Air Touched - A Dragon Tribe Origin

Chapter Seventeen - Ijn

Just because Ijn didn't go to school, did not mean she wasn't able to perform educated research. Now that she'd met Jae, she wanted to understand him a lot more before they went on their second date. Their first meeting had gone a lot better than she'd hoped in many ways. However, there were also moments where she knew she could improve.

Going through her magazines, she noticed he didn't start making an appearance in them until around two years ago—sporadically. "Eighteen-year-old prince Jae makes his debut!" Read the headline of the article detailing his first public outing with his father.

Eighteen, two years ago? Wouldn't that make him twenty just like her? She frowned, almost positive her father had said he was nineteen and younger. Was the magazine wrong? Did she not remember correctly? She searched for an article with all the dirt involving his fiasco of a date with some famous model. Again, it said he was eighteen despite the incident occurring only last year. Even if he'd just had a birthday, it still wasn't possible for him to be eighteen for two years straight.

"That's not possible," she whispered. When she compared the pictures from the two clippings, she searched for some kind of telling difference in his appearance. A bit more exhaustion in the eyes, or a mature jawline, anything that would show he was indeed a little bit older. He was exactly the same. Maybe he just has good genetics. After all, it seems like his father has hardly aged any over the years, and his grandfather always looked young from the old photos I've seen.

Why the goof in the magazine, though? Was she the only one who noticed? There had to be others who were paying attention. Just a bad typo? Sloppy reporting? The question was, how did she go about researching to figure it out? Use of the Internet in Aero was highly restrictive. A lot of websites not run by the Aero nation were blocked from servers. They got foreign films and novels, but not much in terms of news from the other nations. The king was passionate about maintaining tradition and order, not approving a technology for use until it was proven to be dependable.

Min did not agree, she complained about it every so often. How her life would be so much easier if she had access to more up to date methods for study, or some of the alternative research from the Terran nation which lead in all areas of medical advancements. Ijn, on the other hand, liked tradition. It was how she was getting the chance to marry a prince, and why she was able to pursue a more family oriented path of life. Tradition was stability, and the nation of Aero was prospering because it held onto the ways that worked. Aero was not broken. It did not need to be fixed.

The drawback to all of the restrictions and traditions, of course, was that solving the mystery of Jae would end up being much more difficult than it should have been. But she would find out. She would learn everything about the love of her life, because that's what a good wife did.

Besides, she had plenty of time on her hands.