Chapter 34: The Discarded Pawn

“This is the ointment you requested, Your Highness. They say if you apply it consistently, even minor wounds will heal cleanly and completely without leaving a trace of a scar.”

Because it had been weighing heavily on his conscience all day, Anok had specifically commanded Eunuch Im to quietly procure the medicine. The remedies Yeo Jae-won had sent over were admittedly of excellent quality, but Anok couldn’t bring himself to return a tube he had already used to the Prince.

Though Yeo Jae-won was remarkably skilled at wielding a sword and drawing a bow, his hands were strangely flawless, lacking any unsightly scars. Rather than looking delicate, his hands were large with thick bones and long fingers, and Anok had always been quite fond of them.

The thought of his own teeth leaving a permanent blemish on such a hand was simply unacceptable.

“You have worked hard. Take that and deliver it to His Highness.”

“To the Prince?”

Despite Eunuch Im’s blank, bewildered repetition, Anok simply offered a calm, leisurely nod. As he prepared to dismiss the eunuch, Anok lowered his gaze to the stack of formal letters in his hands and suddenly furrowed his brow.

“By the way, where is Court Lady Cho? Ever since I woke up, she has been entirely nowhere to be seen.”

Inside Deoksang-jeon, the main hall of Damyeon Palace, Noble Consort Sa Eun-hyeon lay with one arm stretched lazily out. A young eunuch was kneeling beside him, meticulously and gently massaging his fingers with absolute care.

“Your Highness, Court Lady Cho has arrived.”

Upon hearing the announcement from the chief eunuch of Deoksang Palace, Sa Eun-hyeon slowly lifted his eyelids.

“Court Lady Cho? Ah, the one I dispatched to the Myeong estate?”

“Yes. She is currently waiting outside.”

“Hmm…… how long has she been standing there?”

“Less than fifteen minutes, Your Highness.”

“I still feel quite weary. Tell her I will grant her an audience in a little while.”

This brand of casual malice was entirely routine for him, so it surprised no one. The chief eunuch simply offered a subtle nod to another servant standing at the far end of the hall, signaling him to fabricate an excuse and keep Court Lady Cho waiting.

In truth, ever since the Prince’s wedding night, Court Lady Cho had been desperately sending messages to Damyeon Palace and slipping out to visit whenever she could manage. However, terrified of catching the Prince’s eye, she would instantly turn around and slip away the moment her request for an audience was denied.

Though Sa Eun-hyeon had been intentionally testing her by throwing her out every time, today he had oddly dispatched a servant to summon her to the palace. Yet, knowing she had arrived, he deliberately chose to make her wait—a cruel, playful display of his sheer arrogance.

He was a former catamite of the Prime Minister who had accidentally caught the Emperor’s eye. After spending years holding his breath in a remote corner of the palace, he had viciously crawled his way up to this exact position—a Noble Consort born from the womb of a lowly concubine.

The chief eunuch of Deoksang Palace, who had been castrated at a tender age and thoroughly raised as a palace servant, had been anchored here since before the current Emperor was even designated as the Crown Prince.

Over the decades, he had witnessed countless consorts enter these walls. He had seen the concubines of the late Emperor as well as those of the current sovereign, yet across that entire tapestry, he had never encountered anyone quite like Sa Eun-hyeon.

In his youth, what had instantly captured the Emperor’s eye wasn’t an extraordinary physical beauty, but rather his unique, unyielding aura.

To use a metaphor, he was like a solitary, ancient pine tree clinging to the edge of a jagged cliff. Despite his low birth, he possessed a lofty, untouchable demeanor that naturally provoked an intense competitive drive and a desire for conquest in whoever looked upon him.

Why else would he have been sold as a catamite to a powerful minister despite his humble beginnings? And why else would His Imperial Majesty have taken the massive political risk of ripping him away from a loyal subject just to install him in the inner palace?

Across the empire, rumors that the Emperor’s favorite consort possessed an ethereal, matchless beauty still circulated widely. Yet, if a person were to encounter Sa Eun-hyeon without knowing his station, he looked far more like a noble, high-minded scholar who had spent a lifetime immersed in academia.

However, perhaps due to the advance of age, beneath the elegant curve of his eyes lay a piercing, rigidly brilliant pair of pupils that clearly betrayed his ruthless, uncompromising nature.

Likely due to his humble origins, Sa Eun-hyeon harbored an insatiable greed for power. In truth, for a man of low birth to rise to the rank of Noble Consort without even undergoing the formal imperial selection process was already an achievement that had provoked massive backlash from the court. Yet, his ambitions refused to stop there.

He was determined to transform his own son into the next Emperor. He refused to remain a mere concubine who would be stripped of her titles and quietly thrown out of the palace like a string-severed kite once the Emperor died. He intended to reign supreme as the Empress Dowager of the empire, holding absolute power over the throne.

If a person was going to survive the imperial palace—a place where one had to constantly slash and pierce through rivals with invisible blades and spears—harboring this level of ambition was the bare minimum required. For that reason, the chief eunuch didn’t entirely dislike his master’s greed.

Yet, this brand of motiveless, petty malice was incredibly difficult to comprehend. The chief eunuch suspected that Sa Eun-hyeon’s plot—sending Court Lady Cho to the Myeong estate to sabotage the bridal chamber—hadn’t been engineered solely to keep Yeo Jae-won in check.

At its core, it was likely driven by a low, wretched sense of inferiority. Sa Eun-hyeon had lived a life of supreme luxury as the master of his own palace hall for decades, yet he could never become the true, legitimate Empress. Coldly speaking, Sa Eun-hyeon was nothing more than a high-ranking concubine.

