Chapter : 1017
Lloyd sat there for a long time, the Viscount’s chilling words echoing in his mind. The Devil Race. The Altamiran legions. A two-front war. His own personal quest, his own desperate, romantic, and perhaps foolish, attempt to heal a single, broken woman, now felt so small, so insignificant, in the face of the encroaching, world-altering darkness.
But as he rose to leave the chamber, a new, and far more dangerous, thought took root in his mind. A cold, insidious suspicion that was a perfect, chilling fusion of his own personal quest and the grand, terrible, geopolitical storm that was about to break.
The curse that held Nilufa Siddik in its grip. A Grade A Spiritual Corruption Curse. A masterpiece of ancient, forbidden, and impossibly powerful magic. The kind of magic that was not wielded by simple assassins or court mages.
The kind of magic that was the known, and terrifying, signature of the highest echelons of the Devil Race’s sorcerer-lords.
The two wars, he realized with a sudden, sickening, and absolute certainty, were not separate at all. They were one and the same. The quiet, insidious, and decade-long assault on the matriarch of the most powerful house in the South had not just been a random act of cruelty.
It had been the first shot. The first, silent, and terrifyingly patient move in a war that had been waged in the shadows for ten long years, a war that was only now about to explode into the light. And he, Lloyd Ferrum, had just, by a sheer, blind, and cosmic stroke of fate, stumbled directly into its secret, silent, and still-beating heart.
The Siddik estate’s study, a room that had for so long been a silent, cold theater for Lloyd’s solitary work, had transformed into a war council chamber. The air, once still and smelling of old books, was now thick with a new, palpable tension, a shared, focused energy that was a testament to their new and strangely effective partnership. The large, polished table was no longer a space for his schematics alone; it was a shared battlefield, littered with maps of the southern provinces, treatises on ancient curses, and the single, magnificent, and utterly impossible 5-Color Divine Pearl, which sat on a velvet cloth in the center of the table like a captive star.
They had two of the three keys. The Heavenly Jade Lotus, its life-giving energy a constant, gentle hum in its sealed, alchemical container, was a testament to their own brutal, hard-won victory. The Pearl was a testament to… something else. A mystery. A secret that Rosa still held, locked away behind the cool, impenetrable fortress of her silver eyes.
Lloyd, his mind now a relentless engine focused on the final, daunting piece of the puzzle, looked at the two women who had become the unlikely cornerstones of his new reality. Mina, her pragmatic mind a perfect, logical sounding board for his own strategic thinking, was tracing a route on a map with a slender finger. Rosa, a silent, watchful presence, was simply staring at the pearl, her expression a mask of unreadable, contemplative stillness.
“The final ingredient,” Lloyd began, his voice a low, steady instrument that cut through the quiet, focused atmosphere. He pulled a new, unmarked map of the kingdom to the center of the table. “The Violent Purple Tree. And a single, perfect leaf from its branches.”
Mina looked up from her own map, a frown of concentration on her face. “Another mythical beast to slay? Another gods-forsaken, magic-dead mountain to climb?” she asked, her tone a mixture of weary resignation and a new, hard-won confidence. After what they had survived on Mount Monu, she now seemed to believe that there was no obstacle, no legend, that they could not, together, overcome.
Lloyd shook his head, a slow, grim finality in the movement. “No,” he said, his voice dropping slightly, becoming a more serious, more dangerous thing. “The Violent Purple Tree is not found in a place as… physically hostile as Mount Monu.” He paused, letting the weight of his words settle. “But it is, in many ways, far, far harder to reach.”
Rosa’s gaze finally lifted from the pearl, her dark, intelligent eyes now fixed on him, a silent, questioning intensity in their depths.
“The legends, the oldest and most reliable ones, are very specific,” Lloyd continued, his finger tracing a path on the map, a path that led not to a wild, untamed wilderness, but to a small, unassuming patch of green deep within the civilized, settled lands of the kingdom’s central plains. “The tree is not a wild thing. It is cultivated. It grows only in a single, specific, and very, very old garden.”
Chapter : 1018
“A garden?” Mina asked, her confusion evident. “Then we simply… ask for it. Or, if need be, purchase it. My family’s coffers are deep. We can afford any price.”
“It is not a matter of gold,” Lloyd said, his voice now a low, grim whisper. He tapped his finger on the small, green patch on the map, a place that was marked with a single, ancient, and almost forgotten name. “The tree grows only in the ancestral gardens of the House of Garcia.”
The name fell into the room with a strange, heavy thud. It was a name that was both familiar and alien. A name that was a part of the kingdom’s history, and yet, somehow, stood apart from it.
Mina’s brow furrowed in thought. “The Garcias,” she said slowly, the name a distant, dusty memory from her history lessons. “The Old Lords. The ones who… refuse to attend the Royal Court.”
