An iron poker dragged slowly across the stone floor of the hearth, pushing aside the cold gray ashes of last night's fire.
When Roland Wimbledon opened his eyes against the dim light filtering through his bedchamber curtains, the very first thing that registered in his mind was the silence.
It wasn't the normal, peaceful quiet of an early morning in the castle; it was a thick, heavy, suffocating silence—the exact kind of stillness that hangs over a valley right before a violent thunderstorm breaks.
Sitting up slowly on his mattress, Roland looked toward the fireplace.
Tyre—the timid nineteen-year-old head maid who had been as constant and punctual as the sunrise every single morning since he woke up in this world—was nowhere to be seen.
In her place knelt a much older servant woman with hunched shoulders and a deeply wrinkled face that looked like crumpled brown parchment. She didn't hum, she didn't glance toward the royal bed, and she didn't offer a morning greeting; she simply stacked fresh pine kindling onto the grate with slow, stiff, mechanical movements.
That single absence rang like a shrill alarm bell inside Roland's skull.
Of course, Cheng Yan already had a pretty good idea of why the girl wasn't there. Less than five hours ago, in the dead of night, after reading the intercepted pigeon note that proved Tyre had poisoned the original Fourth Prince, Roland had given Nightingale a quiet, grim order: slip into the maid's quarters next door, subdue her without waking the guards, and lock her somewhere secure so they could interrogate her today about who her master in the capital was.
Swinging his legs off the bed, Roland didn't bother waiting for the old woman to bring him warm water. He pulled on his heavy dark wool tunic, fastened his belt with slightly stiff fingers, and walked straight toward the bedroom exit.
The moment he pulled the oak door open and stepped across the threshold into the outer hallway, he nearly collided chest-first with a wall of polished steel.
Chief Knight Carter Lannis was already standing two paces outside the door.
The veteran knight stood as straight and unmoving as an iron statue, his gloved hand resting on the pommel of his longsword and his sharp face set in an expression far more solemn and guarded than Roland had ever seen before.
— "Your Royal Highness. Forgive the intrusion, but I bring unfortunate news before the sun has even fully cleared the eastern hills," — Carter announced, his voice deep, raspy, and kept low enough that the servants down the hall wouldn't hear. — "Your personal head maid, Tyre... was found lifeless on the flagstones of the inner courtyard at dawn."
Roland stopped dead in his tracks.
Even though he had been the one to set the invisible hound on the girl's trail the night before, hearing that she was dead instead of captured made his heart give a sharp, genuine jolt against his ribs.
Forcing his facial muscles into the stunned mask of a confused lord, Roland widened his gray eyes slightly.
— "Dead?! What are you talking about, Carter?" — Roland demanded, his voice dropping an octave. — "How is that possible? She was completely fine when she brought the hot tea to the dining hall yesterday evening!"
— "The night patrol discovered her body at the base of the eastern servant tower during the five o'clock rotation, Your Highness," — Carter reported, his sharp, calculating eyes never leaving Roland's face for a single millisecond as he watched for the prince's reaction. — "From the angle of the impact, it appears she fell straight over the low stone railing of the balcony outside her private quarters on the third floor."
Carter paused for a beat before adding:
— "I personally inspected her room and the tower stairs immediately afterward," — the Chief Knight continued evenly. — "Her door was bolted from the inside, there were zero signs of a struggle in the room, and the outer wall sentries swear on their lives that no intruder breached the castle perimeter last night. Everything points to a tragic, accidental slip on the frosted stones in the dark."
Standing in the chilly corridor, Roland immediately caught the subtle, probing gleam behind his Chief Knight's eyes.
Carter wasn't just delivering a routine casualty report; he was testing his liege.
Throughout the royal court back in King's City, and among every guard who had marched west with the prince's retinue, the original Roland Wimbledon's pathetic, obsessive infatuation with the pretty maid Tyre had been an open secret. In a feudal world where winters were long, nights were boring, and nobles treated commoner servants like disposable toys, a prince keeping a favorite girl next to his bedroom was hardly unusual.
Except that ever since arriving in Border Town three weeks ago, the "new" Roland hadn't touched Tyre once.
As Cheng Yan, he felt nothing but cold revulsion toward the way his predecessor had harassed a helpless employee. More than that, none of the young maids in the castle interested him in the slightest; his mind was far too consumed by the looming terror of the Months of Demons, the chemistry of gunpowder, and the nightmare of fixing a bankrupt economy.
