Chapter 380
Rusty watched as a dozen people filed into his throne room. Next to him were Frederic and Tur'stal to round out the meeting. Now that the Emperor had stated this was his final offer to the Knight revival program, they were either going to move forward or the effort would die here.
It had taken almost fifty years after they officially presented the proposal to reach a hopefully mutually acceptable agreement. But now, it was time to convince the stubborn mules that were the remnants of the Orders into actually accepting.
Because things could never be easy.
It was days like this that Rusty wondered why he had ever accepted the mantle of King instead of just remaining a duke,or just passing the title onto a relative and ascending.
Sadly, he couldn't even shunt this off to Frederic and had to host the meeting himself. This was, out of all of their duties, primarily his.
His kingdom's leader two generations ago, King Damian, despite being an Agatha loyalist, sheltered a number of the old Knight remnants in defiance of the overt disapproval of the Empress. With the then Duke Damian protecting the remnants of the Knight Orders, those he sheltered were spared the majority of Agatha’s wrath and they had settled down within his borders. And so, his kingdom had the most Knightly Orders who still knew the closely guarded secrets of just how they could merge Natural Treasures with newborns and make the benefits genetic enough to become inheritable.
Rusty’s predecessor had continued the trend of protecting the Knights even when Georgios wanted the information of how to create elites, but the remaining Orders had made it clear they would rather die than share their secrets with anyone. Georgios had apparently even tried to look back in time to watch the procedure done without their consent, but the time between Agatha’s rise and her outlawing such measures was simply too long, which made the cost impossible to pay when paired with their once-formidable wards.
The Knightly Orders had had very robust anti-divination, anti-clairvoyance, and anti-pre and post-cognition wards around their strongholds, which increased the difficulty exponentially. Combined with the fact it had been a full sixty thousand years, it was probably impossible even once Matt was T50.
Not that he thought Manny would be interested in trying, even if he could.