My Anime Shopping Tree & My Cold Prodigy Wife!
Episode-177

Chapter : 353

The door to the suite opened and closed with a barely audible click. Her personal handmaiden, Laila, entered, moving with the silent, unobtrusive grace of a ghost. The older woman’s face, usually a mask of stoic, professional deference, was tight with a barely concealed disapproval. She approached Rosa, bowing deeply.

“My lady,” Laila began, her voice a low, respectful murmur. “I have… returned.”

Rosa did not turn her head. She did not look at her handmaiden. Her gaze remained fixed on the dancing flames. “Report,” she commanded, the single word a whisper of ice in the silent room.

Laila hesitated for a fraction of a second, her lips thinning. “As you instructed, my lady, I maintained observation of Lord Lloyd and… Lady Faria.” The name of the Southern Marquess’s daughter was spoken with a subtle, almost imperceptible, edge of distaste. “Their… ‘collaboration’… in the garden pavilion continued until well after sunset.”

Rosa remained silent, a silent, demanding vessel waiting to be filled with information.

“They were… in close conference for many hours,” Laila continued, choosing her words with the care of a diplomat navigating a minefield. “Their demeanor was… animated. Familiar.” She paused. “At the hour of the evening meal, Lord Lloyd dismissed the Lady Faria’s carriage. He had a private supper for two sent from the main kitchens… to his study at the manufactory.”

The silence in the room deepened, became heavier, colder. Rosa’s posture did not change by a single, infinitesimal degree. But Laila, who had served her, and her mother before her, for decades, who knew the subtle signs of her mistress’s moods better than anyone, felt it. A drop in the room’s ambient temperature that had nothing to do with the cool night air. A subtle, almost invisible, tightening of the aura of Spirit Pressure that always, unconsciously, surrounded the powerful Ice Princess.

“They remained in the study, my lady,” Laila concluded, her voice now barely above a whisper, “for a further three hours. Alone. The servants who cleared the meal reported hearing… laughter.”

Laughter.

The word hung in the air, a bright, discordant, and deeply, profoundly, offensive sound.

For a long, long moment, Rosa said nothing. The only sound was the faint, soft hiss of the burning candlewicks. She continued to stare into the flames, her obsidian eyes reflecting the tiny, dancing points of light, but seeing something else entirely. She was seeing a sun-drenched pavilion. A smudge of cobalt blue on a beautiful, laughing face. The easy, familiar proximity of her husband and another woman. She was hearing a sound—a shared, joyful, unrestrained sound—that he had never, not once, directed at her.

The cold, tight, acidic knot in her stomach, the one she had felt before, the one she had tried to analyze, to dismiss as illogical, irrelevant, now returned. But it was no longer just a confusing prickle of emotion. It was a physical, twisting pain. A cold, sharp, shard of ice, lodging itself deep within her.

This feeling… her logical mind raced, desperately trying to categorize it, to process it, to neutralize it. It is an irrational, possessive response to the transfer of the subject’s positive emotional attention to a third party. It is a weakness. A flaw in the system. An emotional variable that serves no logical or strategic purpose. It is… inefficient. It must be suppressed.

But she could not suppress it. The more she tried to apply cold logic to it, the sharper the pain became, the tighter the knot twisted. It was a foreign, invasive, and utterly, humiliatingly, powerful emotion. It was a fire, not of warmth, but of ice, burning through her carefully constructed defenses.

“My lady…?” Laila ventured, her voice filled with a quiet, genuine concern, seeing the rigid stillness of her mistress, feeling the almost palpable cold emanating from her. “Are you… unwell?”

Rosa finally turned her head, her movements slow, deliberate, as if moving through thick, viscous water. Her face, in the flickering candlelight, was a mask of perfect, terrifying, alabaster calm. But her eyes… her eyes were no longer just cold. They were abysses. Black, empty, and burning with a distant, frozen, starlight.

“No, Laila,” she said, her voice a whisper of pure, polished ice. “I am not unwell.” She looked past her handmaiden, her gaze once more fixed on some distant, unseen point. She was no longer just observing a perplexing anomaly. She was confronting a threat. A threat not to her political position, not to her physical safety, but to something deeper. Something she had not known she possessed. Something she did not want, but could not, it seemed, relinquish.