To a sharp military observer like Carter Lannis, that sudden shift from obsessive lust to total indifference—followed now by the girl mysteriously plunging to her death from a locked room—made the Fourth Prince an increasingly dangerous enigma to his own men.
If I act relieved, Carter will think I had her thrown off the roof myself, Roland calculated coldly.
Lowering his gaze to the tips of his leather boots, Roland let out a long, heavy, and well-rehearsed sigh, letting his shoulders slump by an inch as if weighed down by sudden grief and discomfort.
— "It is a terrible, regrettable loss," — Roland said quietly, keeping his eyes averted from Carter's probing stare. — "She served my household since we were in the capital. As for the arrangements... draw ten silver royals from my personal purse and instruct the older maid who tended my fireplace this morning to handle a proper burial outside the town cemetery. Have that older woman permanently assume the housekeeper duties on this floor from today onward. We have a war to prepare for, Carter; I want the castle's morning routine reestablished immediately."
Carter studied the young prince for two more seconds, found no crack in the armor, and finally bowed his head in a crisp, formal salute.
— "As Your Highness commands. I will see to it at once."
Turning on his heel, the Chief Knight marched away down the stone hallway, the rhythmic clinking of his steel plate armor slowly fading down the stairs.
The instant Carter rounded the corner out of sight, every trace of rehearsed sadness vanished from Roland's face.
Without wasting a single second on breakfast, Roland turned in the opposite direction and strode rapidly down the corridor toward his private study. Reaching the heavy mahogany double doors, he pushed them open, stepped inside, and shoved the doors shut behind his back with a loud creak.
He didn't even need to look around the room to know that he wasn't alone.
Over by the tall stone window overlooking the courtyard, the air rippled like grey silk, and Nightingale materialized out of the monochrome veil, sitting casually on the wide stone sill with her boots pulled up and her silvery-blonde hair catching the pale morning light.
— "Would you care to explain what happened last night?" — Roland asked, his voice dropping all royal pretense and taking on the cold, clipped edge of an engineer whose precise instructions had been botched. — "I asked you to subdue a nineteen-year-old maid and keep her alive so we could find out who paid her to poison me. I thought witches of the Association were supposed to be faster than ordinary humans."
Nightingale didn't flinch at his sharp tone; leaning her shoulder against the cold window frame, she looked back at him with calm, serious blue eyes.
— "I did immobilize her, Your Highness," — Nightingale replied evenly. — "I slipped through the wall of her room ten minutes after leaving you. I pinned her arms to the mattress from inside the Mist and covered her mouth before she could even let out a squeak. What I underestimated... was her fanaticism."
Roland frowned, walking closer to his oak desk.
— "Her fanaticism?"
— "That girl was no ordinary servant bribed with a bag of gold coins, Roland," — Nightingale said, her voice turning grim. — "The exact second she felt an unseen hand pin her down in the dark, she didn't thrash, she didn't cry, and she didn't try to beg for her life. Before I could force her jaw open, she clamped her teeth together with everything she had and crushed a false hollow molar in the back of her mouth."
Roland's eyes widened slightly.
— "A suicide capsule?!" — Roland breathed out in shock.
— "A bladder of ultra-concentrated alchemical nerve poison," — Nightingale confirmed with a nod. — "By the time I realized what she had done, black foam was already bubbling between her lips and her heart was seizing in violent convulsions. Not even little Nana Pine could have saved her if she had been standing right next to the bed. Once her heart stopped, I couldn't just leave a poisoned corpse lying in a bolted room right next to yours—your Chief Knight would have turned the castle upside down looking for assassins or 'ghosts.' So I unbolted her balcony door, staged the fall into the yard, and locked the room back up from the inside before leaving."
Roland stopped behind his desk, rubbing his forehead as his annoyance evaporated, replaced by a deep, unsettling chill.
— "I thought I was dealing with a greedy palace maid who got paid off by one of my brothers," — Roland muttered, his irritation spilling over into a dry sigh as he looked at the assassin on the windowsill. — "Instead, I get a professional suicide operative who bites down on cyanide the moment she gets caught. Well... I suppose I shouldn't complain if the threat is gone, though it's hard to reward a mission that ended with a silent corpse."
