Chapter 118

I returned with a sea sponge that had been thoroughly dried in the bathroom. When Princess Florin saw me carrying the soft sponge usually used for bathing, she gave me a strange look. But the moment I unhesitatingly dropped ink onto the sponge, she gasped and covered her mouth in shock.

“Vivi, what are you doing?!”

Apparently, the sight of ink being poured onto a bath sponge was deeply unsettling.

“Why are you suddenly—”

“It’s fine. Just watch.”

Unfazed, I began pressing the sponge over the stencil plate. As the sponge touched the holes in the stencil, the letters transferred onto the paper below.

Plop plop plop. The sound of the sponge tapping the stencil echoed rhythmically. After a while, I lifted the stencil, revealing a pristine letter below.

“How… how is this possible?”

Princess Florin’s eyes, which I thought couldn’t get any wider, now looked like they might actually pop out. She stared at me and the letter, as if I had just cast a spell.

“I think this’ll do.”

Aside from the one missing line and the unprinted seal, the forged letter was flawless—completely indistinguishable from the original.

But no matter how perfect a forgery it was, if we couldn’t resolve that one line that hadn’t been copied, it would all be useless.

I brought over a notebook and wrote down the problematic sentence.

 “His name is Armin Grey. Once the fiancé of Princess Florin’s dearest friend, Vivian Roha, he is to become Gellang’s Prince Consort.”

A total of 130 characters. To maintain the formatting of the letter, the revised line needed to be the exact same length.

I began testing variations, striking out “Armin” and “fiancé” with my pen.

“His name is Alessandro Roha.”

I muttered to myself. That had to be the start of the new sentence. While I pondered the rest, Princess Florin pulled up a chair beside me without a word.

“We have to fix the sentence after that one, right?”

“Yes.”

“And the number of characters has to match?”

Princess Florin was sharp. When I nodded, she gently took the pen from my hand.

She replaced the phrase ‘once the fiancé of’ with ‘the elder brother of’. It matched the original character count while shifting the meaning seamlessly.

“Alessandro has one more letter than Armin, so we need to lose one somewhere in the second sentence.”

We huddled together, scanning for another word to adjust. There weren’t many options. After a moment, the princess brought the pen back to the page.

With a confident hand, she crossed out the word ‘dearest’.

“How about using ‘close’ instead of ‘dearest’?”

It was perfect—we gained exactly the single letter we needed. I looked at her in admiration, and Princess Florin blushed, speaking quickly as if to defend herself.

“Calling you my ‘closest’ friend isn’t a lie, right? I mean, it’s true that you’re my closest friend.”

“It’s true for me, too, Your Highness.”

Michelle and I were close, but class differences still lingered. Andre was a friend, but he wasn’t a woman. So calling Princess Florin my closest friend wasn’t a stretch at all.

“Perfect. I think this is the right answer.”

“Then… what now?”

“What else?”

I looked at her and grinned inwardly.

You’re looking at someone from the land of the Tripitaka Koreana*, after all.

[*T/N: A Korean version of a collection of sacred Buddhist scriptures]

* * *

Princess Florin watched, without even blinking, as I carefully carved individual characters out of erasers to create stamps. She knew books were printed using movable type, but usually it was done by pressing an entire page at once in a rubbing format. The method I was using now—assembling each character one by one—must have seemed fascinating to her.

“Vivi, you’re honestly a genius.”

“I know.”

I arranged the carved letters in a neat line and did a few test prints. The spacing between the letters had to be perfect, too.

Princess Florin, muttering unconsciously in informal speech, made me nod with an unapologetically smug air.

“Really. Sasha and Armin would never guess. That we’re going through all this trouble because of them.”

Grumbling, I carefully lifted one of the finished stamps. It came out with exactly the level of quality I was hoping for.

“This should… do the trick, right?”

“Yes. Let’s test it.”

“Whew.”

Beads of sweat had formed on my forehead at some point.

While I stamped the forged letter, Princess Florin looked as though she’d forgotten how to breathe. I carefully pressed each character in place, completing the previously unfinished section of the letter with every print.

Finally, I added the period. When placed side by side with the original, it was impossible to tell which one was real. Using a large eraser, I even replicated the final temple seal. With that, it was finished.

Florin was meticulous to the end. Saying that only she and I had seen the original, she burned it over a candle. As the divine message vanished into ash, her expression looked almost relieved.

