“How should I know?” Cecil retorted, speechless.
“You are older than me, and you lived through the entire process of establishing the organization.”
“If even you don't know, how could I possibly know?”
Old Mr. Orphal leaned forward slightly.
Lowering his voice, he offered a suggestion:
“This indicates that the security clearance for this place name is extremely high.”
“How about this?”
“Once we finish dealing with this matter and return to Landon, I'll go flip through the headquarters' secret archives.”
“I might even take a look in the deepest parts.”
Hearing this proposal,
the beautiful special envoy's expression shifted, and she suddenly felt a touch of embarrassment.
“You'd better not,”
Cecil immediately stopped him.
“Did you forget so quickly about the last time you broke into the headquarters' Forbidden Library?”
“Ah?”
Orphal was taken aback.
A bewildered and innocent look appeared on his face.
The old man rubbed his nose and looked away, feeling a bit guilty.
“Did that happen?”
“How come I don't remember?”
“Did you get the wrong person, girl?”
Cecil rolled her eyes weakly.
She knew her teacher's personality all too well; as long as it was a troublesome matter he didn't want to admit to, he could always pretend it had never happened at all.
The conversation broke off there.
Inside the cramped VIP cabin, the atmosphere quickly grew heavy once more.
For Cecil could not help but worry whether they truly had enough manpower for this operation.
According to the insider news her teacher had just brought,
most of the core investigators at headquarters had currently been urgently deployed to Euckshire in the north,
to suppress and seal the newly awakened “Skeletal Divine Lord.”
This meant that
the entire western defense line was in an unprecedented state of emptiness.
Once the situation in Moon Bay completely deteriorated,
the combat forces currently available, at best, would only consist of the personnel from the local Hastings Port Branch,
and her teacher sitting beside her.
But could the incident in Moon Bay really be resolved so easily?
The Wayland Chamber of Commerce was plotting frantically in the shadows.
The cultists of the Mist Veil Society were also acting at all costs.
What on earth did these people gathering in Moon Bay want to do with the “Fifth Element” once they obtained it?
As she pondered,
a new question suddenly popped into Cecil's mind.
Namely,
when exactly did the current place name “Moon Bay” begin to appear in official documents?
If Moon Bay did not exist two thousand years ago,
then this topography and name must have been altered on some page of history.
To investigate this, she actually had a ready-made clue at hand.
Namely, the Fortville family, who had ruled this region for hundreds of years.
The Fortville family was the rightful supreme lord of Moon Bay hundreds of years ago.
Their family chronicle would surely have recorded the geographical changes of this territory.
With this in mind,
Cecil did not hesitate.
She bent down and pulled out several thick ancient volumes from her portable Secret Chest.
She began to flip through them rapidly.
Among them was a copy of 《A Study of West Velen's Local Customs and Geography》 compiled by predecessors,
as well as a heavy official document—《Chronicle of West Velen's Nobility》.
Cecil's fingertips traced firmly across the yellowed pages.
She searched backward page by page, guided by the years.
In 《Chronicle of West Velen's Nobility》, she found a temporal node spanning a thousand years.
AC 234.
That page clearly recorded the detailed account of a knight dubbed by the Fortville family traveling to the royal capital, Triumph City, to attend the king's birthday banquet and participate in a tournament.
According to the relevant court dialogue documents,
during his conversation with His Majesty, this knight from the west had explicitly mentioned a name—Greywater City.
Cecil stopped her finger.
According to historical comparison, Greywater City was the original, true seat of the Fortville family.
For a long time, it was the largest core city in the western territory and the center of power.
But later, due to the rapid development of industry and steam technology,
the traditional castle topography was no longer suitable for larger-scale trade expansion.
The Fortville family moved entirely out of that sturdy castle, which represented ancient aristocratic glory.
They opened up a new port along the coast
and established the brand-new city of today—Hastings Port.
Consequently,
that abandoned, towering castle stood lonely on its original site for hundreds of years.
In the present era, due to the lack of effective official management, that abandoned old city had almost become a gathering place for adventurers, secret societies, and outlaws of all kinds.
Having researched up to this point, Cecil wrote down a logical timeline in her notebook.
Which meant that
regardless of whether the place name “Moon Bay” actually existed or was called “Moon Bay” during the period of AC 234,
at the very least, Greywater City, as a landmark, had already been established by then.
