Crunch, crunch!
Half an hour later, Annie Pombo appeared in a room on the second floor of an extraordinarily luxurious restaurant in Saint Louis City.
Before her sat a table laden with expensive, sumptuous dishes, but she had barely touched them. Instead, she seemed quite interested in a plate of light yellow, human-shaped biscuits, picking them up one after another and biting into them with crisp crunches.
They were gingerbread cookies, made from butter, sugar, ginger powder, cinnamon powder, clove powder, honey, eggs, refined flour, and other ingredients. Ginger powder, an essential ingredient, was not produced locally in Saint Louis City and had to be transported from faraway places, making it extremely expensive. Thus, ordinary people and minor nobles could not afford to taste it.
Annie kept eating gingerbread with an expressionless face. Richard stood silently some distance away from her. Brando stood on the other side, his head lowered, his face dejected and brows tightly furrowed as he racked his brains over how to salvage his image in Miss Annie's eyes.
Just then, the door to the room was suddenly pushed open without warning, and a figure walked in, calling out, "Annie!"
"Who is it?" Brando sprang up with a jolt and quickly moved to block the way. He had been worrying over the lack of an opportunity to prove himself, and now he put on a full display.
Looking at the young man in lavish purple clothes who entered through the door, Brando fixed him with a wary stare and asked as though interrogating a criminal, "Who are you? What business do you have with Miss Annie?"
"Me?" The purple-clad man smiled, the corners of his lips curling up. "I'm Annie's friend! As for you, you must be her new guard..."
The purple-clad man looked Brando up and