Reborn as the Psycho Villainess Who Ate Her Slave Beasts' Contracts

Chapter 442: Chapter-442

The private medical sanctuary was sterile and exceptionally quiet, smelling faintly of crushed eucalyptus and strong antiseptic.

Chief Physician Vane sighed softly, taking off his glasses and rubbing his forehead. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief before replacing his spectacles, looking down at Elara’s hand resting on the velvet cushion.

"Your Highness," Vane murmured, shaking his head. "I really cannot find anything wrong with you."

Elara looked back at him, her expression perfectly calm, her posture unyielding. "But there is a strangeness here." She pointed a single, pale finger toward her chest.

Vane sighed again, looking at her intently. "Your Highness, your breathing is normal, your heartbeat is normal, and I even had your blood tested, but I cannot find anything. May I ask... when or how do you feel this strangeness?"

Elara paused, her brow mimicking the slight shadow of a thought. "It actually happens only sometimes."

Vane pulled out a small leather-bound notebook, readying his pen. "Sometimes. Is there any anomaly, perhaps a connection to a specific scent, a flower, a type of food, or something you saw? An interaction with a person?"

Elara paused again. "Well. Julian."

Vane froze, his pen hovering over the paper. He slowly raised an eyebrow. "When?" He cleared his throat. "Does he possess a specific scent that triggers this?"

Elara shook her head slightly, staring past him as if reviewing a ledger of recent events. "Actually, not his scent only. Whenever he talks. Whenever he... shakes his hair. Whenever he argues with me." She pressed her hand firmly against her chest, right over her heart. "There. I feel warmth, like something heating up, and then it starts beating faster. And I feel... slightly confused, I think."

Vane stopped writing. He stared at her, a small, knowing smile tugging at the corners of his lips—one he was trying beautifully hard to control.

"Um, Your Highness," Vane coughed slightly into his hand, keeping his composure. "May I ask... does this only happen with Prince Julian, or with someone else too?"

Elara sat in a thoughtful silence for a long moment, weighing her interactions with the court, the ministers, and her guards. "No. It actually happens just with him."

"Oh, I see," Vane murmured, his smile deepening just a fraction. "Then let me ask you a thing. Does this bring you pain when you see him cry?"

Elara looked at him with absolute clarity. "I cannot feel pain emotionally. I can only feel pain physically."

Vane shook his head, shifting his approach. "Let me rearrange the question for you, Your Highness." He pointed to his own chest. "Do you feel as though something is stabbing you right here, whenever you see him cry, or when he is sad?"

Elara nodded instantly, a faint spark of relief in her vacant eyes. "You are a genius. How could you know that?"

Vane bit the inside of his cheek, violently controlling himself from laughing out loud at the absolute earnestness of the most feared woman on the continent.

"Your Highness, I have diagnosed you," Vane said, his voice brimming with buried amusement. "And you do not need to worry, as it is not a dangerous thing. But... the problem is, there is no medicine for it."

Elara’s eyes narrowed slightly. "That means it is a neurological, incurable disease."

Vane’s amusement instantly vanished, replaced by a wave of panic. "No, Your Highness! It is not like that! This disease... well, you see, it is not a disease at all."

Elara looked at him, her voice dropping into that direct, simple cadence she had been trying to practice. "Can you explain it commonly? In normal terms?"

Vane looked at her, and for a moment, he felt a sudden, ridiculous urge to cry out loud with joy. The Empress Regent—the cold, unyielding ruler who had only ever spoken in bureaucratic edicts, administrative logic, and harsh, working tones—was sitting before him, asking him to speak to her normally. It was so incredibly refreshing, a stark contrast to the unapproachable monarch she had been for years.

"Your Highness," Vane said softly, leaning forward with a gentle, genuine smile. "If I am not wrong, from all the diagnosis in my years... you have just fallen in love."

Hearing that, Elara looked at him with absolute composure and said, "I do not think so."

The room fell into a quiet, heavy stillness. Elara calmly adjusted her cuffs, her voice flat and measured. "Love requires the presence of emotion. Since I am entirely devoid of emotion, it is a structural impossibility for me to fall in love."

Vane let out a soft, patient sigh, leaning back slightly. "Your Highness, love is not merely a conscious feeling you choose to experience. Sometimes it takes root, and we fail to recognize it entirely because it does not fit our expectations."

Elara shook her head, her gaze steady. "That does not make sense. It lacks empirical logic."

"Your Highness, that remains my professional conclusion after all these examinations," Vane insisted gently, gesturing to his notes. "These are the symptoms, and I truly believe this is what we are looking at."

Elara calmly began to button her sleeves back up, smoothing down the fabric. "It appears you need to run further tests. It is far more likely to be a rare physical ailment or an unidentified disease."

Vane watched her, knowing precisely what she was doing. She was ignoring it. She literally could not accept an answer that defied her rigid framework of the world.

To Vane, Elara had always been a profound anomaly. As a chief physician who had studied the human mind and body for four decades, she wasn’t the first person he had encountered who lacked the capacity for emotion. He remembered his master speaking of a few such individuals. Tragically, most of them had been killed by their own families, cast out as monsters or curses. The few who survived lived isolated, detached lives—some turning into ruthless predators, while a rare two or three actually became remarkably precise, unblinking surgeons and doctors.

But Elara was entirely different from any of them.

She was brilliant. She understood her own structural weaknesses and her strengths with terrifying accuracy. When she first assumed power, the court had whispered, wondering how a woman who felt nothing could possibly guide a kingdom. Yet, fully aware of her own shortcomings, she had navigated the political landscape flawlessly, leaving the crown on a puppet emperor while she carried the empire on her back. It was no exaggeration to say that seventy percent of the imperial workload was handled solely by her. And unlike the rare others who hid their emotional void out of fear, Elara dared to admit her condition openly, treating it as a simple fact of her existence rather than a shameful secret. She was easily one of the strongest, most stable rulers the continent had ever seen.

Knowing her mind, Vane knew she wouldn’t accept this diagnosis easily. But truth be told, Vane himself hadn’t expected it either. By all medical logic, a person who could not feel emotions shouldn’t be capable of this.

But that was the beautiful, frustrating mystery of medicine. The human body and the human mind were like the endless stars in a night sky—boundless, unpredictable, and impossible to fully map. You could never truly determine what was absolute, or dictate what could and could not happen to a human heart.