Olivia put down the bone china teacup, bent down, and rummaged through the pile of books casually stacked beside the table leg for a while. Finally, she pulled out a thick book with a blue leather cover from within.
When she picked it up and placed it on the dining table, one could still clearly feel the tremor brought by the hefty book.
She opened the cover, casually flipped through a few pages, her pale silver eyes quickly scanning the pages.
A silver tray hopped over, delivering a small cake decorated with strawberries. Chen Yu swallowed it in one gulp, his round, plump body rippling with satisfaction, and he didn't forget to ask, "What are you looking for?"
"Castle operation logs." Olivia's slender fingers traced the yellowed pages as she answered without looking up.
"A little one is managing this castle. Almost every clock day, it records the castle's daily operational status—such as energy consumption, spatial stability, visitor logs, garden plant growth status, and so on—in detail in this log..."
Halfway through her words, Olivia narrowed her eyes, seemingly finding it a bit hard to see the tiny characters on the page. She reached out and picked up a pair of exquisitely crafted silver-framed glasses from the top of the book pile and put them on.
The lenses of the glasses were very thin, the frames slender, adorned with tiny sapphires, adding an intellectual air to her.
She adjusted her glasses, her gaze returning to the page. Her fingers quickly flipped through, the paper making a soft "rustling" sound. Finally, her movements stopped at a certain spot in the middle of the page.
"Found it. Clock Calendar 1423, Month of the Spring Equinox, Seventeenth Day. Visitor Olivia Silverlight, ascended to the castle with a token, identity confirmed, permission to enter granted.""This year is Clock Calendar 1470, a difference of 47 years... It seems my memory is quite good, I didn't remember wrong." She seemed particularly satisfied with this, nodding slightly.
Hmm... Do dragons get dementia?
He instinctively asked, "I heard dragons have very long lifespans?"
"That is indeed true..."
Olivia pushed the silver-framed glasses on the bridge of her nose, then suddenly tilted her head, revealing a puzzled expression, muttering to herself, "Speaking of which, how long have I lived? Six hundred years, or seven hundred... I can't quite remember clearly."
Chen Yu silently said nothing. Being able to live this long, memory blurriness was probably the most trivial among her many little quirks. At least she didn't have dementia.
However, Viola and Count Bran also seemed to have lived for a very long time. In this world filled with magic and miracles, longevity wasn't such a rare thing.
Perhaps in the eyes of dragons, Olivia at six or seven hundred years old was still just a young woman in the prime of her youth.
Immediately after, Chen Yu hopped and jumped onto the dining table, his round, plump body facing her. "So, what is your purpose?"
"What purpose?" Olivia was very interested in his topic, or rather, she was interested in chatting and conversation itself.
After all, even for a dragon, staying alone in a castle for decades with no one to talk to would be quite a boring thing.
Even if the one conversing with her was just a slime, it didn't hinder her interest in chatting in the slightest.
Moreover, this slime was especially interesting.
"Of course, the purpose of tearing open planar rifts and attracting creatures from the Prime Material Plane to come here." Chen Yu directly pointed it out.
Olivia closed the log in her hand, her pale silver eyes looking at Chen Yu through the lenses, and she gently shook her head. "Your little Majesty has misunderstood. I have no authority to interfere with this castle's operation."
"It's just that some of this castle's core magic formations occasionally need to replenish fuel. Opening the rifts is merely to draw mana and arcane energy from the Prime Material Plane."
"I just happened to be traveling with the castle's lady and arrived here."
In other words, the castle's caretaker was someone else, not an artifact spirit, not a castle elf. Chen Yu understood clearly.
Olivia took a small sip of the flower tea in her cup, which was at just the right temperature, and continued, "This is a naive and pure soul. It almost only displays professional competence in specialized matters, such as maintaining castle operations and recording logs. The rest of the time, it hardly pays attention to outsiders."
"Over so many years, I've communicated with this little one countless times, but the conversation usually doesn't exceed one or two sentences. If you want to pry more information about it from me, you'll be disappointed."
"However..." She changed the subject, her gaze falling on Chen Yu's emerald green gel body. "Possessing the same power, you should have come for the master who built this castle, right?"
"You've seen him?" Chen Yu's heart stirred.
Olivia shook her head again. "No, I haven't seen him, but my grandmother's grandmother did meet him. I heard that at that time, the human empire hadn't yet collapsed, and they maintained a... well, ambiguous relationship for a while."
"Only later, that man disappeared, vanished without a trace. Any divination spells or divine magic couldn't find the slightest trace of him, as if he had completely left this material plane."
"You came here to help your great-grandmother find her lover?" Chen Yu blinked. He felt he was sniffing out the sour stench of love-hate entanglement.
Olivia gave him a glare. This action made her look even more like an ordinary human girl.
"Dragons just have long lifespans; it's not like we don't die. That past affair has long since returned to the embrace of sky and earth with her old self. I only learned about it in recent years."
"As for why I came here... I think you probably wouldn't be interested in a dragon's family trivialities. But our purposes are, to some extent, the same—both to find the master of this castle, or rather, to explore the traces and secrets he left behind."
"But unfortunately, as you can see, he hasn't returned to this castle up to the present."
Although what Olivia said was almost like saying nothing, Chen Yu still obtained quite a bit of useful information.
Olivia's great-grandmother's romance was at least a thousand years ago now, and she was still certain that the Golden Core great master was alive and might return to the castle.
This far exceeded the lifespan range of a Golden Core stage cultivator. This senior who came from Xu Xuan Heaven, his story might be even more legendary than Chen Yu imagined.
After all, he was an alchemist capable of creating alchemical objects that attracted gods to fight over them. The shackles of lifespan might have long ceased to be a problem for him.
He pondered for a long time before asking again, "How can I directly converse with this castle's elf?"
Those complicated operation logs were just piled up here, who knows how many times Olivia had looked through them.
She didn't mention any clues in the logs, so there probably wasn't any useful information to be found there. Directly conversing with the castle's caretaker elf was the most efficient way to obtain information.
"You wait a moment..."
Olivia rummaged through the pile of books stacked like a mountain beside her for a while before pulling out an ancient-looking small booklet.
She opened the booklet and laid it flat on the tabletop so Chen Yu could read it.
"Silver Sparrow, that's what I call her. As for her real name..." Olivia pointed with her slender finger at the mysterious runic signature at the bottom of the page.
"Yin Que?" Chen Yu discovered this was actually written in the ancient language of Xu Xuan Heaven. Although different from current calligraphy, it was from the same lineage. Even with slight differences, a cultivator a thousand years later could easily recognize it.