All Chapters of The Codex System:From Forgotten Teacher to Author of Worlds
: Chapter 61
- Chapter 70
185 chapters
Chapter 61: Scholars' Alliance
The lull after House Croft was burned and Duke Valerius made his showy surrender was not quiet. It was the stillness of a held breath, of a city holding its breath for the other boot to drop. The nobles had retreated behind their high walls, but Felix could feel their fear and hatred like a feverous heat rising off the cobblestones. He had achieved a giant victory, but he stood alone on top of a peak of shattered lies, with all the arrows of vengeance pointing towards him.He could not stand by himself. Truth was a weapon, but it needed an army of minds to battle for it, not an army of fighters.Liora saw it before he did. “You’ve become a one-man inquisition,” she said one evening, watching him pore over yet another ancient ledger, his face pale with strain. “You are the judge, the jury, and the archivist. It will break you. And if it breaks you, the truth breaks with you.”"What else can be done?" Felix demanded, his voice worn out. "The court hangers-on are the official historians.
Chapter 62: Banquet of Venom
The Scholars' Alliance was an earthquake in silence, its tremors reshaping the foundations of the kingdom without even an official announcement. But to the old guard, the nobles whose power had been based on the very deceptions now being systematically removed, silence no longer existed as an option. Terror had fermented into a blind, lethal rage. If words and law were no match for Felix's truth, then they would employ a less complicated, yet more lasting, remedy.There had been an invitation, heavy with scented wax and gold leaf. It was to be a feast by the survivors of House Croft's alliance—a loose collection of minor lords who had been most severely damaged by the recent upheaval. The facade was "reconciliation and a discussion of the kingdom's future." It was a sly trap.“You cannot go,” Liora stated, her voice flat. She held the invitation as if it were a venomous snake. “It’s an execution invitation. They’ll poison the wine or stick a knife in your back between courses.”Felix
Chapter 63: Crown's Suspicion
The scandal of the Banquet of Venom caused an earthquake shock to the Seat's power system, but it was a silent tremor, one that was felt in the gut, not heard in the streets. Lords Graves, Mott, and Pellen were spirited away to the dungeons of the king, their titles and holdings stripped by a swift, ruthless economy that testified to the crown's desire to hold the scandal in silence. The official version was a vague tale of "financial malfeasance" and "conspiracy to defraud the crown." The truth—the poisoned wine, the servant's shocking revolt—was hidden, a damning secret known only to the guests, the king's inner circle, and the Alliance's watchful gaze. It was not a victory but a bitterly personal warning to King Edric. He was sitting in his own solar, the quiet broken only by the light of the fire and the soft, steady thump of his signet ring against the arm of his chair. There were two reports on the desk before him. One was from his spymaster, Vex, a dry, factual account of the
Chapter 64: Festival of Legends
Following the secret battle between the scholar and the crown, the city needed a distraction. The mood was a taut thread, humming with unuttered tensions and hidden agendas. The king, a piece of political genius, provided it with one: the Festival of Legends.It was an older custom than the kingdom, a leftover from the pre-unification tribal era. Hosted once a generation, it was an extravaganza of magic and strength, a week-long celebration in which the kingdom's greatest mages, summoners, and beast-masters vied to conjure beings from myth and legend. It was a display of the kingdom's strength, a spectacle intended to awe the populace and remind any potential rivals of the magical might at the crown's disposal.Timing was not accidental. With Felix's reality threatening the pillars of authority, the king needed to reaffirm an alternate, more spectacular version. He had to remind everyone—the people, the nobles, and most notably the young scholar—that true power resided not in yellowed
Chapter 65: Lost Beast Remembered
The Sunken Arena was more silent than any cheer. It was the silence of a thousand suspended breaths, of a terror so newly faced that its image still grated against the bone. The air that had been electric with carnival enchantment and heavy with the smell of popcorn and greasepaint now stank of ozone, hollowness, and clammy sweat. Every eye was fixed on Felix alone on the burnt earth where the hole in the world had just been stitched up.The king's dazzling performance had curdled into an exhibition of another kind of power. Not the loud, flashy power of magic, but the quiet, chillier power of definition. Felix had not fought the Null-Beast; he had excised it from existence. The awe he evoked was now mixed with a primal fear. He was not a mage; he was a constructor of reality.The officials of the Festival, white and shaking, stood poised to declare the festival ended—a disaster nipped in the bud—when a fresh voice thundered out, sharp and clear."The contest is not over."It was Kael
