Chapter 106: Afternoon Tea and the Prober

Chapter 106: Chapter 106: Afternoon Tea and the Prober

Jeremy cast his eyes over the stack of invitations: "You know I don’t like attending any gatherings."

"Of course." Melson pulled a card from the stack, placing it separately on the table. "But this one was sent by the royal family. Young Master should ideally make a trip."

The royal family...

The core value of the existence of the four great Dukes was to act as a shield for the royal family. This kind of invitation naturally couldn’t be thrown into the fireplace.

For Melson to speak up like that, it meant the weight of this banquet was absolutely not light.

Jeremy didn’t make things difficult for Melson: "When is it?"

"In five days."

"And that letter?"

"A letter from the Clivein Duke’s mansion."

The Clivein Duke’s mansion?

Raphael would never use the family’s name to send a message. That meant this was personally written by Duchess Clivein.

Did she arrive in the capital this early?

Jeremy took the envelope and flipped it open.

The wax seal and handwriting indeed belonged to Duchess Clivein. Aside from a few lines of greetings, the content was an appointment for a private meeting the day after tomorrow.

"Does Young Master intend to keep the appointment?" Melson asked.

Jeremy set the letter aside: "Yes."

The statuses of the two families were equal, their relationship was close, and furthermore, the other party was an elder. Refusing would be inconvenient.

Going there and dealing with it perfunctorily for a bit would be enough.

He didn’t pay it much mind, casually changing the subject: "I heard my older brother woke up?"

Melson seemingly didn’t expect this young master to have grasped the news beforehand. Melson’s gaze paused for exactly half a second before he bowed his head and replied: "Yes. But the Eldest Young Master is currently still in the observation phase, he is still at the Divine Temple. According to their intentions, it will take about three more days before he can be brought back to the mansion."

Three more days...

The day he had to face the original owner’s family members arrived much faster than anticipated.

Jeremy gave a "yeah", not asking further, proactively cutting the conversation off there.

Unclear whether it was because of the sudden change in sleeping location so his body hadn’t had time to adapt, but Jeremy’s sleep quality that night was incomprehensibly terrible.

He tossed and turned until past midnight before falling asleep, but the moment he touched sleep, he felt as if a thousand-pound boulder was pressing straight down on his chest; every breath had to be fought for.

Startled awake once again, his consciousness was very alert, but his body refused to obey commands. Even lifting his eyelids was as difficult as pushing a stone door.

A warm and damp current enveloped his four limbs, a sensation exactly like soaking in a hot spring.

Water?

He was clearly lying in bed...

Unclear if his willpower was too strong, or for some other reason, the heavy weight pressing on his chest gradually faded. Faint sounds of people conversing drifted around, but the voices seemed as if filtered through a thick layer of water; he couldn’t catch a single word.

After struggling for a while, Jeremy finally managed to pry his eyelids open. But before he could clearly see anything in front of him, the entire scene was completely swallowed by pitch-blackness.

By the time his consciousness fully returned, it was already the afternoon of the following day.

Looking at the familiar ceiling, Jeremy propped himself up on his hands and sat up.

His entire body ached unreasonably, and his mind was as exhausted as if it had just been drained dry.

He raised a hand to massage his temples forcefully.

...Was this a corpse possession or sleep paralysis?

Having been back for exactly one day and it was already this abnormal. Could it be that the following days would also maintain this form?

Because he had slept for too long, by nightfall Jeremy didn’t have the slightest feeling of sleepiness left.

Thinking of the appointment with Raphael’s mother on the twenty-seventh, he decisively stayed awake all night.

He originally intended to take this opportunity to charge towards the Intermediate Stage, but the difficulty this time was more arduous than any previous attempt.

Ever since leaving the Wasteland, his soul sea almost gave no response whatsoever, remaining tightly stuck at the Basic Stage Nine-Star threshold like a door welded shut.

