I followed the teahouse manager toward a wall disguised as a bookcase.
Without a word, the manager tugged out a single book with a thud— and the bookcase twisted sideways, creaking open.
Behind it, an underground passage appeared, breathing out cold, damp air.
“Follow me.”
He spoke curtly and went down first.
I stepped in right behind him.
A narrow, seemingly endless spiral staircase.
Each time our footsteps echoed, chill and moisture crept coolly up my legs.
Had we walked for a good ten minutes?
The manager ahead of me glanced back several times.
As if the fact that I was following in silence irritated him greatly.
At last, the stairs came to an end.
At the very bottom, deep underground.
Between rock walls worn smooth as if they had been ground down hundreds of times, a strangely incongruous, ornate door stood alone.
It felt as though only this place had been carved out of reality.
The manager stopped before the door.
“Because of your impudence… I have guided you as far as the place where Her Highness the Princess is, but.”
His voice sank low.
“If you are thinking of trying anything foolish inside… it would be better not to even consider it.”
A cold gaze, as if he might make me vanish quietly until the day I died.
Rather than a human, he seemed like some beast that lived underground.
I smiled faintly and nodded.
‘There must be all sorts of magic cast inside the room anyway. If I make even the slightest strange move, it’s only natural I’ll be turned into a beehive….’
But seeing as he didn’t bother telling me that, it seemed he still suspected me to the very end.
However, that suspicion was exactly what I needed.
Because it was the key that would open the first wall of my plan.
If my memory was correct, this place belonged to the most infamous secret group in the Avelan Empire.
‘The Grey Hand.’
On the surface, they were known as “a chivalrous band that defeats evil with evil,” and rumors said they saved oppressed citizens all across the empire, but the truth was entirely different.
A secret organization personally founded by Evelyn, the second princess of the Avelan Empire, to save the royal palace as its corruption deepened.
No one else knew. Not even the emperor.
A shadow-like army whose movements were controlled solely by the princess.
And now, I was standing before the door to its headquarters.
“Your Highness. I have brought the person I mentioned before.”
The teahouse manager carefully knocked three times before the door.
His voice was low, but each and every word was unusually clear.
Most likely, even while we were descending the spiral staircase, he had already reported everything about me through some communication magic shared only between the two of them.
The method the Grey Hand used in the original work to exchange information with one another.
So I wasn’t particularly surprised.
Click—
The door unlocked from within and slowly opened.
A quiet room like a library appeared, blue candles burning in long flames.
‘…It was eerie when I read about it in the original, but seeing it in person is even worse.’
This room, where the princess—the leader of the Grey Hand—stayed, was not a place any member of the organization could freely enter.
Only two kinds of people could come inside.
A subordinate personally acknowledged by the second princess, Evelyn, enough to keep them by her side, or someone who had stimulated her interest to an extreme degree.
The three heroines of the original work belonged precisely to the “latter.”
Ten years later, they became the first outsiders to set foot in this room.
And now, I had arrived here far earlier than that.
As I stepped into the room—
Fwoosh.
Blue flames that had been sleeping in midair quietly bloomed, then lit up one after another as if making a path for me.
At the end of that trail of flames… a hooded figure appeared, seated before a desk and writing something on parchment.
They were far away, so I could only see their silhouette, but they seemed roughly a little taller than Lucas was now.
If things followed the setting, she should be about a year older than me.
It was precisely then.
Tap—
Behind me, a chair nudged my legs with a faint force.
I was naturally pushed into sitting down, and the chair glided smoothly forward, as if part of a ritual, until it came to rest directly across from the hooded figure.
Then the pen nib stopped on the parchment.
“Welcome.”
The hooded figure raised her head.
“I am Jin, leader of the Grey Hand.”
The blue flames faintly revealed the contours beneath the hood.
“…Though, in front of someone who already knows my identity, it would be rude to use an alias, wouldn’t it?”
A subtle smile.
Her tone was polite, but her air was as cold as the tip of a blade.
Had she decided there was no need to hide it?
Soon, she slowly drew back her hood, and beneath it, sapphire-like eyes and sea-blue hair were revealed in turn.
Colors that one could not possess without royal blood.
She took her hand off the quill, then lightly flicked her fingers toward the air.
Crack, crack, crack—
In an instant, the surrounding blue candles began to change shape.
The gentle flames that had been lighting the path until just a moment ago transformed into sharp spearpoints like shards of ice, aiming at me from every direction and stopping right before my nose.
“Incidentally…”
Evelyn shrugged her shoulders with feigned nonchalance.
“If you look down on me because I’m young, you’ll be in trouble. I may not look it, but last year, when I turned ten, I became a 5th Circle mage. I’m considered one of the empire’s most promising talents.”
…Gulp.
By modern standards, she only looked about as old as an upper-grade elementary schooler, so I hadn’t expected her to be this savage.
In the original, she only appeared in earnest ten years later, when she spoke little and wore a stiff expression, but right now, she was simply a little more talkative and her emotions showed more clearly.
Her attitude toward people was just as prickly as broken glass, both then and now.
Evelyn’s voice sank sharply once more.
“So I’ll ask. Who are you, and how do you know not only the formula for our organization’s secret sleeping drug… but even my identity? You had better answer immediately. I am not kind enough to go easy on you just because you’re young.”
