Candlelight.

Red wine.

Flowers.

Steak.

Accompanied by beautiful classical music, everything was as elegant as could be.

“So this is how the upper class lives?”

Ariel swirled the wineglass and took a graceful sip. The crimson liquid slid down her throat, and whether it was because this bottle cost tens of thousands of Aimier, even that sour, astringent taste she normally found hard to swallow somehow seemed exceptionally refined now.

“And at a time like this, he still has no idea where he’s run off to fool around.”

Looking at the empty seat across from her, Ariel muttered unhappily.

For an atmosphere like this, naturally, two people were required for it to be perfect.

Of course, it was not that she wanted to have dinner with that guy. It was just that a so-called candlelit dinner had to involve two people to truly count as a candlelit dinner, didn’t it?

That was how it was written in books.

“But seeing as you prepared all this so well, I’ll forgive you for now!”

Ariel set down her wineglass and somewhat awkwardly picked up the silver knife and fork.

In truth, she did not like the noble habit of wanting to use eighteen different utensils just to eat one meal. For her, a single fork was enough to deal with ninety-nine percent of food, so why make it so complicated?

But since the mood had already been set, she naturally had to act a little more reserved.

“Was it knife in the left hand and fork in the right, or fork in the left and knife in the right? Whatever. I’ll just do what feels natural.”

Ariel cut into the steak with the silver knife, dividing it into perfectly standard bite-sized pieces. Then she speared one with the silver fork and lightly dipped it into the sauce that had been brushed onto the plate with such bold force.

“Even the sauce has been spread with this much power. The force practically sinks through the plate, like it’s trying to stab someone to death. The chef who made this dish is no ordinary person.”

Ariel sighed in admiration again.

As expected of the Duke Campbell residence. Even the chef was on another level.

But she did not think much more of it. She simply brought the fork lightly to her lips, about to taste this excellent delicacy.

The classical music in the corner of the room continued to flow, but at some point the melody shifted. It had begun as nothing more than a quiet stream, but now it suddenly surged, as if it were about to reach its climax all at once.

Ariel closed her cherry lips, touched it with her tongue, and was just about to—

“Something’s wrong!”

Just as she was preparing to close her eyes and enjoy it, Ariel’s beautiful eyes snapped open and she said gravely,

“There’s something fishy here!”

The candlelight flickered, still warm.

The flowers remained lush and lovely. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

Ariel’s wary gaze swept across her surroundings. Everything was peaceful and normal, as though the warning that had just flashed through her mind had been nothing more than an illusion.

But Ariel did not think it was an illusion.

Her sense for danger was a powerful instinct she had gained through countless ordeals, through struggling again and again at the edge of death. That instinct had saved her more times than she could count in the past, so even in a place like the Duke Campbell residence, where danger theoretically should not exist, Ariel still believed without question that her instincts would not be wrong.

“No assassins, and I can’t sense any enemy presence, which means...”

Ariel looked at the piece of meat on the silver fork.

“Poison?”

She brought the meat to her nose and gave it a light sniff.

The rich aroma instantly flooded her nostrils. It was a mixed fragrance of meat and sauce, full-bodied and heavy, practically luring her into swallowing it in one bite.

That kind of fragrance hid many things. Using it to cover poison would be the most normal thing in the world.

And yet...

“There’s no poison.”

Ariel reached that conclusion almost immediately, because her Delusion-Breaking Eye had already opened. No trace of even the faintest toxin could escape those eyes of hers, which were capable of seeing through all things.

“But if there’s no poison, then where is this sense of danger coming from?”

Could it be that her analysis was wrong, and it was not coming from the food at all?

“No, that’s not it either.”

Ariel suddenly thought of something, and her eyes shifted slightly.

She quickly stood up and took an empty wineglass from the other side of the table.

“Water magic.”

Magic gathered, and clear water flowed into the cup out of thin air. She had summoned it herself with magic, absolutely pure water with no impurities whatsoever.

Ariel dipped the piece of meat into the pure water and rinsed it, washing the rich sauce clean away. Only after doing that did she pick up her knife and fork again and take a small bite from the meat.

Delicious...

Even with the sauce washed off, the flavor of the steak itself was still outstanding. The doneness, the firmness—everything highlighted both the chef’s remarkable skill and the exceptional quality of the meat itself.

But what kind of meat was it?

Beef? No.

Lamb? No again.

