The Silent Reaper did not answer.Her hand moved.The sword was drawn from the sheath on her back in a single, highly trained motion, so practiced that there was no sound of metal scraping against the sheath, no pause between drawing and attacking—the two movements were one and the same.Her body spun, her shoulder leading as the sword followed in a horizontal arc aimed not at his body, but at his neck, a point she had already identified from sound alone. In the darkness of this corridor, with the man’s presence emitting nothing at all, sound was the only reference she could use.It was fast.Faster than most Sky Realm cultivators Lein had ever faced.And incredibly silent.Yet Lein merely raised one finger to deal with the attack.His index finger was positioned directly in the path of the incoming blade, as if he had already read where the sword would end up before its swing had even reached halfway.The sword met his finger.And stopped.It did not slow down. It did not struggle ag

Lein stared at the corpse lying on the corridor floor.Nothing had changed in his expression from the way he had looked at the empty corridor before. Not because he was trying to maintain a particular expression, but because there was nothing to maintain. A corpse was the result of a decision, and the decision had already been made, and there was nothing left from it that needed to be kept within any expression.This woman had chosen a long road before reaching its end here.It was not his place to mourn her.Lein shifted his gaze toward King Vaelthorn’s chamber door.Behind the thick wood, the sound of steady breathing continued. Nothing had changed. The sleeping king had heard nothing of what had just happened outside his chamber because nothing had been loud enough to reach his ears.Lein stared at the door for several seconds.Inside his mind, something was being put together. Not a lengthy plan, but something simpler than that, a single step that, when viewed from the right angle

No one moved for several seconds.Lein in the chair. Bravan in front of the still-open door. Carath beside him. The corpse on the threshold behind them.And within the silence that had formed between all of it, something was being measured from both directions, from the chair to the door and from the door to the chair, in a way that did not use words because words were not yet enough to capture everything that was there.Carath moved first.Not his feet. His jaw.The fear that had appeared on his face during the last three seconds, genuine fear that even the best mask he possessed could not completely conceal, was pulled back, locked away somewhere deeper, and what replaced it was not courage but something more akin to anger that had decided anger was more useful than fear at this moment."What the hell are you doing here, bastard?!"His voice came out in a way that the Second Prince of the Kingdom of Vaelthorn would never allow it to come out in front of anyone except inside a closed

The scream came before the palace had fully awakened.It was not a short scream. Not one that could be dismissed as a nightmare or a minor accident in the kitchen. It was the scream of someone who had opened a door to perform a routine task and discovered that inside a room that should have contained a single sleeping person, there was something that could not be explained quickly.The first guard to reach the corridor saw what had made the servant scream and stopped at the doorway for two seconds before deciding that he needed to wake more people.Not because he did not know what he was looking at.But because what he was looking at required more than one person to confirm that it was real.---Lyris arrived at Bravan's room with Miran beside her and three soldiers behind them.Several people were already in the corridor when she arrived. Guards who did not know where they should stand, servants who had stopped crying but whose faces were already far removed from their usual expressi

The investigation began before the sun had fully risen.Miran took direct command, in a manner he knew well from his years in the military before standing at Lyris's side. He sent groups in every direction without waiting for every detail to be confirmed, because waiting would only give the existing traces more time to grow colder.Twenty soldiers were sent to the eastern market, where merchants who had been open since dawn might have seen something unusual in the alleys surrounding the palace the previous night.Fifteen were sent to the craftsmen's district in the south, where the tightly packed buildings and narrow alleys had long been known as routes used by people who did not want to be seen moving from one place to another.Ten were sent to the inns in the north, which had served for years as stopping places for Explorers and cultivators who came and went without leaving behind names that could be verified, where someone who needed to disappear after a night like the previous one