Olivia set down her bone china teacup, bent over, and rummaged for a while through a pile of books haphazardly stacked near the table leg. Finally, she pulled out a thick, blue leather-bound book.
As she lifted it and set it on the dining table, she could clearly feel the tremor from the thick tome.
She opened the cover and flipped through a few pages, her pale silver eyes darting across them.
A silver tray hopped over, delivering a small cake garnished with a strawberry. Chen Yu swallowed it in one gulp, his round body rippling with satisfaction, and asked, "What are you looking for?"
"The castle’s operational log." Olivia’s slender fingers slid across the yellowed pages as she answered without looking up.
"There’s a little one who manages this castle. Almost every clock day, she records the castle’s daily operations in detail in this log—things like energy consumption, spatial stability, visitor records, the growth status of the garden plants, and so on..."
Halfway through her sentence, Olivia squinted, seeming to have trouble reading the small print on the pages. She reached out, picked up a pair of exquisitely crafted, silver-framed glasses from the top of the book pile, and put them on.
The glasses had thin lenses and slender frames dotted with tiny sapphires, adding a touch of intellectual charm to her appearance.
She adjusted her glasses, her gaze returning to the page. Her fingers flipped rapidly through the book, the paper making a soft rustling sound, until she stopped somewhere in the middle.
"Found it. Year 1423 of the Clock Calendar, seventeenth day of the Month of the Spring Equinox. Visitor: Olivia Silverlight. Gained access to the castle with a token. Identity confirmed, entry permitted."
"This year is 1470 of the Clock Calendar, a difference of 47 years... Looks like my memory is pretty good after all. I remembered correctly." She seemed particularly pleased with this and gave a slight nod.
’Uh... can dragons get dementia?’
He asked instinctively, "I’ve heard that dragons have very long lifespans?"
"That’s certainly true..."
Olivia pushed up the silver-framed glasses on her nose, then suddenly tilted her head with a puzzled expression and murmured to herself, "Speaking of which, how long have I lived again? Six hundred years, or seven hundred... I can’t quite remember."
Chen Yu remained silent. For someone who could live so long, a fuzzy memory was probably the most trivial of her many little quirks. At least it wasn’t dementia.
Then again, Violet and Count Brand also seemed to have lived for a very long time. In a world full of magic and wonder, longevity wasn’t all that rare.
’Perhaps in the eyes of other dragons, a six or seven-hundred-year-old Olivia is still just a girl in the prime of her youth.’
Then, Chen Yu hopped onto the dining table, his round body facing her. "So, what’s your purpose?"
"What purpose?" Olivia was very interested in his topic—or rather, she was very interested in the act of chatting itself.
After all, even for a dragon, being stuck alone in a castle for decades with no one to talk to would be quite a boring affair.
Even if the one she was talking to was just a Slime, it didn’t hinder her interest in chatting in the slightest.
Besides, this particular Slime was especially interesting.
"The purpose of tearing open a planar rift to lure creatures from the main material plane here, of course," Chen Yu pointed out bluntly.
Olivia closed the log in her hands. Her pale silver eyes looked at Chen Yu through her lenses as she gently shook her head. "Your Little Majesty is mistaken. I have no authority to interfere with this castle’s operations."
"It’s just that some of this castle’s core Magic Arrays need to be refueled from time to time. Opening the rifts is simply a way to draw Magic Power and Secret Skill Energy from the main material plane."
"I just happened to be traveling with Miss Castle and ended up here."
’So, the castle’s caretaker is someone else—either an Artifact Spirit or a Castle Elf,’ Chen Yu realized.
Olivia took a light sip of her perfectly warm floral tea and continued, "She’s a simple and pure soul who only really displays her professional competence on technical matters, like maintaining the castle’s operations and keeping the log. The rest of the time, she pays almost no attention to outsiders."
"Over all these years, I’ve tried to communicate with this little one countless times, but our conversations usually don’t go beyond a sentence or two. If you’re hoping to pry more information about her out of me, you’re going to be disappointed."
"However..." Her tone shifted, and her gaze fell on Chen Yu’s emerald green Gel body. "Given that you possess the same power, you must be here for the master who built this castle, right?"
"You’ve seen him?" Chen Yu’s heart stirred.
Olivia shook her head again. "No, I haven’t. But my great-great-grandmother met him. I heard that back then, the human Empire hadn’t collapsed yet, and they maintained a... hmm, an ambiguous relationship for a while."
"But later, that man disappeared, vanishing without a trace. No foreknowledge spell or Divine Art could find the slightest sign of him, as if he had left this material plane entirely."
"So you’re here to help your great-great-grandmother find her lover?" Chen Yu blinked. He felt like he could smell the stench of a messy love affair.
Olivia rolled her eyes at him, a gesture that made her seem more like an ordinary human girl.
"Dragons may have long lives, but that doesn’t mean we’re immortal. That piece of history vanished when my ancestor returned to the embrace of the sky and earth. I only learned about it in recent years."
"As for why I’m here... I imagine you’re not interested in the trivial family affairs of dragons. But our goals are, to some extent, the same—to find the master of this castle, or rather, to explore the traces and secrets he left behind."