How to Live as the Mad Duke’s Fake Daughter - CH 104

My father, who was pulled out from the bottom of the floor, could be completely blown away.

He was so skinny that the silhouette of his bones was visible, and the focus of both eyes wandered in the air.

When I tapped my father’s shoulder because I wanted to talk to him, he tilted his head at an angle and opened up his mouth.

I thought he was hit on the head on the street, but when I looked at his skinny body, I found no wounds.

“Wasn’t he always like this?””

“Yes… Absolutely not.”

To me, the current appearance of my father was unfamiliar, as if seeing someone completely different.

‘When my father screamed, I thought he was the scariest person in the world…’

Now that I see it, my father was normal. Far from Alan, he was so small that he could not match anyone in the knight’s order, and the eyes that used to glare at me were clouded as if drenched by the water.

Hugo examined my father’s physical condition and eventually let go of him.

He was no longer interested in my father and was now looking around the dark house.

Unlike him, I couldn’t take my eyes off my father.

He was someone I once loved, longed for affection from, and hated, but now I had forgotten.

If my dad had cursed at me, I could have responded back…

‘I don’t know what to do because he has become like this.’

As I approached my father, I suddenly found something strange.

I knelt down on the floor and looked into the hole Hugo made.

‘Father was definitely in here, right?’

The smell of stale mold poked my nose. I pushed my head into the dark hole and looked at the section that was broken with a spear of mana.

There were traces of repair after breaking the floor once before we came.

“I think someone did this after my father went in…. Who the hell was it?’

Who locked my father under the floor?

I crawled on my knees and brought my eyes near the broken wooden floor. My braided hair flowed down the hole and shook like a pendulum.

As I was looking at the cut part, my eyes widened.

The wooden board on top was nailed under the floor.

If someone else had locked up my father and built a new floor, a wooden board had to be attached from the top.

This meant one thing.

“He nailed himself from the inside….”

Someone grabbed my ankle.

It was a thick, hairy hand. I knew the owner of this hand well.

As I turned my head, I saw my father’s face glaring like a beast.

He trembled like he was having a seizure. An unknown shout came out of the mouth with crab foam.

“I, I have to hide!”

Hugo threw an old chair at my father.

My father was hit in the temple by the leg of the chair and fell over to the side helplessly.

I crawled away from that gap. As I was getting up from my crawling position, my hand that was trying to touch the floor fell into the hole.

And I just fell through the floor as it was.

The piles of dust flew up and covered my face.

Hugo rushed towards the broken floor and looked at my body.

In the meantime, my father was mumbling, pulling his hair

“I, I saw it. He, he showed me there….”

My father pointed at me with his trembling hands.

He rubbed his face carelessly with his rough hands and fainted after saying another sentence.

“The end will come.”

The sound of his head hitting the wall rang to the bottom of the floor.

Hugo shook off the dust on the back of my head without caring about my unconscious father. The hand sweeping the top of my head occasionally paused for some reason.

“…….”

I was lost in a daze.

Words that my father said were spinning in my head.

‘The end?’

I turned around and removed the pieces from the wooden floor. I didn’t think I was the one my father pointed to.

Hugo observed me and brought the lights that were lighting the house closer to me.

The faint lights lit under the floor where my father was hiding.

Something hard and cold touched my knee. Looking closely, it was a handle made of black metal.

There was a small door on the floor.

Hugo put the lights together and said it casually.

“It’s the basement.”

I couldn’t react as lightly as Hugo.

‘What do you mean a basement? In my house?’

‘Since when was it there? From the beginning?’

While I was puzzled, Hugo reached out. It seemed he wanted to open the door to the basement.

Just before his fingertips touched the black handle, a voice was heard as if someone was reading a book in my head.

「When a person who is not a demon touches the handle of the basement, he will be cursed and will go crazy.」

“Brother, hold on!”

I grabbed Hugo’s wrist. Hugo was dumbfounded.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ll open it.”

I pushed Hugo behind and grabbed the handle with both hands. I pretended to be determined, but I was confused inside.

‘The original story suddenly came to mind.’

Other than the day Michael fed me poison, I couldn’t remember the contents of the novel <No Dream or Hope> that I possessed for four years. It was not long ago at my debutante that I remembered again.

