Chapter 42: The Rumor Has Already Spread

Zeldryn was still staring at the blood staining his palm when his gaze eventually shifted toward the bed. The food Hera had brought earlier was still sitting there untouched. Between thinking about mana, Kera, the invitation letter, and his own experiment, he had been too occupied to eat any of it.

He walked over and examined the tray. There was chicken, several kinds of vegetables, and a few other side dishes, with a surprisingly generous amount of chicken among them.

'That's quite a lot.'

Still, the portion was reasonable enough for one person, unlike the meals he had previously seen in the dining room. Those had been so excessive that they looked as though they were meant to feed several people at once.

'This is still normal, at least.'

Zeldryn picked up the tray and carried it to the table, moving some of his notes aside to make room before sitting down and beginning to eat. He started with the chicken, then tried the vegetables and the other dishes, eating with considerably more enthusiasm than he expected.

His body might have been healed by Kera, but hunger was still hunger.

After several bites, however, Zeldryn noticed the same problem he had experienced with the food in this world before.

'Hmm...'

He slowly chewed the chicken in his mouth. It was not bland, and there was clearly some seasoning on it, but he could not exactly call it savory either. Something seemed to be missing, although he found it difficult to explain exactly what.

Zeldryn had spent far too many years eating modern food filled with countless spices, seasonings, and flavor enhancers. Now, whenever he ate food in this world, his tongue seemed to notice the absence of things he had once taken for granted.

He tried some of the vegetables next. They looked fresh and their texture was not bad, but the taste still left him dissatisfied.

'Why doesn't it taste that good?'

Zeldryn himself did not know. Perhaps the food was not bad at all, and Reka's tongue had simply been spoiled by modern food.

Even so, he continued eating. He had no intention of becoming picky simply because the taste did not suit him, especially when the body he currently occupied was only twelve years old and still growing. Even if all its wounds and bruises had already been healed, it still needed enough food for proper bone growth and physical development.

'I don't want this body ending up malnourished either.'

Zeldryn continued eating until he had finished as much as he could. Once he was full, he leaned back slightly in his chair and let out a satisfied breath.

“Phew...”

A short while later, Zeldryn stood and automatically began gathering the dirty plates onto the tray. His first instinct was to carry everything to the kitchen himself, but after taking only a few steps, he stopped.

“...Wait.”

He looked down at the plates in his hands, then toward the door before glancing back at them.

'Wouldn't it be weird if I carried my own dirty plates to the kitchen?'

He was supposed to be a young noble lord, and there were plenty of servants living and working throughout the mansion. Normally, the servants would obviously be the ones responsible for collecting the tableware once he finished eating.

The problem was that Zeldryn had no idea who would actually come inside.

The old Zeldryn had established far too many strange rules regarding his room, to the point that the servants were accustomed to waiting for permission before approaching or entering it.

Zeldryn sighed. “What a pain.”

In the end, he still carried the tray toward the door, although he had no intention of taking it all the way to the kitchen. He opened the door, stepped into the corridor, then bent down and placed the tray and dirty plates beside the entrance to his room.

'At least if a servant passes by, they'll probably take them later.'

With that dealt with, Zeldryn straightened and turned his attention to something far more important.

Finding Kera.

'Time to find that bastard.'

He began walking through the corridor on the mansion's second floor, but after only a few steps, his pace gradually slowed until he finally stopped. Zeldryn stared down the long corridor ahead before looking in one direction and then the other.

'I do want to meet him, but... where the hell is he?'

Kera had never told him where he would be staying. The man had only mentioned that he intended to remain in the mansion, then left the room and slammed the door behind him.

That had been it.

No room number, no explanation of what part of the mansion he intended to use, and no other useful information. Kera had only said that he would give Zeldryn a gift because he had managed to become a Level 1 Manholer candidate.

“ARRRGHH!”

Zeldryn ruffled his hair in frustration. “That damn bastard.”

Even when Kera was nowhere nearby, the man somehow still managed to make Zeldryn's life more troublesome.

Since blindly searching the mansion for Kera would probably take far too long, Zeldryn changed his objective. He would find Hera first. She might know something about Kera, or at least know which room had been assigned to him.

Zeldryn started walking again and slowly made his way through the mansion's corridors. Along the way, he encountered several servants, and his attention naturally shifted toward them.

