Sorry to stop your enjoyment of my story, but I wanted to mass release 5 chapters once a week. However, I discovered that was a bad idea for a non-established author like me who is still using a corrections bot for grammar fixes in his story, aka me. So that was why I have not been active after the last post. In order to fix the problem, I will be giving 1 chapter per day or after 2 days. So enjoy this chapter and don't forget to support my book. Thanks.
In the Grand Hall of the Golden Phoenix, the Civil and Military Officials stood in their rows looking considerably less composed than they had an hour ago. Eyes drifted to the floor, to the ceiling, to anywhere that wasn't Ethan Ashford.
The reason wasn't hard to identify. From somewhere outside the hall, a voice carried through the walls with impressive volume:
"Your Majesty, I am wronged! Ethan Crest is slandering me! I beg Your Majesty to investigate, please, I beg"
The voice of the Marquis of Ironpass, who had walked into this hall this morning as one of the most powerful men in the room, growing fainter as the guards dragged him further away.
And every Official in the hall was doing quiet, private arithmetic.
Voss had only questioned the appointment. That was all. And Ethan had gone straight through his composure like a blade through paper, pulled out the worst thing buried there, and handed it to the Queen without blinking.
Who among them didn't have something buried?
Some were both frightened and furious — but the Queen's cultivation had reached the Moonlight Realm, and her expression suggested she was perfectly comfortable with the current pace of events, so no one was moving to protest.
"Did anyone consider," one Official said under his breath, "that the Queen brought this man in as a purge? A blade specifically for cutting through the court?"
"I've lived sixty years and forgot the oldest rule," an elderly man said softly, his cloudy eyes looking rather watery. "Don't be the first one to speak."
A young civil Official near the middle of the line straightened his collar and said, with the calm of someone who had thought this through:
"Don't panic. Genuinely reading fate is impossible. And I looked into Ethan Crest as no spiritual power fluctuations whatsoever. He's a mortal with no cultivation. In my assessment, the Queen wanted to promote him and needed a convincing reason, so she arranged for Voss to play the role of example. The rest is theater."
A few heads turned. A few shoulders quietly dropped.
That makes sense, actually.
Poor Voss, though. Not yet forty, a third-rank Marquis, and he ends up the example for a man who crawled out of some village.
The young Official reached the front of the line, noted that the three people before him had each walked away looking relieved rather than arrested, and straightened his jacket with visible confidence.
"Name," Ethan said.
"Felix Crane," the young Official said, in a tone that suggested he was doing Ethan a courtesy by answering.
"Felix Crane." Ethan paused briefly. "Third-place finisher in the Royal Examinations, three years ago. The result was purchased."
The confidence evaporated.
"Specifically: your father liquidated the family's assets to acquire a Heaven-grade spirit blade and delivered it to the chief examiner as a bribe. He was apparently worried the examiner wouldn't remember who sent it, so he had your name engraved on the hilt."
Felix Crane's lips went the color of old paper.
How.
How does he,
His legs began to do something independent of his intentions.
"Investigate. If confirmed, prosecute according to the law," Vivienne said, from behind her veil. She had stopped asking for verification after the second exposure. She trusted the read now.
Privately, she thought: if decorum permitted, I'd stand next to him with a blade and just let him call the names.
Felix Crane sat down heavily on the floor, which was not intentional.
"My family, I'm all they have left, I can't"
The Royal Guards didn't engage with the argument. They fitted the spiritual-binding restraints and moved him out.
Ethan waited for the next name in line.
He was, of course, not actually reading anyone's fate in real time. What he was doing was considerably more mundane: working from memory through the novel's supporting cast, most of whom had been written with detailed enough backgrounds to be useful. Voss had been a mid-novel antagonist a minor warlord who eventually defected to the Duke of Ashenvale and acquired a reputation for brutality that the novel had briefly explained. Felix Crane had been a corrupt Official whose storyline surfaced in a later arc as an example of systemic rot in Goldmere's administration.
