The small victory at the threshold last night was never meant to come without a cost. In a place like Castle Romario, the psychological defeat of an arrogant young master never simply evaporated into the cold air; it settled, rotted, and seeped into a far more insidious form of retaliation from behind the shadows.
That morning, the West Tower was draped in a thick, wet blanket of fog. A biting wind forced its way through the cracks of the decaying wooden window frames, carrying the heavy scents of damp earth, ancient moss, and rust. A ghostly dawn light crept agonizingly slow across the frigid stone floor, yet Marie did not appear at her usual hour. The silence in the outer corridor felt suffocatingly dense, as if the very granite stones of the tower walls were holding their breath.
When the room door finally creaked open near noon, it was not the comforting aroma of warm soup that greeted me, but the foul stench of desperation.
Marie stepped inside, her head bowed deeply. Her footfalls were dragging, awkward, and trembling. Upon the wooden tray she carried lay only a single slice of hard barley bread already dotted with greenish specks of mold, alongside a tin cup of cloudy, ice-cold water. Yet what caused my eyes to narrow was not the poisoned bread, but the striking reddish bruise marring Marie's left cheek and the slightly split corner of her lip.
"Young Master..." Marie's voice was raspy, broken by the tears she was desperately trying to hold back as she set the tray down on the wobbly table. Her small hands trembled so violently that the tin cup clinked softly against the wood. "I am sorry... this was all that... that Thomas permitted."
I did not touch the bread. I stood up slowly, letting the biting chill of the room sweep against my skin, and walked toward her. "What happened to your face, Marie?"
"Young Master Raymond..." Marie shrank back, her eyes filled with unadulterated terror as the memory of the morning in the lower kitchen washed over her. "He said... the West Tower's logistics must be cut to eliminate waste. And Thomas... Thomas struck me when I tried to beg for a proper bowl of soup for you. They said... a bastard and his useless maid have no need for nutritious food."
A strange, icy spark crept through my chest. It was not a burning rage or a surging torrent of emotion, but a frozen, calculating stillness. They could cut my rations until I starved; they could leave me to freeze inside this decaying room; but touching the only hand that nursed this body was a clear trespass of boundaries.
"Enough, Marie," I said, my voice ringing dangerously calm amidst the gloom of the room, like the surface of a frozen lake during a storm. I reached out, gently wiping away the smudge of tears from her cold cheek. "You do not need to apologize. This is not your fault. From this day forth, do not ever argue with them over a crust of bread again."
"But, Young Master—"
"Listen," I cut her off softly yet with absolute finality. "Let them believe that this petty torture is breaking us. Let them enjoy their cheap triumph in the kitchen."
After Marie left, taking her fear and her own cold compresses with her, I sank back into the absolute quiet of the room. I stared at the moldy bread, then shifted my gaze to my reflection in the dusty, cracked mirror hanging in the corner.
This castle was a labyrinth of predators. Duke Alistair sat at the apex of the pyramid, caring only for the clan's prestige. Duchess Eleanor and Raymond were the venomous vipers holding the supply lines. Meanwhile, servants like Thomas and Shane were merely hunting hounds, barking in whichever direction meat was thrown. Relying on their mercy was pure suicide.
I sat cross-legged on the cold stone floor, enduring the dull throb in my ankle, which was gradually mending. Closing my eyes, I focused my awareness deep inside my chest—toward the dense knot of mana locked tight around my heart. The low-dose poison continued to settle in my bloodstream, acting as an iron chain holding back the true potential of this body.
If I were to survive and break out of this stone cage, I needed to sever that chain first.
From the fragmented memories of the original Benedict and the fundamental knowledge residing in my mind, this specific type of mana-suppressing poison possessed a singular vulnerability: it required counter-toxin stimulation or natural neutralizers derived from rare herbal plants to gradually dissolve its density. And the best place to locate such vegetation was precisely where people least dared to tread: the abandoned Old Greenhouse in the rear garden of the West Tower.
That ruined structure, overgrown with wild briars and buried under snow, was the exact spot where Raymond had broken my leg a few days ago. A place deemed cursed and forgotten by t
he castle staff.