The Rebirth of Evelyn Knox

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 

Just as she was left scratching her head, the name below the lid of one of the jewelry boxes caught her attention.

'Anna Stonehardt' is what it said.

Previously, she hadn't paid much attention to the fact that the names on the lids hadn't been the same as that of the artifact in the box. After all, there could be many valid explanations for that. Maybe the box was for something else, and was just reused here to store this artifact, or maybe the actual name of the artifact hadn't been known, and the name on the box was what it was called now.

But wasn't Stonehardt the surname of that Rufus guy? That guy who became the headmaster was also from the same family, apparently. 

"If I recall correctly, this surname belongs to one of the strongest branch families of the Terran royalty, right? So… this 'Anna Stonehardt' must be from their family, right?"

Looking at the grade three white brooch carefully, Evelyn realized that it wasn't actually that old. Not to mention the pristine condition of the clear topaz gemstones that were tastefully decorating the body of the brooch, there wasn't a single scratch to be found anywhere.

For artifacts that didn't have self-repair abilities, although they could still last thousands of years or even longer if taken care of properly, a few signs of wear would still be unavoidable.

This defensive brooch didn't have any such ability, but it was still in such a pristine condition.

Looking back at the other boxes as well, she realized that there was an obvious pattern that she had missed earlier.

Each of the boxes was clearly marked with the name of a different girl, and most of the items were either brand new or seemed minimally used.

As she was inspecting them more carefully, however, one of the boxes suddenly 'clicked' and a small slip of paper slid out from the seam between the base and side.

"Eh?"

Checking the status of the box again, Evelyn realized that this one did actually say 'has a secret compartment that can be used to store messages, pressing at the right spot will reveal it', but this was the only one. None of the other boxes had anything similar.

Looking through the note carefully, Evelyn's expression couldn't help but turn weird.

"A love letter to that idiot Craig? What brain dead girl was so eager to become food for the seeds of rejuvenation? Let's see… 'Ava Brimstone'? Well, can't blame her too much since she didn't really know, but whatever."

With all these details, she could more or less guess what was going on.

"I think I get it now… Aren't these things like a 'promise' to marry in the future? Ah, but now that Craig is dead, would these girls be staying single for the rest of their lives? No, more importantly, how much importance do these things even have?"

When it came to the ancient families, Evelyn knew that a promise for marriage wasn't something to be made so lightly.

For example, although Cecilia and Aeron had supposedly been expected to marry in the future, they still hadn't been promised to each other, because once such a thing was done, it was pretty much set in stone.

Going by the ancient rules, to break the promise between two ancient families, unless an agreement was reached once again to dissolve it, either their alliance would have to be broken, or one of the candidates would have to be disowned.

Of course, the rules were often stricter than the way they were enforced, and there had been no lack of 'promises' that were broken throughout history with little to no repercussions.

"But the promissory item still contains the signature of these girls, heh? Good thing I didn't start binding them yet!"

Although these artifacts would still be quite useful on their own, with her wealth, getting a few good grade three defensive artifacts wasn't so difficult anymore. Instead, these would serve her much better if she was able to exchange them with people to whom they held the most value.

"Mhm… but I assume most of these families must be Terran, though a few could be from other places… this is gonna be tough."

Evelyn knew that she would have to carefully think through how to go about doing this, if she was going to do it right. If she ended up exposing herself as Craig's murderer, it would be in no way worth whatever benefit she managed to exchange.

Of course, now that she knew how 'valuable' these low-grade items were, they became pretty much unusable in public anyway, so it was better to get rid of them when possible. 

Well, in reality, most grade one or two items weren't that difficult to produce, and there could be many that were exactly the same all over the world, but these particular ones were all quite intricate in appearance and seemed easy to identify.

"I guess I'll have to make sure I can stay anonymous, until then, these are better off hiding in my inventory."

Of course, it wasn't necessary for her to have a disguising skill personally, nor was there a need to take on too much risk. She was sure there must be channels in this world to take care of things that were of 'dubious' origins anonymously.

She just had to be sure that she utilized them the right way, because even if such unlawful things existed, they were always doubled-edged swords that could be just as harmful as they could be useful.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 

Carefully sorting through the rest of the 'trash', Evelyn was almost completely done with Craig's spatial storage when she came across a small, ominous looking pouch.

Pursing her lips, she tentatively held it in front of her face before using the probe skill.

- [Pouch of Isolation: Grade Four]

— Not a spatial storage, the items stored inside must be of appropriate size first.

— Able to isolate all effects from the stored items to the outer world, and vice versa.

It was a rather simple description, but not only was it quite impressive, it also gave her a bad feeling.

"A-A small thing that needs to be isolated from the world, even inside of a spatial artifact?"

Thinking about what it could contain, Evelyn could only guess it must be some sort of extremely toxic or poisonous thing that would be disastrous to expose carelessly.

"I can open this and probably be fine, given that I have poison and disease immunity, but Ruru and Bree would still be in danger…"

Just as she was thinking about kicking the two of them out, Evelyn suddenly realized something.

"Wait a minute… this thing is small enough for me to be able to take into cloaking mode, right? In that case, I would be isolated from the rest of the world anyway, so—"

Cutting off that thought with a shake of her head, Evelyn sighed. "No, I can't be so careless. Let me put this aside to check the other stuff first to see if I can find any clues. Who knows if my immunities will even be useful against this thing?"

Looking at the tiny pile of remaining 'junk', the pink haired girl chuckled. "Anyway, since Craig was keeping it with him, he must have had some means to protect himself from its effects, right?"

The last few items turned out to be mostly quite disappointing, with the most 'valuable' ones being Craig's personal diary, though it seemed to be written in a language she couldn't understand, along with a strange array disc.

- [Gilded Memories, Grade One]

— A high-quality diary that can be used to store information for a very long time, impervious to most common causes of data loss.

— The contents are written in the Terran royal family's exclusive cryptographic language, and can only be deciphered by trained individuals.

Evelyn shook her head with a frown as she tossed the diary into her inventory. "Tch, whatever dirty little secrets that thing holds, I'll figure it out somehow."

Moving on to the array disc, Evelyn wondered if it was a stolen cultivation technique, or one that belonged to the Terran royal family. If it was stolen, maybe she could get praised by Aurora for recovering it for the academy, right?

Checking its status, however, her idle thoughts vanished immediately.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 

[Checking status…]

- [Watcher of the Skies, Grade Nine (Incomplete, Broken)]

— ???

— ???

— ???

— When provided with living tissue ??? the user can exert control over the enslaved ???

— Living tissue condition: The more crucial the tissue is, the more ??? it contains, the less the ???.

— Best tissues include the brain and the eyes.

— No limit on the level of the enslaved beast, but an equivalent amount of vitality must be sacrificed in the array as the beast that is being tamed.

— The above condition does not apply if the user's own vitality is greater than that of the beast being enslaved.

— Incomplete method: Each usage will greatly reduce the vitality of the user.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━