“Aren’t you worried?”

When I asked, she shook her head. When she first came to our house, she used to pray daily in the direction of Gellang, that’s how devout her faith was.

“If I hadn’t come here, I probably would’ve accepted the oracle without question.”

“You know it’s too late now, right?”

Worried she might regret it, I quickly added that. In response, Florin gave a small, soft laugh. Her expression seemed a strange mix of weariness and liberation.

“I don’t regret it. If I did, I wouldn’t have escaped the palace. It’s strange, isn’t it? I never imagined myself doing something like this.”

“Haha. You’re right.”

“Maybe I’ve been influenced by you, Vivi.”

Her tone was like someone talking about having fallen in with a bad crowd. The mischievous glint in her voice made me pout dramatically, but the moment our eyes met, we both burst out laughing.

After we’d laughed for a while, I spoke to her gently.

“What Sasha did just now, acting all timid…”

“I know. He did it because he didn’t want me to get in trouble.”

“You’re not… disappointed?”

“I might be. But it’s okay. I know that’s just the kind of person Alessandro is.”

Hearing Florin understand Sasha’s temperament—that he was someone led more by reason than emotion—made me let out something like a sigh of relief.

“Alessandro is popular. But that’s only because people see his appearance. The truth is, Sasha is pretty…”

“Insecure.”

It was a surprisingly blunt word. I turned to look at Princess Florin in surprise.

“I’ve seen it now and then—the way he compares his lower noble title to my status as a princess. I could feel it sometimes when we talked. That’s why he seems so thirsty—for acknowledgment based on his own merit, not his family’s.”

Princess Florin understood Sasha better than I had expected.

Even as his family, there were times when I couldn’t quite grasp my brother’s behavior.

He often seemed stubborn and rigid, but Princess Florin seemed to accept that side of him just as it was.

“Sasha… my brother is really lucky.”

Just like I had met Armin—someone who understood and loved me for who I was—I realized my brother had met someone like that too. The thought made my chest ache with a tight, unfamiliar feeling.

“From Alessandro’s perspective, marrying me might not be the best choice. If he becomes Gellang’s royal son-in-law, any accomplishments he makes in the future might be dismissed as something he gained through marriage rather than by his own merit.”

“It’s already too late.”

“You’re right. It is. If he didn’t want that, he should have pushed me away a long time ago.”

Princess Florin gently held the forged oracle to her chest.

When she burst into our house at dawn, she looked at the envelope with nothing but hatred. But now, her gaze was soft, almost affectionate.

“They say fortune favors the bold, don’t they? If I want to win the beauty, I have no choice but to be brave.”

I agreed with that sentiment, nodding thoughtfully.

Though, between the two, I still thought Armin was the real beauty.

And it felt like such a shame that only Princess Florin—my partner in crime—knew just how brave I had been to win that beauty today.

We leaned against the bed, whispering quietly about this and that.

Florin told me about her escape from the palace, about wandering the city streets before dawn, and how she eventually ran into André and ended up here.

It was hard to believe such reckless and daring acts had been carried out by someone normally so composed and well-mannered.

“The sun’s rising.”

“Oh, it is.”

The light was beginning to slip through the window, creeping in with a soft glow.

“There’s going to be quite an uproar in the palace soon. We’d better send the letter ahead of time.”

Together, Princess Florin and I wrote a letter to Prince Garbo.

She explained that she had left the palace in a moment of overwhelming emotion after reading the oracle.

After everything we’d gone through, the Princess had grown so bold that she wrote the entire fabricated story without even blinking.

“How should we deliver it?”

“Leave that to me. You’ve got other things to do, Your Highness.”

I grinned.

Then I crept quietly to the door and flung it open.

Right outside stood Sasha, pacing nervously in front of my room with a distressed look on his face.

Of course, after Princess Florin, the one who must’ve spent the most sleepless, miserable night was none other than Sasha.

Looking tense, Sasha brushed past me and approached Princess Florin.

His nervous steps were so stiff and awkward.

Princess Florin, too, looked visibly tense as she saw him appear so suddenly.

“Alessandro…?”

Sasha knelt on one knee before her. Then, speaking faster than usual, he began.

“I know this is not the right thing to do if I truly care for Your Highness. Please forgive my rudeness. But if I don’t say this now, I know I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”