In stark contrast, the Grand Consort of Myeong was the legally recognized, rightful primary bride of the Prince, a fact known to every citizen in Great Jin. In the catastrophic event that Sa Eun-hyeon’s schemes failed and Yeo Jae-won—rather than his own son—secured the Eastern Palace, the Grand Consort would automatically become the Crown Princess. And when the Prince eventually ascended the throne, he would naturally be crowned Empress.

No matter how frantically Sa Eun-hyeon clawed and fought throughout his lifecycle, he would remain a concubine. Yet the Grand Consort had seized the primary, legitimate seat from the very beginning. And he was an Omega male, the exact same Sub-gender as Sa Eun-hyeon.

Unable to bear that stark contrast, the Noble Consort likely targeted him out of sheer, petty spite. Though he served him faithfully, the chief eunuch silently shook his head at his master’s actions and kept his lips sealed.

“You may dismiss yourself.”

At Sa Eun-hyeon’s low murmur, the young eunuch quickly stopped his massage, offering a deep bow before backing out of the hall.

Only then did Sa Eun-hyeon let out a long, heavy sigh and push himself up from his cushion. With his gaze lowered, he offered a slow nod, prompting the chief eunuch to personally step outside. It was time to bring in Court Lady Cho, who had been anchored to the stone tiles for a long time.

“Servant Cho offers her formal respects to Your Imperial Highness, the Noble Consort.”

“How did the matter unfold? The Prince transited to the palace to offer his morning greetings, and he claimed his bride succumbed to severe illness the moment the ceremony concluded because he was tormented by a brutal discipline dame before he could even recover from his journey.”

The brutal discipline dame he spoke of was the very woman standing before Sa Eun-hyeon. Court Lady Cho bowed her head even deeper, desperately sorting through her words.

Sa Eun-hyeon had already gathered a significant amount of news regarding the estate. The glaring issue was that none of the data managed to satisfy his original expectations.

The Yeo Jae-won he knew despised Omega males above all else. Knowing intimately that he was the root cause of that deep-seated hatred, Sa Eun-hyeon had specifically recommended the Prince to the Emperor when the monarch was aggressively pushing for a marriage alliance with the Baekya region. At the time, Jae-won had been confined to a mourning house due to a three-year funeral cycle.

He had also secured confirmation that the Prince paid zero attention to the wedding preparations. Since Sa Eun-hyeon’s biological son, Prince Hye, held sway over the Ministry of Rites, this data was entirely ironclad.

For a man who literally shuddered with disgust at the mention of an Omega, his reaction upon entering the bridal chamber to find his newly wedded bride actively locked in a volatile heat cycle should have been entirely predictable.

……Until the event actually materialized, Sa Eun-hyeon had been utterly convinced his calculations were flawless.

“The medicine functioned precisely as intended, and the Grand Consort was successfully consumed by his heat cycle.”

“And yet, the Prince caused a massive uproar, turning the capital upside down in the dead of night just to hunt down an imperial physician and bring him to the estate, did he not?”

To the public, it was widely believed that the newly crowned Grand Consort had simply suffered a sudden, dangerous fever late at night, prompting a panicked medical intervention. It made it appear as though Yeo Jae-won was deeply, fiercely devoted to his young bride’s well-being.

That was the absolute opposite of what Sa Eun-hyeon had engineered. He slowly rose to his feet. He hadn’t summoned Court Lady Cho to audit the details; he had brought her here to demand accountability, command her to erase the evidence, and then discard her completely.

“What did you do with the remaining medicine?”

“I have hidden it away in an absolute secret location, Your Highness.”

“Which means you have failed to dispose of it entirely.”

As his left brow furrowed, his right brow naturally arched upward in a cold glare. Sa Eun-hyeon slowly closed the distance, his vibrant red robes striking a stark, menacing contrast against Court Lady Cho’s dark navy uniform.

“Destroy it.”

Sa Eun-hyeon slammed his hand down onto Court Lady Cho’s shoulder, his grip tightening with terrifying force. The very fingers that had been softly massaged by the young servant just moments ago now bulged with thick, indigo veins.

The court lady suffered an immediate, instinctual realization. Though the Noble Consort hadn’t uttered the words explicitly, she knew with absolute certainty that this was the final directive she would ever receive from his lips.

She could not afford to be discarded like garbage. Though she had only served the Grand Consort for less than a month, she had found him to be a deeply unsettling, peculiar individual. To the common servants, he was remarkably gentle, generous, and overflowing with tolerance. Yet, when dealing with her, he drew an invisible, unyielding line—as if he looked right through her skin and knew exactly what secrets she was harboring.

Shaking her head in a panic, Court Lady Cho threw her frame flat against the floorboards. The Consort’s black leather boots sat mere inches from her face. Her desperation was so absolute that she would have gladly crawled forward to lick the leather if he commanded it.

“Your Highness, I swear I will handle this final task with absolute perfection. Please, I beg of you, grant your servant just one more opportunity……”

The red silk hem, which had been anchoring her gaze two inches above the leather boots, suddenly rustled as the Noble Consort bent down. Reaching forward, he caught Court Lady Cho’s chin, forcing her face up. He offered a flat, entirely empty smile.

“Why on earth should I continue to hold onto a pawn that has completely failed to prove its own intrinsic value?”

At those words, the last remnants of light shattered and died within Court Lady Cho’s eyes—the very eyes that had routinely looked down on Anok with such casual arrogance. Sa Eun-hyeon released his grip, tossing her face aside with utter indifference as he straightened his posture. Turning his back to return to his cushion, he casually waved his right hand toward the chief eunuch. It was a silent command to drag her out.

With a hollow, broken expression, Court Lady Cho was forcefully hauled across the threshold. The heavy wooden doors of Deoksang Palace snapped shut before her face with absolute finality.

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