“Refuse is a… polite word for it,” Lloyd corrected, a humorless, bitter smile touching his lips. He leaned back in his chair, the professor about to deliver a lecture on a subject of deep, profound, and dangerous complexity. “The House of Garcia is not just a noble family. They are a relic. A living ghost from a lost age. They are the last, unbowed remnants of the Kingdom of Al-Kazar, the great, sprawling empire that ruled this entire continent for a thousand years, long before the Kingdom of Bethelham was even a concept, long before our own houses were anything more than petty, backwater fiefdoms.”
He let the weight of that history sink in. He was not just talking about an old family; he was talking about a fallen empire, a civilization that had been ground to dust under the heel of the new order, the order to which their own families belonged.
“When the Bethelham kings rose to power,” he continued, his voice a low, storyteller’s drone, “when they unified the warring states and forged this new kingdom, the Garcias did not bend. They did not break. They were too powerful, too ancient, too deeply rooted in the very soil of this land to be simply… erased. So a treaty was made. They were allowed to keep their ancestral lands, their titles, their traditions. In return, they swore an oath of non-aggression. They would not raise their banners against the new throne.”
He leaned forward, his gaze meeting Rosa’s, his expression one of grim, absolute certainty. “But they did not swear fealty. They do not see the King of Bethelham as their sovereign. They see him as a descendant of the upstart usurpers who destroyed their world. They reside within the borders of our kingdom, but their estate is a sovereign territory. A pocket of the old world, a living museum of a lost age, that does not bend its knee to the current throne. And they hold a deep, ancient, and utterly unforgiving contempt for all Bethelhamian nobility. For all of us.”
The full, catastrophic, and deeply inconvenient weight of the situation finally settled over the room. They were not just asking for a leaf. They were, as members of the new, hated nobility, planning to walk into the heart of a fallen, hostile, and deeply proud empire and ask for its most sacred, most mythical treasure. It was not a simple request. It was a diplomatic nightmare of the highest, most impossible order.
Mina’s face, which had been a mask of confident, can-do pragmatism, had now gone pale. The practical, logistical problems of acquiring rare materials and constructing impossible machines were things her mind could grasp, could solve. But this… this was a problem of history, of pride, of a deep, ancient, and festering wound that had been poisoning the political landscape of the kingdom for centuries.
“They are… recluses,” she whispered, the word a confirmation of the dark, whispered stories she had heard in the southern court. “They say the Don Garcia has not left his estate in fifty years. That he rules his small, forgotten kingdom like a ghost-king, speaking only in proclamations and judgments. They say he has a hatred for our kind that is as deep and as cold as the sea.”
“They say correctly,” Lloyd confirmed, his voice a grim, flat line. “To the Garcias, we are not just nobles of a rival house. We are the children of the barbarians who burned their libraries, who toppled their statues, who erased their civilization from the pages of history. We are a living, breathing reminder of everything they have lost.”
Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.
Chapter : 1019
He looked from Mina’s dawning horror to Rosa’s cold, analytical stillness. “To walk through their gates as a Siddik, a family whose wealth and power was built on the new, global trade routes that the Bethelham kings established, the very trade routes that made the old, land-bound economy of their empire obsolete… it would be seen as the ultimate insult. It would be a merchant queen, a symbol of the new world, flaunting her success in the face of their failure.”
The implication was clear, sharp, and brutal. Rosa, for all her power, for all her newfound, hard-won courage, was not an asset in this next, delicate mission. She was a liability. A poison.
A long, heavy silence descended upon the study. The path to the final ingredient was not guarded by monsters of flesh and bone, but by a monster of a different, and far more intractable, kind. A monster of pride, of history, of a hatred so deep and so ancient that it was a part of the very soil upon which their world was built.
To simply appear at their gates and ask for their most sacred treasure would not just be met with a refusal. It would be met with a contemptuous, absolute, and perhaps even violent, rejection. They would be lucky to escape with their lives. The quest, which had just moments before seemed so close to its conclusion, now seemed, once again, to be utterly, completely, and absolutely impossible. The final door was locked, and they, with all their power, with all their wealth, with all their will, did not seem to possess the key.
----
The silence in the study was a thick, suffocating blanket of despair. The final obstacle, the ancient, unyielding pride of the House of Garcia, seemed a wall more insurmountable than any physical mountain, more deadly than any primordial beast. Mina, the pragmatist, was for the first time in her life, utterly, completely out of solutions. Her mind, which could solve any logistical or financial puzzle, was useless against a problem forged from a thousand years of hatred and grief. Rosa, the warrior, was a queen who had just been told that her very name, the very source of her power and her pride, was the one weapon that could not be wielded in this next, crucial battle.
It was Lloyd who finally, decisively, broke the silence. He stood up, his movement a sharp, sudden, and utterly final declaration that cut through the heavy, defeatist atmosphere.
“I will go,” he said, his voice a calm, steady, and unshakeable instrument of pure, unadulterated will. The words were not a suggestion. They were not a proposal. They were a statement of an unalterable fact. The decision had already been made.
The two sisters looked at him, their expressions a mixture of shock, of protest, of a dawning, fearful respect.
