The Emperor had his first look at the girl brought to Lodden when he greeted her. 'Not bad,' he had thought.

She was as beautiful as they came, perhaps more so. A bit peculiar, but nothing that couldn't be chalked up to a young girl traveling outside her nation for the first time, as he was informed.

Still, he wasn't sure what to make of her. Punctual or not, it was important to know where priorities lay. An invitation to a meeting of the utmost importance was something one would place quite high on such a scale of priorities, wouldn't it?

Nevertheless, she arrived late, her face devoid of energy, and even though she had been officially invited as a scholar, she didn't seem very interested in anything but the sweets on the table.

At least for the first few minutes, until their contract was passed around. He was absolutely sure that he had heard her muttering a curse right then and there, while he tried to pretend not to have heard it.

Rowena knew her words weren't very loud, and no one else reacted, except for her brother and the guy to her right, who seemed too embarrassed to say anything.

'I'm sure nobody heard that... except him,' she thought, looking at the young gentleman to her right, who was looking at her from the side. Was there a glint of amusement in his eyes?

Indeed, her words weren't very loud, but the Emperor was capable of using Mana as well. Not much, since they didn't have access to the wisdom of the old, and worked with the accumulated knowledge of the last two hundred years instead - one hundred and fifty-one years to be exact.

Not nearly as much as they would have liked, as much of their power was lost back then.

Of course, that was a few generations ago, and Lodden was thriving in the meantime, even without excessive help from the Church, but it was a problem now. He could only sigh as he watched the young attendants a few seats away.

"Do you have anything to add, Lady van Varnhagen?" he asked after all, as her behavior warranted his intrigue.

Flinching, Rowena's head whipped around like a cat's, staring at the emperor with the macaroon still in her hand and crumbs still stuck to her mouth.

"I didn't say anything," she stammered, then decided to try and turn the conversation away from her somehow, putting the pastry down and dabbing her lips with a napkin to get rid of the sugar, when a clever-sounding idea popped into her head, "I just thought Lodden could use some 'Triple S'. You should try it, it might help in this case."

She thought of the holy trinity of hunting Visitors, as people in her profession would joke.

The old man, who had put himself in a position to talk to them as if he were on the same level as the people around him, wasn't exactly ready to joke though. Visibly irritated, his rough-skinned forehead wrinkled as he tried to understand what the young girl was saying.

'Was she trying to appear wise, or was she deliberately pretending to be a bit witless?' he wondered. He didn't want to think badly of her, as she was just a girl born into the wrong family, ready to be used as cannon fodder if need be, but she didn't give him much to work with.

"What are you talking about, Rowena?" Alan said, his red eyes boring into her intimidatingly.

She almost flinched again at the sight, though he was only looking at her, trying to figure out his younger sister's intentions. All the way to Lodden, they hadn't really spent any time together, and they hadn't talked.

When he looked into her eyes, she would cringe, look unfocused or confused, sometimes wary or curious; there was none of the malice he used to see in her.

In recent years, whenever he thought of his sister, he saw a fence with thorns on it. That fence was moving farther and farther away from her, pushing everything outside of it away. He didn't hate that it was gone now, even if she didn't jump into his arms the way she had as a child.

But he wasn't entirely sure what to make of some of her more... questionable new habits. ''Triple S'? What is she saying?' He couldn't make sense of it.

If there was such a thing, wouldn't he know about it? They grew up in the same house, although she spent her later years in a separate building.

When Rowena found herself cornered like that, between a rock and a hard place - or her brother and the Emperor of Lodden - she really wished she could explain herself right now. The only problem was that she couldn't, because part of this explanation involved knowledge they didn't yet have in this world.

She'd read a few novels where the protagonist would simply whip out some facts they couldn't possibly know with the resources available in their new world, but everyone just believed they'd "read it somewhere in an old book" - a book that no one else had ever seen, apparently.

In her case, if she did, she would probably be burned as a witch - or even worse, as a heretic.

