After changing into a complete set of clothes, I ran my fingers along the full-length mirror built into the dressing room wall.
If my memory was correct, there was a secret passage hidden here.
Among the countless buildings within the Imperial Palace, most palaces had passages like this. The hidden routes inside the Emperor's palace itself were top-secret, known only to the Emperor, but the others had quietly become the subject of whispered rumors.
Some of those rumors were deliberate fabrications, spread to protect the real passages. Others were true. Most of the secret routes had disappeared into the pages of history, their very existence forgotten.
The passage in my dressing room was one of those forgotten ones.
I had discovered it not long after moving into Lavender Palace.
To be honest, it hadn't been pure luck.
When I first moved into Lavender Palace, one thought had crossed my mind.
If this palace has unofficially served as the Crown Prince's residence for generations... wouldn't it have a secret escape route prepared for the Crown Prince as well?
If everything went wrong and history repeated itself...
Then this time, I had no intention of dying quietly, just as my uncle had wished.
In my dreams, I had witnessed the horrifying fate of those left behind after I drowned in despair and finally died.
Even if escaping meant becoming nothing more than the nobles' puppet emperor in the future...
I would survive.
No matter what.
And when I did, I would make Kien and Voltaire pay.
To do that, I needed an escape route before an emergency ever arose.
Fortunately, when I first moved into Lavender Palace, I had more free time than I knew what to do with. So from the age of three until I turned five, I searched every corner of the palace under the pretense of playing hide-and-seek.
Two years later...
I finally found it.
As an aside, my nanny and maids still believed hide-and-seek was my favorite game in the entire world.
I slipped my fingers into the narrow gap beneath the mirror.
Click.
Something caught beneath my fingertips.
Oddly enough, there was almost no sound.
One of the six mirror panels silently slid about half a meter to the side, revealing a passage barely wide enough for a single person.
I quickly slipped inside and pushed the mirror shut behind me.
"Whew... I thought I was going to die from nerves."
What if my nanny came in to check whether I was sleeping?
What if one of the maids remembered something she'd forgotten and quietly entered my room?
I knew those fears were irrational.
But the possibility—however tiny—was enough to make my heart pound wildly.
After calming myself, I lit the magical lamp hanging on the wall.
Tick.
A faint crackle of mana echoed as blue light blossomed inside the lamp.
I adjusted the mana regulator until the light was no brighter than an ordinary lantern.
Holding the light toward the secret door, I locked the mechanism from the inside.
Only then did I finally relax.
Step by step, I began walking through the narrow corridor.
Truthfully...
Even I couldn't say for certain that this was the correct path.
I was relying entirely on memories from my dreams.
Yet now...
I could finally be sure.
I had never ventured this deeply into the passage before.
And despite that...
This maze-like network matched my dreams perfectly.
It was enough to give me goosebumps.
No—
It was so unbelievable that I felt like I was losing my mind.
"...Wow."
"So you've finally gone insane, Amelia."
This route led toward the northern forest outside the Imperial Palace—roughly the same direction as the Cold Palace.
After walking for quite some time, I arrived at an abandoned pavilion where no one lived anymore.
The emergency passages hidden throughout the palace intertwined like a spider's web, forming a massive labyrinth.
The pattern of that labyrinth was passed down only to the Emperor.
So why...
Why had this place appeared in my dreams?
I'd never been here before.
Questions kept piling onto questions.
In the end, I shook my head, forcing the useless thoughts aside.
There was no point overthinking it now.
First...
I only needed to confirm whether that dagger—the one that hadn't disappeared when I woke from my dream—was really still in that place beneath the Cold Palace.
In my previous life, the trail of the dagger had ended there.
The fact that it appeared in every dream connected to both my past and my future...
Perhaps...
No.
Surely it meant the dagger held an important key to my regression.
Otherwise, there was no explaining this impossible reality of time being reversed.
Somewhere...
There had to be evidence that my time had truly been rewound.
Stepping outside the abandoned pavilion, I allowed my eyes to adjust to the darkness.
To avoid being discovered, I extinguished the magic lamp and relied solely on moonlight to guide my way.
Fortunately, neither the deserted pavilion nor the abandoned Cold Palace had anyone living nearby.
Even the Imperial Guards seemed to patrol with only the minimum number of soldiers, following fixed routes.
Thanks to that...
Sneaking into the underground chambers beneath the Cold Palace proved far easier than I'd expected.
Once I reached the deserted basement, I lit the magical lamp again.
The pitch-black underground looked like the kind of place where something might leap out at any moment.
For a brief second, I even wondered if I was actually walking toward a meeting with a demon.
Tap... tap...
My footsteps echoed through the tunnels.
As expected of the Cold Palace, the conditions were miserable.
Moisture clung to every stone wall.
Eventually...
I reached a chamber so deep underground that even the entrance I'd come through had vanished into darkness.
That place.
The prison where Ar had been confined after my death.
The place where...
Ar had died.
I wrapped my hand around the rusty iron doorknob.
The rough texture of oxidized metal scraped against my palm.
The sour scent of rust filled the air.
It felt as though flakes of corrosion were sticking to my skin.
Taking a deep breath...
I pulled.
Creeeak...
At last...
The door opened.
A storm had unexpectedly swept through the Empress's Palace.
