Chapter 474: Sincerity, the Ultimate Technique
Chapter 474: Sincerity, the Ultimate Technique
Angus Watson terminated the connection with a heavy expression, saying he'd need to request an audience with the emperor regarding the meeting.
Ambrose wasn't in any hurry. Lyon was, not him.
"Why exactly do you want to talk business with the Lyon emperor personally?"
Heki Stone had already pulled out his little notebook again, and was ready to record Ambrose's answer.
"I have a suspicion the Lyon emperor might have been swapped out for someone else."
Ambrose had been run completely off his feet lately, with no real time to study the changes happening in Lyon properly. It was only now, with this Lyon business deal on the table, that he finally found a moment to sit down and review the recent intelligence.
And in doing so, he'd uncovered a number of shocking inconsistencies.
The first concerned the supposed collapse of the entire Lyon royal family. At the time, Ambrose had only caught a fragment of the story and assumed it was simply exaggeration, that Lyon had executed a handful of nobles and called it settled. Having now dug deeper, he discovered the death toll had actually been substantial.
Whether the entire bloodline had been wiped out was unclear, but the deaths were undeniably significant.
That, frankly, was insane—and Ambrose genuinely couldn't make sense of it.
He'd originally assumed the young emperor would simply abdicate in disgrace and be replaced by some other member of the royal line.
Lyon had, after all, cycled through emperors at a remarkable pace in recent years; that hardly counted as a major event for them anymore.
But instead, the young emperor remained untouched while the rest of the royal family had been offered up as sacrifices. That, Ambrose simply couldn't parse.
The real mystery was this: who had given that order?
As everyone knew, self-interest was the default human—or, in this case, royal—instinct. People were selfish, and royals even more so.
The Lyon royalty had abandoned the Lord of Dawn's teachings long ago and were perfectly willing to do absolutely anything to protect the family's collective interests. So under what conceivable circumstances would that family order a mass sacrifice of its own members purely to protect one useless boy-emperor?
The only explanation that made any sense was that the young emperor himself had given that order.
But that, in turn, required that the young emperor hold real power.
That should have been flatly impossible.
Anyone who'd paid even passing attention to the Lyon emperors of recent years knew exactly what the role had become. The emperors of the present day were merely figureheads, targets for blame, essentially breeding machines churning out heirs.
The current emperor simply didn't hold real authority, let alone have the standing to order half his own bloodline to die as a stepping stone for his personal survival.
Something had clearly happened along the way, something significant.
Now that Ambrose had the time, he intended to look into it properly. After all, on this entire continent, Lyon remained his one true, irreconcilable enemy.
Holy light and undeath were fundamentally incompatible. Even when Ambrose had prayed devoutly to the Lord of Dawn, all he'd received in return was agony, as if he were being flayed alive one inch at a time.
Whatever Ambrose did, or didn't do, made no difference. Holy light fundamentally countered the undead.
Perhaps some exceptionally gifted undead out there could somehow shift their alignment to nullify this effect, but even that would amount to a different kind of death in its own way.
"I'm living a perfectly fine existence as an undead. Why should I be required to live by the standards of the Holy Light?"
Cattle grazed on grass; humans ate cattle; the undead fed on humans. All of it was simply a link in the food chain. Arguing over moral superiority within that chain was an exercise in futility.
The trouble was that this particular world didn't operate on morality as its organizing principle. It operated on the will of the gods.
Holy light existed as an immovable fact. It was no abstraction. It would shine on him regardless of if he wanted it to or not.
So Lyon would always remain an enemy Ambrose had to pay attention to.
Ever since the young emperor's catastrophic blunder crushing his own troops, Lyon had undergone one sweeping transformation after another. The sacrifice of his own family had stabilized a kingdom teetering on collapse, papering over what should have been an obvious internal fracture.
Then, astonishingly, the young emperor had started listening to Allen and initiated a gradual program of reform, apparently aiming to shift the kingdom away from religious extremism and back toward something resembling a normal faith.
Then came the orc invasion. The emperor, against the weight of public opposition across the entire kingdom, sacrificed twenty thousand ordinary civilians rather than cooperate with the orcs.
Lyon's royal prestige had already been badly weakened by that point. To spare Angus Watson the full force of that public backlash, the emperor had deliberately taken the blame onto himself—a sacrifice that had, predictably, won Angus's absolute and unwavering loyalty. The man would now genuinely serve until his last breath.
The resurrection of the dead was the real masterstroke.
Every ounce of resentment that had built up over the preceding crisis transformed, in an instant, into universal acclaim.
