F-Rank Puppeteer!! But I'll be Queen, and I'm not a narcissist!!!!!-Chapter 181: A Cruel Familial Destiny

I quickly rise from the chair, grabbing the letter and running to my room with it. I squeeze it tightly against my chest, protecting it.

"Eve and Lyn, take care of my paperwork!! I have to handle something..." I say urgently, speeding to my room as fast as I can. I don’t want anyone near me yet.

As soon as I reach my room, I lock the door. I look around, noticing the three mirrors I placed in here. Seems I’ve started accumulating mirrors like the original Evelyn did—which is bad—but I don’t even care about that right now.

"Horns... I have horns..." I stare intently at my horns in the mirror. They’re somehow majestic, and beautiful—they even suit my appearance—but it’s a bad sign of maturation.

"..." I touch the horns, but they’re sensitive. I can easily feel my fingers running over them, the touch giving me a strange sensation. After observing my horns for a while, I stop and go to the bed, lying down on it and looking at the letter.

"...Love... she loves me..." I stare at the little poem she wrote for me. I understand the metaphors in it, and having seen her love favorability rise back to 20 makes me blush.

"..." I’m not quite sure what I’m feeling. I only know I like this sensation—it makes me forget all the pain momentarily. I smell the paper; it carries Esther’s scent, that slight metallic smell she always has.

Soon, I stare at the kiss mark on her signature. She sent me a kiss. Did she ever do that in the game? No, never. She never wrote a poem or sent a kiss in a letter to Grace. It was always Grace doing things for her, never the other way around.

I hug the paper tightly, as if it might fly away if I don’t hold it. I like this—the letter, what’s in it, and the physical proof of love I’ve just received.

...

...

...

I throw thousands of punches in a single second. Massive electrical discharges spread out, bending and melting one of the world’s most resistant minerals. The electric discharges are so powerful the very air in the environment is affected, ionizing while a faint smell spreads through the place.

"Tch, tch, destroyed the training room again. Need to have it fixed." I walk to the training room door and step out, seeing a servant holding a towel. I take it and start wiping the sweat from my forehead.

"Lady Vivienne, your bath is completely ready," the servant says, bowing to me as I look at my simple, tight training clothes. Small parts have melted because of my electric discharges.

"Hmmm, I’ll take a bath in half an hour." My body is too energized. If I try to enter the water now, it’ll explode into a steam blast that’ll destroy the room. I need to release the electricity I’ve built up.

"Understood, Lady Vivienne." He rises and leaves my side as I walk through the empty corridors of my mansion. Almost no servant stays near me after I train, since I release so much electricity that some suffer cardiac arrest, heat damage, or even shocks that fry their brains.

So it’s kind of lonely after training, where I have to wait for the electricity to "calm down" before they can come near again.

"I wonder what that bitch Ecatherine is doing now." I push my hair back, adjusting my hairstyle while thinking about that damn woman. I bet she’s making the most of the Demon King’s offer to gain an advantage.

Several dragons ended up accepting the Demon King’s offer, so the agreement happened to help him. But unfortunately, since we took some time to accept, we lost the initial advantage that Ecatherine gained by accepting immediately.

"Forget it!! I should stop thinking about that cold bitch, corpse-like and all!! I wonder now what my little gold pot is doing." I activate the spy magic—a spell I stuck on Evelyn when we hugged at the castle.

Normally, I wouldn’t spy on Evelyn. It’s not in my nature to do this kind of thing. But something about Evelyn bothered me—the fact that she hadn’t awakened anything from her dragon form. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Why? That means she hadn’t matured at all. So the magic I stuck on Evelyn is meant to observe for now, or record if the magic detects any sign of dragon power released by her.

’Let’s see if it recorded anything good...’ I try to retrieve everything the magic recorded, but there’s only "one" recording, and it’s from today. I find it strange until I inject it into my head and watch what happened.

"Horns? She awakened horns?... And she has horns similar to my mother’s..." It seems Evelyn inherited my mother’s horns—meaning her grandmother’s horns. But the situation the magic recorded makes me uncomfortable.

"Haa... you stupid little girl... I told you not to make Esther your safe cave..." The complete recording makes it clear. Evelyn received a letter from Esther and liked the "reward" so much it triggered her mental maturation.