After everything involving Henry and Aeglo had finally been resolved, Zeldryn had hoped the atmosphere within the mansion would gradually begin to improve. He did not expect every servant to suddenly respect him, since that would have been unrealistic after the reputation the old Zeldryn had built over several years. There was no way something like that could disappear within one or two days.

Still, he had hoped their opinion of him might improve slightly. Even that would have been enough.

Several servants approaching from the opposite direction noticed Zeldryn and immediately lowered their heads.

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“G-good morning, Lord Zeldryn,” one servant greeted him.

“G-good morning, Lord,” another quickly followed.

Zeldryn was about to walk past them as usual when something about their expressions caught his attention. He glanced at their faces more carefully.

'Huh? What the hell is this?'

They were greeting him politely, and their words sounded no different from before, but the way they were looking at him had changed.

Previously, whenever the servants saw Zeldryn, their expressions had been dominated by fear. They lowered their heads because they wanted to avoid causing trouble, while some behaved as though they desperately hoped Zeldryn would not notice their existence at all.

That fear was still present now, but something else had appeared alongside it. Their expressions carried an unmistakable discomfort, almost as though they were looking at something disgusting. Worse, Zeldryn had the distinct impression that some of them were making extremely unpleasant assumptions about him.

'Why are they looking at me like I'm some kind of pervert?'

Zeldryn frowned.

'What now?'

Had he not already dealt with Henry and Aeglo? Was the situation not supposed to start becoming at least slightly better? Why had another problem suddenly appeared?

Rather than returning their greetings, Zeldryn simply walked past the group. Once he had put some distance between them, however, he deliberately slowed his pace.

'If something really is going on, they might talk about it after I leave.'

He continued forward while listening carefully. At first, there was nothing but silence behind him, but after several more steps, a quiet voice finally reached his ears.

“Did you hear?”

Zeldryn immediately paid closer attention.

“About what?” another servant asked.

“Hera.”

His steps slowed even further.

The first servant lowered her voice. “Last night, Hera was called into that perverted lord's room.”

Zeldryn nearly stopped walking altogether.

'...What?'

Another servant sighed. “Phew... poor Hera. She's still young. She's not even that much older than my son.”

“I also heard she stayed in there for quite a while,” a third servant whispered.

“What did Lord Zeldryn do to her?”

“I don't know, but considering his reputation all this time...”

Their voices gradually became quieter as Zeldryn moved farther away, eventually becoming too faint for him to understand. It did not matter. He had already heard enough.

His expression went blank.

'Shit.'

Now he understood.

It was the misunderstanding from the dining room. When he had asked one of the servants to tell Hera that he wanted her to come to his room at night, the servant had immediately misunderstood what he meant.

Apparently, the misunderstanding had not ended there. The story had spread.

Once Hera arrived in his room that night, Zeldryn had explained that he only wanted to ask her for information. Unfortunately, Hera was the only person who actually knew that.

The other servants had no idea what had happened behind the closed door. From their perspective, Hera had been summoned late at night to the bedroom of a young noble lord who had spent years building a reputation as a pervert, and she had remained inside for quite some time.

Zeldryn rubbed his forehead.

'This is insane. Don't tell me this rumor has already spread throughout the entire mansion.'

He could not know for certain, but judging from the expressions of the servants he had just encountered, the possibility seemed extremely high.

For a brief moment, Zeldryn considered turning around and explaining everything to them directly, but he quickly abandoned the idea. It would be pointless.

If Zeldryn himself approached the servants and insisted that nothing had happened, would they actually believe him? They might nod, apologize, and claim that they understood, but once he walked away, there was every possibility that the rumor would mutate into something even worse.

'No.'

Zeldryn sighed. There was only one person who could explain what had happened without sounding as though she were desperately trying to protect his reputation.

Hera herself.

If Hera told the other servants that nothing had happened that night, her explanation would at least carry far more credibility than anything Zeldryn could say.

'That means I need to talk to her.'

Now he had another reason to find Hera. Originally, he had only wanted to ask where Kera was staying. Now he also had to deal with this ridiculous rumor.

Zeldryn resumed walking and began searching through different parts of the mansion. He checked the rest of the second-floor corridor first, but Hera was nowhere to be found, so he headed downstairs to the first floor.

