Exactly 21 days must pass from the moment Lada is chosen, then the gold is deducted, and the quest is counted. But was the quest counted? Maybe it's just been 3 weeks since the start of the map?
By the way, the trick with setting up the program to run without optimizations, which I wrote about, eliminated crashes in all key points - the willow tree, the undead king, communicating with the elf king's deputy. It seems to be a universal recipe for Heroes of all versions on Windows 10:smile07: