"Have the young lady drink this," said Raven throwing a vial to Vernon, which the latter caught with ease.

  "Hey, hey, isn't that your blood!" Elias protested when he saw the tiny glass that Raven previously used to collect the blood from the wound on his cheek.

  "Hmm," was Raven's only response, his eyes focused on the pot of medicine he was brewing.

  "Raven's blood has a special property," Vernon explained. "It can neutralize any and every type of toxin in the body. Given the amount of Paradise the young lady had ingested, she'll need Raven's blood to fully remove the poison from her body."

  "If that's the case, what do we need that for?" Grandpa Roan asked, pointing at the pot Raven is brewing.

  "Bah! So many questions! Just watch and see, okay?" Raven responded impatiently.

  Before they could continue to argue, a sliver of darkness snatched the vial from Vernon's hand and handed it to Prince Aleric. Without waiting for anyone's approval, the prince poured the contents of the vial into Ingrid's mouth, tainting her chapped lips with red.

  Ingrid tasting the metallic liquid in her mouth, reflexively swallowed.

  At first, nothing happened. But in just a few moments, Ingrid's eyes fluttered open.

  However, it was still too early for them to breathe in relief.

  Ingrid who was trapped in the endless cycle of her nightmarish memories, couldn't tell reality from her dream.

  "No! No! Let me go! Let me go!! NOOO!" Mistaking Prince Aleric for the mad scientists within the illusion, Ingrid shrieked and thrashed. The cold metallic bed flashed in her mind, and with it, the dread of another torturous session.

  "Ingrid! Look at me!" Prince Aleric held Ingrid's face, forcing her to look at him. But Ingrid's eyes, filled with haze, could not register the familiar face. On the contrary, the huge hands holding her down frightened her even more. Her body trembled, and her screams grew louder and louder.

  "Hold her down! Make her drink this!" Raven ran towards Prince Aleric with the newly brewed concoction in his hand.

  Elias, Grandpa Roan, and the grand duke ran in haste to help, but then all of a sudden, Grand Duke Rasmus' steps halted. He raised his hand sideways and stopped the other two from moving. He remembered Ingrid's reaction six years ago when several healers and physicians held her down. The way she's reacting right now was similar to back then.

  "Prince Aleric, let her go," commanded the grand duke, his face somber.

  Prince Aleric frowned. He did not mind when Ingrid's nail left long red scratches on his neck as she flailed widely.

  "Let her go now!" Grand Duke Rasmus's voice grew louder.

  Prince Aleric's lips formed a thin line. Though unsure if the grand duke's decision was right, his grip on Ingrid loosened. With the way Ingrid is acting, he did not have a choice. Given his strength, Prince Aleric feared he would accidentally hurt her. That's why he conceded.

  As soon as Ingrid was freed from Prince Aleric's grasp, she bolted for the door. Fortunately, Vernon had the wit to lock the door, keeping the deranged young lady from escaping. Blocked from escape, Ingrid fled to the farthest corner, curling into a terrified ball.

  The people in the room stood there wordlessly, unsure of what to do next. They watched as she rocked herself back and forth with her face hidden between her knees.

  "By any chance, has the young lady been to Serus?"

  All eyes shifted to Raven, whose attention remained on the trembling frame of the young lady, his mind filled with a myriad of complicated thoughts. The young lady's reaction reminded Raven of his sister, so he unconsciously blurted out the very place that made his sister that way.

  Vernon couldn't help his surprise. Among their people, only Prince Aleric and he knew about Lady Ingrid's abduction by the king of Serus a few years ago.

  Raven was shocked by their expressions. He simply asked that question because he momentarily saw the shadow of her sister's former self in Ingrid. But Raven never thought the question he whimsically asked would hold such a devastating response.

  Raven's gaze turned complicated. Several questions arose, the most pressing being how a grand duke's daughter could end up in such a place. People of her station were supposed to only experience the world's beauty and none of its darkness.

  'How tragic!' thought the man who was born and bred in that hellhole.

  Raven inched towards Ingrid, carefully assessing her reaction. When he saw her shrink, he stopped. He crouched on the floor while balancing the bowl full of greenish liquid still in his hand.

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  Raven opened his mouth and, with a dour expression, said words whom the people in the room did not quite understand, except for Ingrid, who slowly lifted her head, her wary eyes filled with surprise.

  "Underground, 2314, Rafflesia, the serpents mark..."

  Ingrid looked at Raven with wide eyes. She opened her mouth to speak but couldn't find the right words to say.

  "It never occurred to me that I would find a fellow rat here," Raven smiled bitterly. He placed the bowl of concoction on the floor and carefully pushed it towards Ingrid and said, "Drink this. I brewed it myself. It will help you calm down."

  Ingrid eyes remained wary, but her hands were reaching for the bowl. Whatever those are, they made Raven earn some of Ingrid's trust. She placed the bowl close to her nose and smelled it before taking a tiny sip. Tasting the minty taste and sensing nothing wrong with it, she gulped the entire bowl and then slid the bowl back on the floor towards Raven.

  Ingrid looked at Raven with childlike eyes. It looked like she was waiting for him to tell her what to do next. But not long after, her eyes begin to turn heavy. She tried to fight the drowsiness off, but the lull of sleep was stronger than her will, and she succumbed into a dreamless sleep.

  "Please carry her to the bed. I added a dose of sleeping agent to her drink to give her a much-needed rest. When she wakes up tomorrow, I'll decoct another bowl of Dream for her." Raven no longer acted quirky. He stood up with a solemn expression.

  This time the grand duke did not allow the prince to steal his job from him. He collected his sleeping daughter in his arms and carefully carried her to her bed, like a fragile glass.

  Another wave of silence engulfed the entire room. This time it was silence filled with unspoken questions, seeking answers.

  Elias and Vernon, each with the thought of their master in mind, began grabbing seats and lining them in a semi-circle. It was obvious none of them wished to leave Ingrid all alone. So they can only hold their conversation there.

  Another chair was placed in front of the semi-circle where Vernon beckoned Raven to sit. The rest of the men filled the seats in the semicircle, looking at Raven with a grim expression.

  Grand Duke Rasmus in particular felt like there was a knot in his stomach. Although he had his speculations, he really had no idea what kind of life Ingrid lived in Serus that year that man took her. He had his spies investigate King Oliver's palace, but most of his men returned as corpses, and those who lived to tell the tale didn't bring back any valuable information with them.

  That shows how powerful King Oliver is. And that Mad King loves nothing more than to flaunt his power. Whenever King Oliver caught a spy of the grand duke, he would deliberately deliver the corpses to his doorstep to show the grand duke his powerlessness against him.

  Similarly, Prince Aleric, or Vernon rather, faced the same obstruction from the Kingdom of Serus. Aradhya had watched Serus—Vernon's only perceived threat—long before the House of Lennox became one of the chess pieces on the board. But Serus was impenetrable. That place is like a breeding ground for crocodiles—where only the most cunning of demons survive. Thus, Vernon's every attempt to convert some of their officials to their side was unsuccessful.

  Had they not coincidentally rescued Raven and his sister from within a secret lab in the Kingdom of Weeldro, they wouldn't have learned some of the most terrible things the Kingdom of Serus did behind closed doors. Though Vernon sensed there was more that Raven hadn't told them—not from fear or distrust, but because the memories were too painful to revisit.

  "Speak," Prince Aleric commanded.

  Raven let out a deep sigh as memories he had long buried resurfaced.

  "The Kingdom of Serus has an underground lab. I am unsure of its exact location, but I know it is run and funded by that mad king himself," Raven retold the story, which Prince Aleric and Vernon already knew, in lieu of those in the room who do not have any knowledge of it. "I am one of the many rats inside that lab. And by rats, I mean test subjects treated in inhumane ways for their vicious experiments."

  Raven unbuttoned his shirt and revealed dark, ugly root-like veins starting from the center of his chest and spreading outward. It was such a horrifying thing to look at that even Elias, who had seen his fair share of hideous wounds on the battlefield, was startled by the sight.

  "This was caused by a poison fungus that, when introduced to the bloodstream, eats away at the person's cells, leaving these visible root marks in their wake. They injected it directly into my heart. And if you asked me if it hurts, it did, like hell. Normally the poison fungus would overtake the person's body in a span of a day or two. But because of my special constitution, capable of fighting any type of poison, my body battled against the poison fungus for a very long time. So for days on end I was in constant pain," he explained in a rather nonchalant manner.

  Raven stretched his arms. Though he seemed carefree, his eyes were saying otherwise. In them you can still see the pain, rage, and trauma that horrifying experience left in him, though he was trying to hide it under the mask of a smile.

  "Long story short, that place is hell on earth. Mountains of corpses pile every single day inside the lab that they began planting Rafflesia flowers in the hallways to mask the scent of death. That way when ambassadors from other kingdoms visit, they can simply blame the flowers for the rancid scent that even strong chemicals could no longer hide."

  "Are you implying that my child was a..." Grand Duke Rasmus trailed. He couldn't dare say it. Perhaps leaving it there in the air would make it less true.

  Raven looked at Grand Duke Rasmus with a weighty expression. "Paradise was called paradise because the man who discovered it was a sybarite. As Paradise makes hallucination seem awfully real, he used it as a drug to enhance his pleasure. However, they soon discovered that through mind suggestions, Paradise can also be used to make a person relive their most terrible memories. Thus, it turned from a drug of pleasure to a medicine of torture."

  The sound of a chair cracking filled their ears. They turned towards the grand duke's hand, clenching the pulverized arm of the chair in his hand. The giant veins on his neck popped, his eyes turning red as anger overcame him. In his mind he was killing the king of Serus several hundred times.

  But more than anger, the grand duke felt a crushing weight of sorrow. He mourned his daughter's pain, the cruel twist of fate that had stolen her innocence. He was consumed by guilt, his powerlessness a constant reminder of his failure to protect her. He wished he had been more perceptive, more wary, because then, Ingrid wouldn't have endured that torment a second time.

  Grand Duke Rasmus broke into a heart-wrenching sob. He covered his face with his hand and cried without a care for whoever was watching. His mournful wail made some eyes brim with tears while others had their conscience stricken.