'Forget jotting that down in some book. No way, it wouldn't be something everyone knew about, if anything, it would be something only the Church knew about. Those guys were stealing knowledge and burning books all over the place. They'd probably think I broke into their stash somehow.'

Suddenly, there was a shining way out that presented itself to her like the stairway to heaven, and hopefully it wouldn't turn out to be the highway to hell instead.

When they kept looking at her, due to her own mistakes, she knew she couldn't get out of it. "Oh, I made that up because it sounded amusing. 'Triple S' or 'SSS' – 'Sugar, Silver and Salt'. Sugar for energy, silver for strength, and salt for protection."

If anyone had looked at her oddly before, they were now intrigued, but just as confused.

"What does that mean?" the guy with the forest green eyes next to her said, "I can follow you on the first part, with the sugar. But what about silver and salt?"

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They had a lot of those two in Lodden, didn't they? Almost all the officials in the room became restless at this point.

The people of Lodden thought the Arlen Empire might know something they didn't, while the Arlen envoy thought it must be something the Northern Lion knew and hadn't revealed to the world yet.

In any case, if she was onto something, it must have been a slip of the tongue and something top secret. Perhaps knowledge that could change the world. And they weren't wrong about that last part.

"Explain," Alan demanded, not even trying to polish his words anymore.

"With silver you can craft weapons. You must know that I was in the north a while ago and visited Eisenwacht, the iron village." Every good lie held a little bit of truth. "While I was there, I talked to their best blacksmith, and he told me that there is a way. Silver conducts Mana, that's why it's so potent, and you can use it to forge suitable weapons."

She would apologize to Ansgar later, but he was supposed to become famous anyway, Rowena was just helping with the process a bit, right? But now they really started to whisper and argue about her words.

With a smile she cleared her throat. "As for the salt..." she really couldn't tell tall tales with that one, so it was better to stick to what she already had, "when I was in Eisenwacht, there was an incident involving Visitors. We were near a village, and I was unlucky, so I must admit that I threw what I had at them, and it happened to be some salt. It seemed to burn the Visitor. But I lost consciousness and wasn't sure what had happened later on, so I didn't feel comfortable revealing what I thought I had seen."

She made a point of sounding embarrassed and a bit pitiful, trying to make them feel sorry for her situation in which a noble lady had to behave so undignifiedly. It appeared that they felt a little sorry for her, but most of all, there was doubt on their faces.

Now, she didn't want them to question the origin of her knowledge, but it seemed like they were treating her story like a fairy tale instead, which wasn't good either.

"May I suggest a test?" the noble lady said, now much more stern than before, tucking one of her lavender waves behind her right ear, "Wouldn't it be fine if someone were to visit the mine that had to be shut down and see if my findings have any merit or not? If so, I firmly believe it would greatly improve the situation within the Empire."

The meeting was definitely more than she could handle as she left the conference room. It was her victory, but she felt a hundred years older now. It was that draining.

But it was her fault for not having a seal on her lips. Then again, they had to improve the conditions to minimize the amount of help they would need. Only then would they be able to wave off the help they got from Arlen as normal trade, and they could also secure a deal for virgin silver if they could open the additional mine.

Why was it so important that they either had a cause for helping them greatly, or didn't go into the realm beyond a simple trade at all? Because of the political climate, as explained in the novel.

For that to happen, a daughter of importance to Arlen would have to be married, as Lodden had no other heirs and couldn't give their Crown Prince away, but the only princess of Arlen was already promised to marry into the Aurora Empire.

Ironically, it took them a long time, because the situation had to be put to rest after Rowena's death. She now understood why her father, in his grief, opposed the deal with all his might, to the point that the Arlen Emperor put the political marriage on hold for a short while. The Grand Duke presumably thought that she had ended her life because of the rumors of this political marriage.

Later in the story, they tried again, with the next lady in line, which happened to be the young lady of the Neuhaus Marquisate. Nerena would have been first in line, but there was no young daughter left.