…She’s young herself, yet she treats others like children.
Or maybe it was simply a habit of hers.
Even in the original, her way of speaking nearly caused her alliance with the protagonist’s group to fall apart.
But now that I had come this far down, I had no intention of hiding any further either.
I slowly nodded and removed my hood.
At that moment—
“Huh, huh…?”
Evelyn’s relaxed expression slowly, ever so slowly, began to crumble.
“Y-you are…?!”
Her sapphire eyes trembled greatly.
Like someone who had discovered an answer she did not want to believe.
Toward her, I wore the gentlest smile I could manage and calmly bowed at the waist.
“It is a pleasure to meet you, Your Highness.”
In the space so silent it could steal one’s breath, my voice rang out all the more clearly.
“I am Lucas Argent, the youngest of the Argent family.”
Evelyn’s lips trembled faintly, as if she had swallowed her breath.
A brief silence.
Even the blue flames in the room did not flicker, as though holding their breath.
And then—
Swish!
The moment Evelyn swung her arm, the ice shards throughout the room trembled and rose all at once.
The spearpoints that had merely been aimed at me a moment ago now circled around my neck, revealing unmistakable killing intent.
“Lucas Argent…”
The princess’s voice twisted low, very low.
“There is an Eastern saying: ‘Enemies meet on a single-log bridge.’ It seems this is precisely that moment.”
“Enemies? I’d like to hear the reason.”
“Enough nonsense!”
Her voice boomed.
“If you know my identity, there is no way you do not know whom the Grey Hand opposes! The black forces that are poisoning the empire… and among them, the Argent family, who have rotted the royal palace through illegal slave trafficking and drug trade! Your family!”
Her anger clung to the end of every word.
…Yes, that was how the “Grey Hand” was born in the original as well.
Illegal slave hunts, drug distribution, corrupt nobles, and the darkness of the rotten imperial family.
Unable to endure all of it, Evelyn had created this secret organization herself at the age of six, in the year her mother was poisoned to death.
The teahouse manager who had brought me here a moment ago was the knight who normally guarded Evelyn.
And most of the core members of the Grey Hand had also been the closest retainers who had served the former imperial consort in life.
To her, I, born into the “worst dark family in the empire,” was a thorn in her eye.
But I had come all the way down here precisely to clear up that misunderstanding.
“I’ll eliminate you right here and now!”
As Evelyn’s ice weapons spun and drew closer, I quietly opened my mouth.
“You’re having trouble because of the drug ‘Ruppong’ currently circulating in the slums, aren’t you?”
“…What?”
The magic paused for an instant.
“How do you know—”
“I know where you are searching, but…”
I flicked a finger lightly in the air.
“It isn’t the slums. You’re completely barking up the wrong tree.”
The ice shards gave a faint trembling sound.
“The real culprit is on the opposite side of the slums. It is… the House of Baron Versailles.”
“Th-the House of Baron Versailles… What nonsense!”
Evelyn’s face instantly stiffened.
As if she had heard a name that should never be uttered, murderous intent and fear mingled in her expression all at once.
But that trembling lasted only a moment.
Soon, her eyes were honed cold again like blades.
“There is a limit to absurdity.”
Evelyn swung her hand like lightning.
The ice shards all trembled sharply at once and aimed at my neck again.
“Right here, I’ll—”
In that instant.
I moved before she did.
Swish.
“?! What… are you doing right now?”
The moment I slipped my hand inside my hood, Evelyn instinctively drew both arms together to cover herself and retreated.
As though I might pull out an explosive from within.
But what I took out was a single small branch.
It was a poisonous herb with one blue fruit and one red fruit hanging from either end.
The princess’s expression hardened.
‘The Fruit of Adam and Eve.’
I grasped the red fruit between my fingers, held it up where she could see it clearly—
Gulp.
And swallowed it in one go.
The ice shards trembled uneasily.
“Did you just… eat that?”
Evelyn’s voice cracked.
I offered the remaining blue fruit toward her.
“I ate the red poisonous fruit. So… Your Highness should hold on to this blue antidote fruit.”
“Lucas Argent. Did you know what that fruit was before eating it?”
“Of course.”
Even at the question that followed, I merely smiled calmly.
“The Fruit of Adam and Eve. A heinous poisonous herb used when ‘training’ intelligent beasts.”
My voice echoed through the quiet room.
“If one eats the red fruit, they die after a week. The antidote… is only the blue fruit on the opposite side.”
The ice shards at Evelyn’s fingertips trembled faintly.
“Even animals understand it. That a companion who eats only the red fruit dies, and the one who eats the blue fruit lives. So, because they don’t want to die, they go mad and throw themselves into training.”
Without chewing the fruit, I looked straight at her.
“And the reason I have just poured this worst of poisons, used only for training beasts, directly into a human body is simple.”
Quietly, clearly.
“If no evidence of drug smuggling is found in the Versailles family, then throw that blue fruit away as it is.”
“…What did you say?”
I spoke calmly.
“But if what I say is true, Your Highness must accept me into the ‘Grey Hand.’ That is my only condition.”
This time, the ice shards trembled with astonishment.