Stepping down from the carriage, Arghena's gaze immediately noticed us. Her usual aristocratic, authoritative demeanor vanished; she raised her hand to wave lightly and spoke casually like family:
"Fraud is back, did you manage to buy what I needed?"
Fraud laughed, scratching his head and replying: "Not yet, that merchant ripped me off too hard so I bailed, haven't bought it yet."
Arghena let out a soft laugh: "It's fine, we can buy that item later..."
Her sentence suddenly trailed off. Arghena's amethyst-purple eyes shifted, sweeping past Fraud and stopping on me. The atmosphere instantly changed. The shell of a prestigious lady of the Aximous family was immediately erected to envelop her.
"...But," Arghena tilted her head slightly, her eyes shining with scrutiny mixed with surprise, "the person next to you is... Sir Zero?"
Immediately, I retracted my earlier casual, breezy posture, my back straight, right hand placed lightly on my left chest, and bowed at a perfect angle. I smiled politely:
"Greetings, My Lady. It is an honor that you still remember me."
The corner of Fraud's mouth twitched. He stared at me with wide eyes as if he had just seen a strange creature wash ashore, blurting out: "Ay yo, chill... since when are you this elegant, Zero?"
Before I could glare at this monkey for ruining the game, Fraud turned to explain to Arghena: "Let me introduce you, this is Zero. A close friend of mine and Ender."
"Hmm..."
Arghena narrowed her eyes. At that exact moment, her tranquil eyes suddenly lit up.
An unannounced, freezing sensation brushed across my skin. It wasn't like killing intent, but exactly like a high-frequency data stream scanning straight into my system. She was silently appraising, checking whether what Fraud just said, and my very self, were truly facts or not.
Under that invisible yet incredibly sharp pressure, I maintained a proper smile on my lips, calmly facing her inspection.
As soon as the inspection returned a safe result, that invisible pressure also vanished without a trace, as fast and smooth as someone disconnecting a network connection.
Arghena immediately retracted all her mana. The tranquility and vigilance in the depths of her amethyst-purple eyes dissipated, replaced by a significantly warmer look. The solemn shell of the Aximous family representative was completely removed.
She smiled, a bright, sincere smile, no longer the elegant social facade from earlier. Arghena's tone also became intimate, speaking softly:
"Welcome to the Aximous estate, Zero. Please make yourself comfortable, like you're at home."
I breathed a sigh of relief inwardly. Her changing her form of address from "Sir" to "you" and dropping all diplomatic formalities was an unmistakably clear signal. It proved the security check had concluded, and I was officially welcomed by her in the capacity of her husband's close friend, not a strange guest anymore.
After the atmosphere had completely opened up, Arghena happily led Fraud and me into the main area of the Aximous estate.
Just stepping through the exquisitely carved door into the vast drawing room, striking my eyes was the image of a young man burying his head in a pile of documents, calculating something. That diligent, tense posture—and if it truly was Ender—I was certain that monkey was calculating the value of whatever knives bro had.
Before I even had time to offer a greeting, a scene occurred in a flash that made me freeze for a few seconds.
Arghena—the prestigious, sharp lady who had just used magic to scan and inspect me moments ago—now almost completely threw away all aristocratic image. Her face brightened considerably, she walked quickly over and gently threw herself into hugging Ender from behind, wrapping her arms around his neck with an incredibly natural and sweet affection.
Fraud and I stood watching, knowing we were being served dog food by a couple.
Hugged unexpectedly, Ender startled violently, the quill pen in his hand clattering onto the desk. He awkwardly turned around, just in time to look up and make direct eye contact with Fraud and me standing frozen right at the door.
Ender's face immediately grimaced, his eyes widening, sending an emergency SOS signal. That gaze seemed to scream: "Save me from these two monkeys! I still have a few knives whose value I haven't finished calculating, save me from Arghena!"
I looked at Ender. Fraud also looked at Ender. Then, Fraud and I turned to look at each other. With just a tenth of a second of eye contact, a silent protocol of consensus between brothers was successfully established.
Before turning to leave, Fraud and I simultaneously looked toward Ender, giving that monkey an understanding look, overflowing with deep sympathy and pity. However, hidden behind that teary-eyed, humane look, a distinct train of thought ran across both our brains:
"Help my ass, has the luck but doesn't know how to enjoy it."
Completing the farewell procedure for our brother, I calmly turned my face away, looking up at the ceiling, speaking in an incredibly elegant and polite voice:
"My, the vaulted architecture of the Aximous estate is truly a masterpiece of sculptural art. These patterned lines are truly worth admiring."
Fraud immediately caught the frequency, clearing his throat and nodding in agreement: "Right, right. Hey Zero, I remember there are some really high-quality paintings in the corridor over there, let me take you on a tour so you can see how GENIUS this estate is."
"Hmm, sounds ok, I'll trouble you to lead the way then."
