Huh? I tilted my head, picked my ears, and asked again.
“What did you say?”
“I’m the Prime Minister of the Quizen Empire. Haha. I feel a little embarrassed talking about myself like this to Celia.”
The Prime Minister of the Empire?
The highest peak for imperial officials, that Prime Minister?
Suddenly, I remembered the time when Scarlet and I were drinking juice at the café on the Island.
‘It was a very exciting negotiation scene. I recall the war of words that took place two years ago between the Empire’s prime minister and the minister of the Kingdom of Adrin over the Tishen River.’
Uh, um.
I narrowed my eyes and looked him up and down.
Cedric looked docile thanks to his cloud-like pink hair and round glasses.
Now that I looked closely, he is a little tall… and the eyes behind the round glasses were quite sharp.
“Then, did you have a war of words with the minister of the Kingdom of Adrin two years ago?”
“Ah, that. Uh-huh. I did.”
Indeed. It is a somewhat familiar subject matter. I thought hard about the original novel.
The Prime Minister of the Quizen Empire. The Tishen River. Pink hair. Round glasses.
Then I finally remembered.
“….Are you an extraordinary genius or something?”
“Ah. Don’t be like that, Celia. You’ve always been superior to me. I don’t want to hear that epithet from you.”
Cedric scratched his head with a shy face.
I blinked in surprise.
I finally realized who this man in front of me was.
If Dazar, the current representative of the imperial faction, is in charge of the armed forces as her right arm,
he is her left arm and the core of the political world.
Before Axion went crazy, he was a scholar who he deeply respected, and the person who led the Quizen empire to a bright future together with the enlightened Emperor Scarlet.
‘Marquis Ceidrig Eihartz.’
Cedric was his nickname?
No, before that. My childhood friend was such a tremendous guy?
While I was dumbfounded, he laughed and said:
“Uh, now is kind of a break time. It’s like a sabbatical year. I came here after basically handing over work to my aides.”
“But I never thought I would come here and meet Celia,” he added.
‘What is this place? The emperor’s left and right arms are all gathered together, no?’
A feeling of anxiety hit the back of my neck as if I had somehow crawled into a terrible place.
And a slight feeling of emptiness followed.
Celia, you punk. You were farming while your friend was so successful!
“Anyway, I think we need to talk about the Rift day, Celia.”
While I was engrossed in the feeling of emptiness for a while, Cedric spoke with a serious face.
“I think it would be good to leave this place for a while that day.”
* * *
The ‘Day of the Rift’ is the day when the barrier surrounding this continent becomes thinner.
Because of this, on that day, demonic energy would come out through the barrier surrounding the continent, and demons would take advantage of that gap and escape through the ‘rift.’
Therefore, when the ‘Day of the Rift’ comes, each transcendental being removes the monsters that leak from the ‘rift’ they are responsible for and keeps the ‘rift’ from widening further.
The reason the general public was not aware of this day was because the transcendentalists had set up a strong barrier around the rifts in advance.
It was thought that if the general public knew that monsters were pouring out of the demon world every year, anxiety and fear would eat at them.
“Ahh, that’s right. It’s the ‘Day of the Rift’ soon, right?”
Elston said, shaking the golden rattle repeatedly. Every time he came to teach Vanilla, he would stop by here to see Axion.
Hey, hey.
No matter how cute Axion is, isn’t it a bit rude to not even look at the face of the person you are talking to from beginning to end?
I held Axion in the opposite direction so that his face was facing me.
“Ah!”
Whether Elston was embarrassed or not, I rubbed my face against Axion’s cute cheek. A look of envy appeared on Elston’s face.
I pretended not to know and opened my mouth.
“As expected, Elston also knows about the Day of the Rift.”
“Ahem. That’s right. Because I’m a wizard of the Wizardry Tower.”
Rather, it may be because he is the Lord of the Wizardry Tower. I completely ignored him, who had an awkward smile on his face as his conscience stabbed him for lying, and kissed Axion on the tip of his nose.
“Kya.”
Axion smiled and closed his eyes prettily. Aigo, my baby. Pretty, so pretty.
Pretending not to notice that the envy in Elston’s eyes was getting stronger, I asked:
“The Rift Day, is it dangerous?”
“Umm.”
Elston rolled his eyes.
What. Is this something worth ruminating over?
Monsters appear, of course it’s dangerous!
With that thought in mind, I glared at him.
Elston still looked troubled.
“What? Isn’t it dangerous?”
“Well, that’s true.”
Elston twirled his hair with his index finger, then held his hands together and leaned against the sofa.
When he twirled his hair, he looked a little slow-witted, but with his hands clasped like that, he looked quite like a Wizardry Tower Lord.
“Did you know that originally, there were no visitors in the Shiaster family?”
“Um……”
From the way he spoke, it didn’t seem like visitors that just stopped by for a moment, right?
“No. I didn’t know.”
Elston continued as if he had been waiting.