The novel's author, to their credit, had not skimped on the supporting cast.
"You actually, never mind. Move on," Ethan said, waving a hand at a forgettable-looking Official who had no corresponding entry in his memory.
The man left with the expression of someone who had just been told the scaffold was occupied today. He would be grateful about this for years.
Retribution is retribution. Establishing authority is establishing authority. But I can't make enemies of the entire court or I'll have nowhere to stand.
The line continued.
Then it reached the front.
"Chancellor Greymoor."
Ethan's brow came together slightly. He went still for a moment, the way a person does when they encounter something they can't immediately place.
Then he moved quickly, precisely and pressed his palm flat against Greymoor's face.
The hall went very quiet.
Greymoor stood rigidly, eyes forward.
Again.
This familiar sensation. This familiar routine. Why, of all the faces in the realm, is mine the one you find irresistible?
He made several attempts to remove the hand. The hand followed him like it was on a hinge.
"Ethan," Greymoor said, with the brittle composure of a man who has used up all his patience and is now running on principle alone, "that is quite enough."
Even Vivienne, who was not easily startled, had sat up straight behind her veil. Every Official in the hall was holding their breath.
Greymoor?
Greymoor was one of the few truly essential supports of the kingdom. If there was something buried there if the court's most trusted statesman had a secret that serious then the whole project of unification was more precarious than anyone wanted to say aloud.
Greymoor himself had begun rapidly reviewing his entire life for anything incriminating. He was drawing a blank, which was either reassuring or a sign that he'd forgotten something important.
"Do I have a problem?" he asked, keeping his voice level through visible effort.
Then Ethan spoke, with the gravity of a man delivering news of genuine consequence:
"Chancellor do you have a long-lost twin brother?"
The hall: ???
The Queen: ?
Greymoor: ??
A long silence.
"I'm sorry," Greymoor said carefully. "What?"
Ethan said, in the tone of someone sharing a significant discovery:
"I'll be direct. Back in Restwell Village, the village elder, a man called Gerald Grey has the same birthdate, the same bone structure, and the same threads of fate as you. Not similar. Identical. I think he may be your long-lost twin brother. Does that mean anything to you?"
Greymoor did not immediately respond.
This was because he was managing, with extreme effort, not to either laugh or expire on the spot.
Of course it's identical. He had personally played the role of Gerald Grey, village elder of Restwell Village, on multiple occasions over the past several weeks. Ethan had already pressed his palm against Greymoor's face twice in that capacity.
Naturally the readings matched. They were the same face.
He swallowed. Composure. Decades of it, all called upon at once.
"You are... correct," Greymoor said, at a pace that suggested each word was being carefully checked for structural integrity before use. "Gerald Grey. Yes. He is my elder brother. We have already been reunited. There is no need for your concern, Ethan. Thank you."
Ethan rubbed the side of his nose.
He really has a twin?
Why wasn't this in the novel?
The author, he thought, had clearly cut corners on the supporting cast after a certain point.
Greymoor turned very slowly to look at the veiled throne.
The look he directed at Vivienne did not require words. It said, with the quiet eloquence of a man who had served three rulers without complaint and asked for very little in return: look at what you have done to me.
Vivienne looked at the ceiling. Then at her sleeve. Then at a pillar. Anywhere that was not Greymoor's face.
Somewhere in the hall, an Official was whispering to a colleague that they should make a note to visit this Gerald Grey whenever possible, a way to build goodwill with the Chancellor through his newly surfaced elder brother.
Greymoor closed his eyes.
He had served the crown for thirty years with perfect integrity.
He had never once compromised his honesty or his dignity.
And now, here, in the Grand Hall of the Golden Phoenix, in front of every Civil and Military Official in the realm, he had just invented a twin brother.
His reputation had survived wars, political purges, and three changes of ruler.
It had not survived Ethan Ashford.