This question was not only lethal and sensitive, but it was also the most important point of all.
Why would Alberic ask her this?
How could she know that Silbel would become a Saintess? How could she know that fact and use it to suspect her? And just what was Alberic’s true identity?
These were the thoughts that flashed through Dolores’s mind the moment she heard the question. She desperately wanted to judge the situation by reading the expression on the other girl’s face.
However, Alberic, who had arrived six months earlier than Dolores, was far more mature in both her experiences and her expression management. Dolores could only bitingly withdraw her gaze and ask in return:
“How did you know?”
She did not deny it. From the moment Alberic started the question with “How did you know,” she had, to some extent, already confirmed her own situation.
The most critical factor was the mention of the “Saintess.” Silbel becoming a Saintess was not something pushed by any strange, hidden factions; it was a completely accidental moment and a divinely ordained miracle.
According to her memories, Silbel’s status as a Saintess was that of “The One Who Returns to Faith.” This was something only she, Xiao Huayu, and the gods in the heavens knew.
Of course, that was irrelevant to the current situation. Generally speaking, to know that Silbel would become a Saintess in such a short amount of time…
Aside from a Reincarnator like Grimm or a Transmigrator who had seen the plot like Dolores, only powerful experts with special abilities related to fate or time would know.
There was one other possibility: the other capture characters. However, they wouldn’t start regaining their memories of their past lives for at least another four or five years.
The game wouldn’t be designed for them to remember the protagonist too early; otherwise, much of the subsequent plot wouldn’t be able to unfold.
If the late-game bosses blocked the Newbie Village directly, how would anyone play the game?
During the conversation between Dolores and Alberic, only Veserian remained excluded, frozen in a state of shock.
It wasn’t that Dolores didn’t want to send her away, but for one, she lacked any martial prowess herself. Veserian was her physical guarantee of safety.
Secondly, given her current circumstances, she had to take Veserian with her no matter what she did. There were many things and many goals she wanted to achieve that she simply couldn’t hide from her.
Her best option was to bet on the fact that Veserian was on her side. It was a rather helpless compromise.
Alberic merely glanced at Veserian before answering Dolores’s question.
“I’ve had intermittent dreams. In those dreams, I saw myself with Grimm, and I saw many people and events. Among them, I clearly remember seeing Silbel, who was already a Saintess.”
“I followed the scenes in my memories to Ulgrich. I followed the trail of those dreams to find Grimm because I held a certain doubt in my heart.”
“What kind of magic or charm did the Grimm in my dreams possess? Or rather, what was it about him that I liked so much that I would dream of being with him?”
“Sometimes I thought it was absurd to confuse dreams with reality and travel thousands of miles from Vath because of them. But surprisingly, I really did meet the Mr. Grimm from my dreams here, and I saw — and witnessed — Silbel becoming a Saintess.”
“But Your Highness does not need to worry. I have no intention of liking Mr. Grimm. Perhaps he will do something to make my heart flutter in the future, but once I knew of it in advance, I could never bring myself to like him again.”
“I have always loathed the flow of prophecy and fate… Coming all this way was originally meant to disprove them, but I didn’t expect to instead verify the reality of those fragmented dreams.”
Alberic said quite a lot in one breath, not being stingy with this information at all. After all, she had just made it all up.
She had never fallen in love with Grimm, nor was she a capture character from a previous life. However, relying on her knowledge of the plot to spin a lie that was difficult to poke holes in was quite easy.
In this regard, she was exactly like Grimm. He had also spun a tale when he met Felz IV. When it came to fabricating stories, it was enough as long as the listener believed them.
And for Dolores, this was enough to make her believe.
Alberic assumed Dolores was a Reincarnator, so she framed her fabricated story around dreams. If the other party had remembered the past due to some accident, it would likely follow the process Alberic described.
If Dolores remembered more and noticed something was off, Alberic could apply a “patch” to her story at any time using her familiarity with the plot.
Dolores’s knowledge of the plot spanned Grimm’s past life, but Alberic herself was the creator. Thus, they were on equal footing; both could cook up a story and weave a lie.
There was no problem with this, and Alberic had already considered the risks. Everything was planned.
She wasn’t worried about Dolores falling for Grimm and exposing their conversation to him once her affection reached its maximum. In fact, that would suit Alberic’s plans perfectly.
That way, the suspicious points surrounding her would be explained to Grimm through Dolores’s mouth. As for the fact that Grimm would truly remember having no past with Alberic, she could explain it away with various strange curses or ancient ruins.
‘Ah, we were once bound by fate; have you forgotten?’
Alberic was all too familiar with such tropes.
At the same time, Alberic needed to gain a deeper level of trust from Dolores. At the very least, she had to figure out if this situation of remembering the past early was an isolated case or a general rule.
If it were a general rule, it would be bad if she missed a detail and got caught when she contacted other characters in the future.
Some characters, especially the extreme ones, could cost her half her life if she wasn’t careful.
Back on Dolores’s side, her mental activity was also quite rich.
She was surprised by Alberic’s identity and her honesty. She hadn’t believed Grimm’s words in the palace about dreams because she fully understood that part of the plot, but her trust in Alberic’s partial explanation was very high.
Dolores didn’t know that Alberic was Xiao Huayu. The latter had started from the desired result and synthesized the information on hand to begin the fabrication process, so it was logical.
Dolores used the information she had to verify Alberic’s words. At a glance, did they match?
Yes, they matched perfectly.
Alberic was beautiful and cute, and most importantly, she wasn’t very tall, which fit the characteristics of a capture character.
It was possible for capture characters to recall the past.
In this bizarre, otherworldly realm, memories taking the form of dreams was both intuitive and consistent with Xiao Huayu’s mystical design philosophy.
Xiao Huayu loved adding a ton of dream elements to the novels she wrote, likely from playing too many surreal games.
In short, there were no flaws in Dolores’s eyes. It was too real; it couldn’t be any more real.
Aside from thinking that Alberic was a genuine Reincarnator, she couldn’t possibly think Alberic was also a Transmigrator, could she? And a Transmigrator who just happened to know the plot of this world?
The game she and Xiao Huayu made hadn’t even been released. Even if Xiao Huayu finished and released it herself later, and someone happened to play it and transmigrate, they should have arrived after her.
This Alberic looked like a local through and through. From Dolores’s observation, this dormitory really had the atmosphere of someone living there, rather than a temporary stage set up for a confrontation.
This showed that Alberic was truly and earnestly studying at the university.
For some reason, Dolores felt a sense of familiarity with Alberic, as if they were old friends meeting again.
It felt like she had returned to the time before she transmigrated, chatting with a brother on a coastal summer night.
The reason for this was that she finally had someone she could talk to about Grimm and the so-called “past life.”
It allowed her to relax her tightly wound heartstrings just a little.
But now, she was faced with the same problem Alberic had just dealt with.
Alberic was done making up her story.
Now it was Dolores’s turn. How she could spin a tale that was both reasonable and convincing was something that required thought; it was a technical skill.
Fortunately, Alberic gave her some time to think. It wasn’t that Alberic wanted to, but seeing Dolores lost in thought for so long, Alberic was beginning to feel uneasy.
She wondered if there was a flaw in her story that the other girl had noticed.
‘That shouldn’t be the case. My lie should be flawless.’
After thinking for about five minutes, during which Dolores closed her eyes to control her expression, she began with a classic opening:
“I remember that I also had a dream…”