It rained that night as well.

Yi Beom, the husband who once tenderly called her name, was nowhere to be found. It had been over half a year since he started frequenting the concubine's quarters. Even on that night, he held the Queen, Guest, in a drunken stupor, softly murmuring another woman's name. In the dawn, when her tears had dried up from humiliation and sorrow, Guest felt an unknown change in her body and struggled to sit up.

As soon as day broke, the royal physician was summoned in secret. With trembling hands, he placed a silk thread on Guest's wrist to read her pulse. In the room filled with silence, the physician's face eventually flushed with wonder as he sensed the subtle vibration, and he prostrated himself on the floor.

"Your Majesty, congratulations. The pulse flows as smoothly as a round pearl rolling on a tray; this is undoubtedly a pregnancy pulse. Your Majesty has finally conceived His Majesty's noble heir!"

Pregnant. It was an unexpected life met alone amidst terrible loneliness and betrayal.

For a moment, a surging joy rippled through Guest's heart, piercing through the deep sorrow. Though she might have been abandoned by her husband, the warmth of the new life flickering tiny within her womb was like a complete ally and the only lifeline to endure within this harsh palace. Guest wrapped her thin hands around her lower abdomen and wore the purest, most desperate smile of joy she had ever felt in her life.

But Yi Beom did not know.

That the terrifying suspicion he spat out while glaring at her belly in disgust—all to push away his first wife—would in fact become a cruel dagger that mangled his own true bloodline by his own hand.

"How am I to know if that thing in the Queen's womb is truly of my blood?"

Before the arrogant vitriol of the blinded monarch, the noble joy she first held was cruelly shattered. Guest swallowed tears of blood and opened her eyes with determination.

Toward that cruel night where the husband would destroy his most precious bloodline with his own hands and face eternal ruin, the heavily pregnant Mother of the Nation began to walk forward on her own.