She vowed to crush all the bright flowers

The more colorful the flower, the more nutrients it needs and the more delicate it is. It cannot be eaten and is only suitable to be placed in a vase for people to admire. Eventually it withers and becomes a pile of garbage and cannot even return to the soil.

Lucia had a natural aversion to flowers, especially those that were gaudy and useless.

The only flower she liked was the Sharaninifu, not because it was pure white and holy, like an angel, but because its petals were thick, edible, sweet, and crispy when fried, making it a favorite snack for farmers.

The so-called national flower, amid the pile of discarded flowers dumped out of the imperial palace, provides a little comfort to the farmers who planted them.

"Lucy!"

"Here I come!" Twelve-year-old Lucia ran towards the ox cart with four or five flower baskets hanging on her arms.

Under the curved shed of the old but intact oxcart, she stared at the small house in the distance and the gloomy sky in a daze.

She forgot for a moment and then lowered her head to look at the flowers in the basket. The flowers were completely destroyed by the sudden hail yesterday. The flowers that were full and intact last week were now smashed and the flower stems broke powerlessly.

She turned to look at her parents who were driving, and her brothers, who were sitting in the car in unusual silence.

Due to a sudden disaster, the harvest has been very low for the past year.

The family had originally hoped to earn money from this batch of crops to buy food and charcoal for the winter.

Just because of one wrong choice, the harvest was delayed by two days, resulting in heavy losses.

But in fact, they are not the only ones. Many other farmers are facing the same situation as them.

Their family had escaped slavery thanks to Queen Verdin's decree and were about to live a good life. However, bad luck had plagued them in recent years and the domestic situation had become even worse.

The demand for flowers in Izumulu and Harumiya has not decreased, but the exploitation of poor farmers has become more severe.

These poor peasant families who have no money and no power have no capital to resist or bargain. Buyers have many choices, and they are cheap suppliers that can be replaced at will.

Lucy didn't like flowers, but she liked the money they brought, which she could use to buy bread.

The flowers were so delicate, but the nobles were willing to spend a lot of money to buy them with just a little packaging, and then throw them away a few days later without waiting for them to wither.

Of course, most of the money goes into the pockets of the shop owners, who work hard to take care of the flowers, but the money they earn is barely enough to feed themselves.

She once naively asked her parents.

“Why don’t we open our own shop and sell it ourselves?”

“You need a shop to open a store.”

"Then let's find a store?"

"It takes a lot of money to buy a store. You also need to buy a house and land, which also costs a lot of money."

"Can we sell it on the street? Or in the car?"

"My son, the nobles rarely buy flowers from people like us, and we don't have our own cars."

"But they buy newspapers from street vendors?"

“These two are not the same.”

Young Lucia didn't know the difference between the two.

Newspapers are waste paper, and flowers are waste. You can't eat either of them.

She once tried to sell flowers on the street, but only a few people took the flowers from her without giving her any money.

If she sold it near a store, she would be chased away by the store owner and chased by the police.

But she still couldn't understand why the same flowers could be sold for so much money in the store but not in her hands.

Even if they sell the flowers they grow to flower shop owners in this way, they will never be able to save enough money to buy out a new shop. Instead, the shop owners become richer and richer, and all they do is package the flowers and present them to customers with a smile.

Why is that?

Where did the shop owner get the money to buy the shop?

Her little brain couldn't come up with an answer.

She thought maybe she could get the answer by reading a book.

But her family had no money to send her to school, not even her brothers could do anything about it.

It was a miracle that they didn't starve to death.

But maybe a few of them will starve to death this year.

The whole family went into the city with sad faces and returned home crying.

Lucia went into town with her basket full of flowers and came home full as well.

It would have been cleared before.

Why?

I asked several stores and they all had them kicked out.

It is true that many flower growers have poor harvests, but their flowers look the worst.

Some people somehow knew that their families were once slaves, and the way they looked at them changed.

Some farmers who were still slaves did not have to worry about selling their goods because they still had employers to take care of them.

Her parents hugged each other with tears in their eyes, and her brothers and she huddled on a bed, shivering.

They are out of charcoal.

But in order to help their youngest and only sister survive the cold night, they wrapped her in their only quilt and used their bodies to build a human wall for her.

"Don't be afraid, tomorrow will be better."

The brothers told her at the same time.

Lucia looked out the window at the dark and cloudy night sky, and saw only the omen that tomorrow would continue to be gloomy and cold.

How long has it been since she last saw the twinkling starry sky?

With this thought in mind, she fell into a deep sleep.

The next day, the weather cleared up unexpectedly.