Saying that, I turned slightly to the side. Catching Kanade's somewhat flustered and embarrassed expression at the affectionate scene of the host couple, I tilted my head slightly, speaking in a mild voice:
"Let us also go, Lady Kanade. Perhaps we shouldn't disturb their private space right now."
Ignoring the desperate gaze burning holes in my back from Ender, Fraud, Kanade, and I leisurely turned on our heels and strode out of the drawing room. Returning the quiet space to that couple to be affectionate, touring the corridors right now was clearly a much more optimal and logical option.
Along the vast marble-paved corridor of the Aximous estate, Fraud suddenly nudged my shoulder lightly, his tone carrying excitement:
"Say, Zero, if you don't know, Ender has a whole room in this estate just to store his knives."
I blinked, my brain quickly linking the keyword "knives" to familiar hobbies in the old world.
"Chill. Don't tell me Ender brought a whole pile of knives from STK all the way over here?"
Fraud laughed and waved his hand, the smile of a gamer who thoroughly understood the issue.
"How could you bring items from a game into the real world, not to mention this is another world, where would you dig up a Roblox system to play STK here? That pile of knives is entirely forged by Ender himself or hunted down and collected. Then bro will sit and calculate the value of each one, pinning the price waiting for the opportunity to sell for profit."
Hearing this, I couldn't help but laugh out loud.
"Then whenever he touches the problem of pricing and value margin, that monkey is no longer a mechanical engineer. He's completely switched his major to an economist."
The two of us burst out laughing together, leaving Kanade walking beside us tilting her head slightly, her lemon-green eyes blinking in total bewilderment at the series of strange terminology she couldn't possibly understand. But my smile suddenly halted as an illogical point brushed past my logical reasoning.
"But wait a minute." I frowned, looking at Fraud. "You said Ender forged the knives himself? I don't remember any course in the HUST Mechanical Engineering curriculum teaching students how to forge knives."
Fraud shrugged, letting out a sigh full of exclamation for our brother.
"That monkey probably just tinkered and learned it himself here. Anyway, most of the time Ender is locked tightly in the house by Arghena; if he doesn't find something to do, he'll probably get depressed. Even the few lucky times he gets to go out, his wife will follow closely behind, you just saw it."
Then Fraud continued: "Let me take you to admire that knife vault." I nodded in agreement immediately. This waiting period was inherently meant to be used to gather more information.
On the way, we walked through the main garden of the Aximous family. Even though I was mentally prepared for the luxury of the nobility, the scenery here still made me secretly marvel. It was breathtakingly beautiful and majestic. The vegetation was planned and trimmed with flawless precision, interwoven with exquisitely carved fountains glowing under hazy magic layers. Sitting imposingly right in the middle of that vast space was an elegant gazebo—a structure specifically designed just for core members to sit, enjoy tea, and admire this poetic scenery.
Crossing the garden, we approached another mansion. Although somewhat smaller in scale than the main building from earlier, the architecture here still exuded an undiminished majesty and grandeur.
"We're here. This is the private area where Arghena and Ender live together," Fraud introduced, stepping forward to push open the carved ironwood door.
Following behind him, I cast my eyes to observe the whole and quickly connected the spatial data together. It turned out the Aximous family estate inherently wasn't a single giant building. It was a complex of smaller mansions systematically distributed and planned within a closed territory.
This method of spatial organization gave me a strangely familiar feeling. It was identical to the model of national universities in the old world, containing independent member colleges within an overall campus. Mentally calculating the distance from the teleportation station to the main gate, from the main gate into the grand hall, then from the hall across the garden to reach this auxiliary mansion, I began to set up a basic area estimation problem in my head. This real estate block owned by the Aximous family... was definitely not smaller than the HUST campus.
The chain of logical deduction immediately led me to connect to another frame of reference. Wait, then the scale of the Shirakawa estate must also definitely be on an equivalent level. Only at this point did I suddenly realize a loophole in my information gathering. Since the day I set foot in the Shirakawa territory under the sponsorship of Lady Aiselin, I seemed to have only operated around the main building area. Aside from the library, the study, and my resting quarters, I hadn't spent any time surveying or touring their entire campus. Focusing too much on the survival problem and processing deadlines had caused me to inadvertently miss a massive amount of data about the surrounding space.
Cutting through my rambling deductions about the scale and power of the noble families, Fraud suddenly stopped.
We were standing before a double door made of dark oak located at the end area of the first-floor corridor. There were no guards or complex glowing magic arrays protecting the outside, but the sturdy structure along with the metal reinforcement lines on the door frame indicated an absolute priority on privacy.
Fraud reached out and grasped the solid brass door handle. He turned slightly to look back at me, the corners of his mouth lifting into a half-smile full of the anticipation of a monkey about to wreck his brother's pile of toys.
"We're here."
A dry clatter rang out as the mechanical latch inside was popped open. The heavy door slowly creaked open.
End of Chapter 27.