Chapter 289 : Chapter 289
Chapter 289. Moran: Endure!
Early morning.
At the western station of Silverglow City, the Royal Capital, a Magitech Train painted jet-black stood quietly at a dedicated platform. The body of the train was inlaid with the royal crest, and golden vines coiled across the iron plating, gleaming coldly in the morning light.
On both sides of the platform, guards dressed in dark uniforms stood in a straight line along the tracks, one every three steps, their gazes fixed directly ahead. The air was filled with the faint smell of ozone emitted as the magitech engine warmed up, mixed with the scent of cheap wheat cakes drifting over from a breakfast stall at the end of the platform.
Inside the carriage.
Prime Minister Moran sat upright in a dedicated seat lined with velvet cushions. Before him was a cup of fragrant highland black tea. He wore an extremely well-tailored formal suit, and the crystal brooch at his collar refracted the morning light.
“Prime Minister, everything has been prepared at Blackstone Monastery,” the secretary bent down and said in an extremely low voice, as though afraid of disturbing the viscous, solemn air inside the carriage.
“Several bishops from the Holy Church will also be in attendance. As you instructed, the seating arrangement places them slightly below our side. They… have raised no objections.”
Moran nodded slightly, his gaze still fixed outside the window.
The glass reflected his face, one carved by time into an expression of authority that inspired awe even without anger. Because he had maintained himself extremely well, there was not the slightest trace of senility in those deep eyes, only a silence too profound to measure.
The train began to move slowly. The slight vibration of the magitech engine, like the heartbeat of a giant beast, traveled through the expensive wool carpet and reached the soles of his feet.
That vibration gave him a sense of security, as though everything was under his control. Behind every inch of railway, every factory, and every circulating Golden Lion Coin in the Royal Capital, his will was flowing.
Moran reached out and pushed the window open a crack.
The cool morning wind poured in, ruffling the fine silver-white hair at his temples. Faintly mixed into the wind was the smell of coking coal from the ironworks in the distant suburbs—a bitter, coarse smell that belonged to the lower classes.
That scent stirred up very distant memories.
Forty years ago.
Back then, Moran had only been a thin, weak boy on the western border of the empire, not even qualified to possess a name.
For two or three Copper Sparrow Coins covered in green rust, he could run back and forth barefoot through the pouring rain dozens of times, helping passing caravans move sacks of salt heavier than his own body.
Salt seeped into the cracks on the soles of his feet, hurting so badly that he trembled uncontrollably, but he did not dare stop. If he stopped, he would have no food that day.
Once, he failed to dodge a noble’s carriage in time.
The carriage curtain was never lifted. The person sitting inside did not even know what had happened outside. Or perhaps they knew, but simply did not care.
The one who jumped down was a house servant wearing a silk coat. His whip struck quickly and accurately.
The first lash landed on Moran’s shoulder. Flesh split open, and beads of blood flowed down along his collarbone.
The second lash struck his back. He was whipped to the ground, his mouth hitting the mud, filling it with a sweet, bloody taste.
The third lash swept across his cheek. Blood and muddy water poured into his mouth, and he heard the dull sound of his teeth knocking against his tongue.
A circle of people had gathered around him. Men, women, children, old men.
Not a single person stepped forward.
Some were even laughing.
That was the first time Moran understood an extremely clear fact—in this world, birth determined species. In the eyes of nobles, he was not human. He was livestock that could speak.
But when he was fourteen, fate opened a crack for him.
To escape the pursuit of debt collectors, he stumbled into an ancient ruin that had been buried beneath yellow sand for unknown ages. Amid bones scattered across the ground and collapsed stone pillars, his hand touched something.
A ring.
It was pitch-black from end to end, like a condensed abyss. The band was covered in fine, scale-like patterns, and it was cold to the touch—no, not ordinary cold. That chill was like a living snake, burrowing into his blood vessels through his fingertips and swimming all the way into the depths of his heart.
At that moment, he heard a voice.
An extremely ancient murmur, so deep that it was almost infrasonic. It was not any known language, yet it exploded directly in the depths of his consciousness.
That was the whisper of the Old Days. The only crack through which the weak could steal power.
It was also the foundation of his rise.
At sixteen, carrying that ring and the money he had saved through blood and sweat, he boarded a cargo ship bound for the United States of Meriga.
In that country, which revered contracts and efficiency, he worked while studying. In the intervals between washing dishes and copying documents, he madly absorbed knowledge of magitech industry and advanced social management.
He saw one thing clearly: so-called noble bloodlines and so-called inborn nobility were nothing more than clay idols waiting to be crushed before the flood of capital and technology.
After returning to his homeland, what followed was more than ten thousand days and nights of endurance. He climbed, inch by inch, up the perilous peak of power.
He had betrayed the mentor who had promoted him, and he had also supported political enemies he would eventually have to eliminate.
He swallowed humiliation in the cold wind and calculated the fate of the nation under an oil lamp late at night.
Of all this, opportunity accounted for thirty percent, effort accounted for thirty percent, but in Moran’s own view, the remaining forty percent was entirely endurance!
He endured until the old King was terminally ill. He endured until the Holy Church declined day by day. He endured until the entire kingdom’s bureaucratic system could no longer function without him.
Now, he was already the kingdom’s number two figure. If one did not count the “puppet King” currently locked deep inside the Golden Rose Palace, whose very breathing rhythm was set by him, then he was the undisputed emperor of Astrelia.
“My lord, your tea has gone cold. I will replace it for you.” Seeing that Moran had remained silent for a long time, the secretary anxiously extended his hand, moving so gently that it was as though he were touching a fragile divine statue.
“No need,” Moran said indifferently.
The secretary’s hand abruptly froze in midair. His breathing stopped for an instant, then he quickly withdrew his hand and returned to that humble position, like a shadow.
This was Moran’s current status. He did not even need to be angry. A single look, a single refusal, was enough to make the most promising young official in the Royal Capital feel as though death had come knocking.
Moran took a sip of the black tea. The bitterness exploded on the tip of his tongue, followed by a lingering sweetness so long that it felt almost illusory. It was just like most of his life—the first half had been all mud and blood, and only in the second half had he slowly tasted the sweetness of power.
“What a pity.”
He sighed inwardly.
The state banquet.
The state banquet he had originally designed should have been a flawless work of political art.
The Pope, that stubborn old man, was deeply obsessed and extremely easy to incite.
He only needed to gently pluck, like a zither string, the string called “purging evil” in the Pope’s subconscious, and supplement it with a trace of Mental Suggestion. Then this supreme divine spokesperson would become the sharpest and most legitimate killing blade in his hand.
According to the perfect script he had deduced countless times, he only needed to sit calmly in the position of chief minister and watch coldly from the side.
The ripples of Mental Suggestion would silently spread throughout the entire hall. Fear, suspicion, fanaticism—these most primitive human emotions would spread, infect, and ferment like a plague.
Once the conflict intensified to the boiling point, a bloody riot under the banner of “purging demons” would “naturally” erupt.
When that time came, swords and blades would have no eyes. Sylvia, that obstructive Governor of the Northern Territory, would very likely be “reasonably” injured by mistake and die amid the chaos at the hands of the Knights of Judgment. As for Logaris, he would be rejected and strangled by the entire secular world.
As long as Sylvia died, Astrelia’s royal bloodline would have only Dorg left—that sickly invalid whose days of comfort were nearly over and who could only gasp out the last of his life in a wheelchair.
A man who had to count his days with every breath—what could he possibly use to turn the tide?