The Eldest Daughter Walks Down The Flower Path - Chapter 277

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Chapter 277

Translator: Yonnee

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A soft rustling sound came from nearby. Yves Russel, waking from a sweet dream, groggily pulled off his sleep mask.

“…What?”

Radis was standing at the open window, one foot perched as if she was about to leap out.

Yves blinked.

“Radis?”

“You’re awake? Go back to sleep.”

“What’s going on…? Is it really you, Radis? When did you get here?”

“Of course, it’s really me. Is there a fake? I came back early yesterday morning.”

Without thinking, Yves glanced down and let out a startled yelp, pulling the sheet up to cover his bare chest.

“W-What? What’s going on?”

Radis gave him a meaningful smile as she spoke.

“Don’t you remember what happened last night?”

“W…What do you mean?”

“I thought so. If you don’t remember, that’s fine. Just go back to sleep.”

“I’m wide awake now…!”

Yves, still wrapped in the sheet, stood up from the bed.

He ran barefoot over to Radis as if worried she might jump out of the window at any moment and pulled her into a hug.

Feeling the warmth of the person he loves against his bare skin, he groaned softly and asked,

“Did I… do something? Or did I really not do anything?”

Radis gently stroked his cheek and said tenderly,

“Not doing anything? That’s not true.”

“What?”

“You did something important.”

“Huh…?”

Seeing Yves’ bewildered expression, Radis’s eyes curved into crescent moons. She then hopped up onto the windowsill, sitting on it.

From this different angle, Yves suddenly felt his heart drop.

She pulled him closer by the nape of his neck, gave him a light kiss, and said,

“Let’s have breakfast together, okay?”

“Um… okay.”

Releasing him, Radis jumped lightly from the windowsill. Yves quickly looked down and saw her slipping into the window of the floor below.

Yves cried out in desperation,

“Did I really do something? You’re not lying, are you? Where in the world is there a man as proper as me…!”

* * *

After a breakfast where Yves passionately defended his propriety and innocence, Radis returned to her room and found a letter that had arrived while she was away from the mansion.

Seeing the name ‘Armano’ on the envelope, Radis quickly checked the contents of the letter. It was brief.

[ My cutest and dearest student, I’ll be waiting at the place where we used to have our secret training sessions. ]

It was time to stand at a dead-end alley once again and face the shadow.

* * *

The Tilrod family estate, Willingham, greeted Radis in its usual, unchanged manner. The landscape of Willingham was the same as it had been ten years ago, and it would likely be the same ten years later.

The people here were so afraid of divine punishment that they trembled at the thought of leaving their village.

The children were born with the same unremarkable faces as their parents, and when they grew up, they worked the land they inherited to raise children who would resemble them.

What they passed down through the generations wasn’t just their livelihoods.

The mundane appearance, the unexceptional family customs, the trivial habits, and even the way they lived—all were passed down like bricks stamped from the same mold.

They found happiness in patching up crumbling houses to make them look just like they did before, resisting any kind of change.

They wouldn’t even consider widening the dirt road, which barely accommodated a single carriage, to preserve an old, lightning-struck tree.

They couldn’t bring themselves to cut down the branches that hung over the road, so they spent their entire lives avoiding them.

As Radis rode along the centuries-old dirt road, ducking under the overhanging branches, she thought that perhaps this landscape wasn’t much different from how it looked five hundred years ago.

‘Alexis, did you live here too?’

She knew very little about Alexis. All she knew was that Alexis was the ancestor of the Tilrod family and one of the king’s three knights during the founding of the kingdom, known as the ‘Sword of Fire’.

If it hadn’t been for Regia telling her a brief story about Alexis, Radis would have believed, as the fairy tale books depicted, that Alexis was a man.

‘Why is such a lie accepted as truth?’

The world remembered Alexis Tilrod as a hero, born with special talents who gave their life to save the world.

But when Radis encountered Alexis Tilrod’s apparition at the imperial city, she couldn’t find any trace of that heroism.

She just… looked exhausted.

“…….”

Radis gazed over Willingham with distant eyes.

She could feel the people by the roadside recognizing her as the eldest daughter of the family that managed this small land.

They watched her sitting on her horse, wearing pants and a sword at her waist, and took sharp, disapproving breaths.

Most of them turned their heads away as if they had seen something they shouldn’t have, and the cantankerous old folks muttered words that were undoubtedly curses with their pursed lips.

It wasn’t hard for Radis to predict that her name would be the subject of their scorn over their meager dinners tonight, along with their black bread.

They would spend a long time cursing the ‘eldest daughter of the Tilrod family, who broke away from the family, refused to fulfill her duties as a daughter, didn’t marry, and dared to act like a man’.

She asked herself inwardly,

‘Alexis, did you live here too? What kind of person were you? What made you decide to save the world? You saved the world, so why have you been in pain for so long?’

As she led her horse through the muddy path, past the familiar faces of the people she grew up around, Radis suddenly spotted someone familiar.

‘Father…?’