Chapter 66: Kael's Wrath
The mood in the Sunken Arena was still tense with the radiance of the Argent Stag's death. There fell a profound, solemn silence, interrupted only by the distant, reverent whispers of the assemblage. The scent of ozone and terror had been replaced by the sweet scent of flowers that bloomed by night and damp, cool earth. The burned circle where the Null-Beast had writhed was a vibrant, living garden now, a reminder that would endure to the legend Felix had revived.All eyes, hearts, and minds belonged to Felix. He stood at the center, not as conqueror, but as vessel for something lost and sublime. Felix was white, tilting slightly under the weighty metaphysical cost of his action, but in people's gazes, he shone.Against the dark, hard backdrop of this adoration stood Kael.He stood a statue of raw, helpless wrath. The applause he had been denied in his terrifying calling now erupted for Felix, but not as cheers, and instead as an eruption of warm, grateful sound. It was a sound far mo
Chapter 67: The Beast's Oath
Reality returned to Felix on a slow, torturous tide. The first he was aware of was the cold, hard pressure of stone against his back. The second was a hollow pounding in his head, an empty space where the unbelievable energy of the Codex had been. The third was Liora's voice, a soothing, anxious buzz cutting through the fog."Too much. Too much, it was. Felix, can you hear me?He opened his eyes. They were in a small antechamber beneath the Sunken Arena, away from the cheering crowd whose appreciation had receded into a dull, muffled wave. Flickering torchlight danced across the roughly hewn walls. The air was heavy with dust and stale sweat."I hear you," he ground out, his throat burning. He tried to sit up, and the world shifted ominously. Liora's firm and cool hand rested upon his shoulder."Don't. You're worn out. You. you re-created a myth, Felix. You didn't just summon it up. You fashioned it. I could feel it. All of us felt it." Her voice was heavy with awe and deep, loving fe
Chapter 68: Codex Revelation II
Argent Stag's Mark was a still, cooling caress on Felix's forehead, a compass magnetized to a truth beyond any he had ever pursued. Over the next few days after the Festival, a necessary transformation came over him. The exhaustion was dispelled, replaced by a steady, buzzing lucidity. The Codex of the Unseen Tide, that had lain dormant after the sheer exertion of remembering the Stag, was alive once more. Yet it was not the same.It was no longer a tool of utilized analysis. The link to the Stag, a mystery. That was itself a story with flesh put upon it, and had been a catalyst. The Codex had adopted a new precept, a new function that had lain latent, waiting for a turn of a key in a lock it did not know it held.He sat in his rented room, the chaos of the Festival a distant recollection. Liora was away, gathering intelligence from the Alliance of Scholars, whose clandestine activities continued to unravel the minor lies of the nobility. Felix sat with a simple, cracked clay mug in h
Chapter 69: The Princess's Question
The miracle of the Cracked Wheel did not go unnoticed. In a city choking on deceit, a gratuitous, simple act of unadorned good shining so vividly like a beacon. It was told and retold, the tale enlarged each time it was spoken. The scholar-healer. The water-cleansing man. The Stag's chosen one. Felix's name, already bound up with threads of awe and fear, now being intertwined with something new: respect.This new reputation traveled before him like a scent, and it invited an unexpected guest.She arrived at his door not with a royal retinue, but with a single stone-faced soldier and the stern, bookish figure of Archon Therus. Princess Elara was the king's second child, and everything his father was not. Where King Edric had been big and strong, she was tall and wrapped in on herself, as if trying to take up as little space as possible. Her clothing was simple but refined, unadorned. Her brown hair was pulled back into a severely practical braid. She did not look like a princess; she l
Chapter 70: The Broken Chronicle
The revived Song of the First Dawn haunted the palace, its reality so intense it seemed to suck the air from the room. Princess Elara had taken it, her hands trembling with fear and starving hunger, and vanished into the twisted passages of the citadel. The weight of what Felix had given her—a secret that could bring down the church and redefine the very essence of magic itself—hung in the air between them, unsaid but enormous.Her arrival, and the Restoration she had made necessary, left Felix with a renewed sense of purpose and an increasing unease. The princess's motive seemed pure, the zeal of the scholar overwhelming royal privilege. But she was, in the end, her father's daughter. The Codex held no certain Annotation on her integrity, only a muddled whirlpool of intellectual honesty and deep loyalties to a dying familial hierarchy.This experience brought him to a new path of thought. He had dispelled the deceptions of the nobility's bloodlines. He had brought forth the authentic