Winter Royal City, the Ice Castle, a few reindeer, and a sleigh.
After a long wait, the white-bearded old man finally hurried back to the group, his face full of apology.
"She won't see us?" Miss Nan looked a little surprised.
The sleigh was fast. This was a magical world, after all... The trip from the snowy peak where Nicholas lived to Winter Royal City had taken only a morning.
"That's right." Nicholas sighed. "Perhaps Her Majesty the Queen has too much to handle with the wedding preparations, so she isn't receiving guests for the time being."
What exactly had the old man said to the guards?
He had walked right up, announced that he was Nicholas from the great snowy mountains, and said he wanted to introduce a few foreigners to Her Majesty the Queen—then the guards had thrown him out.
The old man had even complained sadly that he had given those guards presents when they were children.
"The old man in red who comes at New Year? Isn't that just a story to fool children? Go on, get out of here!"
Meeting the Queen wasn't strictly necessary. For Nan Xiaonan and Medanzo, who already had experience navigating several Page Worlds, the key was figuring out how to witness the story's ending.
According to what Medanzo had learned in the previous Page World, any action that affected the story's ending was inadvisable. They needed to reproduce the pages' original outcomes as closely as possible to piece together the primordial truth depicted in the Book of Gaia.
Here in this magical kingdom, the two of them had recovered most of their abilities, so entering and leaving the ice-and-snow palace wouldn't be difficult—but the question was, even if they met the Queen of Rin Dong, what would they do