The first place he checked was the main hall. It was the largest hall in the mansion, located not far from the main entrance and apparently used more often for receiving guests or other general purposes. Zeldryn stood near the entrance and scanned the room, but there was no sign of Hera.

“Hmm...”

He did not linger and soon moved toward another section of the mansion. Along the way, he passed a room that had already become strangely familiar to him.

It was another hall, although unlike the large and open main hall, this one was smaller and located farther inside the mansion. Zeldryn still remembered it clearly because it was where Henry and Aeglo had been tied up and forced to kneel before him several days earlier.

This was also where Zeldryn had sat on a stool while interrogating those two bastards. Most of the mansion's servants and guards had gathered here when Henry and Aeglo's actions were finally exposed.

Zeldryn glanced inside.

'This place again...'

The room had already been completely tidied. Henry and Aeglo were gone, there were no guards standing nearby with swords, and there was no crowd of servants waiting to see what punishment the two men would receive.

Unfortunately, Hera was not there either.

Zeldryn continued to the dining room next. He stepped inside and looked around, only to find it empty as well, or at least empty of the person he was actually looking for.

His irritation gradually increased.

'Why the hell am I the one walking around almost the entire mansion?'

At first, all he had wanted was to find Kera. That had somehow turned into finding Hera so he could ask where Kera was, and now he also needed to find Hera because of some absurd rumor concerning what had supposedly happened between them the previous night.

Technically, Zeldryn could have solved the first problem much more easily by asking one of the servants he encountered.

All he needed to say was, “Where's Hera?”

That should have been it.

After overhearing the servants gossiping earlier, however, the idea suddenly seemed terrible.

'No. That's a bad idea.'

If he started wandering around the mansion asking every servant where Hera was, the rumor that was already spreading could become significantly worse.

Zeldryn could already imagine what people would start saying.

'Lord Zeldryn is looking for Hera again.'

'After calling her into his room last night, now he's looking for her first thing in the morning.'

He immediately shook his head.

'That'll just make it worse, damn it.'

Searching for her himself was safer.

Zeldryn tried to reconstruct the mansion's layout in his head. He had already checked the main hall, the room where Henry and Aeglo had been punished, and the dining room. He had also passed through several corridors on the first floor.

Only a handful of obvious places remained.

Then one location finally entered his mind.

“...The kitchen.”

Zeldryn stopped and stared ahead for several seconds as the obviousness of the answer sank in.

'Wait. Hera is a servant, and it's still morning. If she's working, wouldn't the kitchen be one of the most obvious places to look for her?'

He rubbed his face.

'Don't tell me I've been wandering around almost the entire mansion while she's been in the kitchen this whole time.'

Zeldryn immediately headed in that direction.

As he approached the kitchen, the sounds of the servants working became progressively clearer. He could hear running water, tableware clinking together, footsteps moving back and forth, and several quiet conversations overlapping in the background.

When Zeldryn finally reached the kitchen entrance and looked inside, he immediately saw several servants at work. Some were washing tableware, others were cleaning the tables, while several more were putting away ingredients.

Among them was Hera.

Zeldryn stared at her for several seconds.

'Well, of course she's here, right?'

She was a servant, it was morning, and this was the kitchen. In hindsight, there was almost nowhere more obvious for her to be.

Zeldryn let out a long sigh.

'Then what the hell was I doing wandering around almost the entire mansion?'

He started walking toward Hera, but after only a few steps, another problem became apparent. She was not alone. Quite a few servants were working around her, and after what he had overheard earlier, their presence made approaching Hera considerably more troublesome.

Still, Zeldryn could not simply stand at the kitchen entrance staring at everyone like an idiot. He eventually decided to call out to her anyway.

“Hera.”

The moment Zeldryn's voice entered the room, the activity throughout the kitchen visibly slowed. Several servants turned their heads almost simultaneously, and Hera looked toward him as well.

Just as he expected, the expressions of the other servants immediately changed when they realized who was standing there. Their familiar fear remained, but Zeldryn could now clearly see something else behind it: uneasiness and suspicion. Some of them even stared at him with barely concealed disgust, without the slightest trace of genuine respect on their faces.

'...So it's true.'

The rumor had already reached the kitchen as well.

Hera, having heard her name, finally turned completely toward him.

“Lord Zeldryn?”