“Valerie is said to have fallen asleep.”

“Um.”

We spoke to each other at the same time. Carl yielded the opportunity to me, telling me to speak first.

Should I ask or not, should I ask or not. After struggling with inner conflict for a while, I finally threw out the question, thinking if not now, when else could I ask.

“What kind of relationship did we have?”

Carl’s pupils dilated as if it was an unexpected question. He seemed to be the type who doesn’t usually show emotions on his face, but the fact that his poker face cracked to this extent means the question I asked must have been truly surprising.

“Ah. You said you lost your memory.”

Carl, who had an expression like ‘why are you asking what kind of relationship we had’, soon nodded as if he understood.

“Do you really not remember? Everything about that day we spent together…?”

“No. I think you asked before if I remembered about that day. What day was it? Perhaps…”

The day Valerie was created? Good heavens, how could I ask such a thing! I stopped mid-sentence and just opened and closed my mouth.

Even without looking, I knew my face must have turned bright red. My ears were burning hot.

“That day was probably… the day Valerie was created.”

To think I’d hear those words from Carl’s mouth! This time my eyes widened as if they would pop out. Thump, thump, thump. My heart was beating fast. My face was now as hot as it could possibly get.

Laughter echoed through the still pitch-dark interior. It was laughter that didn’t match this eerie place.

“I thought I could no longer bring children to use magic, but what in the world is this?”

The owner of the laughter was Marina. She had been delighting for days over Isaac, who brought her all the news from the capital.

She was about to complain to Isaac, who hadn’t brought any good news lately. Her joy at Isaac finally appearing after waiting and her anger at why he made her wait so long were all tangled together.

And Marina came to hear about the widespread news in the capital of Grand Duke Albrecht’s marriage.

The news that Count Louisette and Grand Duke Albrecht were to be united in marriage was actually of no benefit to her at all. She was about to get angry, asking if he hadn’t shown his face for a whole month just to bring this kind of trivial news.

But Isaac’s subsequent words were powerful enough to blow away Marina’s displeasure in one go and then some.

Lady Tupper. He was referring to Pulcheria.

To her, who poured all her heart and love into her nephew as if he were her own child after losing her child, Carl was no different from a son, and that’s why she hated Franz, who was an obstacle to Carl’s future, to death.

And naturally, she came to be at odds with Marina, Franz’s mother, and Marina also viewed Pulcheria as a thorn in her side. It was because she interfered with everything she did and kept picking fights.

“No matter how I think about it, isn’t heaven helping me?”

The ripping laughter sounded similar to the sound of scraping metal. Anyone who heard this sound would get goosebumps all over their body.

Garcia, who was listening to Marina and Isaac’s conversation, heaved a deep sigh.

“Because of that damned imperial law, there’s not a single child left.”

A few years ago, child abduction incidents began to occur frequently. At first, it was the poor children wandering without family or home who disappeared.

Because they were children who wouldn’t be strange if any one of them disappeared, no one paid attention, but from some point on, people began to feel that something was going wrong one by one. It was because the orphanages in churches and monasteries that took in and cared for orphans were becoming completely empty.

But even if they felt something was strange, there was nothing people could do. There weren’t many adults who would raise their voices for nameless wandering children just because children without parents or connections had disappeared.

As time passed like that, at some point, even the kidnapping of children with parents began. As the number of parents who lost their children in an instant and wailed increased, houses raising young children firmly locked their gates and never came out with their children.

When the situation became this serious, even the imperial family had many discussions to come up with countermeasures. They directly deployed the imperial army to track down who was kidnapping all these children and enacted laws to ensure that all children in the empire could receive basic protection.

Not only that, but they instructed that if there was a child wandering alone on the street, they should immediately be taken to the security office to confirm their place of origin, and if a child with uncertain origin was with someone, a paternity test should be conducted unconditionally.

It was the result of efforts to give all children in the empire a place of origin, parents, and affiliation so that they could immediately know which child had gone missing.

Marina was at the root of all this.