Later in the evening, I ended up skipping dinner.

  A lot of things had happened, and to put it pinly, I didn't really feel like I had an appetite.

  After cleaning up in the area around the botanical garden, no one that I encountered seemed to think there was anything out of the ordinary. Nene, who I found outside of the Royal Apothecary, was in a cheerful and dreamy mood, and I caught her daydreaming while standing outside of her station. When I asked her if her day had been busy, she told me that there hadn't been any requests for potions from the infirmary.

  I even saw Aisha and Sienna — the big-breasted beauties who were always with Nelle (the maid who had taken over my job) — whispering and giggling like a bunch of school girls as they strolled through the corridor.

  'Did you see how the Emerald Prince held the door open for El this afternoon? He's so sweet and affectionate... nothing like the nobles from our world. Do you think he'll actually take her to bed tonight?'

  Of course, they went completely silent like crickets when we passed each other in the hallway.

  From their perspective, I was probably something like a disgraced viliness who had been demoted from her position as the crown prince's fiancée. Moreover, their best friend had taken over my spot, so it was natural to think there would be tensions between us. Even though we were just low-ranking maids, there could be a lot of drama and infighting behind-the-scenes when it came to choosing the guests that we served. In fact, many of us could get especially possessive and explosive when our client was "stolen" by a different maid, and the popcorn-eating spectators in our community were probably all waiting for my inevitable confrontation with Miss Nelle.

  However, I didn't say anything as they watched me walk by.

  I wasn't really in a mood to chat.

  If anything, it sounded like Kang Jiesu was still with in the group with the rest of my cssmates, and it was enough for me to know that he hadn't been stabbed.

  As far as I could tell, the future had changed entirely, and this might as well have been an alternate reality.

  + + +

  As I flopped on my bed in the servant’s dormitory, I honestly still didn't have a very good understanding of what had happened.

  It was hard to believe that everything was so normal.

  In fact, the total normalcy of everyone around me made me doubt if my memories were even correct in the first pce.

  For example, what if it had all been an illusion? After all, I could have inhaled some odorless chemicals in the royal garden that caused me to hallucinate something that was completely irrational and nonsensical. From my (Hana's) memories, there were plenty of exotic pnts in this universe that could be used to make potions, so it wasn't completely impusible that I might have accidentally touched some kind of pnt that caused me to go crazy for an hour.

  I didn't really know anything about herbalism, but a simple expnation like this was probably the closest to Occam's razor.

  Otherwise, I didn't have a good expnation for how Kang Jiesu had ended up in the closet, or why anyone might have wanted to stab him. It was a crime without an obvious motive, and I was too attached to the doctrine of rationality to concede that it was pure randomness, divine intervention, or magical whimsicality.

  If we assumed that my experience was real, then my best guess was:

  — Kang Jiesu teleported into the closet.

  — He got stabbed after making someone extremely angry.

  — Somehow, he ended up in possession of 「Excalibur」.

  But a lot of this still didn't line up, and the sequence of events wasn't clear.

  For example, there were contradictions; if Kang Jiesu had an unbeatable "wish-granting" sword before he got stabbed, it should stand to reason that he wouldn't have been stabbed in the first pce? Or if we considered the alternative sequence, he surely would have simply just healed himself if he obtained the sword after he got stabbed?

  It made absolutely zero sense.

  In either case, I couldn't see a retionship between my cssmate, the attacker, the sword, the closet, and the wound.

  + + +

  I rolled over in bed and stared bnkly at the ceiling.

  Considering Aisha and Senna's comments about the "Emerald Prince's" totally ordinary behavior this afternoon, it seemed safe to assume that Kang Jiesu hadn't retained any memories from that other reality when he got murdered.

  I was gd for him — after all, anyone would be traumatized if they could remember dying like that.

  I didn't want my ex-childhood friend to suffer from that kind of mental damage.

  ...But at the same time, I felt incredibly isoted and alone.

  Was I the only person who was going have those mentally scarring memories forever?

  It really made me wonder if this was going to make me all strange and twisted in the head.

  + + +

  After a procrastinating and wallowing in existential self-pity for an unnecessarily long time, I eventually gathered the motivation to do something productive.

  I sat up in bed and began to browse through the collection of documents that I had fished out of the pond.

  The stack of paper had already dried at this point, although they were crinkled and distorted in the way that paper often warped after they got wet. Unfortunately, most of it was basically illegible in this current state.

  All of the the parchment was torn in half, and the pages were all out of order. It was essentially a jigsaw puzzle that needed to be reassembled, and I had a feeling I was missing some pieces after I id them all out. Apart from this, there was an even more damning issue — the water had smudged the ink to point that everything looked like blurred text. I could probably make out a sentence or two if I stared at the irregur blobs on the page for long enough... but it was essentially like interpreting hieroglyphics.

  I probably spent close to half an hour sorting through the documents.

  I mostly skimmed, trying to see if I could there were any keywords or phrases that were still legible.

  It was an extremely tedious activity, but did manage to pick up one or two small details that I thought would be useful for my family. For example, I couldn't spot the name of my hometown, and didn't (?) seem like my family's vilge was directly affected by the camities that the Prime Minister had mentioned.

  Of course, I couldn't be a 100% sure, but the absence of news was probably good news......

  + + +

  Eventually, I heard some voices shuffling through the common area of our dormitory, so I quickly rushed to collect the paper that were strewn all over my bed. It would be bad if anyone found out that I had all these confidential documents.

  The walls in the maidservant's quarters were extremely thin. There were six beds to a room, and ten rooms per dormitory block conjoined by by a long narrow hallway and a small common area. Needless to say, there was very little privacy in this kind of environment, and it was often possible to hear conversations straight through the walls.

  If you didn't want to be heard, you either had to whisper or be totally silent.

  Visitors were forbidden — although there was always a few times a year when someone would bring a "guest" in the middle of the day when they thought no one else would be around. Needless to say, if you happened to be in your room, you could hear them doing certain things very loudly.

  I wasn't so prudish to judge people for their natural biological behavior, especially since there weren't many pces in the Royal Pace where a young hormonal maid might be able find any privacy, but it did get very noisy whenever that kind of thing happened in front of me.

  I tended to value my privacy a lot in general.

  The footsteps outside grew louder as they approached my room.

  ?