Chapter 34.

The uncle I knew would smile at me and tell me to work under him. But I was positive that working under Uncle would result in me being sent to Demon’s Territory to get beaten up by demons. Then what was the point of me running away from home? I may seem like I don’t have a dream, but I still had a goal of becoming a civil servant.

I carefully opened the envelope that was sealed with sealing wax. The plan was to take a look at the contents of the exam and then seal it up again by slightly heating up the bottom of the seal.

Now show your true self!

Let’s see the back, back!

Dammit!

I’m screwed!

The wax turned to powder as soon as I took it off and disappeared into the air without a trace.

Who put fairy powder in the sealing wax?

By mixing magic fairy powder within the item, triggering the powder would make the item disappear without a trace. I had heard that this method was used on daggers of assassins or letters with secret content.

Were they out of their minds for using such expensive fairy powder for a piece of sealing wax?

Anyone on their right mind wouldn’t use fairy powder in these kinds of places. Someone definitely had a mental illness. Fortunately, there wasn’t any magic that would send out an alarm when I opened the seal or I would have noticed and simply teleported the question paper to check the contents. Fairy dust was a magical substance, not magic, so it went unnoticed.

Dammit, who uses fairy dust on a sealing wax that would cost as much as gold of the same volume?

There were two problems. First, I had no sealing wax with fairy powder mixed in. Second, I had no stamps with the same sealing pattern. Although I had plenty of fairy powder in my pocket space, the problem was the sealing wax and magical processing required.

Think, think. Let’s check the question paper first since the seal has already been opened.

It was possible that the contents of the envelope were some other documents. However, the contents of the envelope were definitely the exam questions. It was the warm original version that had not even been sent to the print shop yet.

Why would you seal the question paper like that when it hasn’t even been sent to the print shop?

I would have nothing to say if they said it was for security reasons, but I still thought it was overdone. I had to solve this problem immediately. This wasn’t a simple matter of delaying or canceling the exam. An intruder had broken into the inner palace treasury office where the emperor also lived. The security manager of the inner palace would see his head fly away if this problem became known. I meant this literally in a physical way. It would be 100% capital punishment whether it was a count or a marquis.

Common sense dictated that it would be impossible to sneak in without a traitor in the ranks. Whether it was the security manager himself or one of his subordinates who had betrayed the empire, the security manager would unconditionally be executed. Improper subordinate management was not a joke when the emperor’s security was concerned. Additionally, if something were to go wrong and the manager was deemed guilty of treason, his entire household could be executed or sold to slavery.

What I just blew away was not a simple sealing seal but the physical necks of one or dozens of people. I had to reseal the envelope with sealing wax containing fairy powder before the night was over.

I carefully examined the seals that had been stamped on documents with the exam paper. There had to be at least one stamp that was identical to the one used on the seal.

Recollect the pattern of the seal...

Although it was hard to tell because it was dark and I hadn’t looked closely, I was sure that it was probably the pattern on the stamp on one of the last documents. According to my memory as well as normal procedures, if an envelope was opened and resealed, the person who opened the envelope would reseal it with his own seal.

Let’s see, the name on the bottom of this seal was...

The Emperor?

I’m screwed!

-o-

Late at night, while avoiding the maids, Arelia escaped from the room. This was because of the sudden suffocation she felt from thinking of the man in the half-white mask.

What was this sorrow she was feeling?

She hadn’t had an appetite for the last three days. She felt no energy or desire for anything (except for snacks). This was the first time she felt this way in her 16 years of life. As if she was suffering from indigestion, her heart felt heavy like there was heavy air pushing on her chest. But the heavy pounding heart did not feel so unpleasant.

Why was this the case?

Arelia was deep in thought as she continued walking. She couldn’t figure it out. For some reason, her steps were directed toward the outskirts of the inner palace. As she kept walking, she suddenly realized that she was close to the location where she had come to hide from the maid three days ago.

She headed for the terrace. She set foot on the terrace and drank the slightly cool air of the night feeling refreshed. The moon was bright again tonight.

-o-

I decided to first look for sealing wax containing fairy powder. The emperor’s seal would only be in his office, but the sealing wax with fairy powder could be available at other locations.

I searched through all the desks in the inner palace treasury office and managed to find some sealing wax. Although I managed to find a huge pile of sealing wax, they were all ordinary ones that did not contain fairy powder.