Time flowed to noon on the twenty-seventh. Jeremy temporarily halted his cultivation, properly washed his face and groomed himself, then set off on time to keep the appointment.

The Northern Region was densely packed with rifts leading back to the Wasteland, and its borders adjoined several hostile nations, so Duchess Clivein - Watala - in her capacity as the true power holder of the North, very rarely set foot in the capital.

Furthermore, the young master Raphael was entangled by that bizarre slumber curse, so throughout the past few years, whether it was the national day banquet or the New Year’s banquet, only Duke Clivein alone appeared.

For her to come this year, it meant the situation in the North could be considered temporarily stabilized.

Jeremy calculated very simply: sit out of courtesy for half an hour, find an excuse, and then leave.

But before it was his turn to find an excuse, Watala was called away halfway by an urgent matter.

After a few polite words of apology, she left the tearoom.

As a result, only Jeremy and Raphael remained.

The pastries for the afternoon tea had only been half-served, and the host had just stood up and left for less than two minutes - opening his mouth to say he wanted to leave at this time would be too glaringly obvious.

The excuse Jeremy had prepared since he was in the carriage was thus blocked right back down his throat.

Raphael pushed a plate of pastries shaped like lily of the valley flowers in front of him: "I remember you really like eating this, Jeremy."

Jeremy stared blankly at the pure white sugar flowers, his brows furrowing to a barely noticeable degree. Remaining silent for a few seconds, he finally replied: "I don’t like it anymore now."

To be more accurate, the one who liked it was the original owner, while he did not.

On Earth, ever since he began to have awareness, the eyesore fools always had a hobby of messing with his food.

At the age of six, when he discovered that the pastries he had been swallowing into his stomach were synthesized from blood-sucking Gu worms that were both poisonous and addictive, mixed with pureed monster corpses, he developed a repulsion towards all sweets in the world.

"Then what about me?"

Raphael’s voice remained as gentle as usual. Raphael quietly looked at the youth sitting opposite him, who was both familiar and strange; within those silver-white eyes settled some very carefully suppressed emotions.

"Do you not like me anymore either, Jeremy?"

The fingers Jeremy was using to hold the teacup paused in mid-air.

"?"

What the hell?

Weren’t these two supposed to have a pure childhood friendship?

Before he could pull himself out of his wildly diverging train of thought, he heard the other party continue: "Lately, you seem to be particularly repulsed by me, Jeremy."

It was clearly a question, but it was dropped with an affirmative intonation.

Jeremy set the teacup down, his voice calm: "You are overthinking it."

Raphael lowered his eyes: "...Let’s just consider it that way."

Jeremy had originally mentally prepared himself to deal with a subsequent barrage of interrogations, but the other party stopped exactly right there.

He took the opportunity to treat the first question as if it had never existed.

Raphael also seemed to have just asked a question in passing, not bringing it up again.

The dishes were successively served in full. The steam rising from the silver teapot drew a thin thread of smoke between the two, then dissipated.

Both of them were somewhat absent-minded.

Raphael unconsciously spun the plain ring engraved with lily of the valley patterns on his fingertip. His silver-white pupils seemed covered by a thin layer of fog; no one could grasp what was drifting behind them.

Raphael originally thought the other party was angry over the loss of contact for the past few months, so he didn’t dare to advance too quickly, afraid that the more he pushed, the more disappointed the other person would become.

But the more he took a step back, the clearer the outline of the distance between the two became.

That vague unfamiliarity, coupled with the suspicion still smoldering in his heart, just surfaced and then sank back down like that.

Was he really overthinking it?

No. It was still too early to finalize any conclusions right now.

Perhaps the direction he had been focusing his efforts on from the beginning was wrong.

Throughout the past few days, he had been busy reviewing all the clashes the other party had endured during the two years of living alone in the capital. Just compiling the list and cleaning up a portion of the garbage in it had consumed several months, taking up all his time, leaving him with few opportunities to get close.

Perhaps now he should probe a little bit...