That dense texture was very similar to beef, but the aroma of the meat was extremely close to lamb. But beyond that, Ariel’s senses sharply caught... a faint, cloying sweetness that had been very well concealed.

“This is... Capodo Demon Sheep meat!”

Ariel finally made her judgment.

The chef who had made this dish had been extremely careful. They had probably used dozens of spices, all for the sake of covering up that distinctive sweetness of Capodo Demon Sheep.

But they had challenged the wrong person in this regard. If nothing else, Ariel was extremely knowledgeable when it came to food. It might have looked as though she lived on black bread every day at the Academy, but elsewhere, the breadth of her diet was astonishing.

So let alone this sort of rare demon sheep—even ancient magical beasts from ruins, she had eaten quite a few of those. There was no way she would be fooled by something on this level.

“If this is Capodo Demon Sheep, then this sauce...”

Ariel did not swallow. Instead, she spat out the bite of meat, rinsed her mouth with water, and only then carefully tasted a little of the sauce paired with the steak.

“As I thought. There’s purple kelp in the sauce!”

Capodo Demon Sheep was a magical beast that lived in the north. Its numbers were extremely small, but it was not poisonous.

Purple kelp, meanwhile, was a type of seaweed that grew in southern waters. It was extremely common. In those fishing villages, a few Aimier could buy an entire boatload of it. It was the sort of thing even the locals looked down on.

Also nonpoisonous.

These two things—one from the south, one from the north, utterly unrelated, both harmless on their own—even if someone mixed them together as carefully as this, or even threw them directly into a stew, there were probably very few people in the world who would notice anything wrong.

But Ariel, of all people, was bound to notice, because she had once read in an old text that Capodo Demon Sheep was a violent magical beast, extremely powerful and very hard to capture. But so long as you tricked it into eating purple kelp, it would immediately lose the ability to move and could be slaughtered at will.

Because purple kelp would drive Capodo Demon Sheep into an uncontrollable state of paralysis.

And correspondingly, if someone ate purple kelp and Capodo Demon Sheep meat together, they too would be paralyzed by a substance produced between the two. These two delicacies, each perfectly harmless and edible on their own, became something entirely different once combined... In an extremely short span of time, they could directly leave even a lord-class magical beast in a state of utter helplessness!

“How insidious...”

A trace of gravity appeared on Ariel’s little face.

“If I hadn’t read that old text, I’d already be finished by now!”

A subtle method. Brilliant disguise.

Such perfect temptation and arrangement that even Ariel had to admit the plotting behind it was exquisite down to the last detail.

“What a shame.”

Ariel crossed her arms and let out a cold laugh.

“My plan was still one step bette—”

Thud.

Before she could even finish speaking, Ariel’s body suddenly went limp, and she collapsed face-first onto the dining table.

Not long after, the faint sound of snoring could be heard. Having only just slept through an entire day, she had once again fallen into an exceptionally sweet sleep.

The flowing music still played, but it had shifted back from that surging torrent into a peaceful little tune.

“One step better?”

An stepped out from the shadows. Looking at the deeply sleeping Ariel, a faint trace of teasing actually appeared on her usually dignified face.

“No. It seems I was the one who was one step better.”

Capodo Demon Sheep? Purple kelp?

Yes, that was indeed a very covert combination. Very few people in this world knew of it. The reason she knew was because her mind now contained certain memories from a thousand years ago.

Back then, the range of Capodo Demon Sheep had been much broader than it was now, and some of those areas had overlapped with where purple kelp grew. So in that era, quite a few people had known of this trait.

But none of that was important. It was all just smoke she had deliberately used to hide the real killing move.

An, who was familiar with Young Master, naturally knew how troublesome people with a danger instinct like this could be. But unfortunately, precisely because they trusted that sense of danger too much, their attention would always follow that instinct and fall upon the most dangerous-looking thing in the room.

For example, food that very likely contained poison.

But the more one focused on the food, the easier it was to overlook other things.

“Frantanks’s Lullaby. A little thing from a thousand years ago used to treat insomnia. It seems it still works just fine at times like this.”

After finishing in that mocking tone, An put away the sound-recording stone and turned off the drawn-out melody.

Of course, Ariel, who was already sleeping like the dead, naturally could not hear any of those words.

“My apologies, Miss Ariel.”

An came to Ariel’s side, lowered her head, and stared at her pale neck.

