Chapter 5. The Price of a Curse and a Predator's Kinship

I sat on the cold stone floor, facing the hundreds of mirror shards spread out before me. The Imperial Palace’s Secret Appraisal Chamber. The room, finished on all sides with slick obsidian, was a prison built to swallow sound and light. The only illumination came from a faint magestone light in the ceiling and the massive, specialized glass that took up an entire wall. He was on the other side. Rixian de Valois. His gaze felt like an invisible blade piercing my spine. He was 'testing' me, weighing my value, trying to strip me bare. I took a deep breath. My bandaged wrist throbbed. The wound from Cassian was nothing compared to the agony I was about to face.

‘The First Empress’s Mirror.’

Its infamy was well-known even in my past life. A cursed holy relic that had driven every craftsman who tried to restore it mad, or led them to an inexplicable, unhappy end. But I knew the truth. This wasn't a curse. It was a memory. An object steeped in a memory so powerful, so tragic, that it protected itself by inflicting its pain on the next person to touch it. Hundreds of years of condensed resentment and despair. That was the true nature of the curse that drove all who touched it insane. I closed my eyes. I had no choice. If I broke here, I’d be dragged to Rixian’s interrogation chamber. My revenge would be over before it even began.

‘I have to do this.’

I placed both hands on the cold floor and focused all of my will.

‘Eye of Truth.’

My curse and my blessing, awakened upon my return.

Normally, just focusing on one object was difficult. But I didn't have that luxury now. I split my consciousness into hundreds of threads. I connected my ‘Eye of Truth’ to every single shard on the floor, all at once.

“…!”

In an instant, all sound in the world vanished. The next moment, hundreds, thousands of screams exploded inside my head.

‘Aaaah! It’s a lie! He could never betray me!’

‘Your Majesty, please… please don’t abandon me! I’m sorry!’

‘Cold… so cold. Why is this tower so high? No one ever comes for me.’

These were the memories of the First Empress. The final shrieks of a woman driven to madness, abandoned by the emperor she loved, betrayed by the lady-in-waiting she trusted most, and locked away in a tower. Every night, she had stared into this mirror, comparing her beautiful past to her miserable present. The mirror had absorbed it all—her despair, her sense of betrayal, her bone-deep resentment.

‘It’s not my fault… It’s not my fault! This mirror, this mirror made me this way!’

In the end, the Empress had hurled the mirror to the floor, shattering it. And with one of the shards, she slit her own throat. But that wasn’t the end.

‘Th-that’s not it… Why doesn’t it fit?’

‘I see it… the woman’s face… she’s laughing at me!’

‘Help me! Get out of my head! Get out!’

After the Empress’s death, the memories of the countless craftsmen who had tried to restore the mirror crashed over me. As they worked, they were infected by the Empress’s lingering hatred. Their frustration, their fear, and their madness intertwined with hers, creating an even more powerful ‘hell of memories.’ This was a curse. A chain of agony that no human mind could withstand.

“Ugh…!”

A groan tore from my lips as pain, like a sledgehammer striking my temples, erupted. My vision flashed red.

“No! Get out! These aren’t my memories!”

I screamed, my body trembling like a leaf. I collapsed to the floor, clutching my head. The more I struggled to reject the pain, the more sharply the memory shards dug into my mind. But… something was strange. Even as my body convulsed, my hands… my hands were moving on their own. Sifting through the hundreds of memories, they were searching for the one truth: the trajectory of the moment the Empress shattered the mirror. The location of the first piece a craftsman had successfully placed. The shape of the piece that made the second one give up. My hands began to pick up the shards, mechanically, but without a moment’s hesitation. Even in my agony, my instincts were fulfilling their duty as a restorer. Something hot streamed from my nose. I didn't even think to wipe it away. I was bleeding, I was wailing, and I was piecing together the fragments of a centuries-old grudge, one by one.

***

The thick, specialized glass of the observation room perfectly soundproofed the chamber. But Rixian grimaced in displeasure, as if he could hear her screams. The sight of Eliana Bester was wretched. She was crumpled on the floor, clawing at her head in agony. Her wheat-gold hair was matted to her cheeks with sweat, and her thin, trembling shoulders looked fragile enough to snap. Finally, red blood began to stream from her nose.

“Your Grace.”

Leo Baumann, standing like a shadow behind Rixian, spoke in a low voice.

“Any more of this is dangerous. Her mind could completely collapse. I advise we stop…”

“Leave her be.”

Rixian cut him off, his voice like ice.

“She could truly die, Your Grace.”

“If she dies, then that was the extent of her value.”

His reply was cold, but his gaze never once left the woman beyond the glass. He was used to watching people die. By torture, or on the battlefield. But this was different. She wasn't being subjected to external pain. Right now, she was destroying herself from within. She whimpered nonsensical words, convulsing in pain. Yet even as she spasmed, her hands never stopped, piecing the shards together. She was like a doll, her agony and her will completely separate. That sight was bizarrely… familiar. Rixian found himself looking down at his own white-gloved hands. His extreme mysophobia, his inability to bear the touch of another. It wasn't a simple personality flaw. It was from that night, the night his family fell to treason. The sensory overload from the smell of blood and betrayal. That horrific trauma had made his senses pathologically sharp. Whenever another’s skin touched his, he felt a flooding of those memories along with a pain like being burned. It was an uncontrollable chaos, a hell that only he knew. And now, that woman was experiencing the exact same kind of hell. A storm of senses she couldn't control, a desperate struggle to keep her sanity. For the first time, Rixian felt a strange ‘kinship’ in another’s pain. This wasn't pity or sympathy. It was an unfamiliar, intense feeling that went beyond discomfort. It was the obsessive curiosity of a predator that had just found another creature with the same ‘flaw’ as itself. He became intensely curious to see just how far she could endure, and what she would pull from the depths of that pain.

***

My consciousness faded. I couldn't tell if I was Eliana or the Empress from centuries ago. Her resentment and the craftsmen's curses spilled from my lips. My blood-soaked fingers picked up the last remaining piece. This was it. ‘

…Traitor.’

Someone whispered in my head.

‘…I’ll kill them all….’

I pressed the final piece into place. Click. A small, clear sound. In that instant, the thousands of screams that had filled my head vanished as if they had never been. Simultaneously, the shattered fragments of the mirror erupted in a blinding blue light. The seams between the shards melted away, and the mirror finally reformed into its original, perfect shape. The blue light that had filled the room slowly faded. Silence returned. I lay collapsed on the floor, gasping for breath. All the pain was gone… but something was wrong. It felt as if another being, one that was not me, had taken root inside me.

BANG!

Just then, the heavy door to the chamber was thrown open. Rixian de Valois strode in, his face an icy mask. Leo Baumann followed anxiously behind him. Rixian’s gaze flickered between the perfectly restored mirror and my bloodied form collapsed in front of it. His blue eyes wavered, just slightly. “Eliana Bester.” He called my name. Slowly, very slowly, I raised my head. All the strength had drained from my body, but strangely, the movement itself was as smooth as a doll's. My face was a mess of blood and sweat. I looked up and met the gaze of Rixian de Valois as he stared down at me. In that moment, Rixian’s icy expression shattered for the first time. Shock. Utter confusion flickered across the face of the man who never lost his composure. I couldn't know what my eyes looked like, but the voice that spilled from my lips was decidedly not my own. It was the voice of a strange woman, cold as the centuries and arrogant as if it looked down on all creation. I looked at Rixian, no, I looked through him, at something flowing in his blood. and whispered. The voice echoed chillingly through the room.

“So… it is you. The child who inherited the traitor’s blood.”