Poisoned Soup

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Rather than whiting out, it felt like the inside of my head was being filled with darkness.


Without hesitation, I sunk the hemlock into the pot of soup. I didn't know what kind of face I was making, nor where I was looking at. With leather gloves too large for me on my hands, I felt like laughing at how silly it looked.

Although I cried when I first decided to poison my family, I no longer had any tears left to cry.

As I looked at the finely ground poison, while being extremely careful not to touch it, my head had been completely filled with blankness, leaving no space whatsoever for emotions to seep in.

Luckily, on the dinner table was a large quantity of seafood and other delicacies that my vile mother had probably obtained from unscrupulous merchants. The irony was, this was all supposed to be in celebration of my birthday today. I just happened to recognize a poisonous plant from my previous world. Perhaps the merchants that had sold this food had tried to assassinate us, is what I thought people would think. No matter what, I probably wouldn't be suspected due to my age.

Viscount Kaldia and his family that were infamous for being villainous, all died, leaving their daughter Eliza who had just turned two as the only survivor. For the crime of poisoning the viscount's entire family, a merchant who was once again infamous for being villainous was executed.

...And that is the story of how I, Eliza Kaldia, succeeded the position of a Junior Viscount.

Since hemlock is a poisonous plant that doesn't take effect immediately, I thought that perhaps someone would survive, but it seemed my fears were unfounded. They either died due to lack of oxygen caused by paralysis, or choked to death on vomit caught in their throats, or hit their heads and died as they lost consciousness. My family members died in a rich variety of ways, but the scene caused by my crime wasn't even able to traumatize me.

In my previous life, hemlock had caused my younger sister to become hospitalized, causing quite a commotion. Because it almost killed her, it had remained as a frightening memory up until now, so it was ironic that I had now used that memory to poison and kill others.

It would be no lie to say that my vile, base mother was interested in nothing but money, and my father's favorite interest was to see blood and pain along with contorted facial expressions, so this was their punishment. And since all of my relatives were wiped out, as the only survivor of the Kaldia family, I've inherited everything.

Of course, taking my age into consideration, it was impossible for me to actually run the Kaldia family, so this seemed to have sown the seeds of a pointless power struggle among the conservative nobles in this country. Well, if they all crushed each other, it might even turn out to be a good thing for me.

Obviously, as I was only a two year old infant, I wasn't even considered a suspect in my family's assassination, even though I was the one who benefitted the most by inheriting everything. But of course, I wouldn't be able to immediately take up the duties that came with being a Viscount. For the time being, the royal capital sent someone to become my guardian. All I wished was for the person who came to be more humane than my father. After all, if he were just like my father, then I wouldn't know what I even killed my family for. It wasn't even funny to think about how rotten this country must be if that were to be the case.

Although I didn't know if the heavens responded to my dearest wish, the vigorous elderly aristocrat that the royal capital sent to me let out a terrible wail at seeing the terrible state of my family's lands and economic situation.

From haphazardly stacked bills and debts, to the countless numbers of idiotic, despotic laws and higher taxes than permitted that had been enacted illegally despite the country's national laws. The people in this domain had been under such a tyrannical regime that they were too exhausted to even complain. Meaning, the people in my domain were all tattered to the point of breaking down. I could safely say that hell would be akin to this.

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