Chapter 133: Isaac Newton’s Waste Book

With no hearth flames or choking smoke, the praetorium bedroom was incredibly warm and pleasant by the newly installed subterranean steam radiators.

One could walk barefoot across the floor wearing only a thin silk tunic, ignoring the Alpine blizzard raging outside.

The newly engineered glass bulb resting on the nightstand flooded the room with a remarkably stable glow.

He was trapped somewhere perfectly in between... directly inside the memories of his past life on Earth.

At this realization, Lucius slowly turned his head and looked at the woman sitting against the headboard.

She was currently reading a stack of logistical parchment.

"What exactly are you staring at?" Valeria had already lowered the parchment rolls and was looking directly at Lucius, a smirk on her lips. "Me?"

"Ahem..." Lucius shifted his eyes toward the radiators, but immediately shifted his gaze back to her face. "Indeed. I am."

After surviving an entire year of warfare, senatorial purges, and industrial expansion together, the two of them had forged a familiar bond.

Lucius was significantly more open about the profound affection he usually suppressed behind his ’Ashen Demon’ persona.

They stared at each other for a long moment before bursting into genuine laughter.

"Do you think my demands for tonight were slightly too tyrannical?" Valeria shook her head, "Commander Valerius and Aulus clearly spent weeks preparing a celebratory banquet for my twenty-first birthday, yet I ordered the *Custodes* to bar the doors and pushed the entire high command away."

"Do not worry about the bruised egos of the generals," Lucius laughed, spreading his hands. "They were merely shocked by your sudden lack of vanity. Usually, a Roman Matriarch would demand a parade."

Valeria sighed, "I assume the other officers will quickly recover their pride. You, however, will be incredibly busy tomorrow handling their delayed complaints."

"I am finally enjoying a peaceful evening away from the Senate spies," she confessed quietly. "I could not spend my previous birthdays with a husband who actually respected my intellect, but I can certainly make up for it tonight."

Watching Valeria’s sincere expression, Lucius actually felt a flush of heat touch his neck.

He quickly cleared his throat, reaching behind the nightstand to retrieve a manuscript tied with a silk ribbon, and handed it to her. "A specialized gift for your twenty-first year."

The only reason he had burned his remaining brain cells to reconstruct the advanced principles of calculus was to ensure it was bound and completed before this exact evening...

Lucius had always possessed a crippling inability to choose standard romantic gifts... jewelry and silks felt useless to him, and this year was no different.

He decided to give Valeria the ultimate weapon of the universe: advanced theoretical knowledge.

After receiving the manuscript embossed with the title *Principia Mathematica*, she did not immediately tear open the silk ribbon as she normally would with classified intelligence reports.

Instead, she placed it down on the nightstand next to the bulb. "Thank you, Lucius."

"The ledgers... Have you already finished reviewing them?"

"Not yet." Valeria slightly shook her head, her eyes pinning him in place. "But tonight, I wish to hear something vastly more specialized."

"Specialized?" Lucius was slightly taken aback by the request.

"Yes," she said, a smile curving her lips. "Your personal history. The last time we spoke of it, I fell asleep far too quickly while listening to your descriptions, and tonight, I demand to hear the continuation."

Lucius pursed his lips tightly.

The pressure of the previous day came rushing back.

He suddenly felt an irrational impulse to just shatter the lie, to tell her the truth of his transmigration and stop hiding his chronological origins.

"Do you still recall that I once told you I used to live in an advanced metropolis? By ’metropolis,’ I absolutely did not mean Rome, Alexandria, or Antioch."

"I am well aware of that."

"Huh?"

Valeria’s immediate calm reply genuinely shocked him.

"I deduced that those events could not possibly have occurred within the borders of the Roman Empire, or even the Parthian territories," she said with a knowing smile. "Do not forget, I have memorized the Imperial Chronicles and the maps of the known world."

"Is that a fact?" Lucius hesitated for a long moment, his mind freezing. "I actually..."

"You do not have to force the words out right now." Valeria raised a hand, "You are hesitating, which means the truth is difficult to articulate without sounding insane, correct? Then do not speak it. Besides, it is not difficult to deduce the broad strokes. I believe I am not the only one in the high command who harbors this silent suspicion. The closer your generals get to your intellect, the easier it is to feel the chronological distortion... you are different from everyone else born on this earth." She paused, "What if... we engage in a wager."

"A wager?"

"Let us bet on how much of your true life story I can deduce on my own."

Lucius was suddenly struck by the memory of an exercise he used to observe in his past life: the time capsule.

The premise was simple: write down your thoughts, bury them in a cylinder, and unearth it decades later.

The sensation of reading words displaced by time was impossible to quantify.

Valeria was offering him a time capsule... a way to share his past without the crushing burden of a direct, insane confession.

He didn’t even bother to ask about the specific stakes of the wager.

It did not matter who won or lost, since she had clearly proposed the game to comfort his anxiety, rather than to force his true identity into the light.

He was forced to admit, out of all the brilliant minds in the Syndicate, Valeria was the only one who truly understood him...

"The wager is accepted," Lucius nodded.

"Where exactly did your description conclude last time?"

"I had just finished my formal engineering accreditations under the guidance of my university mentors..." Lucius laughed.

When the light of the Gallic dawn finally broke over the Alpine skyline, Valeria peacefully drifted to sleep, having spent her twenty-first birthday listening to the perfect fairy tales of the twenty-first century...