Chapter 13: A Sigh Starts a War

After that inexplicable “Day of Quiet Contemplation” was established.

Sylvia was certain her plan to lie low had officially entered hell mode.

She was being set up.

Raised to a height she couldn’t understand and never once thought to climb.

The more she wanted to be a silent, invisible presence, the more she was forced to become the sole focus of the entire empire’s gaze.

She gave up.

Truly.

Tired. Let it all fall apart. Hurry up and destroy it.

In the afternoon, Sylvia wrapped herself in a soft cashmere blanket, sitting by the floor-to-ceiling window in the garden.

Outside the window was the Eternal Night Empire’s unchanging landscape.

The sky was a lifeless, dull purple.

Not a hint of vitality, like a piece of congealed, ancient blood amber.

A disproportionately huge Blood Moon hung high, radiating an ominous scarlet aura.

There was no sunlight here.

Nor any wind.

Even the air itself was thick and stagnant like a pool of still water.

Sylvia propped her chin with one hand, her blood-colored eyes unfocused.

She just stared blankly at the unchanging eternal night outside.

A thought suddenly surfaced from the depths of her memory without warning.

She remembered the past.

Back when she was a disposable knight named Ignatius of the Holy Radiance Alliance.

Life was truly harsh.

Every day was a struggle on the edge of a blade, never knowing if her head would be crushed on the next charge.

Her mouth gnawed on black bread hard enough to crack teeth, her throat burned from the low-quality malt beer that scraped her esophagus.

But back then, the sky was blue.

The sunlight that fell on her skin was warm.

She still remembered after one mission, a few broken soldiers gathered around a small campfire.

A rough man named Barton laughed as he shoved the last piece of charred, dripping beast meat into her hand.

Everyone laughed loudly, raucously, singing out-of-tune ballads to the horizon.

No one knew where the next meal would come from.

No one knew if they would return from the next mission.

But at least then, she was free.

She could speak loudly, laugh without restraint.

She could lean on her only companion’s shoulder, sharing a piece of hardened bread.

Unlike now.

Every breath felt like countless eyes were spying in the shadows.

An indescribable helplessness, mixed with a long-buried homesickness, flooded her heart like a tide.

Those companions back then… were probably long dead in some nameless muddy field.

Without even a burial shroud.

And yet she survived in such an absurd way.

Living in this gorgeous, delicate, but bone-chillingly cold cage.

Sylvia’s chest tightened painfully.

Unconsciously, she exhaled a breath.

It was an extremely light, faint sigh.

So faint she barely noticed it herself.

However.

Behind her, the hand of the maid brushing her silver hair froze for a moment.

This maid was beautiful, personally appointed by Queen Ophelia,

Responsible for Sylvia’s daily care.

But she had another identity — “Emotion Observer.”

Her sole duty was to record and report any emotional fluctuations of the Little Princess every day.

A shift of the eyes.

A twitch at the corner of the mouth.

Or…

A sigh.

Deep in the maid’s eyes, a rune barely perceptible to others dimmed.

She had caught it.

Caught that sigh, and the fleeting loneliness on the Little Princess’s face.

Her hairdressing movements remained perfectly smooth, her posture still deferential.

But her other hand, hidden beneath the wide sleeve of her robe,

Had already touched a nondescript obsidian pendant at her waist.

An invisible magical message was sent across space in an instant.

The intelligence was compressed, concise and precise:

“Little Princess sighing by the window, expression forlorn, suspected homesickness.”

This message was encrypted with the highest-level royal cipher, then split in two.

One part went straight to the deepest part of the Silent Court — the Queen’s Study.

The other shot down into the depths beneath the royal city, to the Blood and Fire interwoven Royal Training Hall.

***

Silent Court, Queen’s Study.

In the room that never saw daylight, cold spirit-fire candles burned quietly.

Queen Ophelia sat upright behind a huge black sandalwood desk.

Before her lay an urgent imperial document concerning whether to impose trade sanctions on the Dwarven Kingdom of the Spine.

This document was enough to affect the empire’s core strategic material reserves for the next hundred years.

Just as she was about to make a ruling with her imperial Dragonbone Imperial Brush in hand,

The space before her rippled.

A wisp of black smoke appeared from nowhere, coalescing into a line of blood-red text in midair.

Ophelia’s gaze fell upon the words.

Her brush froze midair.

Time seemed forcibly halted in that moment.

Light and shadow in the entire study solidified utterly.

Sylvia.

Sigh.

Loneliness.

Homesickness.

These words echoed repeatedly in Ophelia’s pseudo-divine mind.

A subtle yet real displeasure rose on the still surface of her ancient heart.

This feeling was unfamiliar.

Her daughter.

Was unhappy.

Ophelia set down the Dragonbone Imperial Brush lightly.

That imperial document concerning the empire’s century-long strategy

Was casually pushed aside like a scrap of waste paper.

In her eyes, the survival of the Dwarven Kingdom,

And even the future pattern of the entire continent,

Became insignificant at this moment.

***

Royal Training Hall.

An enormous underground space, large enough to host a small-scale war.

At this moment, at the center of the arena, the eldest princess Avira fought barehanded against a giant beast.

It was a Starlight-Grade Magical Beast captured from the Abyssal Rift —

The Hundred-Eyed Ripper.

Its size rivaled a siege tower, its shell grotesque, covered with hundreds of bloodshot eyes spinning wildly.

“Heheh, faster! You’re too slow!”

Avira’s petite figure darted nimbly between the beast’s massive claws and tentacles, a sickly yet delighted smile on her face.

She relished the thrill of dancing on the edge of life and death.

The moment one of the beast’s claws slammed down with a gust of foul wind, a blood-red rune exploded out of nowhere before her eyes.

Avira dodged to the side, her peripheral vision catching the message within the rune.

“Little Princess sighing by the window, expression forlorn, suspected homesickness.”

The smile froze on Avira’s face.

In her crimson eyes, the nervous excitement and frenzy quickly drained away.

Instead, a sharp, offended irritation took its place.

Like someone had dirtied her most beloved, one-of-a-kind doll with filthy mud-covered hands.

Who?

Who made my adorable little sister unhappy?

Was it this dull royal court?

Or those worthless sycophants always wagging their tails?

“Roar—!”

The Hundred-Eyed Ripper seized the moment she was distracted and opened its abyssal maw, snapping ferociously.

Avira didn’t even look back.

She just impatiently threw a punch backward.

A completely ordinary punch.

No fighting energy, no laws, just pure physical strength to the extreme.

***

The next second.

The giant head of the Starlight-Grade Magical Beast exploded into a cloud of blood mist the instant it met her slender pink fist.

The huge headless corpse crashed to the ground, raising a cloud of dust.

Avira shook her hand as if swatting away a buzzing fly.

Without glancing at the still twitching body, she turned and strode out of the Training Hall.

Only one thought remained in her mind.

Sylvia is unhappy.

I will make her happy.

In my own way.