One Day My Sister Died - Chapter 8

Episode 8. Dreams are Resolute

The overwhelming curse shattered the door right in front of Vile like a pillar of salt, and it slammed shut.

He didn’t dare knock on the door, but stood there with the beast’s howl in his ears. When he was cut off like a knife, he scrambled to his feet and ran for his life in the opposite direction.

His pants were soaked and tears streamed down his face without a sob. He had no sense of shame.

The red eyes that had glared at him as if to crush him would likely haunt him even after death.

The doctor, Vile, lay sick in bed.

Gustav, the butler, saw him collapse from a distance and pushed him into the guest room.

The butler shoved a sedative into the doctor’s mouth. Just when he thought he’s done examining the doctor, a message came from the guard at the gate.

Gustav, with a pale face, relayed the message to his master.

“The carriage is still here?”

As daylight came, Claude, finding some peace, opened his eyes and asked Gustav.

Creak-creak-creak.

His body, stretched out in an old rocking chair that hadn’t even been greased, seemed unwilling to get up.

If the butler could change anything in this bedroom, he would start by oiling that cumbersome rocking chair, but instead of bringing his thoughts up, he replied through clenched teeth.

“Yes, sir. There’s no coachman, and there’s a sign of presence inside the carriage…….”

“You must be mistaken.”

Claude cut off the butler, Gustav, as if he didn’t want to hear more.

His impassive gaze flicked to the window.

Through the slightly open curtains, the snow that fell every day was still falling this morning. The butler, noticing the faint narrowing of his brow, added.

“Perhaps you should have gone out yesterday when Marquis Mosan Reve asked you to come out for a moment?”

“If I had gone out, we would have had eight partings in front of the mansion by now.”

Butler Gustav hesitated for a moment, then spoke again.

“Actually, I was the one who went out at dawn to check, Your Majesty. The new bride asked if you had given your permission to come in.”

A glare of disapproval flew at Gustav, but the irritation passed him and went straight to the new bride.

“My permission?”

Claude snorted.

“Dreams are indeed resolute.”

Gustav glanced over at Claude and picked up the blood-soaked sheets.

The stains were caused by his pain that erupted like a volcano every night as he stabbed himself in the back of the hand.

The blood was everywhere on the plush carpet and hardwood floors.

The large, dark bedroom looked less like the chamber of a noble emperor and more like the quarters of a warrior returning from a brutal slaughter. It’s a wonder he’s still alive after losing so much blood.

It was too much blood to be just from the back of his hand, but everything about Claude was out of the ordinary, and questioning it would only make his head hurt.

Butler Gustav swallowed hard and hurried to tidy up the room.

The seasoned butler’s hands were full of determination to get the room cleaned up rather than irritate the Emperor with pleas for his mercy that he probably wouldn’t care about anyway.

“Is there anything else you need?”

“I don’t want to hear that I killed another wife again, so tell her to get out of here.”

Claude ordered, nervously groping the back of the hand that the butler had bandaged and cleaned.

Butler Gustav moved closer to his side and bent over him.

Claude glared at him as if he were his ninth wife outside.

“If she doesn’t want to go back, she can die, but not in front of my house.”

Gustav paused for a moment, but then, as if he was used to it, picked up the blood-stained sheet and disappeared.

The bedroom door clicked shut, and the creaking rocking chair, carrying his exhausted and sensitive master, began to squeak again.

Creak, creak, creak.

A winter morning when the world was white.

In Claude’s bedroom, his night had come.

His eyelids slowly closed over his beady eyes, which still sparkled despite the loss of light.

His jaw clenched as he reflected on the past night of pain and anticipated the pain that lay ahead. Soon, the dark bedroom of Claude Yufrees was plunged into perfect silence.

Until then, Claude had no idea.

That his ninth wife would be brought before him in another three days.

Gustav really didn’t want to say anything to disturb the sensitive emperor.

But there were certain things he had to tell his master, who was sick and tired of the shadow of death hovering over his house, even when he looked like a corpse lying in a coffin.

“Gustav. You’ve lost your mind.”

