Let's Take What We Need

As Memphiste, the Ice Duke, strode into the tavern, the place immediately became lifelessly quiet, like the frozen plain covered by the blizzard; cold, silent, and never to change.

"Thirty years is better than thirty thousand years?" The old man, who was likely to be a legendary sorcerer in the field of souls, chuckled. It was obvious that he thought the Lord of Mysteries was carrying out his specialties as a devil and bluffing other people with the exaggerated truth that was not to be believed. "In the past ten years, you barely walked out of the Silent Glacier. I almost suspected that you had quietly arrived at the main material world. To what do I owe your visit to my little tavern today?"

He was reminding Lucien that the Lord of Mysteries might be concocting a great scheme that involved the main material world during the past ten years so that Lucien wouldn't be tricked.