The Eldest Daughter Walks Down The Flower Path - Chapter 199 - Olivier

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Chapter 199

Translator: Yonnee

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His lips trembled gently.

Through such tremor, his voice uttered those words.

This is what love is like.

It’s tender and exhilarating, like opening your heart and handing your beating heart to the other person.

In the face of Olivier’s passionate confession, Radis froze in place.

She couldn’t figure out how to respond.

She just felt so utterly lost.

‘Why… do I feel like this? But I like Olivier… don’t I?’

She was aware that she had feelings for Olivier.

Seeing him in pain made her heart ache.

Seeing him smile made her happy too.

When she said she wanted to dedicate her sword to him, it wasn’t a mere jest—it was sincere.

To make him happy, she felt like she could do anything.

But in the face of his confession of love, she had no idea how to respond.

As though she had hit a solid wall, Radis had to squeeze her eyes shut.

‘What exactly does it mean to say… “I love you”?’

Despite having lived two lives, love was still an unknown territory for her.

She had never experienced the feeling of being loved.

She had never loved anyone passionately.

‘Am I that clueless?’

As Radis was lost in confusion, Olivier slowly parted his lips from her forehead.

His irises sparkled like amethyst with various emotions.

“Did I surprise you?”

Olivier murmured as he gently kissed Radis’s forehead, making contact with the red hair strands shaking on her forehead.

“You don’t have to give me your answer today.”

He raised an eyebrow playfully and used his finger to gently caress around Radis’s lips.

“But you’ll have to tell me next time.”

With these lips,

That you love me.

With his eyes closed, he looked down at her, who was trembling slightly, and he wore a thoroughly rapturous smile.

24. Olivier

Sometimes, the misery in the lives of certain individuals is solely because of the circumstances of their birth.

Olivier Arpend was the third prince of the empire.

It’s a title that was often accompanied by the label ‘nobody wants it’.

His mother, Ziartine Pelletier, had become the princess through a passionate relationship with the empire’s then crown prince, Claude Arpand.

In the lengthy history of the empire, there could have been no other princess loved by everyone as she was.

She was not only bright and intelligent, but any jewel would lose its luster in her presence due to her dazzling beauty.

Ziartine Pelletier ascended to the throne as the empress, loved fervently by the emperor and adored tremendously by the citizens of the empire.

The youthful and valiant emperor, coupled with the intelligent and beautiful empress, was a source of great pride for the empire.

There was no doubt about the deep love they had for each other.

The issue lay in their titles of emperor and empress. Their relationship gradually, but definitively, fell apart.

The cause was Ziartine’s infertility.

After her ascent to empress for over a decade, Ziartine had been unable to conceive.

The honor of the empress, once referred to as the empire’s jewel, gradually began to tarnish in the mud.

The emperor’s loyal subject, Duke Lebeloia, offered his daughter, Adrianne, as an imperial consort to secure the imperial family’s lineage.

As soon as Adrienne ascended as the imperial consort, she became pregnant, offering hope to the empire.

And when she gave birth to a son, Ziartine could not avoid her dethronement.

However, something peculiar occurred.

Shortly after her dethronement, Ziartine became pregnant.

Pregnancy was a perilous endeavor for Ziartine, who was already weakened. Though she was still holding the position of the emperor’s wife, the emperor himself, as he still deeply loved her, instructed her to give up the child.

But Ziartine already knew that her time in this world was coming to an end. She wished to leave proof of her existence as a person, as evidence of their deep love.

With a pale face and added rouge to her dry lips.

Though she had lost her clear expression due to the piercing pain she could not escape, Ziartine forced a distorted smile upon her lips.

In such agony, she managed to endure those painful times.

One winter, the emperor received the tragic news that the woman he loved the most had met her end after a difficult pregnancy.

The soul of the man who once loved a woman was buried in the ground along with her lifeless body. What remained was a cruel and cold shell.

As he was faced with the child who had devoured his own mother, resembling the very winter during which he was born, the emperor could think of nothing else but one thing: this child should have never been born.

Death was the only way for it to repay the life it had taken.

Thus, the emperor abandoned the child in the palace where its mother had died and never looked back.

However, against all odds, the child survived.

And much to one’s horror, the child bore a striking resemblance to Ziartine.

The child’s beauty was a testament to the fact that he had been born by taking Ziartine’s life.

The emperor despised the child.

Every year on his birthday, the child had to receive a custom-sewn black suit as a gift—clothes for mourning.

Long before learning to speak, the child had to learn how to hide his emotions. Long before understanding love, the child had to be taught how to manipulate the whims and desires of those in power.

There was no warmth in the child’s world.

Only the chilling coldness of gold and jewels surrounded him.

The child had never smiled, and to him, every season was like winter.

The child had never seen spring.