"You’re no longer useful."
Rowan ended Lockhart Sikayam’s life with a single strike and calmly extracted the remaining essence from his corpse.
There was no point turning Lockhart into a puppet.
mbers of the Twilight Hermit Circle did not gather physically. Their etings took place inside shared dreamscapes, summoned directly by Adam himself.
A dead soul couldn’t be pulled into a dream.
Even if Rowan copied every mory and mannerism, the disguise would collapse the mont a gathering occurred.
Instead, Rowan kept Jason Belial active.
If Adam noticed Lockhart’s disappearance, soone else would eventually co looking.
And Rowan would be waiting.
Adam fascinated him.
Why had Adam wanted Duke Nigan dead?
What did "guiding the flow of the era" truly an?
As a high-ranking entity on the Spectator path, Adam’s long-term goal was obvious.
Either reclaim the fragnted True Creator and reconstitute the Ancient Sun God.
Or ascend fully and beco a true god in his own right.
Rowan already possessed an object equivalent to a first-rank divine essence.
Which ant one day, Adam would co for him.
Better to understand the enemy before that happened.
One detail continued to bother Rowan.
Adam’s objectives overlapped too neatly with the interests of the royal family.
Killing the conservative leader.
Clearing obstacles to reform.
Secretly gathering enormous numbers of slaves.
It all pointed in the sa direction.
"I’ll see what the churches dig up."
The following day, Kristel contacted Rowan through a dream.
"We need your help again."
Rowan smiled faintly.
"Going after Saint Sert already?"
Kristel shook her head.
"No. For now, we want you to patrol Beckland more frequently. If you notice anything unusual, report it imdiately."
Rowan raised an eyebrow.
"So the crown gave you an explanation."
Kristel sighed.
"Last night, our archbishop and the Storm Church’s archbishop confronted the royal court about the trafficking."
"They didn’t deny it."
"They claid they discovered ruins belonging to the Blood Emperor, Alista Tudor. The slaves were purchased to secretly excavate those ruins."
Rowan’s eyes narrowed.
Kristel continued.
"They also said the kidnapping and mistreatnt of girls was the personal misconduct of a few military operatives. The crown claims ignorance."
"And?"
"We inspected the site. The ruins are real. The slaves are there. The crown promised that once excavation ends, the slaves will be freed and allowed to settle in Beckland."
"The involved military operatives were executed. Saint Sert was stripped of his authority."
Kristel paused.
"But our archbishop doesn’t believe that’s the whole truth."
Rowan understood why.
The story was clean.
Too clean.
"Your archbishop wants to look for what they’re hiding."
Kristel nodded.
"If you uncover anything significant, the reward will be the materials for a fourth-rank spellcaster potion."
Rowan didn’t hesitate.
"I’m in."
He already planned to investigate.
Because the pieces fit together disturbingly well.
Adam.
The Blood Emperor.
The Black Emperor’s ascension ritual.
Nine mausoleums.
Mass labor.
Hidden construction.
A ruler reshaping laws through endless reforms.
Rowan’s thoughts ford into a single possibility.
"Soone in the royal family wants to beco the Black Emperor."
And if that was true...
There was only one plausible candidate.
King George III.
To perform the ritual, the candidate had to be an actual reigning emperor.
Not a figurehead.
Not a noble.
A king.
And the ritual also required establishing a complex, unnatural legal system.
Which perfectly matched the crown’s aggressive reform agenda.
Rowan exhaled slowly.
If his guess was right...
Then Beckland wasn’t sitting atop a political conspiracy.
It was sitting on the foundation of a god-making machine.
...
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