'But before the ink was dry on their scheming letters, they finally figured out the secret of salt, and Lodden got back on its feet at the eleventh hour.' She looked around aimlessly as she wandered down another heavily decorated corridor.

The Principality of Nathos and the Kingdom of Cirylla had been in a warring state for nearly a decade. Still, nations like these two weren't dangerous to adjacent nations like the Arlen Empire.

Not only because they didn't have the same military power as them, obviously, but also because they had enough trouble with each other and the increased danger from the Shifting Ages.

They might not have a word for it in Rowena's world, being at the very beginning of the Shifting Ages, but they certainly felt the pressure.

And even two kingdoms forming an alliance, like Edengard and Kanaria, wasn't that big of a deal, but two of the biggest empires on the map joining forces for something bigger than a simple grain trade? That was worrisome.

It wouldn't have been the first time that two great powers allied and swallowed up other nations, even beyond their own continent. Which was even more of a concern later in "The Saintess' Unbreakable Shield," when Rowena died and couldn't be married off, and they went on to build a railroad for a transcontinental steam train that would connect the continents and avoid the dangers of the sea.

They needed a reason for the level of support that Lodden needed right now, and to be frank, the only nation that had a right to do so was the Holy Empire. In return for "guarding" Aurora's treasures, they were her messengers and helped in times of need.

Or so it should have been. In reality, they amassed a lot of wealth by simply hoarding knowledge about Mana and how to use it, keeping it for themselves, and letting anyone who wanted to learn come to them and swear varying degrees of loyalty.

'Like a High Priest against a Holy Knight. When I talked to Logan Randall, I knew what kind of situation he would end up in. Or when I told Colin that I could use Mana, even though no one had taught me, and now it would be questionable if someone had illegally taught me in secret if the Church ever found out.'

The Aurora Empire was supposed to support others when they claimed that the knowledge of the Goddess should be kept within the Vatican, since it was a gift from God in the first place. But all they did was lock it away and make people pay to get help.

Then they went on to call any nation that didn't cooperate with them a land of pagans. But even if they learned on their own, it would never beat the accumulated wisdom of more than five centuries. If what the novel said was true history, then humanity on this Earth was quite young.

They learned the use of Mana from a Numbered who had visited them as the first of their kind. That was their Goddess, and the first Saintess was her contractor.

'And even though I know all of this, there is literally no mention of who this first Saintess even was. Probably some 'lost' knowledge we would magically find if we rolled the pope over a bit.' As for Celia's world, which was older, her way was of course more refined.

For a moment, her eyes stopped looking around as she hovered over a large work of art. Beneath a painting, that reminded her of the murals she often saw in old churches in her old world, there was a plaque that read: "Abel Rises to Slay Kain."

'Uh, wait, that sounds kind of wrong. I'm not big into religion, but it was the other way around, wasn't it?' It seemed like such a random thing to change. 'Feels like having a parallel universe, but the red light is green, and green light is red.'

'It's not wrong. Kain kills Abel; Abel kills Kain. Neither is wrong, that's why both versions exist.'

'Wow, what? They actually existed?' She also wondered how they could have killed each other, imagining a scene like Romeo and Juliet.

'Indeed. Though, not that part about Romeo and Juliet.'

When reality hit her, she almost stopped walking. 'Jesus fucking Christ.'

'No, that one did not exist.'

'That wasn't the question, I was just… No, forget it. I'm glad you're finally telling me things, now that I know about the multiple world theory. But why such useless things though?'

'History is something that can never be considered useless.'

'Sure, sure. I get it.' She rolled her eyes at his vehement tone. 'Just don't mention the word 'history' for a while.'

"Do you like this painting?" an unfamiliar voice asked, pulling her out of her thoughts and making her turn around to find a pair of beautiful deep green eyes.

'Nice eyelashes,' she thought, blinking at the young man, "Nah, I'm not big into religion."

She seriously had to watch her words from now on. Sleep deprivation was no excuse at this point. On the bright side, at least she hadn't managed to confuse what she wanted to think with what she wanted to say.