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.”