."

"That's why I put a condition on it. As long as I'm breathing."

Iberin smiled playfully.

Then Pons and Rotte chimed in.

"We'll keep you alive somehow, no matter what. I'll even give you my holy power if I have to. I've lived plenty long."

"No thanks. What a great life it'd be, surviving on a piece of Rotte's life. And a temporary one at that."

"If only a Saintess were born somewhere."

"Hm?"

Rotte mumbled it like a useless wish, and Iberin's shoulders gave a small twitch.

A Saintess?

The title of this novel was The Saintess Who Would Save the World, and the protagonist Saintess was also the heroine Ether would grow up to fall for.

That meant the Saintess had been born somewhere in this country too.

"W-wait, would having a Saintess change something?"

"I mentioned before that you could survive if you received holy power continuously."

"Right. But you also said no priest would help."

"Yes. That's also true. Honestly, it's not that priests don't have vessels for it. But purifying your contaminated holy power, My lady, takes enormous power. So there's a limit."

"Ahh."

"But a Saintess is a being without a vessel limit."

"Then…."

"She'd be the only being who could sustain Madam's life indefinitely."

So a Saintess really was that big a deal.

In the novel too, when Ether had died and the Seed of Evil bloomed and everything spiraled, the Saintess had been the one to clean up all the imperial family's mess.

Come to think of it, the male lead must be in the capital too.

He was the crown prince.

Goddamn imperial, but the crown prince in the novel had been the one person who acknowledged the imperial family's wrongs and tried to put them right.

So he wasn't actually that bad—but her absolute favorite was still Ether.

While she was at it, why not push for Ether and the Saintess as a thing?

A pinkish little fantasy spread across her face, and Rotte, Pons, and Tami were all watching her with deeply strange expressions.

She was the only person who could save her own life, and they were telling her that person didn't exist—so why was she smiling?

"…Lady Iberin, what's the matter."

"Hm? What? What's wrong with me?"

"You just smiled like a total creep."

"Creep?!"

{Don't say creep—the actual creeps will hear and feel called out!}(#is189nipx7ib)

"Well, fine, if not. What were you thinking about?"

"Uh, just—I had a feeling the Saintess and our Ether would actually be cute together, that kind of fantasy…?"

"There'd have to be a Saintess for that to even matter. And aren't the Saintess and the young master a hard no? The imperial family would lie down across the road to stop that."

"Ah."

She'd just remembered: if Ether had a child, his wife would die.

If the wife was a Saintess, the Saintess's holy power would get contaminated.

"Damn it."

There had to be some way to get rid of the Seed of Evil.

---

Either way, the Saintess might cross her path someday, but for now the priority was wringing Elvin dry.

A few of the necessary ingredients could only be found in the Forest of the World Tree, and Rotte wrote them down and handed the list to Iberin.

[Three-year-grass, dark-fragrance herb, tail of a Death Serpent, troll's blood]

The hardest-looking ones seemed to be the troll's blood and the serpent's tail.

"Wait, what's a Death Serpent?"

A snake, presumably, but to Iberin's ears the name was distinctly ominous.

Death in the name—it didn't exactly sound pleasant.

"It's a snake. With deadly venom."

"Has the Grand Duke ever killed one?"

"It makes sense you wouldn't know much about Death Serpents. A Remota Serpent, right before it evolves into a spirit beast—that's what's called a Death Serpent. Once it becomes a spirit beast, it's almost impossible to catch. They're far too clever."

"Damn."

"Mm, getting one shouldn't be too hard, though. They're not common, but they're not exactly rare either."

"…But will His Highness actually bring me one?"

"Mm, I can't promise. If he refuses, we'll just have to think of another way."

The only person with the kind of strength to enter the Forest of the World Tree was Lyssel, so for now they had no choice but to ask.

"Ugh."

The man was such an iron wall, she wasn't sure he'd actually do it.