The geographical environment had not changed.
Cecil did not stop.
She continued to flip the pages forward, tracing back to an even more distant history.
All the way back to a thousand years ago.
On the page for BC 741.
Here, a massive western war was recorded in detail.
To respond to the royal summons at the time, the Duke of Fortville had urgently convened all his vassals.
He personally led twenty thousand troops,
assembling and setting off from a place called “Mist City,” crossing the plains...
Wait.
Mist City?
Cecil's brow furrowed tightly.
This place name was extremely unfamiliar.
She immediately pulled another reference book from her chest—《The Evolution of Velen's Ancient and Modern Place Names》.
She spread the book flat across her lap.
Using her fingers along with a complex ancient map of the Velen Empire, she began to cross-reference them one by one.
However,
the results of her repeated comparisons disappointed her greatly.
On the entire map of the west, within the sphere of influence of the Fortville family, there was absolutely no record of “Mist City.”
In the search index of the entire book,
other than an ancient name with an extremely similar pronunciation that once existed at the other end of the empire—Mist-Tide City—there was nothing else.
An even more important point was that
the historical “Mist-Tide City” was on the eastern border of the Velen Empire, not the west.
Not only was that outside the Fortville family's sphere of influence,
but in that era, the eastern lords were even in a state of long-term hostility and warfare with the Fortville family.
So,
how could the Duke of Fortville back then have gone through all the trouble of traveling to the territory of a hostile faction to summon his vassals?
This made absolutely no sense in terms of military common sense and political logic.
Excluding the possibility of errors in the written records,
the only rational explanation
was that the copy of 《The Evolution of Velen's Ancient and Modern Place Names》 Cecil had in hand was not compiled early enough.
Its database had not fully captured the geographical name changes of the earlier period from over two thousand years ago.
The clue broke off here.
Cecil could not help but feel a faint headache coming on.
The mists of occultism were always like this; the deeper one dug, the more unknowns were revealed.
If that was the case,
with the Velen Empire's currently incomplete secular historical records,
it seemed highly unlikely that she could thoroughly investigate the sudden geographical inspiration that had popped into her mind today solely through these public documents.
However,
it was not entirely hopeless.
Cecil took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm down.
She closed the irritating chronicle
and reopened 《A Study of West Velen's Local Customs and Geography》, which specialized in local details.
Because this book was written privately by a local scholar of that era, it did not contain as much grandiose political rhetoric.
The original text was even written on papyrus.
Instead, it detailed the folk customs, humanities, and geographical ecology of West Velen from a thousand years ago.
In the third chapter of this book,
it recorded in detail the top-tier noble foods favored by the Fortville family when hosting grand banquets.
Among these, it highlighted an extremely precious fish with strict water quality requirements—black trout.
Black trout.
This was a special local fish that only lived in the Anvil River basin.
And the geographical coordinate of the Anvil River still existed on the map of the west today, its name never having been changed.
That was an inland river that originated from the alpine glaciers of the western mountains, flowed all the way east, and finally emptied into Moon Bay and the ocean.
In the original text of the ancient book,
when describing the habits of the black trout, there was this passage:
“The Anvil River flows past Mist City and enters Fallwave Bay. Therefore, when the black trout migrate to spawn each year, they will inevitably pass through the rapids beneath Mist City in schools.”
Cecil's gaze locked onto this passage.
The Anvil River was still there.
Its flowing route had never changed either.
If the ancient records were correct, then the “Mist City” of back then must have been situated beside a certain section of the Anvil River.
But another question immediately followed.
“Fallwave Bay” again?!
The modern Anvil River emptied directly into the sea near Hastings Port.
There was no Fallwave Bay at all.
Cecil took out a magnifying glass and repeatedly verified along the banks of the Anvil River on the ancient map several times.
The results showed that
in ancient times, there were absolutely no large cities in the wilderness along the banks of the Anvil River.
Cecil set down the magnifying glass in her hand.
Feeling her body grow a bit stiff, she slowly unfolded the map of Moon Bay from the book.
The long, neat coastline formed a large semi-circular arc.
It was a massive bay with a perfectly geometric curve.
Looking at that extremely neat coastline and the perfect arc that was almost impossible to occur naturally,
a terrifying deduction flashed through Cecil's mind.
Was Moon Bay a landform that was formed after the fact?!
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