Chapter 81 81: The Truth
Before the consciousness of the populace could register the transition, the royal capital of Leyndell had officially formalized its ledger entry into early winter.
Beyond the eternally evergreen, gargantuan golden branches anchoring the absolute center of the plateau, the vast majority of the decorative flora, courtyard hedges, and ancient trees weaving through the imperial avenues had already shed their summer parameters. Yet, the absolute majority of these falling timbers remained deeply influenced by the radiant frequency of the Erdtree; their golden leaves, even after severing their connection from the bark, preserved their brilliant, incandescent coloration across the frost, littering the flagstones like a magnificent, shimmering metallic carpet to weave an exceptionally unique, breathtakingly beautiful aesthetic across the lower wards.
Across the opening suns of November, Lucia consistently maintained his baseline physical drilling schedule during the waking watches, before committing his midnights to executing high-intensity extraction bouts against his three familiar phantoms within the grey sandboxes of the Memory Battlefield. During his rare operational windows of leisure, his gauntlets would play with Shirley's ears, rendering his domestic schedule quite comfortable and balanced.
The solitary deviation separating his current routine from his initial capital watches was the fact that little Malenia had completely desisted from clearing his gates every morning to monitor his drills, freeload across his larder, and terrorize his foxes. Although the active code of the Scarlet Rot had been successfully bound within the tripartite seal, the young princess had received an absolute executive mandate from Miquella commanding her to preserve an un-interrupted, silent rest state deep within the private wings of the Haligtree Palace.
It was precisely due to the volatile parameters governing the girl's physical stability that the grand state banquet—initially scheduled by the ministries to celebrate the sovereigns' return from Roderia—had been indefinitely archived down the calendar.
Across these same suns, Prince Radahn and Prince Rykard had been entirely absent from the residential thoroughfares, their outriders logging zero movements, while Princess Ranni had established a fixed daily appointment with Lucia to jointly clear the gates of the Haligtree complex to audit the girl's recovery metrics.
On this specific watch, the exact microsecond Lucia and Ranni's boots cleared the threshold of the primary palace courtyard, a panicked cascade of shouts filtered from the deep architecture ahead, interspersed with a series of high-pitched, ecstatic cheers that undeniably emerged from Malenia's throat.
The two demigods exchanged a swift, surprised look before accelerating their velocity across the stone paths to breach the inner gardens. Within minutes, their visors locked onto a small, petite silhouette executing a sequence of joyous, rapid bounds out from the grand hall—Malenia had violently shaken off the iron wheelchair that had dictated her mobility parameters for over six winters, running across the turf with absolute, un-bracketed freedom. Her magnificent, copper-red hair danced through the winter breeze like a blazing wildfire cloud, and her golden prosthetic joints—which had historically registered as unruly, heavy metrics across her bone—were moving with the nimble, weightless velocity of organic flesh, supporting her stumbling, frantic sprint toward the vanguard of the courtyard.
"Ah! Ranni! Lucia!"
The little girl caught the flash of their silhouettes from across the clearing, jumping high into the air with an excited wave before rushing toward their perimeters like a localized gale.
The train of personal handmaids tracking her slipstream to enforce a protective boundary let out a long, collective sigh of structural relief the moment they verified the two royal princes had safely intercepted her trajectory. Their minds were finally cleared of the suffocating, non-stop paranoia that the princess might suffer a catastrophic balance failure against the stone.
Ranni dropped her knees to the grass, her arms opening to cushion Malenia's momentum as the little girl nearly lost her footing from sheer kinetic velocity. She frantically ran a diagnostic audit over the golden gears of her prosthetic limb, her blue eyes wide with astonishment. "At what microsecond did your system unlock the capacity to stand?"
"Just this morning watch!" Malenia declared, her voice cracking with an intense, childlike ecstasy at her sudden liberation from the chair. "My brother's boot caught the lip of the library carpet while he was transporting some heavy texts, and my heart was so terrified his frame would strike the flags that my arms simply lunged forward to stabilize his mass—and my own boots accidentally stood straight up against the turf!"
Shirley, who had been resting her white mass across Lucia's left shoulder plate, executed a high-velocity drop the moment she verified the girl's stability. She ran three rapid circles around Malenia's boots, her small muzzle sniffing her laces to verify her biological metrics were clear of the putrid rot odor, before launching her frame happily into her silks, enjoying the soft, rhythmic caresses of the little girl's fingers.
