Chapter 181: The Enigma(1)

Amelia’s private quarters within the palace were swallowed in pitch darkness. Most details of the room dissolved entirely behind a heavy veil of shadows, leaving only a single solitary pool of light to resist the gloom.

The light emanated from a small desk lamp.

Its beam fell directly onto the wooden surface, illuminating Amelia as she sat before it with a clean sheet of white paper and a pen in hand, meticulously transcribing every single detail displayed on the system pop-up window floating before her eyes.

She was not treating this quest as a mere set of standard system directives.

Instead, she was analyzing every single word appearing on the screen with utmost gravity.

Her eyes darted back and forth between the text on her paper and the glowing floating screen, as though searching for something concealed between the lines—a truth the system had deliberately refrained from disclosing outright.

She was attempting to decipher these words; in her mind, they were never as simple as they appeared on the surface.

In her past life, she had reigned as the Empress of the Star Empire.

From early childhood, she had undergone an extraordinarily brutal and comprehensive education—one that extended far beyond the realms of high magic, imperial statecraft, and military strategy.

Linguistics had been one of the disciplines she was forced to master.

She knew far more than just a couple of languages.

The former Amelia was fluent in over a thousand distinct tongues, including ancient dialects that had vanished from common use centuries or even millennia ago, obscure scripts whose surviving readers could be counted on one’s fingers, and intricate codes specifically designed for military cryptography and secret communications.

Her mastery over language had reached a truly astonishing degree.

At a certain point in her previous life, she had even constructed her own private, custom language—a personal cipher she used not to communicate with others, but to record her innermost thoughts and strategic plans in a manner that rendered them utterly incomprehensible to the rest of the world.

For this exact reason, when this system quest materialized before her, Amelia refused to view it merely as a generic arrangement of words.

She actively deconstructed it.

She analyzed its structural composition.

She searched for any latent intent underlying the specific choice of vocabulary.

And she cross-referenced every clue against her vast repository of ancient knowledge.

Amelia jotted down a few key phrases on the paper, then drew a firm underline beneath one specific sequence:

"Cave of the Grandest Heritage"

She muttered the phrase under her breath in a quiet, contemplative whisper.

At least one detail was undeniably clear to her: the quest explicitly referenced a location situated within the mountain range traversing the Empire.

That single clue alone sufficed to eliminate a vast number of potential variables.

Yet the primary anomaly did not reside in the geographic location alone.

The real issue lay in the fundamental manner in which the entire quest had been phrased.

Amelia tilted her head slightly, her gaze locking back onto the illuminated system window before her.

There was something undeniably strange about it.

Extremely strange.

The more she pored over the text, the stronger an unsettling intuition grew within her chest: this quest had never been meant for her in the first place.

Rather... it was originally tailored for her father.

This lingering possibility spun continuously through her mind.

Why?

She had no definitive answer yet.

However, the distinct linguistic structure and underlying tone of the quest repeatedly forced that conclusion to the forefront of her thoughts.

It felt akin to an encrypted letter written by someone intimately familiar with her father—a message that had somehow ended up in her hands through a mechanism she had yet to comprehend.

Leaning back into her chair, Amelia rested her pen on the desk.

"This is strange..." she murmured softly.

The underlying blueprint of this puzzle differed drastically from the ciphers she was accustomed to solving.

Yet surprisingly, she felt no annoyance toward the mystery.

On the contrary... it thoroughly ignited her curiosity.

In her former life, Amelia had been trained from childhood to navigate complex riddles, master ciphers, and decode messages bearing multiple layers of subtext. An Empress was required to read beneath the surface of spoken and written words, for information reaching the throne was rarely straightforward; a single innocent message often concealed dozens of hidden motives.

Throughout those ruthless years of training, she had learned a vital lesson she would never forget:

No matter how strange or fragmented a message appeared at first glance, it did not mean it was void of logic.

Every message possessed a solution.

And every puzzle, no matter how intricate, contained a master key waiting to unlock its core.

Thus, Amelia had no intention of abandoning her analysis so prematurely.

Yet as she re-read the transcribed lines once more, an old memory drifted back into her consciousness—a memory from the day prior to her arrival in the Celestial Continent.

On that day, her father had offered to bring her along with him to the Celestial Continent.

At the time, she hadn’t known the precise destination he intended to take her to. Consequently, the moment her feet touched the soil of the Star Empire, her mind had automatically begun calculating potential training sites her father might select for her.

She had run through countless scenarios: high-risk danger zones, specialized cultivation grounds, and environments her father would deem suitable for someone of her current age and development.

Yet one specific location... had never once crossed her mind.

The Tower of the Absolute Star.

Amelia stared down at the name she had written on the paper, her gaze lingering on the ink for several silent moments.

That place was exceedingly perilous.

It was by no means a site where an ordinary individual could casually decide to enter merely for standard training. Even with all the supreme experience and ancient knowledge retained from her previous life, Amelia could not treat that tower as a routine training ground.

Yet that was not what triggered her deepest suspicions.

The real core of her unease stemmed from another possibility—one so absurd on its surface that she hesitated to even give it credence.

What if this system screen... was genuinely intended for her father all along?

And what if her acquisition of it was far from a random coincidence?

Amelia stopped writing altogether.

She stared intensely at the words written before her, her eyes narrowing into sharp slits.

She lacked absolute certainty.

She possessed no hard, undeniable proof to state definitively that this quest had been designed explicitly for her father. All she had was a collection of seemingly disconnected variables and a persistent, uncanny intuition that something far grander was lurking beneath the surface.

Yet that intuition alone was more than enough to set her brilliant mind constructing dozens of competing theories.

Why did the system trigger this specific quest for her right now?

Why explicitly reference the Tower of the Absolute Star?

Why was she meant to venture there alongside her father?

And why did the phrasing of the quest itself mirror something her father was clearly meant to recognize?

Amelia placed her pen flat onto the desk once more.

She looked up, locking her eyes onto the floating system window.

She did not have the answer.

And that single reality was deeply, thoroughly infuriating to her.