Hearing the commotion from a distance, Estelle hurried over. The moment she arrived, she saw the daughter she had spent ages searching for straddling Eros and shaking his head with all her might.
Her anger flared at once, and her normally gentle face turned icy.
"Wendy! Get up right now! How could you bully your brother!"
At the sound of her mother's voice, the anger vanished from Wendy's face, replaced by fear and panic. She sprang to her feet and tried to run.
"Wendy, stop right there!" Seeing her daughter trying to flee, Estelle shouted from a distance.
Wendy froze on the spot, her head drooping like a little hen that had lost a fight, as Estelle hurried toward her.
Looking at the daughter whose temperament she could not begin to account for, Estelle felt her anger surge again. She said sternly:
"Why didn't you go to your lessons today?"
Wendy kept her head down and mumbled, "Mr. Boroka's lessons are so boring."
Her voice grew softer and softer until it was barely audible.
"So you skipped class because you were bored? Look at your brother. He's two years younger than you, and he's already finished all his etiquette lessons. Why doesn't he find them boring? You're his older sister. You should be setting an example for him."
Estelle looked at her daughter, bitterly disappointed in her lack of effort.
Hearing her mother praise her brother, Wendy glanced toward Eros, only to find him making faces at her, plainly enjoying her misfortune.
Furious, she was about to pounce on him for revenge when Estelle snapped:
"Wendy, are you seriously going to hit him again? What if you hurt your brother, shaking him like that?"
Wendy immediately stopped moving, drew back her hands, and lowered her head again.
Only then did Estelle turn to Eros, her voice full of concern. "Are you all right? You're not hurt anywhere, are you?"
Eros shook his head. "I'm fine, Mom! Wendy was just playing with me."
Looking at her sweet, sensible son, then at the daughter beside her who ran wild whenever no one was watching, Estelle felt another surge of anger.
"Just look at your brother, then look at yourself!"
Wendy turned away, pretending not to hear, and merely muttered:
"Tattletale. Just you wait. I'll get you later."
Before long, Estelle had hauled Wendy away by the back of her collar, leaving Eros staring in astonishment.
After all, although Wendy was not fat, her figure was already beginning to grow slender and graceful. She certainly could not have been light.
Yet Estelle had carried her off effortlessly with one slender arm? He found it hard to believe.
Despite the constant interruptions, he had not forgotten the purpose of his trip.
Still puzzling over what he had seen, he continued toward the library.
Hopefully I'll discover more today. The supernatural! Hehehe.
To be fair, this was his first visit to his family's library.
So when he saw the enormous building before him, he was once again astonished by his family's wealth.
He could hardly imagine how the locals had built something so huge and exquisite in this old-fashioned society, where technology was backward in every respect.
"Still, hehe! Someday, all this'll be mine. All mine!"
Putting those thoughts aside, he stretched out both hands, ready to push hard against the heavy doors, only to find that they opened surprisingly easily.
What struck him as odd, though, was that he had heard someone was always on duty in the library. Yet when he entered, no one stood behind the counter, nor could he see anyone anywhere else.
He had intended to ask where the history books were kept, but it seemed that plan had fallen through.
Fine! I'll just have to find them myself.
On his short little legs, he went from shelf to shelf, scanning the rows of books from bottom to top. "How to Attract a Noblewoman's Attention," "How to Get Along with Noblewomen," "How to Win a Noblewoman's Heart"...
What... what the hell were these things? This was ridiculous!
He made a full circuit without finding any history books, though he found plenty of books on all sorts of nonsense.
To his surprise, the library also held quite a few novels.
Unfortunately, most were biographies of knights and the like.
He pulled out a few and skimmed them at random. Most were about knights who rescued princesses, only for the princesses to marry princes in the end. Even so, the knights remained faithfully by their sides, protecting them.
What breed of hopeless simp was this? Just reading it made him angry. He promptly shoved the book back onto the shelf. If he kept reading, he feared even his vintage 2002 brain clot would become impossible to keep under control.
However, the book "Pirate King Sally's Treasure" proved a pleasant surprise.
Its opening actually contained an introduction to the seas surrounding the Croatia Continent, something he had known nothing about before.
After all, his family's domain lay deep inland, a world away from the ocean, so no one had ever told him much about the sea. There was no need, for one thing, and he was still young, for another.
He had not even finished learning the geography around his family's domain. Thinking about seas a world away would have been getting ahead of himself.
As a result, he knew very little about this world's oceans. His knowledge was practically a blank slate.
After reading the book's introduction to the surrounding seas, he perked up.
According to the book, every sea it described connected to the same stretch of water five hundred kilometers offshore-the Sea of Mist.
The book described the Sea of Mist as being shrouded in fog all year round.
Any living being that entered the Sea of Mist would become lost within it, and fewer than one in a hundred returned alive.
For ten thousand years, countless extraordinary individuals had attempted to conquer those waters, but every attempt had ended in failure. Thus, they were also known as the Godforsaken Sea.
Eros was rather astonished. If the book's account was accurate, did that not mean all the humans on the Croatia Continent had access to only the waters within five hundred kilometers of the coast?
That was truly hard to believe. Fog at sea was perfectly normal, but fog that never dispersed was anything but.
Not to mention that its boundary always remained five hundred kilometers offshore.
This hardly seemed like a force nature could wield. Could this be one of this world's supernatural phenomena? Incredible.
The discovery made him even more excited. This world really did have a supernatural side, and it was so close to humanity.
Still, discovering it did not mean he would rush off to explore the Sea of Mist in a fit of excitement.
Hadn't the book said fewer than one in a hundred who entered the Sea of Mist returned alive? The world was vast. Wasn't staying alive a much better option?
Having finished the geographical introduction in the preface, Eros had little interest in the rest. He returned the book to its place and resumed searching for other related books.
This time, he broadened his search to include books describing the Sea of Mist.
He continued checking the shelves row by row, but his progress was painfully slow. Normally, he could have asked the servant on duty in the library to help him search.
But for some reason, he had not seen a single person who should have been on duty today. He was all alone in the vast library.
Before you continue