In the three days Bellus had spent at the estate, she had been embarrassingly comfortable.

She would think, this is no time to be doing this, and then stop. It was because the things Lora, small as she was but surprisingly quick on her feet, kept placing before her were simply too appealing.

Bellus was willingly accepting everything she had never experienced in her life up to now.

The rear garden of the estate had far more to see than just the plum tree, and on one day she quietly ran her hand through the green grass, and on another she lay down on a blanket spread over the lawn and stared blankly up at the wide sky.

On top of that, she had just made a new discovery about herself: that she, who had never taken much interest in food in all her twenty-five years, had a helpless weakness for sweets.

On the first day she woke here, she had simply reached out without thinking for the round, fluffy thing brought out alongside the red tea at the end of the meal.

‘The feeling that gave me…’

Not knowing the taste had been fine. But once she knew it, she found she simply could not hold back any longer.

The bastard who had brought her here would come back on his own sooner or later, so why not enjoy herself a little longer. With that mindset settled, it was easy to let go of the urgency.

Because of Bellus, who sat with a languidly softened expression and obediently nibbled away at whatever was brought to her, the estate was in absolute uproar.

The household staff, having never seen Bellus’s murderous eyes to begin with, had no idea to be afraid and were each taking turns peeking into the drawing room, clamoring to catch even one glimpse of her like that.

Well, ignorance was bliss.

Lora shook her head, watching Bellus purring contentedly like a well-tamed house cat, wondering where all that killing intent from before had gone.

She had just barely managed to calm down the head chef, who had been making a fuss about how he, a master of desserts, had finally been given a chance to show what he was made of and was begging to at least be allowed to see her face.

It all felt rather pointless now, given that every word of caution she had tried to give had come to nothing, and Lora let out a helpless sigh.

Eyes that had been entirely fixed on the dessert rolled slowly toward Lora at that faint sigh. Lora shrugged at the black eyes that seemed to be asking “what?”

“Here, I brought today’s newspaper. Does today’s dessert suit your taste? I heard Chef Doni put quite a lot of care into it.”

“Yes. It’s delicious.”

The reply, concise and direct in a way that reflected its owner’s nature, was delivered in a cool voice and was nothing short of chilling.

And this was precisely the voice that made Lora work tirelessly to handle all the household staff herself, so that the guest would not be made uncomfortable.

It was only natural that Lora, who had spent the most time closest to Bellus among everyone in the estate, was the first to see through to her true nature.

Despite her rather endearing and composed appearance, this young woman was genuinely cold, and emotionless. The mineral-flat eyes that turned toward her from time to time were enough to draw a faint cold sweat down her spine.

And yet, even so, the reason Lora’s gaze softened whenever she looked at Bellus was this:

‘She’s strangely, oddly cute…’

This woman, whose attention was so easily stolen by the sunlight rippling through the drawing room window, gave Lora the feeling that she might be someone quite unaccustomed to expressing her own emotions.

Rustle, rustle.

With no way of knowing what Lora standing beside her was thinking, Bellus simply fluttered her dense lashes and read the newspaper in her hands with full attention.

* * *

In the three days she had spent here, Bellus had not simply been idling.

It was this newspaper that Lora had brought when Bellus said she wanted to know more about this place. The out-of-nowhere request had apparently led Lora to conclude that Bellus was not from Atlan, the capital. She had proceeded to rattle off Atlan’s tourist attractions with a pleasant smile.

The newspaper she received covered various issues and incidents from across Attica, and Bellus had no difficulty confirming that this was not the Attica she had lived in, but Attica of fifty years ago, the year 1341.

‘The war hasn’t happened yet.’

All of this overflowing nature had truly existed.

Until that terrible war began.

Bellus had been scanning the newspaper for a while when her black eyes caught the word “Genius” printed large in a headline and paused. The article covered gossip about the Geniuses. Her hand, turning the pages with disinterested ease, stilled as a memory from the past surfaced without warning.

‘Genius…’

A word that had a great deal to do with her, to say the least.

