Chapter 282 : Chapter 282
Chapter 282. The Hidden Power
After finishing all of this, Logaris raised his right hand.
The three high-tier gemstones embedded in his glove lit up at the same time.eerie-blue Aether particles frantically reorganized at his fingertips.
“Absolute Coordinate.”
Ripples spread through the void. Logaris left behind a faint trace of spatial folding where he stood, and his entire body vanished in an instant.
When he appeared again, Logaris stepped steadily onto hard bluestone floor tiles.
This was the outer public area of the Tower of Inverted Truth, deep within the Great Howling Rift.
After the last mortifying walk-in incident, Logaris had learned his lesson this time. He deliberately made his footsteps heavier, his leather boots clicking crisply against the floor tiles.
He passed through the long circular corridor and arrived before the massive bronze doors of the core hub chamber.
He did not immediately push the door open. Instead, he cleared his throat and coughed twice in an extremely deliberate, extremely loud manner.
“Ahem! Ahem!”
His voice was so loud that it even stirred up faint echoes in the corridor.
After waiting a full five seconds and confirming that there was no panicked movement inside, nor any indescribable role-playing game in progress, he finally carried the black leather case in one hand and pushed the door open.
Inside the room, Mad King Maggie was hovering in midair with her legs crossed. Dozens of ancient documents radiating an archaic aura floated before her.
Those glowing characters of the Old God Tongue were like a group of cheerful spirits, leaping, combining, and deconstructing at her fingertips.
“Ran into trouble again?” Maggie asked casually without even raising her eyelids. Her tone carried the impatience of someone clearly saying, I am busy, so spit it out if you have something to say.
Logaris walked straight to the edge of the enormous divination array at the center of the room.
Click.
He opened the leather case.
Then he dumped Moran’s book and the yellowed manuscript onto the ground all at once.
“Moran, the serving Prime Minister of Astrelia.” Logaris straightened his body, pushed up his glasses, and got straight to the point.
“That old man has now almost seized control of the Royal Capital’s entire political situation. Even the old King, who has long been bedridden and out of sight despite being a Sixth-Tier Knight, is suspected of having been secretly turned into his puppet. But the trickiest part is this.”
Logaris’s voice sank, and his gaze turned sharp as a blade.
“Whether it is his public resume or his everyday routine, Moran is so clean that not even the slightest flaw can be found. He has no private assets, no mistress, and every day, he moves between the same fixed points. He is practically like a saintly machine with a programmed routine.”
He paused for a moment. In his mind, the scene from a few days ago suddenly flashed past, when that invisible power had invaded his Spiritual Sea. The experience of being subtly influenced without even noticing it made a trace of lingering fear rise in Logaris’s heart. What followed immediately after was an irrepressible, icy fury.
“He can even use a token to indirectly place a Mental Suggestion on me without anyone noticing, and leave me unable to detect it for a long period. According to my inference, he is at least a Sixth-Tier secret mage who has reached the pinnacle of mental spellcraft. There is even a considerable chance that he has already touched the threshold of the Seventh Tier.”
Logaris pointed at the manuscript on the ground.
“Conventional methods cannot investigate him. I need you to divine him. Peel away his skin and see what kind of monster is hidden inside this seemingly perfect shell.”
After hearing this, Maggie finally stopped dismantling the Old God Tongue in her hands.
She slowly descended to the floor, her bare feet stepping onto the cold stone slabs.
“The serving Prime Minister? Interesting. I did not expect the current Astrelia Kingdom to still be capable of producing someone like that.”
Maggie stepped forward, bent down, and picked up the yellowed manuscript. Her fingers rubbed the rough surface of the paper as she closed her eyes.
An extremely obscure yet suffocatingly vast Mental Power extended from within her body and wrapped around the manuscript like tentacles.
A moment later, her eyes snapped open, and an excited fanaticism ignited in their depths.
“He is hidden very deeply… so deeply that it is practically bottomless. But I smell something familiar.” Maggie let out a cold laugh, her voice echoing through the empty room. “Let me try. Let us see what sort of entity this is.”
The moment her voice fell, Maggie suddenly spread both arms.
BOOM!
The Aether particles in the entire room went completely berserk, turning into a visible blue storm that gathered madly. Before Logaris and Maggie, countless runes wove and coiled together. In just two seconds, they constructed a massive three-dimensional array more than ten meters in diameter.
The array patterns flowed like mercury and erupted with blinding light, illuminating the dim room as though it were broad daylight.
Maggie hovered at the center of the array, her long hair whipping wildly, like a god who governed fate.
“Truth Retrospection.”
The divination spellwork Maggie had created herself began to operate with a thunderous surge. The immense mana even made the air inside the tower grow viscous.
At the center of the array, light and shadow began to twist and overlap, attempting to trace Moran’s past upstream through that faint causal line.
However, an abnormality suddenly occurred.
The moment it came into contact with Moran’s causal line, the area at the center of the array where images should have appeared was suddenly covered completely by a dense black mist that refused to disperse.
The probing mana tentacles slammed into an invisible and indestructible wall. Immediately afterward, all the extended investigative routes were forcibly twisted and snapped by an extremely overbearing power.
CRACK.
Several fine Aether cracks even split open along the edge of the array.
The divination result appeared.
A blank.
There was nothing. No image, no sound, not even the vaguest shadow existed. It was clean, utterly clean, as if this person had never existed in this world at all.
Maggie’s expression changed drastically. She abruptly cut off her mana output, and the entire array’s light dimmed.
She stared fixedly at the trace of misty aura still lingering in midair, her eyes filled with extreme disbelief.
“Interesting…” Maggie murmured in a low voice. Then she raised her head and pronounced a term that was completely unfamiliar to Logaris, word by word. “This is the Authority of ‘Secrecy’!”
Logaris’s brows instantly tightened into a deep frown. He stepped forward, his tone solemn. “What is the Authority of ‘Secrecy’?”
Maggie’s expression became more serious than ever before. She floated back toward the bookshelf and began rapidly searching for something.
“This is not a power that humans should possess. It is not even a power that belongs to gods.” Maggie spoke extremely quickly. “This is an exclusive Authority belonging to the ancient dragons. Or rather…”
She abruptly turned around, a book pinched in her hand, and her eyes flashed with a madness that shattered common sense.
“It is highly likely to belong to the legendary Tenth Dragon King, who has never been recorded in any official history!”
Logaris’s brows furrowed tightly. A Dragon King? How could an ultimate existence that existed only in myths and legends be connected to a living, breathing Prime Minister of Astrelia?
“However…” Maggie’s tone suddenly changed, and an extremely solemn haze settled over her brow.
“Considering that after the ancient Old War, the Black Dragon King Noxarum once vanished from the history of this continent in an extremely abrupt and bizarre manner… if this Authority capable of erasing its own traces truly belongs to one of the known Nine Dragon Kings, then it is most likely the Black Dragon King’s!”