Chapter 694 --694
Heena bowed her head, the icy, imperial verdict hanging over the throne room like a guillotine.
"This subject obeys," she said, her voice completely smooth.
She turned on her heel and began the slow, agonizing walk back down the long imperial carpet. Every step took monumental effort. The heavy thud of her own heartbeat violently resonated in her skull, the blood clot throbbing with fresh, hot agony. But she forced herself to keep an even, measured pace, her chin lifted high, projecting the chilling, untouchable aura of a warlord walking away from an imperial execution block she had just successfully dismantled.
The moment the heavy palace doors closed behind her, cutting off the Emperor’s hollow, devastated gaze, Heena nearly buckled.
Kyle was waiting by the courtyard carriage, his sharp eyes instantly catching the subtle shudder running through her frame. Without a single word of hesitation, he stepped forward, subtly positioning his broad shoulder under her elbow, disguising the heavy support as a respectful escort.
"My Lady," Kyle murmured under his breath, his voice barely carrying past the wind. "The carriage is ready."
Heena didn’t speak. She couldn’t. Her jaw was clamped shut against the bitter, metallic taste of blood rising in the back of her throat. She stepped inside the cushioned interior, the heavy velvet curtains falling shut, cutting off the suffocating gaze of the palace guards.
The moment she was hidden from the world, the facade shattered completely.
Heena collapsed into the silk cushions, curling into a tight ball as a strangled, ragged gasp tore from her chest. Sweat soaked her collar. Her vision fractured into sharp, violent static.
"Host!" the System’s voice echoed, materializing on the bench opposite her in a flurry of gold light. "Host, your vitals are crashing! The intracranial pressure just spiked by forty percent! You pushed the neural threshold too far!"
Heena weakly lifted a trembling hand, pressing her fingers against her left temple. The pain was so sharp, so utterly blinding, that she felt like someone was driving a rusted iron spike directly through her skull.
"Shut up," she whispered, her voice a cracked, pathetic rasp. "Did... did the main mission log update?"
The System paused, rapidly scanning its interface. "No! Because you didn’t touch the transmitter! But the imperial plot divergence just jumped to ninety-four percent! You just handed the Emperor the execution order for his own Empress! Host, ten days? Can this physical body even last ten days?!"
"It has to," Heena muttered through gritted teeth, her dark eyes flashing with a stubborn, terrifying madness. "Ten days... to gather every single corrupt parasite in one room. To purge the board completely. And then..."
She closed her eyes, the darkness immediately rushing up to swallow her whole. The terrifying, unnatural drowsiness was dragging her under again, faster and heavier than ever before.
Before her consciousness slipped away entirely, a strange, disjointed thought drifted through her melting mind.
Samuel, she thought, her fingers weakly clutching the fabric over her chest. Where did Samuel go?
And then, with a sickening jolt of sheer terror that made her dying heart stutter, a horrifying realization hit her:
What does Samuel’s face look like again?
The carriage rattled over the stone streets of the capital, carrying a warlord who had just sealed the fate of an empire, slipping into the dark while the memory of the only man who loved her began to quietly, terrifyingly erase.
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10 hours later in Henna chamber.....
The pain did not announce itself. It simply detonated.
Heena woke up not with a gasp, but with a violently arched spine, her fingers instantly digging into the heavy silk sheets as she clamped her hands over her skull. It felt as though a heavy, rusted iron rod was being swung, with methodical, brutal rhythm, directly against the inside of her brain. Clang. Clang. Clang.
Usually, the spikes of intracranial pressure came in waves—cresting into blinding agony and then receding into that heavy, suffocating, narcotic drowsiness. But not today. Today, the tide of pain did not pull back. It compounded. It grew, layer upon layer of hot, white static blooming behind her eyes.
She dragged herself over the edge of the mattress, her limbs trembling so violently she had to grip the heavy mahogany bedpost just to remain upright. A wave of intense, dizzying nausea hit her, forcing her to swallow down the bitter bile rising in her throat. She tried to call out for the servants to fetch a glass of water, but as her pale lips parted, the word simply wasn’t there. Her mind desperately grasped at the concept of the liquid, the shape of the porcelain pitcher on the table, but the syllables were wiped flawlessly clean from her vocabulary.
A cold, absolute terror crystallized in her chest. The timeline was accelerating. Her physical hardware was failing exponentially faster than the System had predicted.
She needed to clear the board. Not the political board—that was already set for the Empress’s birthday banquet in ten days. She needed to clear her own house.
Heena forced her trembling hands to dress herself in a thick, imposing Vanguard robe, burying her physical decay under heavy layers of dark silk and military authority. She walked to the eastern courtyard, each step meticulously calculated to hide the violent vertigo spinning the world around her.
The Old Master and her grandmother were enjoying their morning tea in the sunlit pavilion. When Heena stepped into the light, she poured every last ounce of her remaining willpower into projecting a flawless, unbothered, tyrannical smile.
She did not tell them she was dying faster than expected. She simply announced that she needed absolute, unbroken silence for the next few days to prepare for the final political maneuver against the throne. More importantly, she handed the Old Master a sealed military writ, officially assigning him a "crucial Vanguard inspection mission" to the far southern borders.
She wasn’t sending them to the freezing, desolate north, like the standard exiles written in the cheap novels she used to read. She was sending them to the absolute jewel of the empire—a lush, temperate coastal territory where emerald mountains cascaded directly into a sapphire ocean, where several rivers met the sea in a breathtaking display of natural beauty.
"The coastal garrisons need your presence, Grandfather," Heena lied smoothly, her voice not wavering even as a fresh spike of pain blinded her right eye. "Take Grandmother. The weather there is warm. The scenery is unmatched. Treat it as an extended vacation, but do not return to the capital until I send for you."
The Old Master, a seasoned general who had survived decades of brutal warfare, looked deeply into his granddaughter’s eyes. He saw the lie. He saw the undeniable shadow of death clinging to her pale skin, the faint tremor in her hands. But he also saw the unbreakable, tyrannical resolve of his own bloodline. He didn’t argue. He didn’t press her for the truth. He gently took his wife’s hand, gave Heena a single, heavy nod, and agreed to leave by noon. Sometimes, a silent departure was the greatest, most profound act of mercy a family could offer one another.
The moment their carriage disappeared past the outer gates, Heena initiated the absolute lockdown of the Marquisate estate.