— "Oh, do not be so quick to dock my pay, Your Highness," — Nightingale countered, a slight, knowing smile curving her lips as she hopped gracefully down from the stone sill. — "Just because her mouth is closed forever doesn't mean I walked out of the shadows empty-handed."
Walking up to the front of the massive mahogany desk, Nightingale reached inside the dark folds of her cloak and slid a small, folded square of damp, yellowed parchment across the polished wood toward him.
— "While the guards were down in the courtyard gathering her body, I went back into her room and slit open the bottom hem of her straw mattress," — Nightingale said softly. — "She had this stitched inside a piece of oiled pigskin right beneath her pillow."
Sitting down in his leather chair, Roland immediately picked up the folded square and opened it with slightly tense fingers.
Unlike the cramped, coded spy note from the carrier pigeon the night before, the handwriting on this page was flowing, elegant, and remarkably delicate.
At first glance, the letter looked completely innocent. It was written by someone who addressed Tyre affectionately as "my dear little sister," filled with warm, casual questions about her health, the cold weather on the western frontier, and how much the writer missed her company.
Yet, as Cheng Yan's analytical brain read through the paragraphs a second and third time, a deliberate, unmistakable pattern jumped off the page.
Whoever had written this letter was completely obsessed with the sea.
Almost every single paragraph contained a vivid, poetic reference to the ocean: the writer described the endless blue horizon stretching beyond the docks, the sharp smell of sea salt carried on the warm southern trade winds, the cry of white gulls over the masts, and the habit of standing on a harbor balcony watching the red sun dip into the waves. And at the very bottom, the letter ended with a nostalgic, almost desperate promise:
"Hold fast until the winter snows pass, little sister. Once the spring tide turns, I swear that you and our whole family will sit together by the harbor again."
Roland's gray eyes narrowed into razor slits as his mind raced across the political map of the Kingdom of Graycastle, matching the domains assigned to his competing siblings by King Wimbledon III.
Prince Gerald had stayed near the central plains. Prince Timothy held the eastern riverlands.
Only one sibling had been sent to rule a domain on the coast.
— "Garcia," — Roland whispered, the name tasting like bitter copper on his tongue. — "My third sibling... Princess Garcia Wimbledon. The Lady of the Port of Clearwater."
— "That is the only logical conclusion," — Nightingale agreed, leaning her hip against the corner of the desk and folding her arms. — "To someone raised in the inland hills of Graycastle, the ocean is a distant myth. Only someone currently living on the cliffs of the Port of Clearwater would use the sea as a recurring cipher."
Nightingale looked down at the delicate parchment with a mixture of pity and cold professional respect:
— "Notice the final line about 'our whole family sitting together again,'" — the assassin pointed out. — "I suspect your dear sister Garcia quietly took Tyre's parents and younger siblings hostage on the coast years ago—turning an ordinary palace maid into a deep-cover sleeper agent before the succession contest even began. Given how fast Tyre bit that poison capsule without a second of hesitation, she knew that if she talked, her entire family in Clearwater would be executed slowly. That level of psychological conditioning takes years to build."
Creaaak.
Roland leaned all the way back in his heavy oak chair, letting out a long, ragged breath as he stared up at the ceiling beams.
Here it was—the final, undeniable proof he had dreaded since day one.
This "contest for the crown" decreed by their father was never meant to be a gentleman's competition of governance, economy, or industrial progress. From the very beginning, his brothers and his sister had treated it as a zero-sum war of shadows, hostages, slow poison, and cold-blooded fratricide. Had Cheng Yan not transmigrated into this body at the exact second the first dose of poison stopped the original Roland's heart, Garcia would have already crossed the Fourth Prince off her list three weeks ago!
Carefully folding Tyre's letter and locking it inside the bottom drawer of his desk, Roland looked back up at the blonde witch standing in front of him.
Now that they had exposed the snake next door, there was one last nagging question on Cheng Yan's mind.
— "And what about the other two?" — Roland asked, dropping his voice to a quiet murmur. — "Arthur and William. Yesterday afternoon, while both of them were out in the mud supervising the militia and the wall, did you manage to slip into their guest rooms in the eastern wing and look around?"
For the first time that morning, Nightingale's confident posture shifted into a look of genuine, baffled frustration.
