Chapter 269 : Chapter 269
Chapter 269. Conjecture
The moment those words were spoken, the temperature inside the private room seemed to drop sharply.
Logaris paused for half a second in the middle of chewing his meat. Then he continued chewing, swallowed, and showed no surprise on his face at all.
Sylvia’s hand, which was holding a red wine glass, stopped in midair. She looked at Conrad, her gaze turning cold.
“Lord Conrad, you may eat recklessly, but you cannot speak recklessly.” Sylvia put down the wine glass, and its glass base struck the tabletop with a dull sound. “Framing the current Prime Minister is not a crime you can bear.”
“Your Highness, I am not speaking recklessly.” Conrad gave a bitter smile. “Over the past half year, all the military memorials submitted to His Majesty have been approved with handwriting that looks exactly the same, but some of the wording habits have clearly changed. Aside from this, I also have other supporting evidence. The recent edicts from His Majesty are completely unlike something written at his side.”
Conrad picked up the water glass in front of him and drank a large mouthful, trying to suppress the agitation in his heart.
“I have always suspected that the Prime Minister controlled His Majesty. But today...” Conrad paused, and a trace of fear flashed through his eyes. “Today, at the funeral, His Majesty personally appeared. Moreover, that aura of authority was absolutely His Majesty himself. That has made me uncertain. If His Majesty has been controlled, then how should today’s appearance be explained?”
Conrad spread his hands. “I truly can no longer see through the situation in the Royal Capital. Therefore, I can only tell this conjecture to the one among the current heirs with the greatest power, which is you, Your Highness, and let you make the judgment.”
Sylvia leaned against the back of her chair and sank into thought.
The power structure of the Astrelia Kingdom was, in essence, an extremely stable triangle.
At the top was royal authority, meaning the king himself. On the left was ministerial authority, with the Prime Minister and the civil officials under him controlling the day-to-day operation of the state machine. On the right was the Privy Council, representing the interests and military power of the great hereditary nobles.
Within this system, the king was by no means a symbolic totem.
Sylvia knew very well what her father was truly capable of. He was not only the symbol of royal authority, but also a genuine Sixth-Tier Knight. He would never be silently controlled by someone without a sound.
More importantly, according to his record, although Prime Minister Moran had risen from the bottom, he was still an ordinary civil official without supernatural power.
What method could he possibly use to silently control a sixth-tier powerhouse?
Alchemical poison? A curse from a high-tier mage? Or perhaps...
The silver mirror that Logaris had intercepted at Scream Fortress, along with the intelligence about Hell’s infiltration, suddenly flashed through Sylvia’s mind.
What if the higher-ups of the Royal Capital, or even the Prime Minister himself, had already made a deal with some indescribable power?
“The intelligence you provided is very valuable.” Sylvia ended her contemplation. She looked at Conrad, her tone returning to its usual composure and authority. “We will intervene and investigate this matter. During this period, maintain the current situation and do not alert the enemy.”
Conrad let out a breath of relief, as though a great burden had been lifted from him. He knew he had made the right move. By tossing this hot potato to the Northern Territory, the faction with the hardest strength at present, he could secure room to maneuver no matter what the result turned out to be.
The dinner ended in an atmosphere of strange harmony.
Conrad left first.
Only Logaris and Sylvia remained inside the private room.
“Loga, what do you think?” Sylvia turned to look at Logaris, who was studying the pattern on the tablecloth.
“It does not make sense logically.”
Logaris withdrew his gaze, his fingertips unconsciously tapping the tabletop and producing crisp sounds. “A Sixth-Tier Knight’s vitality is extremely tenacious. If someone tried to control him by conventional means, he would absolutely have the ability to tear down half of the Golden Rose Palace before he was completely suppressed. But the Royal Capital has remained quiet all this time. That is very unreasonable.”
He pushed up his glasses and threw the question back to her. “As his biological daughter, what do you think?”
Sylvia silently swirled the remaining red wine in her glass. Her silver-gray eyes seemed unfathomable under the dim light.
“The Astrelia royal family has ruled this land for a thousand years. It has far more trump cards than you imagine.” Sylvia’s tone also carried some doubt.
“The inner court of the Golden Rose Palace is protected by restrictions reinforced by generations of Archmages. As the king, my father also carries a pile of treasures on him. Even if the opponent were a seventh-tier powerhouse, it would be impossible to silently turn my father into a puppet without triggering any defensive spellwork.”
She paused, then put forward a hypothesis that even she herself found absurd. “It cannot be that one of the Dragon Kings Maggie mentioned, who still exists in the present world, made a move, can it?”
Sylvia herself was amused by this conjecture.
“Then we can only say that the waters of this Royal Capital run deeper than we imagined.” Logaris spread his hands.
Sylvia pondered for a moment, then softly spoke toward the dense shadow in the corner of the private room.
“Esmeralda.”
Ripples like water spread through the shadows. The Captain of the Shadow Guard, dressed in tight leather armor with her face hidden beneath a hood, appeared soundlessly.
“Your Highness.” Esmeralda knelt on one knee.
“I have to trouble you again.” Sylvia instructed, “Find out all of the Prime Minister’s secret movements over the past half year. Also, think of a way to determine the true current defensive deployment of the Golden Rose Palace’s inner court. I want to know whether my father is pretending to be ill, or whether he has truly become a puppet in someone else’s hands.”
“As you command.”
Esmeralda’s figure once again turned into a blurred pool of shadow, swiftly swimming along the wall before finally disappearing into the darkness beneath the crack of the door.
The private room returned to deathly silence. This impromptu secret discussion had now come to an end. Sylvia picked up the already-cold red wine and drank it in one gulp. Then she and Logaris left the Nightingale Restaurant one after another, each disappearing into the strange and treacherous night of the Royal Capital.
Half an hour later, Logaris returned to a manor Sylvia had temporarily arranged for him. The air was still filled with the preservative smell of new furniture. He did not light the Magic Crystal Lamp. Instead, he walked through the darkness to the window.
The Royal Capital’s night wind beat against the glass window, carrying with it the musty smell of rain unique to deep night.
Logaris stood with one hand in his pocket, overlooking the brightly lit street below. In the distance, the Golden Rose Palace was like a dormant giant beast in the night, quietly devouring every secret.
Conrad’s probing declaration of allegiance, the old king at the funeral, First Prince Dorg’s deliberate concession at the Privy Council... These fragmented clues rapidly interwove and collided within his brain, which possessed tremendous computational power.
They were like an invisible fuse, hidden beneath the seemingly calm transfer of power.
Along with this heavy train of thought, a rare sense of exhaustion quietly crept into his heart.
Logaris removed the elaborate count’s robe and lay down on the hardwood bed in the manor’s bedroom, his eyes tightly closed.
In truth, he rarely dreamed. The brain of a high-tier mage was more accustomed to maintaining a semi-meditative state during sleep.
But tonight, everything slipped out of control.
Logaris’s consciousness seemed to lose its gravity, uncontrollably falling into a deep dream.
When his vision returned, Logaris found his feet standing on a boundless expanse of grassland.
Above him was a blue sky as clear as if it had been washed, along with great clusters of soft white clouds. Yet the edges of everything carried an unreal halo, hazy and blurred, as if separated from him by a layer of rippling water. No matter how he focused his mind, he could not clearly see the distant horizon.
At that moment, an earth-shaking boom suddenly exploded at the end of the sky, causing even the grassland beneath his feet to tremble violently. Logaris raised his head, and the pupils behind his rimless glasses contracted sharply.
It was a pure-white dragon so enormous that it could blot out the vault of the sky, gliding past with a thunderous roar from the edge of the horizon.