— Ding! Destiny suppression successful. Target: Gareth Dunmore, Chosen of Fate. Destiny Value reduced by 500.
— Gareth Dunmore, Destiny Value: 4000 → 3500.
— Reward One: Immortal-grade spiritual herb — Nine Yang Scorching Heart Lotus.
(Quality tiers for techniques, physiques, weapons, and herbs: Common, Refined, Rare, Superior, Immortal, Sovereign, Grand Sovereign, Supreme.)
— *Reward Two: One hundred kilograms of Immortal-grade dog food. Delicious, affordable, beloved by flatterers and divine beasts alike.
Ethan was lying in a garden chair with his face turned toward the sun, casually tossing Superior-grade spirit pills into his mouth like they were sweets, when the system notification arrived.
He sat up.
The spirit pill in his hand went into the chicken coop by accident. The hens didn't complain.
"What does this mean? Gareth gets suppressed and I'm the one getting rewarded?"
He turned it over for a long moment, genuinely puzzled.
Eventually he arrived at an answer: the system rewarded him any time the Chosen of Fate was set back. It didn't matter who caused the setback. Suppression was suppression.
"Whoever put Gareth in that cell," Ethan said quietly, toward no one in particular, "I misjudged you. You're a good person. I apologize."
He mentally issued his thanks to the unknown benefactor and accepted the rewards without further ceremony.
Then he looked them over.
He set them back down with a sigh.
More things I can't use.
The Nine Yang Scorching Heart Lotus was genuinely valuable — an Immortal-grade spiritual herb, exceptional by any measure — but it would do nothing for him at his current cultivation level.
The hundred kilograms of Immortal-grade dog food made him put his head in his hands for a moment. Three years of sealed sight, and the first Immortal-grade item in his reward history was dog food.
He sat with that.
"Nine Yang Scorching Heart Lotus." He said the name aloud, tapping his chin. Something tugged at the back of his memory.
Then it came to him.
In the original novel, the Queen had pushed her cultivation hard — spent time in the Ten Thousand Year Extreme Yin Celestial Pool to break through to the Moonlight Realm. She succeeded, but the cost was a cold illness that settled into her bones. Every night, without exception, she endured it. The novel had described it in enough detail that Ethan remembered the specifics.
The Nine Yang Scorching Heart Lotus was the one herb that could cure it. The Queen had spent years searching for it and never found one.
Ethan considered this for about three seconds.
Giving it to her is a bad idea. One more connection to the main storyline. One more reason to get pulled in.
He reconsidered.
Vivienne is technically my wife. She's been decent to me. And she's not the Queen as far as I'm concerned — she's just the woman I made a deal with three years ago.
That settled it.
The Nine Yang Scorching Heart Lotus had secondary uses beyond curing the cold illness. For someone without cultivation, consuming it in the right preparation would extend their natural lifespan by a century at minimum.
No sooner decided than done.
Ethan retrieved the lotus from the system's inventory, separated a single petal, crushed it to extract the liquid, and combined it with a careful selection of balancing herbs in the Ten Thousand Beast Pot — a Heaven-grade cooking vessel that happened to be among his possessions. The raw lotus was too volatile on its own. The additions would smooth it out, make it safe for someone without a cultivator's constitution.
He set it to simmer.
Across the palace grounds, in the Royal Study.
Vivienne sat at her desk with a stack of intelligence reports in front of her, pressing two fingers against her temple.
General Stormwall was also her distant kinsman by blood, which was one of the reasons he spoke to her the way he did — without the careful framing everyone else used.
He had come in the moment she called, his expression already furious before she finished summarizing.
"As I suspected!" he said, voice carrying enough force to rattle the inkstands. "Aldous Dunmore sends his son to the capital, and the whole thing was a decoy. A clone! The old traitor didn't risk a single hair of the real Gareth!"
"Your Majesty, give me the order. I'll lead the army straight into Ashenvale and be done with it."
Vivienne had just returned from the Ministry of Justice's prison, where she had examined the body herself. The figure held in the deepest cell — designated for the highest-security prisoners — had been still for hours. When her cultivators looked closely at its internal structure, the truth had become undeniable.
Gareth Dunmore, the man they had arrested, had never been Gareth Dunmore at all.
Every one of Ethan's predictions had come true.
Vivienne could no longer treat Aldous Dunmore as a peripheral concern. He had been preparing this for years, and she had underestimated the scope of it.
"Go home and rest, Uncle," she said, calmly. "I have a response in mind."
Stormwall paced once across the room, then stopped. Something crossed his face — an uncharacteristic hesitation.