Around the time Bellus was ten years old, the area of the Kinji district where she lived was caught in the crossfire between government forces and rebel forces and reduced to rubble.

The Kinji district was a rural area quite far from Atlan, the capital, where grinding poverty was the only real problem, making it one of the more livable places even in the midst of war.

But then, that day.

Bellus lost her parents to an indiscriminate mana shell fired by the rebel forces.

It was the moment an Impar girl, sheltered within the sturdy walls of a family, fell to become an ordinary war orphan. Her memory ended and was erased like a cut thread, the last things she held being the crumbling building and the warmth of her parents wrapped around her, and when she came to herself, she was in a government-run orphanage.

An Impar with almost no mana was of no use to the government.

Yet they did not cast Bellus out, and they fed and clothed her, if not lavishly. And in the year she turned fifteen, Bellus became a re-awakened, breaking through the exceptional odds of one in ten million.

Standing beneath the Dimensio Dome again, Bellus prayed.

If there was a god, please grant her an abundance of mana. Give her the strength to cut down the goddamn rebels who had buried her parents alive under the rubble of a crumbling building.

Let her give her life for Attica.

Perhaps someone had finally heard that desperate cry.

That day, Bellus became a Genius.

With an immense reserve of mana, known by the name “the spring that never runs dry.”

Bellus lowered her eyes, shaking off the unpleasant feeling of being pulled under by a memory that had swallowed her without warning.

It was a habit of hers. Whenever something stirred in her chest beyond her control, this was how she pressed it down and hid it.

Feeling her heartbeat gradually slow, Bellus set the newspaper aside and reached for a dessert. She had eaten one earlier and found it so good that she had been holding herself back from the next one ever since.

She already knew there was no one but herself to eat the mountain of them piled before her, and yet she couldn’t help feeling a reluctance to watch them disappear into her mouth one by one.

Deciding she had savored the anticipation long enough, Bellus parted her red lips to take a bite of the dessert.

Clunk―

“Have you been well, Lora?”

“Lord Yantis!”

Lora’s voice bounced with delight for the first time in a while, accompanying a warm baritone. Lora startled in surprise at Yantis’s unannounced arrival, and behind her, the face of that impeccably put-together man appeared in the doorway of the drawing room. Bellus’s brow, which had been nothing but placid, crumpled sharply at the sight of him.

* * *

With Yantis’s return, every ear in the estate was turned toward his study.

The estate’s master, who seemed to be in notably good spirits, and the woman who had begun radiating a dark and ominous air, as though all her docility of the past few days had been a delusion, were now together behind the firmly closed study door.

Everyone was on edge, and only William, who had traveled with Yantis and had no sense of the murmuring atmosphere that had built up in the estate, was tilting his head in puzzlement.

Click―

The soft sound of the door closing was followed by heavy silence filling the study, as though it were only natural.

Yantis, seated across from her on the guest sofa, was choosing his words when it happened.

“Where is my revolver?”

One of Yantis’s eyebrows twitched at the unexpected question. He had been anticipating something along the lines of where he had gone after leaving her here, or what he intended to do with her. Or perhaps his identity, or something of that nature.

The eyes fixed on him were fierce enough that Yantis stood without a word.

He was someone who had spent a long time on the battlefield, and he knew well how to handle soldiers.

Yantis retrieved Bellus’s revolver from the inner drawer of his desk, settled himself on the edge of the desk, and lifted the revolver in one hand as he spoke with his usual ease.

“This, you mean?”

The revolver wrapped in the man’s elegant fingers looked, at a glance, almost picturesquely fitting, its roughness offset entirely.

One hand tucked carelessly into his trouser pocket, leaning at an angle on the edge of the desk, the man looked excessively good, in the way of someone who seemed to bestow beauty upon whatever he held in his hands.

Taking in those violet eyes, striking even with their faint air of melancholy, Bellus twisted her lips in irritation.

The fact that his looks struck her as particularly insufferable today was not only because he had interrupted the moment she had been about to savor her long-awaited dessert.