One week later...
After the mercenary hired by Grant to send his message to the Quinn family had done his job, the matter finally reached the family's upper echelon.
That had not happened immediately, as every message that reached the upper echelon went into 'queues' to wait to be analyzed.
There were queues of urgent information and different levels of importance. So the waiting time for each notification that arrived for the top-level members of this family lasted for different intervals.
But the case of Grant's notification was something relatively important, even if it was not that urgent. After all, even if one day or another was not going to change his situation, he was a member of the family and had not reported for a long time.
This family had many rules, and one of them said precisely that one of its members could not stay many years without reporting to superiors. When someone broke that rule, such a person would naturally receive the appropriate punishment, and his case would be investigated.
So when the name of this missing man came up after so long, his notification had gained enough importance to reach one of the princess' men in just seven days.
When he came into contact with Grant's letter and read its contents, that person immediately remembered the incident from centuries ago involving his leader and a trip to Elves Island.
At the time, the princess was a young Spiritual Emperor who had escaped from her guards at the royal palace and fled, searching for teenage love.
She had traveled towards that person, an elf she had met at training in her state. So she had crossed the Central Continent alone, setting out from her empire to the Snow Kingdom, from where she had departed for the Elves Island.
When he discovered what had happened, Emperor Quinn dispatched several groups to investigate the whereabouts of his irresponsible daughter.
But unfortunately, one of those groups had never returned, and the imperial family's investigators had only found the remains of that ship on parts of the Kingdom of the End's coastline. But no survivors, not even the bodies of the crew members of that ship, had been found.
That incident changed the princess quite a bit as some of the bodyguards who had been by her side while she was growing up had disappeared in such an incident. Thus, when this subordinate of hers read Grant's letter, he immediately rushed to the princess!
...
On an island 600 kilometers off the coast of the Western Empire...
That place the size of a large city but without much human presence, just a few houses, a port, and lots of woods and natural reliefs, was the home of the only princess of House Quinn.
A large palace built with a special kind of pink marble was in the central position of this island. One could have a majestic view of the whole place from this place if one could visit the princess in her home.
The man who had just read Grant's letter had arrived at that place at this very moment. He had just passed by the high-level Spiritual Sages and low-level Spiritual Demigods watching over the surroundings.
The people who lived in this place were so important that even Spiritual Demigods were guarding the area!
"Your Highness, I'm here to deal with a bit of the past." He said as he entered the living room of the residence of that woman and her husband, a high-ranking nobleman from a powerful family of a great empire of the Divine Continent.
Hearing those words from the man who had just knelt near where she was sitting, Amber Quinn, level 90, did not understand what that could mean and looked at him. "What do you mean, Jerry?"
He looked at that black-haired, beautiful woman, 1.7 meters tall, dressed all in white, and said. "Your Highness, a few days ago, a letter addressed to the emperor from a Spiritual Saint arrived at our palace."
She frowned as she heard this, feeling that this made no sense.
But Amber had the gift of patience and gave that subordinate room to continue what he had to tell her.
"That letter was not discarded for one simple reason only, Your Highness. It was sent by a man of our royal guard reported missing for centuries. He was supposedly part of the crew that disappeared during that incident involving your first trip to Elves Island."
She remembered that immediately, recalling how she had lost her love of youth back then shortly after she found him on Elves Island.
To this day, she did not know what had happened but considering that such an elf was of common origin, to this day, she thought that her father had eliminated such a person so as not to get in the way of his own plans.
Emperor Quinn had always wanted to marry his daughter to a high-ranking nobleman from the Divine Continent.
Even noble families from that place had the power to compare to imperial families like theirs on this continent.
So politically speaking, he could gain much more for his state by having his daughter married to a noble than to an elf with no background.
Elves were very talented, true. But besides influence having great weight in political matters involving great powers, besides that elf not having a good background, elves, in general, did not like mixing their genes with those of other races.
Hence, Emperor Quinn had naturally always been against his daughter, which had generated all her distrust over the years.
Because of that, she had become much more mature then, coupled, of course, with the loss of some individuals from that group that was supposed to pick her up, people who were close to her.
She usually would not have been so saddened by the deaths of those subordinates. But as the death of her beloved touched her at that time, she had been scarred by the case of her family's shipwreck in the North Sea in that period.
With that, she was very interested in that letter.
"Did you confirm if this person who sent the letter was telling the truth? It could be some enemy trying to lead us into a trap or someone trying to distract us." She said as she looked into the eyes of this kneeling man.
"Yes, I have confirmed that everything he used as evidence is indeed true, Your Highness. He even sent his insignia and gave details that few would be able to give." He said, certain that the text sent by Grant had been written by a former member of the imperial guard.
'If not for that incident, this Grant fellow would probably have reached the end of the 9th stage after all these years.' He thought silently, trying to remember that man, who should be from the same era as him.
But since the Quinn family was large, this person could not remember anyone.
"So where is this message? I want to read it immediately." The princess said before asking. "By the way, where is he? Why didn't he come with you?"
"About that, Your Highness, he is in the northern region of the continent. According to the information from the letter and what we received, he was crippled and is not strong enough to come here."
"Is that right?" She asked as she began to read the said letter.
...
