CHAPTER 173
“Hiiieek!”
A frivolous, shrill groan split the air inside the tent. The girl who, until just a moment ago, had been lying there like royalty in a sleeping forest—Rosenitte—had opened her eyes.
Jolt!
The way Rosenitte sat up was so urgent it looked like she’d only just clawed her way out of the water right before drowning.
“Huhk, huhk…”
Her ragged breathing refused to settle.
In the darkness, Rosenitte’s ruby-colored eyes roamed restlessly, filled with terror.
It was because the nightmare she’d had was even more severe and vivid than yesterday’s—clamping down on her mind and refusing to let go.
That nightmare was so horrific that merely recalling it again was enough to make Rosenitte shudder.
“Are you all right, Your Highness?”
“Mill…ard-gyeong?”
It seemed the only things around Rosenitte hadn’t been silence and darkness.
Inside the dim tent, silver hair—pure and pale as a moon halo—approached her.
Sylvestian reached out to wipe Rosenitte’s cold sweat. Even though he always wore an emotionless face, his movements were meticulous to the extreme. For Rosenitte, it was familiar attendance.
However.
Smack!
Without realizing it, Rosenitte’s eyes flew wide as she struck Sylvestian’s hand away.
It was because, for an instant, an unfamiliar hallucination overlapped Sylvestian.
That hallucination was the sight of a knight kneeling on the floor as if discarded—dirty and miserable.
“Your Highness?”
“Ah.”
An awkward silence fell. The one to break it first was Sylvestian, whose hand had been pushed back.
“My apologies.”
Even without this, their relationship lately had been distant to the point of awkwardness.
Rosenitte didn’t know what to do with the uncomfortable atmosphere.
Then Sylvestian spoke again.
“Your Highness, may I ask you one thing?”
“What is it.”
“By any chance… did you have a nightmare?”
It was an honest silence that was practically an admission.
As she’d been warned early on, nightmares here were part of the process of mental contamination—something that could never be dismissed as trivial.
“If so, then informing Her Highness the 7th Imperial Princess would be—”
“I-I just dreamed about eating monster sausage. It’s nothing, so there’s no need to tell my sister.”
It was a flimsy excuse anyone could see through.
It wasn’t because she was embarrassed to be found out as mentally weak enough to have nightmares.
Rosenitte had, a long time ago, already given up on mental achievement in the first place. The reason lay elsewhere.
‘I don’t want to tell my sister!’
The aversion was strangely intense.
You could even call it desperate.
Fortunately, there was only one person Rosenitte needed to silence—her personal knight.
“…Understood.”
Sylvestian lowered his eyes quietly. Normally, he might have tried at least once to persuade Rosenitte to change her mind.
But today, he didn’t.
“You must be hungry. I will have a meal brought to you.”
“…If you bring monster-sausage stew, I’ll spill it on the floor. Know that.”
“Rest assured, Your Highness. Another dish has been prepared.”
“Another dish?”
Soon, one of the White Night Knights brought in food in a bowl.
This time it was stew as well, but instead of sausage, pieces of white-cooked chunks floated here and there.
“It is fish stew.”
The appearance was ordinary, and the smell was familiar. Rosenitte immediately brightened.
“There are fish here, too?”
“I am told there is a clear lake to the north.”
“Ahh… so you fished there?”
“Yes, Your Highness. From what I heard from Young Lady Graniche, Her Highness the 7th Imperial Princess personally went deep into the lake to catch it for you.”
While mentioning Eve, Sylvestian’s expression softened warmly.
In contrast, Rosenitte’s face—just as she was about to take a spoonful—stiffened hard.
“M-my sister…?”
“Yes.”
Rosenitte’s ruby-colored eyes trembled finely.
Her half-sister had gone into the water herself and even fished, just for Rosenitte.
And yet, in her dream, Rosenitte had… indecently… toward that sister…
Flinch.
Her fingertips lost strength. The spoon slipped and sank back into the stew.
“Your Highness?”
“…I’ll eat later.”
“Even if only to honor Her Highness the 7th Imperial Princess’s heart, you should take at least one bite—”
“Later… I said I’ll eat later, so don’t worry about it and go.”
“…Understood. Please rest comfortably.”
Despite the fragrant, savory scent, her appetite felt as if it had been cut away.
She still hadn’t escaped the immoral nightmare.
Stepping outside the tent, Sylvestian looked up at the sky.
The time was just past midnight, in the deep of night.
The waning moon hung low in the eastern sky.
Beyond this gray barrier, it seemed even the moon absorbed the murk.
The light cast by the moon—imperfect in form—was eerie, with a corner that stirred up impure notions.
Sylvestian spread bedding beside the tent and sat down.
He intended to spend the night outside the tent like this.
Dandelion, with all light and sound gone, looked like a ruin.
His eyes swept over the desolate scenery without emotion.
But the moment one particular place entered his view, his gaze fixed there at once, taking on a deep, dark intensity.
