As it turned out, the third prince didn’t have to take a tour through hell after all. Pearl seemed somewhat disappointed, but the less said about that, the better. Orio was apprehended, but he went peacefully, and he honestly answered questions during his interrogation, stating that he’d always been dissatisfied with his older brothers.
Orio had been raised relatively free because he had three prodigy brothers ahead of him. He hadn’t received a strict education like they had. According to Orio, he was worried that their educational plan for him was training him to one day lower himself to the likes of a vassal.
Orio was qualified to be emperor himself, but his eldest brother, Roy, was the closest to gaining the throne, with the third eldest, Samadan, behind him. The second eldest would be a ruler elsewhere even if he didn’t become emperor. Everyone had high hopes for the three brothers.
But where did that leave Orio? No one paid attention to him or had hopes for him, so his title of imperial prince was the only thing he had. The nobles were only interested in Roy and Samadan, although Orio himself was an imperial prince as well. He’d felt as though he was being ignored in the grand scheme of things, and he’d started to wish that his older brothers would just go away. That said, they weren’t going to just conveniently vanish.
That was when Orio met with a former palace doctor who treated the sick for cheap in a small clinic. More importantly, this doctor also researched cures for diseases deemed incurable. Possibly because of his time serving in the palace, he had a vast knowledge of poisons—all sorts, from all sorts of areas. Thinking he could use this to his advantage, Orio had enticed the doctor with his support and asked for his tutelage.
Orio had been looking for a poison known by few and immune to antidotes. That was around the time he’d come across the blood of a man who’d died from the venom of a tachyotoxian insect.
The insect’s venom contained a terrifying toxin that could kill a person with a single drop and that was immune to all antidotes, medicines, and treatments. Orio himself didn’t know anything about the tachyotoxians, but he also didn’t care either. The venom was tasteless and odorless, so he could easily slip the infected blood into tea. It would take a little time for the symptoms to show too, thus making it harder to identify the perpetrator.
All in all, it was the best solution that Orio could find, so he’d stolen a small amount of the blood from the storage cabinet it was kept in. The doctor couldn’t utilize a pocket pace because he didn’t have any mana, so the blood was there for the taking and ripe for Orio to pilfer.
The rest was easy. Orio had put a drop in Adularia’s tea for a few days and made her drink it. From there, it had taken several days before the symptoms started to appear. No one had known that the tea Orio was serving his mother had been poisoned. All that was left was to wait for Adularia to die, and so she did, just as Orio had hoped.
Orio’s next targets were his two elder brothers. He didn’t care which one he took care of first, but since Roy had visited him to check on him after the death of their mother, Orio had used that as his chance to poison him. That was the only reason he’d gone after his eldest brother first—no more, no less. His brothers had assumed that Orio was shocked by his mother’s death and was holing himself up, which was the exact impression that Orio had wanted to give them. He couldn’t be in shock; he was the one who’d done it.
Orio had left clues hinting at the Reapers near his mother’s bedside and in Samadan’s room to confuse people. This had brought suspicion on Samadan, but Orio didn’t think it would keep Samadan from the throne. While Orio intended on ultimately killing both, when he heard of the eldest falling ill, he’d figured that his time was near, so he’d simply set his sights on his next target.
Fortunately, Orio’s perfectly orchestrated crimes all came quickly crumbling down just before the finish line. If it hadn’t been for the combined efforts of Ruri, Quartz, and Pearl, Orio would have likely become emperor, and the truth would have been buried in darkness forever.
Once Corundum told Ruri the details, she shuddered at Orio’s ruthless and callous nature. He held no reservations about murder. Who ever said that he was timid and gentle? He was the total opposite of that.
“Anyway, what is going to happen to Orio?” Ruri asked, curious.
“We cannot let the scandal of his killing the emperor go public,” Corundum replied. “We will give him poison and officially say that he died of an illness.”
“I see...” Orio had assassinated the emperor, so it was only natural that he would be given a punishment deserving of his crime.
“However, that will wait until the second prince arrives back home. We are arranging to bring him back from the neighboring nation as soon as possible,” Corundum explained. He thought it possible that the second prince would want to see his younger brother one last time.
Corundum bowed deeply to Ruri and the others, but he especially praised Pearl, the savior of Roy’s life. “I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. Thank you very much for your cooperation.”
Pearl grinned with satisfaction. “It’s fine. This was the first time I used the antidote on a human subject. Served as good research material. I actually wanted at least one more subject, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose.”
Corundum grimaced. For her first time curing a live human, she sure hadn’t hesitated to make Roy guzzle down her concoction. What would have happened if she had failed? You could say, in a certain sense, that Pearl was just as ruthless as Orio.
Corundum reproachfully glared at Quartz, the man responsible for bringing Pearl in the first place.
“Well, she healed him, and that’s all that matters, right?” Quartz quickly commented before fleeing the room.
“This has been quite the ordeal, but now that matters are settled, we should get back to the Nation of the Dragon King,” Jade stated, patting Ruri’s head with a relieved look in his eyes.
“Yes, I agree. I have a feeling that Euclase-san will give us grief if we don’t get back home soon,” Ruri added. The chancellor, interim ruler of the nation, was most likely impatiently awaiting Jade’s return.
The party from the Nation of the Dragon King readied their things and left the Imperial Nation not long after. Once they drew near the nation, Quartz headed toward Yadacain in order to drop off Pearl and her ladies-in-waiting. While everyone assumed that he would come right back, Quartz said that he was going to learn how to make the tachyotoxian antidote in case an incident like Seraphie’s ever happened again. His plan was to bring the knowledge back home and pass it on to the doctors in the Nation of the Dragon King. From there, he wanted to share it with the other allied nations and have them proliferate it to other nations as well.
Ruri debated whether it was safe to spread a medicine with such a hellish taste across the world, but considering that was the only way to cure the poisoning, it had to be done. She just hoped that someone, anyone, would come along and improve the recipe.