A Gentle Noble's Vacation Recommendation

The snow‑white Astarnia Royal Palace, standing as if facing the sea, occupied a vast tract of land.

Its white walls, visible from anywhere in the country, shone without ever being dimmed by Astarnia’s sun, and the splendid stone harbor that jutted wide out over the water served as a trading port where huge sailing ships came and went. The palace at its center was not a place just anyone could casually step into, and even within that palace, the room in question lay deeper still.

The windowless room was lit only barely by mana lamps, and remained dim. Between the gaps of bookshelves that had probably once been lined up in orderly rows, additional shelves of mismatched size and shape had been shoved in haphazardly, covering almost the entire floor. Not only were their shelves packed with books equal in number to the shelves themselves, but piles of books rose from the floor and more were stacked atop them, until the room was overflowing with them.

At almost the exact center of all that, a lump of cloth shifted.

“…Ufu, fu.”

From beneath cloth embroidered in Astarnia’s distinctive flamboyant style, a muffled chuckle dropped into the quiet room. Yes, it was impossible to tell which way that lump faced, what it was looking at, or what it was doing, but there was one person beneath that heap of fabric.

For the moment they seemed to be squatting on the floor. An arm pushed the cloth aside, pinched a single book up off the ground, and then vanished back beneath the cover. The glimpse of brown skin and gold ornamentation left no doubt that the person was of this country.

There was no way they could not be. This room was not one of the more accessible parts of the palace.

The only ones who could lounge about like they owned such a place were members of the Astarnia royal family who lived in the palace.

“Orichalcum shark, huh. So it’s been brought in.”

The words fell one by one. A strange voice, neither clearly high nor low.

The lump of cloth squirmed.

“If the door opened…”

He, inside the cloth, looked vaguely down at the book as he turned thoughts over in his head. The noisy, boisterous younger brother who’d come to tell him an armored shark had been brought into the harbor had done so just a short while ago.

Having the strength to defeat an armored shark did not automatically mean one could open the door to the deepest level.

And yet it bothered him. For by the same token, it didn’t mean the door could not have been opened either.

What were the odds that the adventurers who had accomplished a subjugation said to never occur twice would also open a door that had been declared impossible? And what were the odds that adventurers capable of turning the impossible into possible would return from conquering a labyrinth, something that would normally become known immediately, and yet notify no one of their achievement?

The adventurers who had defeated an orichalcum shark in the past had apparently failed to open it, but that didn’t mean the probability was truly zero—so he had arrived at that entirely baseless conclusion. Who would believe that this person was the greatest scholar in the country?

“I’d like to talk to them.”

The moment he spoke the words, his hazy thoughts began to spin at high speed.

If they really had cleared it, why had these adventurers still not reported their conquest? Even if they lacked the desire to flaunt it, the guild would find out sooner or later, so the natural timing would have been to report it upon returning from the labyrinth, just like they had with the armored shark.

It wasn’t that they wanted to hide it. A Guild Card was not something whose information one could conceal by will alone.

Is it just a whim? Would someone versed in the ancient language think in such sloppy terms? If they knew the ancient language, they would also know that it was he who had identified the sigils carved on that door as such. In that case, they might well be watching to see how he would move, whether he would connect the presence of the armored shark that had reached the royal family’s ears with a successful conquest of the labyrinth.