The Empress's personal attendants began turning the entire palace upside down.
Everyone inside held their breath.
Every servant knew what had happened during the hunting festival.
After the event ended in disaster, the Emperor had declared that he would conduct a thorough investigation.
He had even appointed Marquis Serphis as the official investigator.
Officially, the reason was simple.
They would determine whether the wyverns had relocated their habitat or had merely wandered through by chance, then decide whether next year's hunting festival should relocate its base camp while implementing stronger safety measures.
But anyone with sharp instincts already understood the truth.
The Emperor intends to destroy someone.
And that "someone" would almost certainly be one of the nobles supporting Prince Voltaire—the greatest obstacle standing in the way of the future Crown Princess Eonel and Princess Amelia.
Even before the investigation began, the Emperor had already assumed that someone had deliberately lured the wyverns to the base camp.
Everything was proceeding according to that assumption.
If evidence truly surfaced...
The guilty noble's entire family would be exterminated.
And if no evidence existed...
The Emperor would simply create a crime where none existed and execute them anyway.
For example...
The commander of the Twelfth Knight Order, who had been responsible for guarding the base camp during the hunting festival.
The Empress's younger brother.
No matter how one looked at it...
The political situation was extremely dangerous for the Empress.
Naturally, she had become frantic.
Most of the palace maids assumed she was simply venting her temper and quietly kept their heads down as they always did.
But those with sharper instincts realized something else.
She might pin the blame on one of us.
Otherwise...
Why would the Empress suddenly be tearing apart her own palace staff over an incident completely unrelated to them?
No one knew what excuse she would invent.
But if it was the Empress...
She could fabricate evidence out of thin air if it suited her purposes.
Meaning...
One careless mistake was enough to get someone killed.
And so the Empress's Palace became as silent as a grave.
Then...
Just as everyone wondered which room would be searched next...
The Empress's attendants stormed into a room on the western side of the second floor.
It served as both the laundry room for all linens used throughout the palace and the storage area for the Empress's personal fabrics, silk, leather, and sewing materials.
The laundry maids had been diligently folding towels, spreading freshly dried carpets and curtains, and inspecting them for stains when the attendants barged in.
Knowing their turn had finally come, the maids immediately stopped working, shrank back, and lowered their heads.
The head maid swept her cold gaze over them before speaking in a voice as icy as winter.
"Where is the girl responsible for managing this place? She wasn't in her office."
She meant Marie.
The maids exchanged uneasy glances without lifting their heads.
I don't know...
Do you?
No. What about you?
How would I know?
Whenever payday came around, Marie would briefly appear in her office, repeatedly complaining, "What a bother," while lazily calculating everyone's wages before submitting the paperwork.
Aside from that...
She rarely showed her face.
Not in the silk storeroom.
Not among the embroidery threads.
Not even in the laundry room, where the servants gathered most often.
Her father had sent her into the palace firmly believing she would one day become one of the Empress's personal attendants.
But he belonged to such a low-ranking noble family that she had never stood a chance.
Even being assigned this remote western clothing department should have been considered an honor for someone of her status.
"Marie, was it?"
"Find her immediately and drag her here."
"How dare she abandon her post during working hours."
At the head maid's cold command, one of the attendants hurried out to search for her.
Meanwhile, the others entered Marie's office and began tearing through everything.
They swept ledgers into baskets.
They inspected the silk warehouse.
They crossed into the leather storeroom, pulling out expensive hides and bolts of silk to check both their condition and inventory.
Soon, they returned carrying bundles of silk, fur, cloth dye, and several account books.
"Five bolts of silk have been damaged by moths."
"The fox and sable furs have deteriorated."
"Red dye has grown mold."
"The wages recorded in the accounting books don't match the servants' attendance records."
The Empress had found her scapegoat.
The underground chambers beneath the Cold Palace...
Even colder.
Even darker.
Even damper than the Cold Palace of my previous life—the past that was also my future.
The iron door swung open.
I stared directly at the place where Ar had died in my dreams.
It looked exactly the same.
The same oppressive darkness.
The same suffocating atmosphere.
The cold air turned every breath into white mist.
"...Haa."
Goosebumps spread across my arms.
And there...
I found what I had come searching for.
A silver dagger shaped like a dolphin.
The moment my fingers touched it, an intense chill wrapped around my hand.
It didn't feel like ordinary metal.
Nor did it resemble iron left for years in a freezing room.
It was as cold as snow in the dead of winter.
Yet its surface was astonishingly soft—
Like finely woven cloth.
As though the Winter Goddess herself had cut off her own silver hair and woven it into silk.
It possessed an unmistakable sense of otherworldliness.
But an even greater question surfaced.
"...Why is this here?"
Honestly...
The fact that I'd followed nothing but vague dream memories all the way here already sounded unbelievable enough.
But...
It was actually here?
Then again, my regression itself was impossible to explain.
For the past three years, I'd suspected something while repeatedly dreaming about my previous life.
Still...
I never imagined the dagger would truly remain in the Cold Palace basement—the exact place where its trail had ended before my regression.
Logically speaking...
At this point in time, the dagger should not have been here.
The fact that it still existed in this basement meant only one thing.
It was the only object—well, perhaps not the only one, though I couldn't be certain—that had remained completely unaffected by my return through time.
"...Ar doesn't have it?"
