"...Couldn't there be a third choice? Like giving it to someone else...?" I answered hesitantly.

  Stel smiled again, and practically everyone else at the table sighed.

  It was such a stereotypical "Hana-like" response that it was extremely tiresome. Hanamarie Stiria was the type of person who avoided making commitments as much as possible. She was so reluctant to hurt anyone, that she found every excuse to not take sides whenever her friends got in a fight. Her constant fence-sitting could get extremely aggravating to her friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.

  To use an analogy to illustrate Hana's thought process, a piece of pie should be split evenly between a group of people, but if it couldn't be divided fairly (e.g. one horse and seven riders), then nobody should ride the horse at all. In fact, you might as well eat the horse or sell it for money.

  Lilian rubbed her eyes in exasperation.

  "Now that think I about it, I still can't get over that time when Hana suggested that we all cook and eat the horse..."

  "Oh... I almost forgot about that incident..." Francesca mused.

  "The horse didn't do anything wrong..." Nene pouted.

  "What happened with the horse incident?" Mari asked, clearly out-of-the-loop.

  "We were traveling and the carriage axle broke." Lisa answered succinctly.

  As if on cue, Stel suddenly cpped her hands and stood up at the table.

  This interrupted the lively conversation at the table that had spun apart like a ball of yarn. In reality, there were multiple conversations ongoing simultaneously in our corner of the cafeteria, which was to be expected given the size of our group. At a certain point, the conversations had fragmented into pairs or smaller clusters, and everyone gravitated to their closest neighbors.

  She pointed at the clock at the wall.

  "Break time is over," Stel announced.

  + + +

  I walked together with Lisa as we left the staff cafeteria.

  My friend hummed cheerfully as she took care to intentionally step on only the cracks of the tiled marble floor, as if she were a gymnast walking on a bance beam. At this point, we had separated from most of the others, and we had escaped the crowd of nosy spectators whose primary form of entertainment was eavesdropping on gossip.

  It was true that the pace lifestyle quickly grew dull if all you did was mindlessly clean and sweep. For most maids, rumors and hearsay gave a rush of pleasant endorphins. It was a fascinating, curious, and intellectually stimuting past-time.

  "I guess you won't be joining us in the afternoon," Lisa suddenly remarked.

  She was definitely referring to the fact that I hadn't accompanied Kang Jiesu to the Otherworlders' morning activities, and the irregurity had been noticed. Any maid could easily infer that something had happened between the Emerald Prince (Kang Jiesu) and me, although nobody knew the exact details. As a matter of fact, earlier there were multiple eyes in the cafeteria who kept sneaking gnces at me from across the room, and there were probably a lot of people who were dying to get a juicy trace of the spilled tea.

  At least, my very presence at lunch should have confirmed that I hadn't been fired by management.

  I looked down at the ground.

  "The Majordomo decided I wasn't suitable for the Emerald Prince," I expined to Lisa with some cursory brevity.

  "Nothing happened at all?" She asked.

  I paused for a moment to think.

  Earlier, I had lied hinted to my manager that Kang Jiesu was fond of women with bountiful bosoms, so it was probably wise to stick with my story. Even though Lisa was a very close friend, disclosing the full details of what had happened to me in the past twenty-four hours (note: Zhang Guiyu appeared in my brain and our personalities fused) seemed incredibly risky, and the benefits of sharing this secret definitely did not outweigh the risks.

  "No. Not really," I lied. "The Emerald Prince saw Nelle and a few others in the hallway, and he just seemed to like them better."

  There wasn't really anything strange about a noble having personal preferences for servants.

  In fact, it was very common for aristocratic visitors to request a particur type of maid or stable boy. This type of occurrence happened all of the time, and it truly was not a very big deal if one's body type did not match the visitor's tastes. You couldn't bme someone for being too short or too tall; if anything, it was ordinarily the management's responsibility to assemble the appropriate menu for the occasion.

  "Hmm..."

  There was a trace of skepticism in Lisa's eyes.

  "Well," she responded cryptically. "If that's what you say, it must be true."

  We both went quiet and continued walking.

  At the very back of my mind, I wondered if Lisa could tell that something was subtly amiss with my behavior.

  + + +

  "Why did you choose the Empress?" I asked Lisa.

  I was genuinely rather curious about how she had picked Hong Baiye. Most observers probably assumed it was because Lisa was stunningly beautiful, and there is a famous Galuterican proverb that: 'tragedy awaits the most beautiful flower.' The brief expnation of this adage is that beauty is far more of a curse than a boom. A pretty rose gets cut at the stem, and likewise a beautiful woman is coveted by the rich, wealthy, and powerful. The person herself is tossed around helplessly in the wind, trampled by the fingers of fat old merchants, and it's rather unlikely that she finds a happy ending.