— "I went inside both of their rooms, Your Highness. And unfortunately, I found nothing useful at all," — Nightingale admitted, shaking her head slowly. — "Those two men live like ghosts. There are no travel trunks, no spare bags, no letters from this 'Kingdom of Dawn,' and not a single scrap of personal paper hidden under their floorboards. And as for those strange garments they arrived in, or that ticking metal device on Arthur's wrist... they must carry them hidden on their bodies at all times, because they vanish completely whenever they aren't wearing them."
Roland raised an eyebrow. How do you hide two heavy hoodies and boots on your body under a fitted wool tunic?
— "What about their private conversations?" — Roland pressed. — "You followed them earlier in the week."
— "Their private conversations are even more baffling than your steam engine drawings," — Nightingale sighed, rubbing her temple with a gloved finger. — "Whenever the two of them are completely alone and let their guard down, they slip into a strange, rapid dialect filled with words that do not exist in any language of the Four Kingdoms. I could not decipher half of what they were talking about—William kept complaining about things he called 'NPCs', 'character builds', and 'save states', while Arthur scolded him about 'timeline butterfly effects'."
At the mention of "NPCs" and "save states," Roland's left hand twitched violently under the desk, his heart nearly jumping into his throat!
NPCs?! Save states?! Timeline butterfly effects?!, Cheng Yan's brain practically exploded with silent shock. Those two bastards really ARE from twenty-first-century Earth! Wait... why are they calling the people of this world NPCs?!
Before Roland could even open his mouth to ask Nightingale to repeat every single strange word she had overheard, the blonde assassin suddenly froze.
Her head snapped thirty degrees to the left, her sharp blue eyes locking onto the closed mahogany double doors of the study as her ears picked up the heavy, unmistakable sound of boots marching rapidly up the outer stone staircase.
— "Speaking of your two mysterious advisors..." — Nightingale whispered, taking a silent step backward toward the shadowy corner beside the bookshelf, — "it seems we have company arriving right on cue. I had better withdraw from the light."
Like a reflection on water disturbed by a pebble, a ripple of gray-white mist washed over her silhouette. Within half a heartbeat, Nightingale vanished completely from Roland's sight, leaving behind nothing but a faint, crisp trace of autumn ozone in the air.
One second later, a loud, familiar, and completely unceremonious knock rattled the thick mahogany panels of the office door:
BAM-BAM-BAM!
— "Yo, Roland! It's me, William! Everything alright in there, man?!"
Sitting behind his desk, Roland closed his eyes for half a second and massaged his throbbing temples, letting out a quiet groan.
Here we go again, the prince thought wearily. For the love of our ancestors on Earth, William, would it kill you to use my royal title at least once before opening the door?!
— "Come in!" — Roland called out.
The heavy mahogany door swung wide open without a shred of feudal hesitation.
Into the study strode Commander William, radiating his usual larger-than-life swagger as if he owned the entire wing of the castle. He had clearly come straight up from the early morning conditioning drills in the courtyard; his navy-blue doublet was unbuckled at the neck, his linen collar was damp with fresh sweat, and his muscles seemed to hum with boundless physical energy.
And walking just one pace behind William's right shoulder—dressed in his immaculate, silver-embroidered dark-gray wool tunic, his hands clasped calmly behind his back and his dark eyes sharp as scalpels—was Count Arthur.
While Arthur quietly pushed the heavy oak door shut behind them and stood near the entrance, William marched right up to the front of Roland's desk, grabbed a heavy wooden visitor's chair, spun it backward, and straddled it with his forearms resting across the top of the backrest—violating about fourteen different rules of Graycastle royal etiquette in three seconds flat.
— "Morning, boss! Heard there was some commotion in the courtyard at dawn, so we came up to check on you," — William said cheerfully, resting his chin on his crossed forearms. — "Also, we've got two big items on the agenda for today. First, now that our initial eighty recruits know how to march without tripping over their own boots, I want your permission to pull a few more 'key characters'—uh, I mean, high-potential specialists—out of the town patrols and the quarry to form an elite vanguard squad for the First Army. If we want that southern concrete wall to hold when the demonic tide hits, I need a strike team that won't wet their pants the first time a Hybrid roars."
Roland stared at William sitting backward on the chair, then flicked his gaze for a fraction of a second toward the empty, shadowy corner by the window where Nightingale was standing invisible in the Mist.