“Not only the Shiastor family but other transcendentalist families also do not allow ‘people’ into their residences. So the nobles think they are arrogant and keep a distance from them. In reality, it is largely due to the special nature of this residence.”
The special nature of this residence.
None other than that this residence is a ‘rift.’
‘So Elston knows as well.’
Cedric, who visited me the other day, said this afterward.
‘As I said last time, this is ‘that’ Shiaster official residence. Therefore…. This residence, or should I say castle. Yes, this castle itself is a ‘rift’.’
‘Huh?’
‘I said this place itself is a ‘rift.’ So, when the Day of the Rift comes, monsters appear everywhere in this castle.’
‘……!’
What! It was such a dangerous place?
There was no such story in the original novel! It thought the rift was somewhere far away.
By the way.
“…..But I’m here right now?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m trying to say.”
What are you talking about?
I looked at him dumbfounded because I had no idea what he was talking about.
Axion puffed out his cheeks as if he felt the same way as me or was copying me.
Cute fellow.
Elston, who managed to see this, held his forehead with hearts in his eyes.
“Whew. So, I’m guessing that Duke Shiaster had his own thoughts when he brought Lady into the rift.”
“Ummm.”
“To start, wouldn’t it be a good idea to talk to the Duke first?”
I suppose. It would be faster to talk to the person in charge of this place.
Agreeing with Elston, I quietly asked another question.
“By the way, Elston. Do you know of Ruben by any chance?”
“What?”
Spout. Elston, who had just taken a sip of black tea while looking at Axion with loving eyes, spat out a mouthful of tea.
Thanks to this, his pants got soaked.
It’s obvious that he knew.
As expected. I thought that the Lord of the Wizardry Tower would know.
I just cursorily handed him a tissue and asked again:
“You know what is Ruben right? What is that?”
“Wh-where did you hear that?”
“Just, I happened to see some book in the study here in the mansion.”
“…..Umm.”
Elston broke into a sweat.
“Eh, that’s…. Because it’s a sphere that’s even more special than the Day of the Rift…..”
If it’s a special area, does that mean that its information is even more unknown to the general public?
I prodded him a few more times, but Elston only spilled black tea and did not spit out any useful information.
As I watched the floor gradually become flooded, I decided to give up on getting more information from him.
‘Umm. Dazar won’t say anything, and neither will Elston.’
First I had to solve the Rift Day problem, so I left Axion in the care of Carl and headed to Dazar.
* * *
“What did you say just now?”
Dazar who had been hit with the uppercut called rice with soy sauce and eggs the other day by me, had a very rotten look on his face when he looked at me.
The look in his eyes was so murderous that I thought he could kill someone with his eyes.
Nevertheless, I was glad that his face was good-looking because he wasn’t bad to look at.
Perhaps he enjoys sitting in the window because when I came to visit him, he was sitting on the window again, holding a tobacco pipe in his mouth.
In the office where there was still no attendant in sight, he put out the fire in his pipe and escorted me to the sofa.
“So, I said that I’ll be away for about a week.”
He asked, sitting down gracefully and leaning back on the sofa:
“Why? Is it necessary?”
“Is it necessary? Of course, since a dangerous day is coming soon.”
“Hmm. I was going to tell you, but I guess you already heard it from Marquis Ceidrig?”
Since the general public doesn’t know about the Day of the Rift, he must think that I heard it from Cedric.
He treated me like a con artist when I first came here and mentioned the Eastern Continent, so if I told him that I already knew about the ‘Rift Day’, he would say something strange again.
Moreover, it was true that Cedric brought up the Day of the Rift to me, so I nodded cursorily.
‘That day is dangerous, so I think you should leave the mansion, Celia.’
That was Cedric, who quickly rose in status in my mind from ‘a childhood friend who was pitifully pushed around by this body’ to ‘a country’s prime minister.’
I would say that thanks to this, a little trust has been built that wasn’t there before.
As I was just nodding my head and not saying anything, Dazar opened his mouth first:
“Don’t worry. There will be a separate barrier around the annex you are in.”
“…….?”
“No harm will come, never.”
“……”
“Don’t believe me?”
“Yes.”
Dazar frowned at my immediate answer.
“Why don’t you believe me?”
“Because Axion has a dragon heart. Isn’t the Demon Dragon’s dragon heart very attractive to monsters? What should I do if monsters are attracted to it? What if your barrier doesn’t work?”
In the original novel there definitely was the subject matter where he was targeted by monsters because of the Demon Dragon’s dragon heart.
Then Dazar cocked his nose arrogantly and crossed his arms.
“What do you see me as?”
“…….”
At that moment, I remembered what Vanilla had whispered.
‘He’s a b*tch.’
When I didn’t say anything, Dazar looked at me with dull eyes and twisted his lips.
“You.”
“What?”
“You just cursed at me.”
“No?”
His eyes narrowed further at my confident answer.