The remaining flowers are in better condition.

They had originally planned to go to a town farther away to have a look around today, but some uninvited guests broke the tranquility of the village.

"The palace is recruiting young maids, girls under the age of fifteen. Salary: 5 rubles per month, plus 2 rubles for family allowance. Job description: …………"

When the content of the sign was read out, the small village was shocked.

There was a long line in front of the job application counter.

Lucia didn't want to go to the palace. She would rather stay in this small village and pick and sell flowers. Even if she didn't have enough to eat, she still had her brother, father and mother by her side.

But this amount of money is something their family cannot earn in a year.

Her parents discussed it and decided to let her apply for the job.

She just nodded obediently and said "Yeah."

The recruitment interviewer had seen so many girls in the morning that he felt a little dizzy and kept remembering their names with a cigarette in his mouth.

Lucia's parents were a little nervous when they took Lucia in.

Lucia was dazed and absent-minded.

But when the interviewer saw her, he only asked her name, age and place of origin, and then stamped a green seal on it.

Two days later, their family received the notice that she had been hired.

The line was long and only ten girls passed the interview. Lucia was one of the lucky ones.

"Lucky boy."

If you are lucky enough to set foot on the road to hell.

How could the goddess' favor be so biased?

There was a blank period in her life.

Pure black blank.

This is because she sealed off that memory in order to protect herself.

If this had not happened, she would not have lived to see sixteen.

You won't live long enough to get out.

Tomorrow will always be worse than today, that's the way it is.

Four years ago, she was like those flower-like girls, with the ability to cry and scream, and also the ability to feel pain.

Then, she watched others being crushed, and herself too.

At the age of sixteen, she still has one last hope.

She hoped to get out of this greenhouse, even if it meant being thrown out alive as garbage.

She wanted to lie like a corpse in the clean white snow, rather than rot and be infested with maggots in a damp and dark basement.

What she wanted most was to see her family and die in their warm arms.

Living with all of this is unimaginable torture for anyone.

Being a queen itself meant nothing to her.

The two accompanying things of "going out" and "being able to learn" brought about a great change in her thinking.

Some things that she had been unable to understand before, suddenly became clear to her during her studies.

Of course, she hated the teacher's rhetoric. She liked to learn on her own and was always fascinated by those "heretical" ideas.

She secretly came into contact with magic. She used the spell book she brought from another country, tried it out, and she discovered her talent for magic.

She hid all of this and worked day and night to acquire all knowledge related to magic.

There weren't that many wizards in Zalambra, so no one found out about her.

But, in the way of magic, she had no mentor.

She wanted to ask, can a spell be created?

She tentatively asked a wizard, but he became furious and said that this was the work of the goddess.

The goddess does not allow humans to create spells, and it is absolutely impossible for humans to create spells.

She doesn't believe it.

After studying the structure of the spell for some time, she began to try it out on paper like a madman.

Draw every possible character and try every possible and impossible pronunciation.

She also collected a large number of ancient books to help her research.

She knew the probability was low.

But, she succeeded.

Only two spells succeeded, but these two spells were enough to represent a lot of things to her.

She could vaguely feel that these two spells existed, but the goddess just didn't bestow them on humans.

The goddess is stingy.

But she could understand why they did it.

She once wondered how the goddess would deal with her for eating the forbidden fruit and breaking the boundaries.

The goddess did not appear.

He also did not show up when she used a few gossipy maids to secretly feed her the forbidden blood sacrifice technique.

The goddess either turned a blind eye to her behavior, or she no longer cared about humans, or perhaps this little thing was not enough to alarm them.

There was another one that she later achieved in Chune.

Before that, she learned from Vera about the death of her family.

She reflected on it.

Why would she want to see her family when she just came out of the basement?

Because they are the only love and warmth in her memory?

In fact, the love they gave her was only a little.

How much can there be? Love without material things.

They struggled all day long between food and shelter.

She was forced into that stinking basement, raped and whipped by an old man who could be her great-grandfather, and suffered the pain of having her body eaten. Was it her beauty, her youth, or their poverty that was to blame for all this?

They were not wrong. All the sins were laid at the feet of that emperor.

But even if they knew the truth, could they stop it? Or would they die worthlessly?

The probability is the latter.

What is love?

What is the meaning of weak love, which is only spiritual love, to her?

Her warm memories of them didn't make those four years any easier.

Nor were they the ones who helped her survive.

Had she ever considered dying in their arms?

How stupid?

She laughed till tears came out.

Looking at the horrified expression on the maid Vera's face, she cheered softly in her heart.

Has she improved a little now?

