The original Eleanor was never respected by the servants because of how they were treated by her, and this led to them spreading bad rumors of her.
Whereas, Astria was a maid's daughter, so the other servants were already familiar with her. Furthermore, even after getting adopted she always treated them nicely and thanked them for everything they did for her.
She would in fact sometimes discuss her problems with them, but would never directly blame Eleanor and tried to save her from bad rumors. Thus, she started gaining pity from the servants who sided with her whenever they got the chance, and spread rumors of how badly I treated her and how nice she was to forgive me for my mistakes.
For the past few days, I have started respecting all the servants in the mansion.
I smile and greet them whenever I pass them, or thank them for their hard work.
Of course, most of them are still wary of me, but some servants have started to treat me with politeness and thus acknowledging my efforts.
I have also started spending my days mostly in the library, trying to gain this world's knowledge as it will be beneficial for my future.
A few days ago I came across a book which showed how magic is actually awakened at the temple. Originally in the past, most people did not go to the temple to awaken their magic. Most of them who were powerful enough or had a powerful bloodline would just usually awaken their magic by performing a ritual themselves which was similar to what the temple did.
This means, if I wanted, I can awaken my magic and train myself beforehand so I am powerful enough to defend myself in the future?
In fact, Eleanor had Teleportation magic. If I am to be executed, I could simply teleport to another country far away and escape. But this required a lot of practice, because one had to be powerful enough to do that, which the original Eleanor was not.
I read the whole book, the precautions and disadvantages written there for the ritual, as it was quite easy to memorize thanks to my previous life, me being a lawyer.
Thus, as per the book I started meditating very early in the mornings, at 4 am and even did some yoga to make myself fit and healthy enough to do that.
The ritual could only be done on a night of the blue moon, which was nearly 3 months away and I could do it on any blue moon in the following 6 years so I had enough time to prepare myself.
But will just being able to learn magic be enough? As per the books magic when combined with weaponry was much more stronger. So maybe I should start learning to defend myself.
Thankfully, I still had some years before the original plot of the novel started.
I found myself a book on the subject and started reading. I also started seeing knights in the estates as they practiced in the morning and they usually started it at 8:30 am so it did not interfere with my meditation and yoga practice.
But to practice weaponry, I had to get a weapon. So, next morning I decided to visit the market to buy myself something. Milli along with a knight accompanied me.