It was another royal tent—
the place where Eve was staying.
A long exhale poured out, muted.
The longer he stared at Eve’s tent in his thoughts, the more his originally clear blue eyes gradually went out of focus, turning hazy.
Perhaps a little time passed like that.
The fatigue that had accumulated over the last two days did not miss Sylvestian’s opening.
In the brief moment his mind drifted, it seemed he fell asleep.
But that fleeting doze was never rest for Sylvestian.
Rather, it was the opposite.
As if he’d been ambushed, he snapped his eyes wide open.
He was awake, but the lingering aftershock made his chest rise and fall in shallow repetitions.
Biting his lip, Sylvestian covered his eyes with one hand.
“Please… stop it…”
It was a voice full of self-loathing.
Sylvestian—he too, like Rosenitte—was being held captive by nightmares.
His nightmare was just as vile.
It was a dream far too greedy for a noble knight to endure.
“Ha…”
His chest was cold, his head was hot.
With the thought of surviving this wretched night, his mind was steadily being worn down.
The next day.
Eve directed the mid-rank homunculi of Dandelion to focus on processing timber and collecting shellac.
‘Once we pass noon tomorrow, the gate will open. I need them to stack up materials so that the moment Viscount Lucciad and the craftsmen enter Dandelion, they can start work immediately.’
Today as well, Eve planned to explore outside the village together with the Punishment Knights.
She needed to think through how to clear a supply route all the way to the region where the Demon Dragon Ambroksha was sealed.
As with yesterday, Eve’s group included several of Dandelion’s residents, including Helione.
While traveling northwest, Eve exchanged words with Helione.
“Village Chief, this is a bit of a late question, but…”
“Yes, Imperial Princess. Ask—no, issue your question.”
“On the day I crossed the gate, Dandelion suffered a major attack. Was it like this every rainy season?”
“No. This monster attack was an anomaly even for us.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. This is only speculation, but… it may be that something has gone wrong with Ambroksha’s Sealing Stones.”
“Ah, the Sealing Stones. That’s likely.”
To seal a lord-class Demon Dragon required not only immense magic but also massive facilities suited to it.
A sealing was not something that ended in a single burst—
the crucial point was how long it could be sustained.
To maintain the seal properly after personnel withdrew, you needed devices that could maintain the spellwork in place of humans, and a near-infinite source of mana supply.
Those devices were produced by pouring in the essence of alchemy.
Since magic was a discipline that primarily dealt with phenomena, if it was to function connected to a physical substance like a Magic Stone, alchemy had to serve as the bridge in between.
‘Normally, in alchemy, you draw a transmutation circle and activate it. But you can’t exactly climb mountains and cut through forests to draw a transmutation circle with a diameter of several kilometers just to seal a Demon Dragon. So they made something like a sealing artifact instead.’
A device that suppressed the Demon Dragon’s power and layered countless bindings—restraints, barriers, sleep magic, and more.
That was the Sealing Stone.
It was said that sealing Ambroksha took as many as five Sealing Stones.
They were structured in parallel so that even if one was destroyed, the others could continue functioning.
And these Sealing Stones, shaped like gigantic stakes, were said to be planted scattered around Ambroksha at suitable intervals.
“Hm…”
Eve looked around.
Maybe it was just her imagination, but the forest seemed to have grown noticeably more murky than yesterday.
‘Is it because the village is under the World Tree’s protection?’
Even so, the village wasn’t truly clean either.
In other words, even the World Tree could only barely cancel out the murk and maintain the status quo.
Meanwhile, the murk seemed to be growing stronger and stronger, so there was no need to overthink it.
“Let’s change our exploration objective. We’ll search for a Sealing Stone that’s broken.”
And so, they went deeper into the Demon Dragon’s sealing grounds than originally planned.
Soon, before Eve’s group, a barren rocky mountain spread out—so desolate that it looked as though all life had been wiped out, without a single blade of grass in sight.
The material looked like granite.
It was heavily weathered, but traces remained that humans had quarried it.
“It must have been used as a quarry when they built the labyrinth canyon, Labyrinth. Then after the Demon Dragon was sealed and the contamination level in the surrounding region worsened, it was probably forgotten.”
To judge whether it could be used again as a quarry, Eve decided to move closer.
Rumble, rumble. Tap, tap.
Even though quarrying had stopped long ago, small rockfalls and dust kept rolling down, making it extremely dangerous.
Thinking it was no good, Eve stopped after only a few steps.
But for some reason, she suddenly felt as if her stamina were being sucked away.
It was when Eve couldn’t bring herself to take another step and stood in place, breathing hard.
“Your Highness.”
“Yeah, Mikael.”
“Do you perhaps feel as if your body has grown heavy?”
At the accurate diagnosis, Eve’s eyes widened.
Looking back, it wasn’t only Eve—everyone in the group seemed to be in a similar state.
‘So it’s not just simple exhaustion?’