It's really a foolish thing to have hope for anything.

So, she threw away her last hope.

There were so many beautiful girls rotting in the basement, but she was the only one who walked out. It was not because of her once warm memories, but because of her greed for survival as a human being.

Only her own actions are feasible, because she can do it.

If you kill someone, that person will die, whether it's someone who has hurt you or someone you hate.

When she is weak, she deserves to be trampled underfoot and no one can save her. But when she takes the dominant position, the opponent can only struggle in her hands. This is the truth of the world.

It is foolish to pray and wait for others to save you, to bring you out of suffering, to long for some false love and warmth, to wait for the goddess to punish those annoying guys.

The goddess doesn't respond, and the goddess doesn't care.

The Spring Palace is a huge greenhouse.

In the midst of ice and snow, that place is the only one where the weather is warm like spring all year round.

The garden is full of colorful flowers.

The delicate flowers, locked inside, stepping on fertilizer, are good for nothing except beauty.

Lucia had thought she just hated the flowers.

It blooms so beautifully that the slightest exposure to wind and rain will cause it to rot faster.

She went outside, to Chunes, and saw a landscape so different from that of Salambra, and she realized that she hated all flowers equally.

Think about it, we were all born in the same world.

Some are buried in ice and snow, some are kept in greenhouses, and some are blooming brilliantly in the wild fields in the suburbs.

In Chunye, most ordinary farm girls can run freely on the flower-filled roads.

The beggars on the street eat better every day than she did when she was a child.

There are no slaves here. There is no trace of anyone who was ever a slave.

In Zalambra, only the Spring Palace is as warm as spring. In Chuone, the capital, all seasons are as beautiful as spring. The wind and snow here are incomparable to the frozen world of Zalambra.

In Chunie, even in winter, the scenery is unimaginably beautiful and the people passing by are full of vigor.

There are certainly as many maggots on the streets as there are in the palace.

But what does that matter? It doesn't affect its growth.

Why did she rot in the soil before she had a chance to grow?

How do they bloom so brightly?

This world is full of unexpected disasters.

People say there is hell in this world. She was surprised because there is hell in the human world too. So she was not afraid of going to hell after death, because she had been there before.

Flowers do not necessarily wither naturally, nor do they necessarily fall apart in the wind and rain; they may be crushed along the way.

No matter whether the flowers are beautiful or sick, they will eventually be buried in the dirty soil. People are no different.

She wanted to crush the annoying bud herself.

Lucia wanted to crush the bright flowers simply by looking at them.

She vowed to crush all the beautiful flowers in the world.

Although it takes a while.

But maybe she can really do it?

For a little queen from a foreign country, it is as difficult as climbing to the sky to take root in this strange palace, to take root in everyone's hearts and grow pure and beautiful flowers. No, for her who knows magic, climbing to the sky is easy. So she might as well pick stars. She has never picked stars before.

Maybe, it would be enough for her to become a ninth-level wizard?

She knew very well how to win a man's favor, but she would not stop the emperor from liking other women, because that was also a way to please him.

At no time would she speak harshly to the women in the court.

She would only take direct action when necessary.

She did not prevent the birth of the first princess. Instead, she killed her mother after the child was born, and then fed her with drugs to turn her into a prince until she gave birth to her own prince, which saved her a lot of trouble.

She paid some superficial attention to her first child because she had to show it to others, and the child seemed very dependent on her when he was young.

It was such a pleasure to see her face fall apart when she found out the truth.

As for the things that crawl out of my stomach, I find them disgusting just by looking at them and never want to pay any attention to them. I will just kill them cleanly when the time comes anyway.

She kept the other princes and princesses who were not of great use, waiting for the right time to throw them into the cold palace or exile them. She was very tolerant of them.

Among them, only the mother of the Fourth Prince and the mother of the Ninth Prince are relatively interesting.

But this was just a small episode in her boring court life. She chose the right time to let them wither, which was also part of her plan.

The incarnation has grown up well, although it has consumed a lot of her own magic and even life force, but it is worth it. She will play a role at the critical moment.

How can a person who has nothing subvert a country and the entire world?

She had spent more than a decade building her forces in Chugne, but when she heard the news of Emperor Zalambra's death, she immediately gave up everything.

Successfully dealt with a minor future annoyance.

She loved the child very much and he had been a great help, so she didn't want him to face the rest of the world.

As for the pain of his death, she didn't care.

In her opinion, how can the pain of death compare to the pain of living?

Afterwards, she ran straight back home.

Her motherland, her homeland, the place she once longed to escape from, is also the place she most wanted to return to in the past decade.