"..." I sit on the floor. The magic only allows one viewing of what was recorded, so now I’m "rewatching" it through what I remember seeing. Since it only activates if she showed some draconic sign, it only has this single recording.

But it shows me something that makes me sad. I didn’t want my daughter to start loving that girl. I made the risks clear to her, but it seems she ignored my warning.

"Congratulations, Evelyn... you now look more like a real dragon..." I murmur, not at all happy about it. It’s obvious she inherited the worst trait of a dragon. The genuine happiness she felt from the letter’s content makes her obsession with accumulation clear.

"Gold and love... you chose to accumulate those two... why does my daughter have to be so rebellious?" It’s already too late for Evelyn. She felt the pleasure of accumulating someone’s love. She’ll become more and more trapped in the sensation that she needs more.

But since love is unstable, invisible, and very volatile, she’ll become increasingly lost in the feeling that she needs more of it—more proofs of affection, more demonstrations that she still has the love.

"..." I notice the tears in my eyes. I notice I’m crying, and when I realize it, I remember the past—the reason why I didn’t want Evelyn to accumulate love.

My mother... my mother died. She died because she couldn’t stop wanting one person’s love. She was the one who ignored this unwritten rule of dragons—she fell in love with someone.

And made that person her "safe cave" while seeking to accumulate love. But of course, the demand for proofs of love increased, and increased, until it practically made her a slave to that desire.

She did everything that man ordered. She obeyed everything like an obedient little dog, even when he mistreated her. She even ripped off one of my arms when I tried to kill that damn man who was destroying her.

She hurt me—me, her daughter—became less important than her desire to accumulate that damn man’s love. He didn’t love her; he just wanted her resources.

He tore off my mother’s scales to sell, constantly cut off her tail to sell too, and ripped off her wings to exchange for potions. He used her body like a renewable resource.

And she accepted, because she let love dominate her. She was incapable of hurting him. I saw her cry in sadness whenever she was hurt, but right afterward, she’d be ecstatic with joy from a mere compliment.

"..." I cry, thinking my daughter is following this same cursed path. Isn’t it a wretched irony of fate that my daughter, who looks so much like my mother, is walking the same damned road?

"I wish so much I could stop this..." There’s no way. Nothing anyone says or does can stop it. It’s something pathological in every dragon—a mistake a dragon can never make, or they won’t be able to escape it.

"Haa..." I wipe my tears on my sleeve. I never thought I’d cry for someone again after my mother’s death. But I’m also a mother. Evelyn is my daughter, even if we’ve barely met. It still hurts to see her following this path.

’I just hope... Esther doesn’t mistreat her like that man mistreated my mother...’ I truly wish Evelyn at least chose someone who won’t hurt her too much in the future.

"I don’t want to see this anymore..." I deactivate the spy magic. I placed it on Evelyn to keep track of her dragon body’s evolution, but now that I’ve seen this, I’d rather not see any more. What mother would want to watch her child destroying themselves without being able to stop it?

I’ve already seen my mother destroy herself over this feeling. I don’t want to see my daughter doing the same thing. Once was enough for me; I’d rather ignore it now that it’s happening again.

"H-Hahaha... our race is so miserable... Evelyn didn’t get trapped in this feeling because of sex, an eternal promise, or something special... a letter... a simple letter, with a poem and a kiss, was enough to trap Evelyn in this..." I laugh with an empty laugh.

A mere letter was enough. A letter activated this bad feeling. They were literally crumbs of affection—just like I told Evelyn in the past, mere crumbs of affection are enough, and exactly what I said happened.

"I hope... at least you can be truly happy..." Though I doubt it very much. Esther doesn’t seem like a good person for my daughter, and when Esther realizes Evelyn does everything for mere crumbs of affection, she’ll start using that as a weapon.

Just like that man, who when he realized my mother would do anything for just a little affection, started using her. I wonder if Evelyn has already realized what’s happening to her, or if she’ll only realize it when the problem is terribly elevated.

"..." I start walking again. I remembered things I didn’t want to remember. It makes my arm hurt—the sensation is still so vivid. My arm being torn off, the moment I attacked that man because he ripped off one of my mother’s horns in front of me.

The numb sensation of a lightning bolt slicing off my arm faster than I could react. Me crying in pain, and my mother growling at me savagely, as if I no longer had any value compared to that man.