"What about… asking the King-Consort if he has any further counsel?"
Vivienne paused. Then shook her head slightly. "Later."
Before she could say anything further —
"Your Majesty!"
A soldier burst through the doors at something approaching a run, dropped to one knee, and delivered his report with the controlled urgency of someone carrying genuinely bad news:
"Reports from across Goldmere — large-scale bandit activity has broken out across thirty-two provinces and over a hundred counties simultaneously. Total numbers estimated at over a hundred thousand. Public order in multiple counties has already collapsed. The armories, granaries, and treasury vaults of several towns are under direct assault."
He held out a communication crystal.
Vivienne took it, glanced over the contents, and set it down on the desk with a soft sound.
She smiled — not warmly.
"The King-Consort was right again. Aldous Dunmore had already turned more than half the regional administrators. Bandits don't assemble in coordinated forces of a hundred thousand overnight. They don't move directly for armories and granaries by coincidence. Someone told them where to go and when."
She had been warned. She had listened. She had time to prepare.
Without Ethan's advance prediction, she would have spent the first week simply trying to understand what was happening. She would have hesitated to suspect the regional Officials. She would have given the Duke the time he needed.
The dynasty would have bled out quietly while she looked for answers in the wrong places.
Vivienne closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, the warmth was entirely gone.
"Uncle — you'll handle this personally. Go city by city through the affected regions. Investigate every regional administrator of rank seven and above — prefects, governors, county heads. Anyone who won't cooperate, conduct a soul search on the spot."
"Anyone found to be in collusion with Ashenvale: full family consequence. No exceptions."
"Additionally, issue a public proclamation: the Duke of Ashenvale plotted treason, attempted assassination of the Lord Chancellor, and deliberately incited banditry against the civilian population. Make it known everywhere."
Even Stormwall — who had a reputation for preferring action over deliberation — went quiet for a moment.
"Your Majesty. This is… a significant escalation."
Vivienne's smile stayed exactly where it was.
"The Duke is counting on me not taking him seriously. If I respond carefully and moderately, I'm playing exactly the game he designed. Decisive and decisive only — that's the answer." She held his gaze. "Don't hesitate on my behalf, Uncle."
She stood.
Her eyes moved — briefly, just once — in the direction of Restwell Village.
"You're dismissed. I'm going to see the King-Consort."
The crimson of her gown was the last thing visible before she stepped through the space and was gone.
Restwell Village. The Cottage.
Ethan had finished preparing the porridge. It was a small bowl — plain-looking, unassuming — but the ingredients inside represented at minimum the market value of a mid-sized city. Four or five Superior-grade spiritual herbs as a base, and one petal of a Nine Yang Scorching Heart Lotus dissolved in.
He was holding the bowl and frowning.
"I have no idea where Vivienne actually lives."
The courtyard gate creaked open.
Vivienne stepped in, slightly ahead of her usual composure, a faint smile at the corner of her mouth. "Half a day apart, and my husband is already missing me?"
Ethan raised an eyebrow. She was teasing him — he could hear it in the cadence.
He smiled and held the bowl out toward her.
"Perfect timing. Have some porridge. You look like you've had a long afternoon."
The scene felt strange in its simplicity: a young man holding a bowl of something warm, offering it at the gate, the way an ordinary person might come home to find a meal already waiting. Not a palace. Not a throne. Just a courtyard and a bowl of porridge held out without ceremony.
She thinks she can catch me off guard, Ethan thought, still smiling. I spent my previous life being called the Grand Master of Romance by my friends. She has no idea.
There was an old saying he was fond of: if she's sheltered, show her the world. If she's seen the world — take her on a carousel.
Vivienne stopped.
She looked at the bowl. Then at the man holding it — unhurried, relaxed, entirely unaware of who she was or what her afternoon had contained.
Something caught, just briefly, somewhere behind her composure.
She reached out and took the bowl without a word.
She lifted it to her lips and sipped.
Her eyes went wide.
The taste hit her like recognition.
The Nine Yang Scorching Heart Lotus.
Not the raw herb. Not a cultivator's refined extraction. A bowl of plain, clear porridge — balanced, gentle, made safe by someone who had taken the time to think about the person who would drink it — and inside it, the one thing she had searched years for and never found.
Vivienne stood in the courtyard of a cottage that wasn't a cottage, holding a bowl that had no right to exist, and felt the cold that lived permanently in her bones begin, very slightly, to ease.
She drank it slowly.
By the time the bowl was empty, the weight that had settled on her in the Royal Study had lifted. Not resolved — but lighter.
She didn't say anything for a moment.