In private, Roland actually found William's shameless modern informality somewhat nostalgic—it reminded Cheng Yan of the loudmouthed field engineers he used to grab beers with back in his old life. Yet hearing a guy call the Fourth Prince "boss" while sitting backward on a chair inside a fifteenth-century stone castle felt like a hilarious, dangerous glitch in the matrix of Graycastle's reality.
— "You really are never going to learn how to address a prince properly, are you, William?" — Roland let out a dry, exhausted laugh, gesturing loosely toward the territorial maps and the spare steam engine sketches scattered across his desk. — "As for the army, Iron Axe and the recruitment rosters are already under your total command. If you and Arthur see specific men in the town guard or the mines who have the nerve for the front line, you have my blanket authorization to draft them."
Then Roland's faint smile vanished, his gray eyes turning cold and serious as he tapped the locked bottom drawer of his desk:
— "Just make sure you vet their backgrounds down to the bone before you hand them a loaded rifle," — Roland added grimly. — "Because I discovered the hard way this morning that high treason can be served right alongside my morning tea."
By the door, Arthur gave a tiny, knowing nod—having already deduced from the courtyard commotion that Nightingale had made her move on Tyre—while William's grin widened on the back of his chair.
— "Which brings us right to item number two on our morning agenda, Your Highness," — William said, his voice dropping its playful bounce and taking on a smooth, dangerous purr. — "Speaking of catching traitors in the dark... Art here told me on the way up the stairs that we officially have a new witch living under our roof. In fact, I'm pretty damn sure she is standing inside this office right now. Would you mind terribly if Art and I had a quick, face-to-face chat with her?"
Behind the mahogany desk, Roland froze completely.
His fingers locked up around his charcoal pencil as he stared from William's confident grin over to Arthur's calm, unreadable face by the door, and finally toward the empty space beside the window.
He knew for a fact that Nightingale hadn't made a single sound when she vanished ten seconds ago. Not a floorboard had creaked, not a curtain had moved, and there was no footprint on the rug.
— "As for this... 'new witch' you speak of..." — Roland spoke slowly, his voice taking on a sharp, deeply suspicious edge as he tested the two men in front of him, — "the two of you seem to possess an intuition that puts even my Chief Knight Carter Lannis to shame. Tell me, William: how can you possibly be so certain that someone else is in this room right now? My guards outside haven't seen so much as a shadow out of place all week."
William let out a short, arrogant laugh, leaning back against the wooden chair with that textbook posture that Arthur always called his "insufferable protagonist syndrome".
— "Let's just say that those 'ancient books' we read down in the Fjord Islands never let us down, Roland," — William lied with brazen, unblinking ease, even though the real truth was much simpler: back on Earth, he had read the manhwa chapters introducing Nightingale at least three times because she was his favorite character. — "Once you know what signs to look for in the air, it's pretty hard to miss an invisible roommate."
Slowly, deliberately, William turned his head ninety degrees to the left.
Ignoring Roland behind the desk, William looked straight past the edge of the mahogany table and locked his dark eyes onto the completely empty patch of air three feet in front of the stone window—the exact spot where Nightingale was standing inside the Mist World!
Raising his voice so it echoed clearly off the stone walls, William spoke directly into the void:
— "Your Mist World ability is impressive, gorgeous, and the stealth trick is ten out of ten, truly," — William said with a fearless grin. — "But the four of us in this room are already on the exact same side here. You can stop hiding in the gray fog now, Nightingale..."
William paused for half a heartbeat, his eyes glinting as he dropped the final, impossible bomb:
— "...or would you prefer it if I called you by your real birth name, Lady Veronica?"
The silence that slammed down over the Prince's study in that instant was absolute.
Even the crackling of the pine logs in the stone fireplace seemed to freeze in midair.
Behind the oak desk, Roland's jaw dropped open by an inch as he stared in sheer, speechless shock from William's smiling face to the empty corner by the window.
And there, in the empty space beside the window, for the very first time in daylight, Roland saw a violent, visible ripple tear across the air that had nothing to do with the autumn breeze.
The "foreign scholar" hadn't just pinpointed the exact location of an invisible assassin inside another dimension—he had just detonated a tactical atomic bomb straight across her deepest, most guarded secret.