Chapter 1324 - New Dream (1/2)

Translator: Henyee Translations  Editor: Henyee Translations

When Scroll climbed up the stairs to the third floor of the castle with a thick stack of paper in her arms, she met the yawning Nightingale, who was just preparing to leave, in front of the office.

“You haven’t slept yet?” Nightingale stopped and raised her eyebrows in surprise.

“It might be because I’m getting old, I’ve been finding it hard to sleep recently.” Scroll smiled and shook her head. “Where’s His Majesty? Has he already slept?”

“Yeah, he returned to his bedchamber half an hour earlier.”

“Then why are you still staying in the office?” Scroll put her hand to her mouth. “You weren’t secretly eating His Majesty’s snacks, were you?”

“Eh… haha.” Nightingale was stunned for a moment before coughing. “Yeah I was, I ate his spicy shredded beef and drank a bit of his Chaos Drink. Don’t tell His Majesty, alright?”

Now it was Scroll’s turn to be shocked.

What happened to her… why was she being so quick to admit? In the past, as long as she was not caught red handed, Nightingale would never have admitted to stealing food.

But thinking of how she and Wendy often stole Nightingale’s drinks as well, Scroll was momentarily at a loss for a reply.

“Um, I’m going to sleep now…” Nightingale avoided her eyes and walked towards the second floor. “Don’t stay up too late, I heard from Roland that the older you are ,the worse the side-effects are from lacking sleep.” She looked up from the bottom of the stairs. “Goodnight.”

“…Goodnight.” Scroll replied, feeling a little confused. Then, she turned around and walked into the office.

Even though the flames in the fireplace had already been extinguished, its warmth still lingered. There seemed been in there for quite a while.

Without thinking any further, Scroll familiarly opened the book cabinet and placed the data that was in her hands into the categorized columns on the shelf before taking out the information that needed His Majesty’s answers.

It held lines and lines of extremely lengthy equations; she could tell from the handwriting that some portions were written by Roland, and others were written by Anna and Celine. One of her daily jobs was to deliver information like this to the Arithmetic Academy and get that group of astrologers to calculate the answer. Then she would hand it over to the central carrier to compare the answers.

From the written descriptions within the information, the information was probably related to His Majesty’s new experiment. But what she couldn’t get her head around was how one could derive the dimensions of an apparatus that no one had ever seen before—or even imagined, just by doing calculations on a piece of paper. It was as if what was written on the paper were not numbers, but sketches of reality. This, in her eyes, was no different to predicting the future.

Scroll couldn’t help but be amazed whenever she saw Anna’s graceful handwriting. Anna was born in Border Town as a simple girl; yet, she had now reached a level that she and the others could no longer understand. Even when everyone sat in this office watching His Majesty do those interesting science experiments in the beginning, any one of them could make a meaningful comment or two. But now, the only person that could follow His Majesty closely at his side was Anna.

But she didn’t feel sad at all; in fact, she felt full of pride.

—Because that was her sister.

Scroll sat in front of Roland’s desk and opened the folder of data, planning to memorize everything like usual. This way, if there were omissions in calculations when she distributed them, she would be able to catch them in time.

However this time, she noticed something strange.

“Are… my eyes going bad?”

Scroll rubbed her eyes and spotted vague strings of characters floating below some of the equations, as if they were the corresponding answers.

It wouldn’t have been odd if she had been reading test papers or permanent residency files. Ever since she discovered the way to do rapid search, she would usually be able to derive where the information came from and think up all content related to it just from looking at a file once.

The problem was that it was her first time seeing this folder of information.

Not only was she unable to understand the meanings of those calculations and equations, even the ‘answers’ floating below them baffled her.

Also, the strange symbols didn’t follow every row of equations, most of the columns were still completely blank.

If she stared at the hazy, illusory symbols for too long she would even feel waves of dizziness.

It appeared as though Nightingale was right—sleep deprivation was indeed taking a toll on her. Scroll sighed softly. Alas, she hadn’t been feeling sleepy at all recently; it was as if her brain was working at high speeds all the time.