It was not difficult to distinguish between ordinary sealing wax and fairy-powdered sealing wax. Fairy powder had a characteristic of resonating with each other and emanating light. As such, if the sealing wax gave off light when I brought close the fairy powder contained in my pocket space, it meant that the sealing wax had fairy powder mixed in it. Since none of these sealing waxes glowed, it meant they did not contain fairy powder.

Come to think of it, fairy powder was a very expensive item. The Department of Treasury would not be able to use such goods freely no matter how much funding they received. Only someone like a senior official could probably use such items. That said, it could possibly be in the office of the director of the treasury office or the prime minister.

The offices of the prime minister and the emperor were not listed on the map bought from the intelligence agency. The map of the palace was almost blank, but that was natural. If you thought about it hard enough, it was actually shocking that the location of the treasury office and some others were drawn. But now I felt resentment towards the blank map.

For now, I walked around the inner palace treasury office and found the director’s office. I opened the door naturally and started rummaging through his desk. The desk drawers were all locked when I tried to open them.

Let’s unlock it first.

Click!

The first desk drawer that I opened contained office supplies as well as sacks of gold. I thought of taking the money since it looked like it was embezzled, but I decided to let it go for now. There was no evidence that the money was embezzled.

Click!

I opened the second desk drawer. The drawer contained a corruption ledger. Unfortunately, it was not the corruption ledger of the director, but the evidence of a count who had committed corruption.

Click!

The third desk drawer contained documents and keys. I would have been excited if this was an escape room game, but I already had my universal wire.

Click!

There were many items in the last desk drawer with sealing wax amongst them. Bringing fairy powder near it caused it to give a subtle glow.

Found it!

I applied sword aura on my fingernail and cut the back of the sealing wax neatly. The sealing wax was sliced more cleanly than the original section, but it looked natural since there weren’t any marks of being crushed anymore.

With only this much, the owner of this office would wonder if he had used this much wax without suspecting that someone else had cut a part off.

I took a spoon to hold the melted wax as I went out of the inner palace treasury office.

-o-

Arelia had been staring at the stars for so long on the terrace that her body began to feel cold. She had probably stayed outside for too long. She decided to go back in. Her feet did not move easily despite this thought.

What was this feeling? This pounding and dizzying feeling...

She had felt a strange sensation of enthusiasm as she stood on the terrace. She actually did know what was going on. It was like the feeling she got from waiting for snack time to come. Except, it was a little stronger than that. It was like when the maids would answer “It’s Brioche” when Arelia asked, "What’s today’s snack?" She had felt the same when the man with the half-white mask appeared and asked, "Hello, Miss?"

Arelia dejectedly laughed. Where was this place? It was the imperial palace that symbolized the empire. What happened that night was just a daydream. It was possible that the man was caught and killed by soldiers that night. The imperial palace was such a place. She only had worrying feelings for the man. She had to forget about stuff that couldn’t happen.

Arelia turned and took a gloomy step as she returned to reality. Then...

Tak!

She heard something landing from behind.

It couldn’t happen!

But it was going to be...

Arelia looked back, unable to control her beating heart all along. The man wearing a half-white mask said, "Hello, Miss?" Then, "Nice to see you again."

There he was...

-o-

After leaving the treasury office, I headed to the inner palace. Honestly, it was so wide that I couldn’t tell where I was going.

As I went inside, at times when a soldier walked past, I would hide my presence by attaching myself to the ceiling or hide in an empty room. I really wanted to scan the entire imperial palace with magic to create a 3D map and then head to the emperor’s office. Unfortunately, if I were to do that, I would probably be caught by the magicians residing here.

By the way, where am I?

Although I had spent the last three days looking around the imperial palace, my search was still limited to the vicinity of the treasury office. I got lost walking around randomly in this huge palace. This couldn’t continue. I needed to find out where I was first. In a situation where I couldn’t even tell if I was inside or outside, it would be faster to stop for a moment and figure out my surroundings. I went out to the nearby terrace, jumped onto the castle roof, and crawled up quickly to the tallest spire nearby.

When I looked at the palace from my high location, I realized that I was still in the outskirts of the inner palace. As I was moving through the inside of the buildings, it seemed that I had been walking around the outskirts. I heightened my senses using martial arts.

The Crow Tribe’s martial arts vision technique enhanced the physical ability of the user by circulating magic power within their body. As a result, the user’s inner body was completely cut off from the external environment and there was no loss of magic power. As a technique that had been developed to survive in Olympus, no magician outside the forest should be able to detect my magic power.

Thanks to that fact, no magicians or knights residing within the castle could detect me even though I was fiercely circulating mana inside my body.