Instructor Mu had imagined it for many long years.
If she were ever able to meet her daughter again, what should she do?
It was a worthless thing to ponder.
Sien would never forgive the mother who had strangled her neck.
Nor would the Imperial Family ever stand idly by and permit such a meeting.
The deposed Empress was an outsider who had been cast out.
In other words, she was forbidden from exerting any influence over the affairs of the family, great or small.
Even if that influence amounted to no more than the slightest possibility.
And yet she wanted to meet the Emperor’s precious daughter alone?
Was that not absurd?
No one understood that fact better than Instructor Mu herself.
She had once stood at the very heart of court politics, after all.
Even so, why?
The woman had continued imagining a future that did not contain even a handful of hope.
Whenever nightmares of the past returned, on every night she groaned beneath anguish and guilt, she agonized over it.
What should she say?
If only she could somehow convey this desperate longing.
Hundreds.
Thousands.
Tens of thousands.
Perhaps she had imagined even more than that, yet all of it had been pointless.
Had that not been proven at this very moment?
The reality before her overwhelmed fantasy.
It was little different from a form of violence.
Faced with a sight that overwhelmed her retina, eardrums, and…