Chapter 75
Side Story Arc 2 – Can the tragic novel’s male lead be saved by the female lead?
Bleon looked at Astell as she was lying on the bed, her eyes full of helplessness and sorrow. Astell was on the verge of death, and she was barely holding onto her life, breathing heavily just to be with him for even a minute longer.
“Gasp, gasp, Bleon…”
Astell called him in a very low voice that would not be audible unless he paid attention. Instead of answering, he brushed her hair over and over as he looked into her eyes. And he pressed the sight of her to his heart.
“Listen. Haa, just in case, even if I can’t wake up, huuhk, promise me. You will live your life properly…”
Her request to him was something he would never grant her.
How…
How could he continue living in a world she was no longer in?
It was enough once. No, he couldn’t live a day in a world without her.
“I don’t want to… I’ll wait for you, Wife. You’ll be back. You’ll come back to me soon. So don’t say that.”
So he refused the request full of earnestness at once.
“I’ll come, haa, but you never know. Huff, so promise me.”
“…….”
Bleon did not answer her any more. Of course, if he could reassure her as she was at the threshold of death, he could have told her a hundred lies. But he was a terribly selfish man when it came to Astell. He could do anything to have her, to keep her by his side.
So, if he can give her a reason to come back to him, if he can add to it her anxiety that he wouldn’t be able to live properly, so she could come back to him, he would close his eyes tightly and turn a blind eye to her earnest wish.
However, she took his silence as affirmation, and so Astell’s expression grew to be more comfortable. Seeing this, Bleon bit his lip to hold back the tears that were about to burst out.
‘Don’t go. Don’t go.’
He wanted to hold her and beg her.
‘You’re leaving me alone, don’t do this again… Please…’
There were so many things he wanted to say to her, but he swallowed them all inside him. He will trust her. She will be different this time. This time Astell will never leave him alone… He just had to believe it.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Astell’s complexion grew pale as she said he loved him. It was hard to keep her eyes open, her eyelids drooped helplessly.
“Wife…?”
Even as he called her, Astell did not move.
And the strength in the hand holding his hand completely disappeared. So Astell met her second death right before his eyes.
“…Wife? Astell? Hicc…!”
Bleon’s tears-stricken scream echoed throughout the entire room.
He knows that this is by no means the end this time, and he knew it in his mind, but he had a hard time accepting it in his heart. Thoughts of every kind kept running through his mind and he felt like he was going crazy.
‘No.’
She will come back. She will surely come back to him and she will show him his favorite bright smile again.
So he trusted her, and Bleon did not leave Astell’s side even for a moment. Despite the dissuasion of the servants and the butler of the mansion, he did not eat or sleep. No one was allowed to enter her room, He waited by Astell’s side the whole time for her to come back. All of it would have been meaningless if she didn’t wake up anyway, so his time stopped too and he would never move again until she returned.
But even after a day passed, two days passed, and a week passed, Astell showed no sign of waking up.
“Astell…”
Bleon sat next to Astell who was lying on the bed and held her in his arms. Her body was strangely still warm, not like a dead person. This was the only hope he had left.
It’s not over yet, perhaps she’s been in a long sleep and threading a long way to get back to him. He tried so hard to persuade himself.
“I can’t live without you, Wife… I…”
I don’t want to spend that lonely and dark time again. I don’t want to live a lonesome life without you.
I have nothing more to offer so that I can bring you back…
Oh, then, this time, I’ll have to follow you right away.
There was a glimmer of hope in his last life, so he held on to that tough life, but now there was no need for that. Dying would take but a moment. He no longer had to spend horrible time struggling to get Astell back.
He did not have to.
After Astell died in Bleon’s arms in their previous life, he could not live sanely. It was a given. The person he loved, who was his everything, who he would give everything he had, died horribly in his arms. After that, only Astell’s last moments were replayed in his head.
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He couldn’t even remember how he got back to the mansion. However, the moment he cried to not separate from Astell, who had become a cold corpse, and the moment he tried to point a sword straight to his chest so he could follow Astell, he only regained consciousness briefly.
By the time he came back to his senses, it had already been a long time since Astell had been buried in the cold ground. Unable to let him die of seizures whenever he opened his eyes, Philia continued to force Bleon to take sedatives, and after months of terrible and difficult days, Bleon’s seizures stopped. He was alive, but Bleon did not react to anything, and he spent the day in a lethargic state with only his eyes open by the energy of medicine.
He had been abandoned by his wife. He was thrown away because he was useless and dirty. So she left him alone.
If I had been nicer to her, or if I had listened to her, if I had not coveted her, or if we hadn’t met in the first place…
Astell wouldn’t have died. Maybe it was because he was so greedy that things turned out like this.
No. That’s not allowed. Either way, they should be connected. They had to be. So, he erased the brief thought of living without having known Astell.
Bleon spent all day in bed thinking about it.
Thoughts of regret create despair, and slowly start consuming him, but he has neither the will nor the will to shake it off.
‘I must die…’
He wanted to die, but he couldn’t. He had neither the strength nor the will to lift a single finger. The only thought that passed through his mind was that he should follow Astell, but he did not do anything at all.
But it was a letter that came to him one day that lifted him up.
“Duke. I have something for you…….”
Philia said as she approached Bleon, who was lying on the bed. Despite the fact that a letter had arrived, Bleon didn’t respond at all and just stared blankly.
“It’s a letter. I’ll leave it here.”
There was nothing else but the name ‘Bleon Einer’ written on the envelope. But Philia knew who the letter was from. Holding back the tears, she carefully placed the letter on the bedside table.
“And… My teacher passed away not long ago.”
At the mention of her teacher, Bleon’s eyes became cold for an instant. It was almost the first reaction from him who had seemed insensitive to anything since that day. But it was only for a short time, and the focus of his eyes was again blurred and the color was lost.
“The reason I am telling you this is because this letter is from my teacher to Your Grace. So please read it.”
There was the sound of footsteps getting farther away from him, and the sound of a ‘thump’ as the door closed. Again, he was the only one left in the room.
Bleon did not budge for hours, even though he was told it was a letter for him. He doesn’t know what the doctor Logan had to say to him, but he wasn’t interested. Philia’s request to read it was of no interest to him as well.
Towards dinner time, when Philia returned to the room to give Bleon a meal replacement for his unwillingness to eat, she found the letter still there.
As soon as she saw it, a strong emotion rushed into Philia for an instant. It was the words left by her teacher, Logan, in his will, and she was obliged to keep it. So she even begged him to read it, but Bleon ignored her words.
“I beg of you…!”
Unlike her, who expressed her raw emotions, Bleon was staring at the ceiling with still indifferent eyes.
“Haa, I see. If Your Grace does not want to read it yourself, I will read it to you.”
So Philia decided to read the letter directly to Bleon. That man, who was lying in bed waiting to die, probably would never read this letter himself. But her teacher said to her earnestly until he ran out of breath. He asked her to deliver her letter. Therefore, this was the only way to keep her teacher’s will.
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