Lily walked into the "Civil Hall" of Winterfell. This single-storey building is located in the center of the town and covers an area of about fifteen acres - that is, 1,500 square meters. The entrance is a spacious hall with a floor made of
It is paved with neat strips of bluestone, many of which may have cracked over time. There are more than a dozen benches lined up along the edge of the hall. A middle-aged man was planning to lie down on the bench to sleep, but was stopped by the person next to him.
I rushed down. There were many one-meter-square skylights on the roof, and the sunlight fell on the ground through the glass, forming bright squares.
Directly in front of the hall was a long reception desk. Lily glanced at it and saw that there were about forty or fifty people lined up in three rows. She walked straight through the waiting line and slapped a piece of parchment on the reception desk.
On stage.
"Let your stewards come here." She said confidently, "We have some important things that need to be investigated!"
A young male official looked at the paper and after confirming that it was the Viscount's seal, he respectfully led Lily to an exquisitely furnished room.
"The Civil Affairs Officer will be here soon, please wait a moment, madam." He looked at the girl who had no aristocratic temperament with some curiosity, "What would you like to drink?"
"No need." Lily waved her hand, "Try to hurry up, we have other things to do!"
The official bowed and left the room.
The Civil Affairs Hall is the place responsible for managing various specific affairs of the town. This institution began nearly a thousand years ago during the Republic of Oren. It declined for a while, and then revived again with the increase in the population of the settlement. After all, it is not for the lord to handle a problem alone.
All the trivial matters in a town with a population of hundreds of thousands are not power, but trouble.
Early this morning, Yuffie handed Viscount Campbell's certificate to her and asked her to come here to inquire about certain things. At the same time, she asked Al and Bell to go to the "Guild" in the city. As for herself, she said she wanted to go there.
The church has the 'cause' we are looking for.
Lily is not stupid. She can probably guess what Yuffie wants to confirm, but she is too lazy to think about it. In a team, only one person who can use his brain is enough. This is her point of view.
The door was pushed inward, and a female civil affairs officer who seemed to have just entered middle age walked in with her younger assistant. Lily exchanged a few words with the two of them - to be honest, she was not good at this.
--quickly change the topic to the right track.
"We want to know about the work done on the sewerage facilities here about six or seven years ago." Lily held her chin, "There should still be relevant records?"
The civil affairs officer nodded and motioned to his assistant to bring the corresponding dossier.
The file is not too thick, and most of the records are trivial matters of little significance, such as repairs, expansions, cleaning, etc. Lily rummaged through it and found a somewhat special record from the part that recorded the summer of the sixth year.
.
"Introducing a gelatinous monster into the drainage channel on the northwest side... a gelatinous monster?" Lily raised her eyebrows, "If we are not mistaken, it is the kind of square monster that can move and eat everything?"
"As you can see, it's that one." The civil affairs officer smiled, "Because it eats everything, it can be said to be quite suitable as a cleaner of urban drainage channels, and it can also save a lot of manpower."
"Then why only the northwest side, instead of filling the entire sewer with that stuff?" Lily asked.
The civil affairs officer looked a little helpless. "After all, there are still some town residents living in the drainage channel. Leaving them homeless will not be beneficial to the city's security." She coughed twice and explained, "Northwest
The passage on one side is far away from the town, and manual cleaning will take a lot of time on the round trip. The two sections of the passage have been separated by a rock fence. Those gelatinous monsters cannot pass through, and they will not accidentally injure people on the other side.
."
"Hmm... we know." Lily nodded and continued to look through the rest of the records, but found nothing interesting. She closed the file, raised her head, and met the civil affairs official's gaze.
"You just mentioned the 'residents' in the sewers - how many are there in total?"
"This..." the civil affairs officer held his forehead, "They have no fixed address and rarely cooperate with investigations. We have never been able to accurately grasp the number of those people." She thought for a while and added with some embarrassment, "
A rough estimate is that there should be nearly a thousand people."
"In other words, if someone is born or dies there, you won't know about it, right?"
"That's right." The woman replied.
"Okay, that's it - by the way, there is another problem, although it may not be your concern." Lily smiled, showing two slightly pointed tiger teeth, "The serious criminals in this city - let's say the death row prisoners.
Okay, how are you going to deal with it?"
The civil affairs officer was stunned for a moment, "If you are a prisoner on death row, of course he will be executed -"
"That's not what we're asking." Lily interrupted her, "We heard that there were occasional public trials in the past, where the Viscount announced the crime of the condemned prisoner and then executed him in public... But it seems that there has been no such thing recently?"
"About...that incident." The woman frowned and recalled for a while, "I don't know the specific reason. It is said that the lord felt that executing prisoners in public was too cruel and would leave a bad impression on outsiders, so
...Probably it was changed to a secret disposal."
"Understood, thank you very much?" Lily stood up, rolled up the Viscount's letter of certification and put it away. She walked to the door and suddenly turned back, "You are a good person!"
She strode out of the room, leaving behind the civil affairs officer who looked puzzled.
…
When Lily returned to the manor, Alphonse and Bell had already returned. Not long after, Yuffie also walked into the living room. She clapped her hands gently. Lily thought she was going to share the information she had collected, but she heard the expected news.
External words--
"Let me tell you, let's take my wife and go out to play together?"
"What are you planning?" Lily vaguely guessed Yuffie's plan and stared at her seriously, "Is it really okay for you to do this?"
Yuffie smiled and ruffled Lily's short hair, and she shook her head dissatisfied.
"Don't worry, if I guess correctly, Madam is very powerful." The girl looked out the window into the wilderness and said softly.
"Oh?" Lily was a little interested, "She's very famous?"
Yuffie shook her head. "Intuition." She answered simply.
Here it is again, are all wizards like this? Lily murmured in her heart. She had heard Yuffie talk about the principles of spells such as 'predicting the future'. In simple terms - using magic to strengthen one's perception and analysis abilities, so as to predict the future.
Make more accurate predictions. In this sense, maybe the wizard's 'intuition' is indeed better than that of ordinary people?
Having said that, if she had witnessed the scene in the study last night, she might have a new understanding of the word 'intuition'.
They found the Viscount and his wife in the living room. The two were sitting side by side on the sofa. The husband was telling something softly, and the wife was leaning on his shoulder, listening with a reassuring smile. Yuffie walked up to them, gave a gentle salute, and said with
A calm voice offered her advice.
Mrs. Campbell didn't ask where she was going or how long it would take. She thought for a moment and happily agreed to Yuffie's proposal.
As soon as her words fell, the Viscount stopped smiling. He stared at Yuffie for a long time, with no emotion on his cold-faced face, until his wife's voice came from his ears.
"You don't have to stay with me all day long." The woman raised her hand and stroked her husband's cheek, "You still have something to do, right?"
"Really..." Viscount Campbell said to himself. He covered his wife's hand with his hand, and his expression became gentle again, as if he wanted to convey more warmth to her, and as if he wanted to remember this moment forever.
, “Have fun, Annie.”
Then he stood up and disappeared out of Lily's sight without looking at them again.
"I feel like we have become the bad guys..." Lily said in a depressed mood, "I heard that if you ruin someone's marriage, you will be punished?"
"That sentence is not applicable here." Yuffie laughed and straightened her expression again. "I'm sorry to disturb you and your husband, madam."
"It doesn't matter." Mrs. Campbell raised her hand and tied her hair back with some difficulty, "Just now, Julian was telling me his past story. I have heard it many times, but every time, I can
Feel the different moods.”
She was silent for a moment, raised her head slightly, and gently brushed her fingertips from the corners of her eyes. "You guys also have a story you want to tell me."