Once Judith had returned to the manor, she at once hastily made her way to the captain's room. Which was located at the end of the hall underneath the balcony overlooking the hall.
Upon reaching the door, Judith grabbed onto the hande and pushed it open.
Luckily for Judith, the captain never locked his doors when he was out, so as to enable the maids to clean up after him. After all, he had nothing to hide.
Nothing any normal person would discover.
Judith however, was not exactly what one would call normal. At least not normal for this world.
As the door closed behind her, she took a second to survey the room. Which as far as she could see was on par with how it was described in her book.
An enormous bed in the middle with a small table in front, a bookshelf to the right of the bed so as to make people think the captain was smart, a desk with a chair beside the bookshelf and to the left of his room, a small cupboard rested, holding on top itself an ornate clock.
The only other thing in the room was a door to the far left of the room, which was the location of his bathroom.
Ignoring every other thing, Judith made her way to the bookshelf and began to read through the titles of the row of books.
She attempted to search in Alphabetical order for the book titled 'A King's Desire' but as she would discover, the words were written in letters that she had never seen before.
A sudden fear gripped Judith by this realization.
"Stupid, how could I have forgotten?" Judith said with a smack to her head. It had been stated multiple times in the novel that this world had its own style of writing.
Though everyone shared the same language, each Kingdom were unique in the way they put pen to paper.
And what came out of the pen and onto the paper were words Judith wouldn't know how to pronounce, even if she tried.
The more this fact had sunk into Judith, the more she began to panic. If she couldn't find this book, everything she had planned would all be for nothing.
She remembered the name of the book vividly, but how could she discern the book without knowing how to make out these letters? Judith wondered.
As the ensuing panic within Judith began to rise, she decided to take a step back and also a deep breath.
"Focus." Judith said, calming herself and trying to think rationally.
In her mind, she began to sweep through the earlier pages of the novel, when she remembered something very crucial.
Not only was the name of the book given, but it was clearly stated that the book was the only red book in the shelf. And in addition to that, it had a unique emblem which was laureled on its side. Said emblem being a silver dragon-like Lergobeast with a lion's head.
Judith at once returned her full attention to the book shelf and started combing through each book with her eyes.
First she tried the top row, then the second, third, fourth, fifth and then finally, the last.
After the effort of going through each row, it amounted to nothing because she didn't even catch a glimpse of any red book with any such emblem.
Without wasting more than a second of dreading the possibilities of the book not being here, she pulled up her gaze and did another round sweep of the rows of books. This time she didn't zoom through the books, but just like before, no matter how much slower she looked, she discovered nothing.
"Dammit!" Judith had burst, regretting doing so a second later.
She was running out of time, in only a couple of minutes, Tsai would begin to look for her.
"Think, think," Judith had said, if the book was not on this shelf, then it had to be somewhere else in the room.
If it meant combing through every part of the room, Judith was willing and ready. Either that or get skinned alive by nightfall.
Turning away from the bookshelf, Judith began to scan the room, searching for the most likely place the book could be hidden.
"Where did he keep it?" Judith had asked herself, when she froze in place as a memory had flashed into her head.
She had missed it initially, due to the great distance between them. But back when the captain had exchanged glances with her outside the manor, she saw him putting something into a satchel.
As her memory played on loop, she focused on the thing he was placing in the satchel.
She still couldn't make it out, but one thing was clear, it was square shaped, mostly rectangular and it was red.
"He took it." Judith said with a lost expression on her face.
She froze up for a moment, as she found her plans falling apart before her.
Not willing to accept defeat, Judith picked up the chair in front of his desk with a frenzied aggression that the rise of the chair had knocked over the desk and the drawer within, spilling all its contents.
Judith ignored this and attempted to swing the chair into the side of the shelf.
But knowing all this would do was to give away her location more so than the sound of the desk falling over, she calmed down and returned the chair to the ground.
Feeling defeated, Judith walked over to the side of the shelf with a demeanor of a wounded animal and began to analyze it.
It didn't take long before she found a part of the shelf that seemed off.
Knowing exactly why the shelf seemed off, she began to scratch at the strange spot, until a square cube-like piece of wood had come off, revealing on the inside a keyhole.
Judith stared at the keyhole with a somber look, a somber look which began to overturn to calculation when she took in the phillips-head screws at the edges of the keyhole.
And just like a light bulb turned on in Judith's head and an idea had formed.