“I’m sorry, Your Majesty. But how could I touch His Majesty’s body? I only saw people leaving on their own, but in cases like this….”

The Emperor’s ninth bride had been stubbornly holding out for three or four days now.

Claude, lying helplessly in bed, sat up.

Approaching the window, which he usually treated as an ornament and never looked out of, Claude was confronted with a view through the white frost. His nervous gaze quickly scanned the window.

Across a blindingly white field of snow and past an iron fence, a humble carriage still stood firm.

It was only two days ago that he scoffed at the suggestion to put down a comforter and a small brazier in it.

The maids’ whispers about needing to prepare for a funeral procession had only come yesterday. 

“In truth, Your Majesty, we weren’t sure if she was still alive. The maids were too scared to go near her, delaying the confirmation…”

One of Claude’s eyebrows rose at the mention of something that was no longer their concern.

The solution was simple, assuming she was alive.

Either bring that stupid, stubborn woman into the manor and provide her with a warm place to stay, or put something warm in that shitty carriage.

The former meant she would die in the mansion, and the latter meant she would tire from protesting and eventually die.

He didn’t want either, so the choice is clear.

Claude knew how to make the unwelcome visitor flee once and for all.

It was a trick that had never failed him before.

After a long silence, Claude’s parched lips opened.

“Everyone goes to my room. It’s a mansion, and not even a rat can walk through the entrance.” 

Gustav bowed his head in silence, not daring to look up at Claude’s irritated face.

***

She knew Louise wouldn’t live long.

After more than a decade in the South as a child, and later enduring Yuan’s laboratory work, no amount of medication had cured her of her illness.

Her nosebleeds came out of nowhere. She would bleed profusely when she exerted herself, and she would collapse in a fitful run.

Hers was different from the fragility caused by thin bones and lack of muscles. Outwardly, she seemed no different from ordinary people. Her father said it was a genetic disease that ran in the family.

A disease that affects one or two people in every generation.

It’s a rare disease that kills people at a young age.

Fortunately, it didn’t strike her father’s generation, but Louise was not spared.

It wasn’t only Yuan’s lifelong desire for home and family that kept her in the Felice mansion as she endured her uncle’s torment.

It was the hope that by helping her uncle with his many experiments in the lab, she might find a way to cure Louise.

Yuan squeezed her frozen, heavy eyes tighter.

Even if she had known she would die before everyone else, she didn’t know if Louise had died according to his orders.

The rumors of Emperor Claude Yufrees were very bad, and it was possible that he had killed Louise or made her illness worse.

‘I must ask.’

A new home. A new family.

It was the place where Louise had lifted Yuan from the hell of Felice. It’s one thing to live with what you’ve been given, but it’s another to accept it.

At the very least, Yuan needed to know how Louise had died and what her last moments were like so that she could truly bury her in her heart.

Only then would she be able to live in the world she had brought Yuan, in a world without her.

“Ugh-“

Her whole body seemed to scream as she wiggled her frozen fingers. Her fingertips had long since lost feeling.

After days and nights of thinking about what she would say if she were to meet the Emperor, Yuan could hardly tell if this was a dream, a reality, or an illusion.

All around her was silence now.

The occasional murmurs of the guards had ceased.

The beak of the forearm-sized bird that pecked at the roof of the carriage had ceased.

Even the bitter winter wind seemed to have stopped.

She’s dying.

No, she was dead.

Should she shout at that mansion before she dies?

What was the end of Louise, and was he a loving husband to her?

Just as her mind was filling up with useless fantasies.

Thud!

Suddenly, a sharp sound accompanied by cold air hit her face. The cold chill she had barely blocked out swept through her body.

Black eyes twinkled between frowning eyes.

In contrast to the cold air, the warm sunlight that poured in stung her pupils.

Yuan creaked to her feet, ignoring the screams of her body.

Only when she was halfway up did she manage to open her crumpled eyelids fully.

There was a man with his back turned to the light pouring in front of her.

“Ah.”

Emperor Claude Yufrees.

No one had introduced him as such, nor had he introduced himself.

The sensation, apart from the cold, that made the hairs stand on end all over her body, must have been from seeing the man she had only heard rumors of.