"You reckless little thing... what manual of biology defines 'accidentally' standing upright against the grass? Does your soul register zero happiness that your baseline indicators are clearing their deficits?" Miquella murmured, a mixture of profound helplessness and deep affection mapping his features as his boots cleared the hall steps to join their circle.
Lucia's hyper-refined tracking network keenly isolated a secondary data point—the young prince's pupils were lightly bloodshot, yet his handsome, aristocratic brow broadcast a profound, un-bracketed ease and structural joy that had been entirely absent since their initial meeting at the Lift. It appeared the immense, dark sorrow that had weighed upon his heart for years had been completely vaporized within a solitary morning.
The two boys exchanged a silent, synchronized look across the grass, tracking an identical processing thread within each other's focus.
On the parallel flank, Princess Ranni's initial excitement was swiftly dragged back behind her default frost, her analytical processors re-aligning her features into a calm, courtly detachment. "The empirical data indicates the Thermodynamic Stabilization Lattice is delivering an operational efficiency that out-scores our initial simulations, prince... but your intellect must preserve the knowledge that this configuration does not comprise a permanent resolution for her ledger."
Miquella's joyous expression caught, a solemn gravity instantly reclaiming his blue eyes as he delivered a slow nod of compliance. "Let us migrate our bodies to the inner study; the variables require an un-monitored translation."
"Identify the parameter... your statement implies your diagnostics have verified that Malenia's structural biology has achieved zero true improvements?"
Inside the quiet, book-lined basements of the inner royal study, Princess Ranni's features altered a fraction of an inch as her ears parsed Miquella's un-varnished summary. "When my visors initial audited her movement across the grass, my engine was merely executing a baseline hypothesis—after all, the energetic aura vibrating from her marrow still carries a highly irregular frequency."
"Correct," Miquella whispered, a soft, heavy sigh escaping his lips as he dropped his gold head into his palms. "Her current mobility is a manufactured illusion; her limbs can trace the turf strictly because the active code of the fouled curse has been temporarily bound inside our freezing parameters. But the underlying rot disease continues to execute a non-stop, silent erosion targeting the absolute basements of her Vigor. This insidious, molecular degradation has actually escalated its processing velocity the exact microsecond our seal locked its coordinates."
Lucia's memory traveled back to track his initial audit of Malenia's form upon his arrival in the capital. Her skin had always carried a sickening, translucent pallor. At that watch, his gamer processors had assumed the readout was simply the natural byproduct of a long-standing domestic illness that would clear its indicators once her schedule stabilized—but mapping the current ledger, the core problem was mathematically distant from that simplistic summary.
"Has your calculation isolated the primary source code behind the bottleneck?" Lucia asked, his voice dropping into a lower register. "Does the fault rest with a deficit of raw power clutched by our three systems during the channel?"
"Negative... the deficit rests entirely with the failure of my own architecture," Miquella answered, his voice thick with a profound, academic sorrow as he met their searching visors. "When our vanguards finalized the sealing matrix last night, the baseline programming was anchored strictly to the tenets of my Golden Prayers. Across my previous cultivation cycles, my engine had formulated an absolute axiom stating that even if the linear design of the Erdtree's Law lacked the specific code to completely eradicate the Scarlet Rot, its grace could at least enforce an permanent defensive ceiling over Malenia's curse."
He paused, a bitter, self-mocking twist warping his lips. "It was only after analyzing the data loops of this joint seal that my intellect profoundly realized its own bankruptcy—my calculus was flawed from the absolute dawn of the dynasty."
"The solitary variable that enabled my Golden Prayers to barely force a temporary freeze over the Scarlet Rot wasn't the active execution of a sovereign Law; it was a simple byproduct of my personal divine grace commanding a high qualitative purity index, backed by the immense regional stat multiplier hand-delivered by our proximity to the Erdtree's roots. This comprises the exact administrative logic explaining why my father and mother—despite commanding a literally infinite, abyssal treasury of divine power—find it impossible to compile a healing file to restore Malenia's bone."
"Your statement implies your incantations do not comprise a structural counter-code or cure targeting her rot... but rather act as a high-purity fluid designed to dilute the concentration of the poison, which is why the tissues recorded a minor, temporary therapeutic dividend?"
