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Tinkle.
The brass bell made a refreshing sound.
Inside the open door was much cleaner and spacious than it looked from the outside. There were quite a few people too.
As soon as she entered, there were people on the counter and it was noisy on one side as it was a restaurant. On the opposite side of the restaurant’s entrance, stairs can be seen, so it’s probably an accommodation for travelers.
“Welcome to [Where theLambs’s Honey Comes]. This is the counter for overnight guests. If you want a meal, you can go to the waiter over there.”
“I’m going to stay. Just for one day.”
“What is the number of people?”
“One adult… one child.”
Valletta glanced down at the child whose head barely touched her waist.
The woman sitting at the counter lifted her body slightly and looked under the counter, and she held out a piece of paper with a business-like smile.
“This is the consent form for the use of the inn. Please read carefully and sign below. What about your meal?”
“I will eat. Please bring it to the room when the time is right. And they said there is a bar here.”
Valletta asked while looking at the consent form.
“The bar is in the restaurant.”
The well-trained staff answered Valletta’s sudden questions without hesitation with a smile on her face.
After hearing the answer that she wanted, Valletta roughly signed and nodded dryly.
“Please use room 314 on the 3rd floor.”
Valletta nodded and turned to the stairs.
The child who was watching her quickly followed suit.
Only when Valletta felt that the child was following her did she step on the stairs.
The hallways of the inn, although quite old still had a subtle scent of wood hovering at the tip of her nose, were enough to bring out the fatigue she had been pressing down.
Her eyes were heavy and the tension that had been held tightly in her body all day was released in an instant as she stepped her foot into her hallway.
The way to the third floor was quite long.
‘If I had known this would happen, I would have asked for a room on the second floor.’
Regretting, she put her hand on her forehead and let out a low sigh.
She forced her legs that were like a rusty machine broken due to it not being oiled properly, to move.
The creaking sound seemed to hover around her like an afterimage.
“Valletta-nim, are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
Valletta answered quietly and entered room 314.
The piece of cloth that was loosely tied on her wrist felt as if it had been soaked in blood and almost dyed with red.
She knew it’s good to untie the tied cloth and wash it with clean water, but she didn’t want to.
There were two beds in the room, and she lay her body on one of them.
‘I ran away.’
She ran away from Reinhardt.
She knew it was just a brief reprieve until Reinhardt’s patience ran out, but it meant a lot to Valletta.
It was because she had run away from the person that she thought would kill her by choking her for the rest of her life.
***
Reinhardt and Valletta had a strange relationship.
Reinhardt had an unusual obsession with Valletta, who completely ignored him.
From day one, Valletta never talked to him first.
The more Valletta disregards him, the more Reinhardt becomes obsessed with her.
Even if the number of times she spoke to him decreased, the madness in his eyes proved it.
It occurred to her that perhaps what instigated his madness was a self-inflicted disaster.
“Even so, do you really need to do such crazy things?”
She had only closed her tired eyes for a while that night, and it was already morning.
In one bed, a child was sleeping, and in the room, a dinner that seemed to have been brought by that child was on the desk, all cold.
Valletta washed her body, put on her robe, and headed down to the restaurant, leaving the sleeping child alone.
There was something called a bulletin board in the inn’s restaurant, where Valletta found two sheets of paper with her face on it.
‘… Is he crazy?’
She thought Reinhardt was crazy, but she didn’t know he was this crazy. Of course, the Imperial Family was also not sane.
[Wanted]
[Missing]
Two sheets of paper hung side by side on the bulletin board.
She didn’t know when the portrait was painted, but neither pleased her.
What’s more, she was not expecting to be wanted.
Valletta reflexively pressed down on her robe a little more.
She instinctively realized that she should hide her face.
She just hoped that the clerk she met yesterday didn’t remember her face properly.
A wanted poster from the Magic Tower and a missing poster from the Imperial Family.
Two different names, but what was certain was that both of them were desperate to catch her.
‘I can avoid the eyes of the Imperial Family.’
She was confident that she could quietly hide away from them.
She was confident in avoiding them, unless they charged a person named ‘Valletta Delight’ with annihilating a clan thereby releasing a large-scale military and placing a high bounty on her.
Even if she couldn’t live in the village, she had her spirits, and if she could enter the underworld, she could sell her potions as an alchemist and earn money.
Or, she could get the crowd on her side and oppose the Imperial Family.
There are many ways to fight against the Imperial family. You just have to use your brain a little when you deal with people.
The problem was Reinhardt. Reinhardt, who became the Magic Tower’s master, was troublesome in many ways.
Now Reinhardt seems to be unwilling to find her with all his might, so she can hide.
Perhaps he knows where she is.
And Valletta could guess what he was thinking.
Valletta knows Reinhardt well. And Reinhardt knew Valletta better than anyone.
Maybe, if they were asked to pick a person in this world who knows each other best, they themselves would pick each other without hesitation.
Ironically, they came to understand each other more than anyone else, even though he was the person she tried her hardest to get away from.
‘Is the bar over there?’
Valletta walked heavily from the bulletin board and entered the restaurant.
It was okay to leave the wanted bounty aside for now.
Once she enters the underworld, there would be no one who doesn’t have one or two pieces of that kind of paper anyway.
‘There is not much information about the Alchemist Association…’
It was not mentioned in detail in the novel that she had read, and neither did she have the freedom to look for information while under her father’s supervision.
At the bar, a bartender wearing a black vest over a pure white shirt was wiping the glasses one by one with a handkerchief.
Valletta sat down on the bar seat, staring at the glass that sparkled with each wipe.
“Good morning.”
“Yes, good morning. It seems to be too early for the lady to start drinking in the morning…”
“I have something to show you.”
Valletta looked around slowly.
The restaurant in the morning was quite busy, so no one paid attention to the bar. She took the potion she had brought in advance from the depths of her robe and slipped it towards the bartender.
The bartender’s eyes widened slightly, then narrowed quickly.
He took it naturally and set it down on a table inside the bar.
With his head bowed, slowly examining the bottle of red potion, he suddenly opened the lid of the potion bottle and poured it into a wine glass.
Like a well-trained sommelier, Valletta had a look of surprise at his unnatural behavior, as any alchemist could tell the purity of the potion by illuminating it with light.
However, he was checking it naturally, as if examining wine in such a crowded place.
It wasn’t something he had done only once or twice.