Chapter : 354

“Continue your observations,” Rosa commanded, her voice utterly devoid of any emotion, a flat, chilling directive. “Report everything. Every word. Every gesture. Every… laugh.”

She paused, then added a new, single, chillingly calm instruction.

“And Laila… find out everything there is to know about the curse that afflicts the Lady Faria’s brother. The nature of its magic. Its weaknesses. And,” her obsidian eyes narrowed, a flicker of something cold and calculating, a strategist’s grim purpose, replacing the earlier emotional turmoil, “most importantly… every possible component required for its cure. Every herb. Every reagent. Every alchemical process. I want a complete, comprehensive, analysis. Immediately.”

Laila blinked, surprised by the sudden, unexpected shift in focus. The brother’s curse? Why? But she did not question. She simply bowed her head. “As you command, my lady.”

With a final, deferential bow, Laila slipped from the room, leaving Rosa once more alone in the silent, candlelit darkness.

The Ice Princess was not just feeling the heat anymore. She was learning to fight fire with ice. And the game, she knew, had just become infinitely more dangerous.

The power simmered under his skin, a constant, low-level thrum of contained lightning. The Spear of Justice, the devastating new weapon he and Fang Fairy had forged in the crucible of Transcendence, was a constant presence in his mind, a beautiful, terrifying blueprint of annihilation waiting for the command to be unleashed. But a weapon untested was just a theory. A blueprint unrealized was just a dream. And Lloyd Ferrum, the Major General, was a man who dealt in the hard, brutal reality of applied force.

He knew, with an absolute certainty, that he could not test the spear’s true potential within the confines of the Ferrum estate. The last trial, the one that had vaporized the Warlord-class dummy and left a smoking crater in the training hall floor, had already stretched the limits of plausible deniability. The guards had whispered for days about the ‘freak lightning strike inside the building’. Another such incident would not be dismissed so easily. It would draw attention, questions, the kind of deep, probing scrutiny from his father that he could not afford. Roy Ferrum knew his son was powerful now, yes. But he did not yet know the full, terrifying extent of that power. And Lloyd intended to keep it that way for as long as possible. An ace in the hole was only an ace as long as the other players didn’t know you were holding it.

He needed a place far from prying eyes. A place of desolation, of ruin, where the thunderous clap of a manifested lightning spear would be swallowed by the silence of empty space. He needed a real-world firing range.

The plan formed in his mind, simple, direct, and cloaked in the plausible deniability of his newfound ducal responsibilities. His burgeoning soap empire, and the subsequent, almost comical, success of the ‘Radiance’ laundry powder concept, provided the perfect cover. Master Elmsworth had been pestering him for weeks about expanding their sourcing for raw materials, particularly the high-quality wood ash required for their lye.

He made his request to his father one evening, his tone one of dutiful, diligent enterprise. “Father, the demand for our products continues to exceed our production capacity. We need to secure new sources of hardwood ash. The logging camps in the Whispering Hills are a potential source, but the terrain is difficult, the transport routes unreliable. I wish to conduct a personal survey of the region, to assess the feasibility of establishing a new, more efficient, collection and processing outpost. It will require a few days.”

Roy Ferrum had listened, his expression the usual unreadable granite, but Lloyd saw the flicker of approval in his eyes. This was the kind of proactive, resource-management thinking he had been trying to instill in his son for years. “A sound proposal, Lloyd,” Roy had conceded. “Prudent. Take Ken with you. And a small retinue of guards. The Whispering Hills can be… unpredictable.”

“Of course, Father,” Lloyd had agreed easily, knowing full well that Ken’s ‘retinue’ would be dismissed the moment they were out of sight of the capital.

The true preparations took place late that night, in the quiet solitude of his study at the manufactory. He didn’t need armor, not for this. He needed anonymity. He took a block of soft, workable pine and a sharp whittling knife. His hands, guided by the memory of a thousand different battlefield improvisations, moved with a speed and precision that was a world away from the awkward fumbling of a nineteen-year-old.