I sent that message to Zaitenmodi while walking home with Lilac and Savi.
His response came so quickly, I had to imagine he was on his phone too... or perhaps he replied using something other than a phone?
Either way, it seemed like he wasn't busy at all.
'He sure likes meditation.'
Unfortunately, since I didn't have servants devoted to my personal well-being like an emperor did, I could only spend so much time in a day meditating.
Well, if I were truly selfish, I could try to just make Lilac and Savi do everything, so I suppose it was a matter of what I wanted, rather than what I needed.
Particularly if he really was willing to let me stay at his palace, but even the Empire was probably willing to put me in an orphanage for a couple of years.
But things like that rarely last for long anyway...
'Ah.'
'He gave such a quick response, but he barely said anything.'
It wasn't like I was all that talkative either, but I still thought he was a pretty odd guy sometimes.
***
A couple of days later, the Azure Dragons finally got back to me about the prior research that had taken place in the Lost.
Suon came to hand deliver it.
"You didn't have to come all this way. I could have come pick it up," I told him.
"And make you walk all the way yet again? I guess it would be poetic since you picked such a far place to live, but I'm not that cruel."
"Well, thanks... have something to eat while you're here."
So naturally, we made him lunch before he returned to usual shift.
But since it was nearly four hours here and back, he didn't stay too long.
If we had a place for him to sleep, it might be different, but apparently since the three of us were girls, he didn't even want to risk sleeping in his own tent nearby.
I didn't really get what the problem was, though.
So once we said our goodbyes and he left, we started reading through the reports.
Well, Savi and I did, anyway, while Lilac did her homework and chores.
Their contents generally matched our expectations.
For instance, it was hard to be sure the spring water was effectively sterile, but none of our experiments showed any signs of it harboring microscopic life. Neither, apparently, did theirs, even using more rigorous methods than we had.
The same went for the soil and everything else they'd tested, with the sole exceptions being bacterial life they themselves had brought in.
Of course, without anything for that life to sustain itself on, it was doomed to eventually perish too.
Given enough time, anything brought into the Lost would eventually become sterilized, save from lifeforms that could go completely dormant, like certain types of viruses.
To be frank, there wasn't anything in the reports that I didn't already suspect.
Even their conclusions weren't incorrect.
Although I'd heard and even later read various claims that they'd determined the Lost to be wholly incapable of sustaining life, the official reports merely concluded that it would require further investigation to confirm one way or another, and only that methods that worked on Terra and some other dungeons would be insufficient in the Lost.
But while there weren't any shocking revelations to be found, their research was still ahead of ours in a few ways.
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For instance, the material sample composition reports wasn't entirely useless.
After reading through them with me, Savi stopped bothering with boiling water before drinking it.
Well, since she mostly drank tea and coffee, she generally still boiled it, but she was a whole lot less careful.
I tried to warn her. "It's sterile now, but it might not be forever."
"Hmm? I won't be around forever. I guess you might be though, so yeah, it's a good habit for you to keep boiling the water!"
For some reason, she pat me on the head after that.
'Does she still think I'm a kid?'
***
It was also interesting to learn that they hadn't explored very far either.
Well, there wasn't even a map of the woods until Cierri mapped them with me, but detailed map surveying is a lot more work than general exploration.
Namely, they'd mostly stayed within the boundary of the forest.
Early reports even believed that was all there was to the Lost.
There wasn't anything stopping me from trying to go past the mountains either north or south of the forest, but I wasn't sure I could take Lilac with me, and I wasn't sure I'd be able to return in a timely manner.
I suppose that meant Lilac was stopping me, but it wasn't really a big deal.
If she was an immortal like me after all, then she'd eventually be ready to explore with me if she ever wanted to, even if it took a few years or decades to reach that point.
If not, then she'd eventually no longer need me, whether it was for reasons that were good, ill, or both.
In other words, I'd inevitably go beyond those mountains and explore the rest of this strange world I'd somehow inherited.
But it was likely full of things more dangerous than the animals in the western plains or eastern desert, so I'd also need to get more Skills.
While puzzling over how to accomplish that, I realized glumly that Zaitenmodi's method had been more helpful than anything else I'd tried.
Moreover, the strange and arrogant man had claimed I could depend on him again and again.
I doubted that was true. No matter how generous and benevolent he claimed to be, such things always had a limit.
Even immortals usually fail to fathom something that's truly without end.
To be honest, even I couldn't really understand my own existence. In that regard, I felt like an infinitely small point along a line that never seemed to end.
But I wondered why he was helpful toward me in particular, given there were hundreds of millions of people in Terra, and supposedly even more in Naraka.
So I decided to just ask him. For some reason, I felt comfortable being blunt with that man, even though he could probably erase me from this world with the snap of his fingers, no matter what I did.
Perhaps that was even why I felt that way.
He replied.
Surprisingly, for once, he didn't respond right away. Well, it took him a moment to send that prior message, but its length explained why.
So he was either sending an even longer one, or he got the impression that he'd annoyed me by replying so quickly.
Unfortunately, while my phone showed an indicator when other people were typing a response, it never seemed to work for him. Maybe it was because he was sending them from Naraka.
At least, I assumed that's what he was doing.
I finally caved in and sent him a follow-up message.
After all, Zaitenmodi could betray me like any other person. Actually, since he was so powerful in a myriad of ways, he could do so pretty much on a whim, if he wanted. So it wasn't like I particularly wanted him to keep bothering me.
But it wasn't like I could stop him either.
At the very least, since he could get away with doing whatever he wanted, it was refreshing to know that he wasn't just trying to deceive me. I think that's why I could be myself around him, too.
'Ah, I guess he didn't think I was annoyed after all.'
Though it had taken him a bit longer to write that than other messages of the same length, it could just be that he needed the time to put his thoughts into words.
Or something.
But it seemed like he wasn't done, even though he sent his message early.
Did he think it would take me long to read it? Well, Terran wasn't my first language, but I read quite a lot in it already, so I wasn't that slow.
Even if Savi was still three or so times faster than me, I was sure she was an outlier anyway.
'Oh, he sent another message.'
It came a bit more quickly than the last one had, too.
'Ah.'
It was a motivation I could empathize with, at least.
***
The emperor's personal attendant got to see the back and forth between his emperor and the small dungeon boss he'd been exchanging messages with.
He didn't particularly want to read the messages, but the moment they were visible without him having acted, he did so unhesitatingly.
Just in case they revealed a grim future or other information necessary to his future well-being.
And so, when the small dungeon boss asked his imperial majesty why so much of his attention had been focused on her, he couldn't help but flinch.
Although questioning the emperor was punishable by death, it didn't mean literally asking questions, so that much was fine.
But he personally knew that his boss had tried his best not to appear overly invested, or more importantly, to give off any impression at all that he did things and that he hadn't spent the past century or so being something akin to a trophy emperor.
Of course, he also personally knew his boss was impossibly powerful, so he was one heck of a trophy, but having power and using it were two very different things.
The attendant himself didn't think the emperor was outright useless or anything. When his imperial majesty actually set his mind to something, it was usually done with almost cruel efficiency.
Although such a thing was a rare sight, it was still very difficult to forget.
But his boss still didn't want to look useless in front of the other dungeon boss... and now he was getting asked why he'd bothered in the first place.