Chapter 81: A Blank Slate
As the evening drew near, the golden sunlight shifting into a deep, bruised violet across the mountainside, April found herself thoroughly stuck.
"Stupid, rigged piece of trash," she hissed, her thumbs aggressively hammering the screen of her tablet.
After her uninvited guests had finally cleared out, she had spent hours downloading various mobile games to pass the time.
To her own immense shock, she had stumbled into a strange addiction: and it was with a hyper-glamorous dress-up game and a pixelated block-building game called Winecraft.
Right now, a particularly brutal boss level in the latter was pushing her to her absolute limits.
She had died four times in a row, her pixelated fortress torn down by digital monsters. Her brow furrowed in fierce determination. She refused to lose.
She adjusted her grip, executing a flawless sequence of maneuvers she had memorized over the last hour.
With a triumphant ping, the screen flashed in brilliant, rainbow colors. Victory!
"Yes!" April yelled, completely throwing her standard composure out the window. She let out a victorious gasp and began literally bouncing up and down on the edge of her mattress, swinging her fists in the air like a child who had just won a tournament. "Eat that! You digital monsters!"
The door to her suite suddenly clicked open at that moment.
"Miss April, the vehicle is—"
Samuel froze in the doorway, his hand still resting on the brass handle. His eyes widened as he stared at the sight of what he knew as a detached and terrifyingly brilliant seer actively jump-hopping on the bedsheets in pure ecstasy.
April froze mid-air, her ankles landing awkwardly on the mattress.
The silence stretched for three agonizing seconds. Her face didn’t flush, but her eyes narrowed as she immediately smoothed down her oversized t-shirt, dropped her feet to the floor, and swept a few stray strands of hair behind her ears with absolute, clinical precision.
Her fluffy skincare headband was long gone, tossed somewhere near the nightstand during the height of her gaming frustration.
Just what was up with everyone and not knocking today?
"Is it time to leave?" she asked, her voice instantly dropping back into its flat, deadpan tone, completely pretending she hadn’t just been acting like a hyperactive teenager.
Samuel cleared his throat, his professional mask snapping back into place with terrifying efficiency, though his chest subtly heaved with suppressed amusement.
He bowed his head respectfully. "Yes, Miss April. The sedan is prepped. I shall wait for you outside by the courtyard."
"Alright. I... I’ll just get dressed in a moment."
Ten minutes later, April was sliding into the plush leather back seat of the luxury sedan. She kept the tablet in her spatial dimension in case she needed to use it to kill time whenever.
In the meantime, she would use her Titanium Pro out, her fingers tapping lazily on the screen to check the game’s offline progress.
"I seriously hope the game servers don’t go out of service when the apocalypse hits," she muttered entirely to herself as the car engine raved to life and glided past the heavy iron gates of the Reed estate.
"Did you say something, Miss April?" Samuel asked from the driver’s seat, his eyes catching hers in the rearview mirror.
"Nothing of importance, Samuel. Focus on the road."
Her destination for the evening wasn’t the auction house just yet. She figured she didn’t entirely know how high the bidding for that hillside bunker fortress would go, but it was going to be astronomically expensive.
Carrying around hundreds of millions in checks with the name of Reed and Greels to an auction wasn’t viable. She needed to have all the money in her private credit line and get a physical checkbook while at it.
So, it was to the bank first. Thankfully, they closed by six and it was just five in the evening. There was plenty of time. She thought as she tapped on the screen of her phone, playing her dress up game.
"Miss April, we have arrived," Samuel announced precisely fifteen minutes later, pulling the car smoothly up to the curb of a towering, black-marble private banking firm. He stepped out with his usual, impeccable grace to hold the door open for her.
April stepped out into the crisp evening air, smoothing her casual clothes. Once they were done here, she would have to handle her wardrobe.
Xavier had offered to have Samuel pick out her evening wear, but since they didn’t know her specific aesthetic preferences, he had suggested she visit the boutique in person.
So, she had precisely three hours to pick out a dress, get fitted, and make it to the auction. Thankfully, the event didn’t enforce a corporate dress code, leaving her entirely clear to choose whatever suited her mood.
Thirty minutes later, the heavy glass doors of the bank slid open once more.
April walked out onto the pavement, her gaze entirely locked onto the sleek, premium leather-bound checkbook resting in her palms. It was her very first one.
The process would have been over in five minutes if she were simply depositing her millions, but printing a high-clearance checkbook customized with her legal details took time.
As she traced her finger over the crisp paper, a small, genuine smile curled the corners of her lips. It was a look of pure glee—the raw satisfaction of a true wealth hoarder realizing her arsenal was expanding.
Samuel, walking half a step behind her, caught the expression. It was one of the incredibly rare times he had ever seen April smile without a calculating, cold motive behind it.
He could still vividly recall the first time he had accompanied her to have breakfast; back then, he had thought she simply enjoyed the act of eating, but that pure, untainted warmth had never replicated itself during their subsequent meals.
She had things she genuinely liked, and whenever those rare elements aligned, she looked remarkably, beautifully human.
But the smile didn’t last long as April’s eyes fell on her name.
April Gabriel.
April muttered her own full name under her breath, staring at the elegant font printed across the top of the primary check. The surname felt heavy. Foreign. Like a piece of clothing that belonged to a complete stranger.
She had never used her surname before—not when she had first arrived at the Morgan estate ten years ago, and certainly not after the apocalypse had shattered the world in the previous timeline.
Her last name had always felt like a physical weight resting against her heart, and right now, the pressure was exactly the same. It brought back a lingering, frustrating shadow, and it was because she couldn’t remember a single detail of her past before she turned sixteen.
Her entire life before she entered the Morgan household as a heavily abused, mistreated maid was a total, impenetrable blank slate. She had suffered through those early years with no memory of where she came from or who her bloodline belonged to.
She let out a slow, quiet sigh, the fleeting warmth vanishing from her face as she slipped the checkbook into her purse. There was no point in digging up dead memories when the future required her full attention.
"Alright, Samuel," April said, her voice turning crisp and business-like once more as she opened the passenger door. "Let’s go get my dress."
