Once the inspiration struck, opening the lock on the entrance was easy.
It was a chemical symbol — what they call a "morse code" of sorts using element abbreviations.
It was the kind of thing you'd learn in middle school, but Rest had studied hard enough for his high school entrance exams in his past life to the point of getting blood in his urine, so the memory was still there.
(With the combination of "sailor" and "clerk," I figured it out right away… I was a little stumped by the 'berry' part, but it must be 'beryllium.') Fortunately, you only needed to know up to element number nineteen to solve this problem.
It was just a guess, but… Sanada Shoko probably had the same mnemonics memorized too.
Just like at the vacation house, she had designed this puzzle as a code that only a Japanese person could crack.
(The fact that she keeps dropping these puzzles at every opportunity makes me think Shoko might have actually been into puzzle-solving games… I also can't help but wonder if she couldn't have come up with something a little more creative.)
"I read about this decoding method in a book a long time ago too… probably."
"…Is that so."
Listening to Rest's half-baked excuse, Celestine gave a noncommittal response.
She absolutely did not believe him, but the fact that she didn't press the matter despite that — she really was a wonderfully well-mannered young lady.
(Man… a woman this great is hard to come by. Rodele, you really let a good one go, didn't you?)
Grumbling to his now-deceased rival, Rest opened the door to the mansion.
The moment he opened the front door, the smell of dust assaulted his nostrils.
How long had it been sealed shut? For the first time in years, outside air flowed into the mansion's interior.
The inside of the mansion had a perfectly ordinary interior. It hadn't been ransacked or left in disarray or anything like that.
The only unnatural thing was this — from the entrance all the way down the corridor, numerous picture frames were hung at equal intervals.
"Are these… paintings?"
"……Yeah, I can see them."
At Celestine's question, Rest nodded.
The things in the frames were paintings. There were oil paintings, watercolors, and even line drawings without any color filled in.
Numerous paintings lined the hallway.
"Could she have been collecting artwork? The signature on these reads… 'Sanada Shoko'?"
"I'd guess the queen dowager painted them herself…"
The signature aside, the scenery depicted in the paintings felt familiar too.
Every one of them showed landscapes from Japan. Many of them overlapped with the scenes he had once seen in her mental world.
There were paintings of nature—seas, forests, and the like—but interspersed throughout were road signs, cars, airplanes, and other things that didn't exist in this world.
"I had no idea the queen dowager had such a hobby… This strange cityscape—where is it from?"
"Honestly… I've never seen it. Maybe it's from her imagination?"
As he answered Celestine's words, Rest examined each and every painting hanging on the wall, one by one.
Why had the queen dowager—why had Sanada Shoko—left behind paintings like these?
The reason was probably the same as with that diary.
(She wanted to preserve memories and recollections of the world she once lived in…)
Shoko, like Rest, had been a reincarnated person—but there had been one major difference.
In her past life, she had lived a happy one.
In his past life, Rest had been forced into a miserable existence by his toxic parents.
His father was a gambling addict and a drunkard who dipped into his children's tuition money. Unable to bear watching that father any longer, his mother abandoned her children and ran away.
He'd had a few people he could call friends, but… no matter how generously you looked at it, it was far from a blessed life.
In contrast, Shoko had been living an uneventful life in a small rural town and harbored a strong yearning for the city.
However, she seemed to have been blessed with both family and friends, and was by no means an unhappy person.
Rather, her misfortune came only after she was reincarnated.
She caught the eye of a tyrant, was forced to become his consort, and her family was killed in the process.
For the queen dowager, who had devoted her second life to revenge, the happy days of her past life may well have been the ideal world she envisioned.
(So that's why she was secretly painting scenes from her past life. She must have come to this manor from time to time to gaze at the paintings of Japan and soothe her homesickness...)
Thinking of the friend who shared the same homeland, Rest felt a tinge of melancholy settle over him.