Rosa was the first to find her voice. She stood as well, her own posture a perfect, magnificent mirror of his own unbending resolve. “We will go,” she corrected him, her voice a low, cold, and absolutely certain blade of steel. She had not come this far, she had not faced down the very gods of the mountain, she had not shattered the laws of her own reality, to be left behind now. This was her fight. Her mother. Her quest.
But Lloyd simply shook his head, a slow, final, and utterly non-negotiable gesture. His refusal was absolute. And it was based not on an emotional, protective impulse, but on the cold, hard, and brutal calculus of strategy.
He turned to her, and his gaze was not that of a husband or a partner. It was the gaze of a commander, a general, explaining the grim, unchangeable realities of the battlefield to a subordinate.
“No, Rosa,” he said, his voice quiet but firm, leaving no room for argument. “You will not. You cannot. Your presence on this mission is not just a risk; it is a guaranteed failure.”
He saw the flicker of her old, defiant pride in her eyes, the familiar frost beginning to gather. He knew he had to be brutal. He had to be cruel. He had to make her understand that this was not a slight against her strength, but a simple, cold, and verifiable fact of the political landscape.
“My name,” he began, his voice a low, steady drone, the professor delivering a difficult, but necessary, history lesson, “the name of Ferrum, is not one that the Garcias love. Our ancestors were the hammers of the Bethelham kings, the ones who shattered their western legions and broke the back of their empire. They see us as the brutes, the barbarians who brought their age of high culture to a bloody, ignominious end.”
Chapter : 1020
He paused, letting the weight of that dark history settle. “But,” he continued, a new, and far more complex, note entering his voice, “in the centuries since, a different kind of relationship has been forged. The Ferrum lands border the Garcia territories in the west. We have faced the same threats. We have fought the same border skirmishes against the wild tribes of the Razorback Peaks. We have bled on the same battlefields. There is no love between our houses. But there is… a history. A grudging, mutual respect born from a shared, bloody history of survival. My name, to them, is not the name of a friend. But it is the name of a known, and respected, enemy. It is a key, however old, however rusted, that might, just might, be able to open their door.”
He then turned his gaze fully upon her, and his expression held no malice, no contempt. Only the simple, unvarnished, and utterly brutal truth.
“Your name, however,” he said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, “is a different matter entirely.”
He did not need to be a historian to know the story. It was a tale taught to every noble child in the kingdom. “The Siddik family rose to power on the tides of the new world. You are a house of merchants, of traders, of the sea. Your wealth was built on the global trade that the Bethelham kings ushered in, the very trade that made the old, land-bound, and agricultural economy of the Al-Kazarian empire obsolete. To them, you are not just a rival house. You are a symbol. A living, breathing symbol of the new, vulgar, and money-grubbing world that destroyed their own. Your very presence on their ancestral lands would not just be unhelpful; it would be seen as a direct, calculated, and unforgivable insult. A provocation of the highest order. They would not just slam the gates shut; they would, I suspect, take it as a cause for war.”
He had laid the facts bare, a series of cold, hard, and undeniable truths. He had not questioned her strength. He had not questioned her courage. He had simply, brutally, and logically demonstrated that her very identity, the very name that was the source of her pride, was a poison to this specific, delicate, and deeply dangerous mission.
He saw the understanding dawn in her eyes, and he saw the pain that came with it. The warrior in her was being told that she was a weapon that could not be used, that she had to remain behind, a queen benched in the most critical moment of the game.
“I must go alone,” he concluded, his voice now softening slightly, a rare, almost imperceptible note of sympathy in its depths. “Not because I doubt your strength, Rosa. But because, in this one, specific, and deeply foolish battle, my name is a rusty key. And yours… yours is a bomb.”
The silence that followed Lloyd’s brutal, tactical assessment was a heavy, suffocating thing. He had not just outlined a plan; he had delivered a judgment, a verdict that had stripped Rosa of her agency in the most critical phase of her own quest. He had taken her sword from her hand and told her to wait in the castle while he went to fight the dragon alone. He had expected an explosion. A storm of icy, furious pride. A declaration that she would go, his logic be damned.
Instead, he was met with a profound, and deeply unsettling, quiet. Rosa stood perfectly still, her face a mask of pale, unreadable stone. The fire of defiance he had expected to see in her eyes was not there. In its place was something else, something far more complex and far more… mature. A cold, hard, and deeply pragmatic understanding.
She was a strategist. A queen. And she had just been presented with a piece of undeniable, verifiable intelligence. Her personal feelings, her pride, her desire to be a part of the final battle—they were all irrelevant in the face of a single, cold, hard, and unalterable tactical fact. He was right. And she knew it.
“You will be walking into a nest of vipers,” she stated finally, her voice a low, flat monotone, devoid of all emotion. It was not a protest. It was an assessment. A statement from one commander to another.
“I am aware,” he replied simply.
“They will not see you as an ally,” she continued, her mind clearly processing the political and personal risks. “They will see you as a supplicant. A barbarian from the north, begging for a favor. They will test you. They will humiliate you. They will do everything in their power to break you before they even consider your request.”