When I think about it, it was a little strange.

The contents of the novel came to mind only when I hit my head on the desk or got hurt eating poison.

But just now, I didn’t do anything, but the memory rose on its own.

There was only one difference between the past and the present.

‘I have awakened the power of the devil….’

Squeak, the door to the basement opened.

A hole appeared, small enough to barely fit one person in. Below that, blackish stairs meandered like a trail of ebony trees.

I couldn’t go straight down to the basement. This was because several chains stretched in front of the stairs and blocked the road.

The moment I brought my face nearer to see the inside closely, the chains suddenly broke off.

“Ugh!”

I panicked and pulled my body back.

A pile of shredded chains scattered everywhere.

The surface of the chain, which had been strangely shiny until just now, faded, and the lump of metal soon turned into fine crumbs like sand.

At that time, Hugo’s light shook like a lamp in front of the wind.

Hugo tapped his fingers a few times as if to return the mana to its proper form, but the more he did, the dimmer the lights became.

He shifted his blue eyes and stared down the stairs.

“There’s something down there.”

Hugo stood up without warning and stepped on the stairs.

I reached out to stop him because of the memories of my previous life, but fortunately nothing happened.

Instead of going down, Hugo frowned and stepped up a few times in the first compartment.

The sounds of footsteps rang out.

“These stairs, the material is too light for an ordinary stone staircase.”

“What?”

“It doesn’t even look like they colored the metal. Don’t tell me….”

Hugo patted his chin and fell into thought.

I followed him and looked at the road leading to the basement.

A spiral staircase that was winding like a snail’s house. As I kept looking at the black color, there was a place that reminded me of it.

“How… It’s similar to Brother’s dark magic lab.”

Unlike other spaces, the stairs leading down to the academy’s black magic lab were made of black stone.

Hugo said it was a substance that blocked the magic power of the World Tree that spreaded throughout the empire.

“The ingredients that make up my lab are called ‘manastone’. It’s a black stone found in areas where the evil spirits are concentrated. It could be the same thing. But… I’m not sure.”

Hugo kept knocking on the stairs with his heel and groaned.

“Manastone cannot be distinguished from imitation jewels on the outside. So even after collecting it from the West, you have to bring it carefully so that you won’t lose it in the middle. Transportation alone requires a tremendous amount of trouble, but why here…”

Bam! Hugo stopped stomping around and reached out to me.

“Let’s go down. Now that we’re here, we have to check everything weird before we go back.”

There might be something in the basement, so let’s go together.

It was an offer that he would never have given to me if it was the usual Hugo.

‘As expected, Hugo’s condition is weird.’

Even though I thought so, I held his white hands carefully.

There was a black magic lab in the house where I spent my childhood. First, I had to figure out what was going on.

Hugo grabbed my hand tightly and went down to the basement as if he wouldn’t miss it.

As I went down, the light of mana faded. Later, only Hugo’s hand and the shape of the stairs were barely visible.

I was lost in thought in the still darkness.

‘Did someone study black magic? Who?”

If it wasn’t me, then it could only be my real father, but it was hard to believe that it was his work. Because my father rarely came home.

‘But to say that it’s someone else’s work is a bit… Oh, wait a minute.’

At that time, the prime suspect crossed my mind like lightning.

‘There’s one more person. Other than me and my father, another person who lived in this house.’

The imagination that bloomed like smoke gradually approached conviction.

‘…Mom.’

My mom, who was said to be a quack fortune teller. The woman who ran away when I was a newborn baby, and so I didn’t even know her face.

If anyone studied black magic in this house, she would have been the only culprit.

“Lily, I want to ask you something.”

Hugo called me in a low voice.

His expression could not be seen properly because the only light, the light of mana, was shining at his feet.

“What is it?”

I tilted my head and gripped Hugo’s hand again. His icy hands filled with cold sweat.

“Brother?”

“…….”

Hugo spoke first, yet remained silent for a long time.

That was when the stairs ended. The flat floor appeared, but there was too little light to recognize what was around.

Hugo murmured softly as he felt the wall with his other hand.

“I saw the letter.”

My blood cooled in an instant.