Dragonkins lived a very long time. They aged at such a slow rate that a human’s lifespan would pass in the blink of an eye. When she looked over at Lydia, the spirit looked sad. Spirits didn’t have long lives—in fact, they didn’t have lives at all. No matter what Lydia did, she was always the one seeing people off to the grave.
“Lydia, I still have a lot of time before I’m gone. Chelsie-san gave me her guarantee that I’m going to live longer than normal humans because of all the mana I have,” Ruri assured her.
Despite her best efforts to act cheerful, Lydia’s face remained glum. “From where I stand, dragonkin or not, your lives still pass in the blink of an eye...”
“Lydia...” Ruri stood in front of the spirit and held her hand. “Just like you made a contract with me after the First Dragon King, I’m sure that someone will show up who wants to make your next contract.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Lydia replied.
“Then just make a contract with my kid!” Ruri said, blurting out the first thing that came to mind, but her face brightened as if she had just proposed a great idea. “Yeah, that’s the ticket! I was an only child, so I always wanted siblings of my own. I hear that childbirth is tough, but I’ll do my best to have a lot of kids, and you can make a contract with any of them that you like. Right?!”
Bowled over by Ruri’s momentum, Lydia blinked, dumbfounded. But before long, her lips curled into a smile. “You’re quick to decide things when you haven’t even had one child yet,” Lydia pointed out.
“But with people in this world, it’s not uncommon for girls my age to have children. I’m pretty confident in my stamina too, so just leave it to me! After all, I am my grandpa’s granddaughter.” The words “my grandpa’s granddaughter” held a lot of weight considering Ruri’s grandfather could go toe-to-toe with dragonkin unarmed.
Lydia broke her gloomy expression to let out a giggle.
“Heh heh, I’m looking forward to whenever that happens.”
“Leave it to me!” she said confidently, but still hoping that Lydia wouldn’t be sad even when she went away.
After chasing away the dour mood in the air, the three finally began their tea party. The first thing Ruri did was give a status report. Of course, Quartz gave regular reports on the status of Yadacain, but Ruri wasn’t really involved in that. Even if she knew about it, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Therefore, while they were called status reports, the content wasn’t all that difficult to follow. It was mostly just harmless talk about life in Yadacain and what kind of nation it was. Ruri’s status reports were mostly humorous—about things popular in the capital and trouble in the castle.
“Oh?” Lydia suddenly exclaimed, making Ruri and Seraphie turn their heads toward her.
“What’s the matter?” asked Ruri.
“It’s a message from Chi. That’s unusual.”
“What did Chi say?”
“Just as second,” Lydia said, looking into the distance for a bit before spawning a letter in front of her. She took the floating letter and handed it to Ruri without reading it. “From your grandpa, apparently.”
“From grandpa?” Wondering if he was in an extreme rush if he had to go through Lydia to give her a message, Ruri worried that something had happened to him before tearing the envelope’s seal. The note inside was lined with sentences written just as powerfully as Beryl’s personality. “Grandpa’s party seems to be in a region near the Nation of the Beast King.”
Ruri was relieved to find out that Beryl was fine, but as she read on, wrinkles started to form in her brow.
“Some sort of issue?” asked Seraphie, also looking pensive after seeing Ruri’s reaction.
Ruri shook her head. “Not an issue necessarily, but he said that there might be a number of transmigrators in Furgal, the neighbors to the Nation of the Beast King.”
“By transmigrators, does he mean people like you?” asked Seraphie.
“It doesn’t seem that he’s looked that far into it, but according to the rumors he heard, there is a Beloved among those people.”
“Isn’t that a pretty big issue, then?”
“Hmm...”
The presence of a Beloved could enrich a nation, but it could also threaten to destroy it if handled incorrectly. There was Ruri, Celestine of the Nation of the Beast King, and Lapis of the Nation of the Spirit King. While each of them had slight character flaws, none of them would ever do something as irrational as harming another nation. Even Pearl of Yadacain, who had tried to wage war with the Nation of the Dragon King in the past, was fulfilling her duties as a queen thanks to the Spirit of Darkness pulling the reins on her.
Yet here was a new Beloved—one who was very likely to be a transmigrator like Ruri.
“Did he write any more details?” Seraphie asked, possibly worried as well.
Ruri gave the letter another read, but the words remained the same. “That’s all the information here. It wouldn’t have killed him to put in a little bit more detail...” The letter was fitting, given Beryl’s loosey-goosey ways, but it was severely lacking in information. “He said that maybe Kotaro could look into it.” That detail was included at the end.
“Well, Wind’s power is best suited to investigation out of all the spirits,” Lydia said. She would have difficulty gathering information since she couldn’t leave this realm.
“He said that the Nation of Furgal is at odds with the Nation of the Beast King. That’s why I might need to report this to Jade-sama just in case,” Ruri explained, also ready to ask Kotaro to gather information while she was at it.
If these were ordinary transmigrators, the power of the great nations would likely resolve the issue, even if Ruri simply sat back and watched from the sidelines until trouble arose. But if a Beloved was among them, she couldn’t just sit tight.
Perhaps Seraphie fully comprehended this fact, because she readily allowed Ruri to skip their tea party. Lydia seemed slightly dissatisfied but settled down once Ruri promised that they would have another party in the near future.
And with that, Ruri walked out of the pocket space with Beryl’s letter in hand.