  From this perspective, it would make a lot of sense for someone like Lisa Luslilia to choose a female mistress. First of all, there was a lower probability that a woman would demand sexual favors from another woman. Second, one could expect a mistress to defend her own staff from any creepy and grubby lechers.

  However, this kind of prudish mentality had its traps, and it was considered retively childish. Honestly, a young and immature fifteen year old maid like Nene was more likely to have this kind innocent thinking. Although a female mistress was certainly more comfortable in the short-term, it was difficult to say if there was any degree of job security or a reliable future. Once a noblewoman is married, she moves to her husband's estate, and most of her servants apart from a handful of her favorites are left behind (note: typically id off). Moreover, suddenly the maid is in the jurisdiction of a man's household again. For an especially beautiful maid, tragedy strikes once the husband covets the wife's servant, and the ultimate finale is a Shakespearean tragedy in the fashion of a jealous wife with a special vendetta who raises her dagger against her former maid.

  In that kind of situation, it was arguably better to have become a nobleman's mistress from the very start.

  There was a popur saying among the female servants of the Royal Pace that 'maids are disposable, but a heir is permanent.' The most definite way to guarantee a maidservant's future is birthing a child for an aristocrat. This kind of Machiavellian mentality towards sex might seem rather crude and disagreeable from Guiyu's perspective, but it was a battle-tested and well-proven avenue of css mobility.

  Lisa wasn't at all naive.

  I knew my friend well enough to understand that each her actions were intentional and carefully thought out.

  + + +

  "I think she is very simir to me," Lisa responded, rather anti-climatically.

  "Simir? You? With her? Really?" I remarked incredulously.

  "You don't think so?" Lisa smiled.

  "Well..."

  I remembered at this point that I wasn't supposed to know anything about Hong Baiye, and I became speechless.

  "Hana, you were probably curious about why Stel chose the Moonlight Prince, am I right?"

  ...

  ...Wait a minute. Didn't Lisa seem know what I was thinking a little too well? I always felt like we were close friends, but not that close. It made me feel terribly self-conscious to think that she was so close to reading my mind.

  "...You're... not wrong," I admitted.

  "You just seem to really dislike the Otherworlders for some mysterious and unfathomable reason," Lisa remarked.

  "...I have a really bad feeling about them."

  "It's rare for you to have such a strong gut feeling like that, Hana."

  "...I don't really understand the reason either," I said ambiguously.

  Lisa looked away momentarily.

  After hesitating for a moment, she spoke again.

  "You'll have to ask Stel herself if you want to know her reasons, but I think she picked the Moonlight Prince (Lu Liwang) very intentionally. When we were all choosing pairs yesterday, nothing was a coincidence. I'm fairly certain she had been watching him from the beginning."

  "The beginning?"

  "As soon as the Otherworlders arrived in the summoning circle."

  "I don't think I get it, Lisa. What's so interesting about the Moonlight Prince? He's just a slightly unattractive guy."

  My friend sighed.

  "There are twelve of them," she reminded me. "Even if we don't speak the same nguage, you can see a lot from observing how they interact with each other, especially when they don't think we're watching."

  Well of course — I had been watching the entire time too, but it wasn't like my cssmates did anything unusual or extraordinary.

  "The Moonlight Prince seems to be the runt of the group, like a little bullied mouse who wants to hide inside a den of tigers."

  "Oh..." I muttered in realization. "So that's what you mean..."

  "Stel wanted that."

  "I see..."

  I looked outside of the window while ambivalent feelings began to simmer inside my heart.

  It made total sense that an outsider's perspective could point out things that I had overlooked about the retionship dynamics of my cssmates. Zhang Guiyu had grown up with the same group of people ever since Kindergarten, and it was natural to develop certain habits, prejudices, and feelings about the people you interacted with every day. Lu Liwang had essentially been bullied by the entire school for the past six years, but it had been happening for so long that everyone considered it to be totally normal.

  Thinking about it from Hana's perspective, it was probably a little bit of a sad situation.

  "Also. Hana." Lisa spoke up again.

  I turned back to face her.

  "I don't think your conclusion that Emerald Prince has a preference for other maids is correct."

  "......?"

  "I think that man — the Emerald Prince — he was almost certainly watching you from the very beginning."

  ?