CH 204

‘Mom bragged about driving five nations onto the path of destruction and having twenty-five men in her clutches during that time.’ In what amounted to a tenth of the time she’d spent as an elf, the dragon lord had achieved countless things as a human. That’s why dragons believed their time was most efficiently spent as humans.

“Two eyes, one nose, and one mouth. Looks like I did change proper—Eh? I’m making sounds?” Since a polymorphed Girgantia took on the appearance he’d have if he’d been born as a human, he was able to maintain his form easily. He’d even begun speaking with his voice instead of using telepathy. As he stared at his reflection, he remarked, “So, this is what I look like when I become a human.”

Girgantia felt awkward as he inspected his new look, patting himself all over his body. In truth, he still wasn’t able to comprehend the aesthetics of humans, so he was curious as to what impression he made by human standards. Snapping out of his amazement, he realized he’d been staring in the mirror for too long. “Oh, now’s not the time for this. First, I’ve got to wear clothes like humans do…”

“Commoner clothes…” But what clothes could he choose from? At the very least, he recognized that ordinary folk didn’t wear the same attire as the emperor or the knights. Just as he found himself in a pickle, he spotted a magazine Tania had haphazardly chucked after reading. Flipping through it until he reached a page the handmaiden had marked, he grinned, “Okay, I should go with this then.”

* * *

A small iron door in the corner of the villa was pushed open with an unpleasant creak. Some of the villa attendants came walking out with their hand full of a bunch of cloth.

“Will it be fine not to burn these?” one attendant worriedly asked the other.

“What can we do? The incinerator is broken and we’ve got a ton of work to do. It can’t be helped even if we just throw them away,” the other replied with a sigh.

“But still, the instruction was to burn everything that was used once by His or Her Majesty…”

“Who has time to follow such rules now? Besides, who’d follow us to the dump to check? Let’s just dump them here and hurry back. We still have plenty of work ahead of us.”

“Well, I suppose it can’t be helped.”

The attendants threw the bedding into the garbage dump outside and swiftly returned to the villa. A long while after they had left, the grass behind the dump swayed as a woman cautiously emerged. The woman wore a wide-brimmed hat that obscured her entire face—it was Yuliana.

Hurrying over to the garbage dump, she began searching through the bedding the attendants had thrown away. A few minutes later, she found what she’d been searching for. Triumphantly, she held a long thread of platinum blonde hair.

“It’s just as the book described…” she murmured. The former princess thought she was hallucinating when a mysterious book appeared containing a method to kill Cecile. She thought she’d been driven mad from her hatred. However, as she read the book, she began to doubt her eyes as the instructions were far too detailed to be a mere delusion.

That night, Yuliana scoured through the pages over and over, thinking how nice it would be if reality truly played out as the text dictated. After falling asleep while hugging the book, there was no trace of the book to be found when she awoke the next day. ‘Was it all a dream?’ There was a simple way to ascertain whether the book had ever really existed. She merely needed to act as what had been written in the book.