“I allowed your date with Young Master in order to repay the favor you showed back in Gutongs Castle. But now that debt has already been repaid, and yet you still keep tangling yourself around Young Master like some clingy little otter... Since you refuse to know your place, I have no choice but to use a method that isn’t quite so gentle to do the cleaning.”

As she spoke, An’s fingertip lightly brushed across the back of Ariel’s neck.

“After all, cleaning is a task that every excellent maid must complete.”

“Oh?”

Ariel suddenly opened her eyes and asked,

“Is using a dirty sneak attack like this also something an excellent maid would do?”

A cold gleam flashed. At some point Ariel’s hand had already gripped the hilt of Skyfire. Sharp sword intent moved invisibly, instantly sealing off every possible retreat An had, while Ariel’s blade came to rest against her neck.

It seemed Ariel had been waiting from the very beginning for An to come close.

But An’s hair stirred, and she did not retreat at all.

“Why?”

Unstartled by Ariel’s sudden awakening, An’s dignified beautiful face only showed a trace of confusion.

“You should have been completely asleep.”

Frantanks’s Lullaby was neither magic nor some sort of attack method. Correspondingly, it should not have been something that could be defended against.

So long as one listened to the tune for more than five minutes, even the most vicious, frenzied magical beast would fall asleep, let alone a completely unsuspecting girl.

“Hmph.”

Ariel let out a disdainful sneer.

“I admit I almost fell for it, but sadly for you, this kind of negative effect stopped working on me a long time ago.”

A strange dim glow faintly shimmered across Ariel’s body, as if coating her in a layer of sacred radiance. But until she deliberately revealed it, even An, standing this close, had not noticed it at all.

“I see.”

An understood at once.

“Ancient magic that isolates you from all negative status effects. I do remember something like that existing.”

“Good. Then you understand.”

Ariel pressed Skyfire even closer to An, while planting one foot on the chair and lifting her chin.

“So what now? Since that trick didn’t work, you should give it up already, shouldn’t you? Seeing as Miss An used to be my favorite beautiful girl, I can choose not to pursue this matter—”

“Give up?”

An tilted her head, as though she did not understand the meaning of that word at all.

“We’re already at this point, and you’re still saying something that ridiculous?”

“Then what do you want?” Ariel’s face darkened.

“It’s simple. Since the gentler method won’t work, then I can only...”

The knife and fork on the table floated into the air, and cold steel began to ring.

An’s gaze gradually turned icy as well.

“Use a somewhat stronger method.”

“With that Steel Divine Favor?”

Ariel glanced sideways at the pieces of steel moving according to An’s will.

“I’ll say this up front. You won’t beat me with things like that.”

In the reflections on the steel, blazing fire suddenly rose. Ariel was a little shorter than An, and she did not have An’s overwhelming bust either, but under the light of the flames, she seemed even more imposing.

“As expected of Miss Ariel. In such a short time, it feels like you’ve grown stronger again.”

“If you know that, then why are you still—”

“Heh. Of course, I also know that the old me would have had a hard time doing this. You are Miss Ariel, after all. In our clash at Gutongs Castle, I didn’t gain the slightest advantage.”

As An spoke, her tone shifted.

“But on this trip into the Abyss, I didn’t merely sit on a throne waiting to be rescued without gaining anything.”

“Oh?”

Ariel arched a brow.

“For example?”

“For example... after integrating those fragmented memories in my mind, I gradually awakened the talent of the strongest martial artist from a thousand years ago.”

Boom!

A terrifying wind pressure swept through the dining room. The silver dishes on the table were instantly shredded apart. An’s hair danced wildly, her face cold, and after a tremendous muffled blast erupted from within ⊛ Nоvеlιght ⊛ (Read the full story) her delicate body, her aura seemed to break directly through some sort of limit and began climbing higher and higher at the speed of a volcanic eruption!

At first, An’s realm had been slightly below Ariel’s. After all, she had only stepped onto the true path of cultivation about a year ago, at most. Before that, most of what she relied on had been the power of her Divine Favor.

And yet, in the span of just a few breaths, right before Ariel’s increasingly grim gaze, An’s aura rose in a manner that was completely unreasonable and directly overtook Ariel’s!

“Now then, let’s start getting serious.”

An looked straight into Ariel’s eyes with absolute seriousness.

“You little slut seducing Young Master.”