While Lucia's modern consciousness was still attempting to align the metaphysical physics of the explanation, Ranni—whose intellect had deeply processed the deep architecture of both Carian sorceries and Erdtree liturgies—instantly mapped Miquella's thesis.
"Precisely," Miquella murmured gravely. "If the mathematics were otherwise, the joint output of our seal last night should have delivered a structural yield vastly more absolute than this current freeze. Armed with a demigod's baseline metabolic threshold, Malenia's frame should have re-written its parameters within an hour."
Hearing the final calculation, Lucia's modern meta-knowledge violently locked the pieces of the historical puzzle into place.
Across this exact chronological junction of the pre-Shattering era, when Malenia's Scarlet Rot was hovering on the absolute precipice of a total, continent-destroying eruption, it was Princess Ranni of Caria who had initial joined her mass to Miquella's line to forge the initial multi-factional freeze over the fouled curse.
However, across the un-altered historical script—where his own ancient dragon form had been entirely absent from the timeline—the dual-tier seal executed by the two adolescent Empyreans had lacked the cataclysmic, purifying thermal payload of a True Dragon King's breath. The deficit had left the seal dangerously un-optimized, preventing Malenia from ever reclaiming her physical mobility during this age.
Following this specific structural failure, Miquella's intellect would initiate its long, agonizing realization that the Golden Order was completely bankrupt of authority when locked against the signatures of Outer Gods. The two fundamental principles of Golden Order Fundamentalism currently taught by Radagon's ministries would manifest as his final, desperate attempt to solve the equation within the boundaries of his father's church—an attempt that history had already logged as an absolute, permanent failure.
Ultimately, stranded in an existential dead-end with zero remaining administrative options on the board, the young saint would execute a total rebellion against the Erdtree's geometry, creating his own independent Unalloyed Gold Law, hand-delivering the creation of the legendary Unalloyed Gold Needles that would echo down the subsequent ages.
With her twin's absolute devotion backing her line, Malenia would finally secure a reliable defensive ceiling to freeze the scarlet fire. Later down the chronology, a chance alignment would guide her steel to intersect the path of the fabled Blind Swordsman, enabling her muscle memory to master the peerless, flowing variations of the Waterfowl Dance to manually compress and seal the curse within her blades, transforming the crippled princess into the most terrifying, universally feared Valkyrie of the continent.
Yet, the terminal trajectory of the file remained a pitch-black tragedy. Malenia would spend half a lifetime enduring an un-namable somatic torment, fiercely upholding her sovereign dignity as a human being without ever surrendering a single inch of her soul to the rot—yet across that apocalyptic dawn on the fields of Caelid, her hand would ultimately, desperately choose to unlock the Sovereign Bloom, embracing the absolute defilement of the Outer God strictly to secure an escape vector for the brother who had been violently severed from her side... falling into a boundless abyss of sin, madness, and desolation from which the universe allowed zero structural return.
"What specific trajectory does your office intend to execute next?" Lucia asked, his internal psychological mood turning deeply somber as the weight of the future pressed against his chest.
"My father cleared my chambers last night," Miquella murmured, his blue eyes lifting to track the window, a complex hesitation slowing his syllables. "He stated that the exact watch his office finishes organizing the administrative files governing the Royal Private School, his hand will personally guide my frame into the absolute core of the Erdtree interior—ascending the Sovereign Stone Platform to receive the un-filtered, core architectural inheritance of Golden Order Fundamentalism."
The boy's fingers tightened against his silks, his dim, exhausted eyes revealing a final, desperate glimmer of hope. "My soul intends to execute one final trial within that matrix."
Monitoring the pure, doomed dedication burning within the young saint's pupils, Lucia's jaw parted, his lips trembling several times as his meta-knowledge screamed to hand-deliver the un-varnished truth of the universe across his table—to tell him that the Erdtree was nothing more than a golden cage, and Fundamentalism was a dead language. But in the final accounting, his vocabulary remained completely bankrupt of syntax; his mouth closed without letting a single drop of data clear his teeth.
"Our vanguards will undeniably unlock the solution down the timeline," Princess Ranni spoke, her cool voice cutting through the heavy silence of the study like a silver bell, her hand dropping to lock around Miquella's weak fingers. "The stars do not maintain an permanent gridlock."
[System Status: Normal]
[Chronological Ledger: Updated]
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