By the end of the entire sequence of events, Lyon had lost a single city but emerged more unified than ever, with the emperor's prestige and the army's morale both at all-time highs.
That city's loss probably hadn't even been accidental. If the young emperor had genuinely been capable of absorbing the full weight of public outrage over twenty thousand lives just to protect Angus Watson, there was no plausible scenario where he'd then crumble under a fraction of that pressure and let a city fall through an emergency change of command.
Ruthless, precisely calculated, and flawlessly executed... Ambrose genuinely had to admit it was a remarkable piece of strategic theater.
But could that cowardly, self-preserving boy-emperor really have orchestrated something this sophisticated?
Ambrose found it almost impossible to believe.
It took time for people to grow. Brushes with death could certainly reshape someone's character, but raw intelligence didn't simply leap upward overnight.
The young emperor might plausibly have shed his old habit of seeking glory after enough hard lessons on the battlefield, but everything that followed wasn't a matter of character at all. It required an extraordinarily intricate strategic mind, the kind built through long study of human nature, not a single flash of insight.
Someone had to be behind the emperor's actions. Ambrose intended to find out exactly who.
A single face-to-face meeting would reveal a great deal.
Once Ambrose finished laying out his reasoning, Heki Stone finally understood what was going on. The dwarf vampire couldn't help but reflect, with some surprise, that for all this lich's love of swindling people, he was genuinely dependable when it actually mattered. Being his friend was remarkably reassuring. The lich thought through every angle, every single time.
"Should we let Black Rose know? She'd surely find anything concerning the Lyon royal family fascinating."
Ambrose nodded. "I'll let her know right now. Of course I have to share Lyon-related intelligence with her."
Black Rose was simply one flick of the magic mirror away.
The undead queen looked exactly as she always did. Her skin was the color of unblemished snow, her eyes and lips a striking, otherworldly crimson. She left a deep impression on anyone who laid eyes on her even once.
Black Rose's tone carried a hint of amusement. "Finding time for me, are you? Weren't you just busy holding Aige's hand on her way to godhood a moment ago?"
Off in the corner, Heki Stone was scribbling away furiously. Ambrose, oblivious, simply explained calmly, "It was just a minor inconvenience and has been resolved. We owe it to the President's intervention."
"The President? He actually appeared?" Black Rose exclaimed.
She'd been a member of the Elegiac Society far longer than Ambrose had, and yet she had never once laid eyes on that mysterious figure.
"I was just as surprised. I never sensed him arrive or leave at all. It was as though he'd never been there to begin with. It's incredibly mysterious. Our boss, it seems, is no ordinary deity."
Black Rose considered this for a moment, then asked, "Did you manage to talk him into anything while you had the chance? With your particular talents, you'd normally manage to wring some advantage out of any conversation."
"Of course not! I save that for enemies, and the Elegiac Society is family. Unfortunately, the President didn't give me an opening. He greeted me, then vanished. Though it wasn't a total loss, at least. Aige no longer needs my help with anything, and her path to godhood should be entirely clear from here. Our plans concerning Lyon should proceed considerably more smoothly now."
Black Rose froze for a moment. "Our plans concerning Lyon?"
Ambrose said, as though it were obvious: "What else? Wasn't destroying Lyon our entire goal, from the very beginning? My master alone is no match for the Lord of Dawn. This whole scheme to abduct the kouto goddess is, fundamentally, an experiment too. I want to know exactly how much divine power I can actually mobilize. If I could pull the kouto goddess straight out of her own divine realm, would that be enough to threaten the Lord of Dawn himself?"
Black Rose felt a small thrill of excitement. So he'd been thinking about this all along.
Ambrose, meanwhile, continued thinking aloud.
"Look at it this way. Now that Lyon has an external enemy, they've thrown off their internal divisions almost instantly. Everyone is united against the orcs. This is exactly why I opposed using Arthur Lyon earlier: a thousand years has let their cultural identity calcify completely. Any major external shock will only tape up their fractures, not expose them further. But the situation isn't entirely against us. Lyon has come to me for business, which means their principles are steadily eroding away. They're not far from collapse, in their own way..."
Black Rose listened carefully, her expression toward Ambrose growing steadily warmer.
Watching this unfold, Heki Stone felt a near-overwhelming urge to compose a hymn in this lich's honor. The lich hadn't seduced so many women through sheer luck. He took what should have been an existential threat and resolved it with effortless "sincerity."
But was he truly being sincere?
Even as an outside observer, Heki Stone found himself genuinely unable to tell. Every single accomplishment Ambrose had just listed was completely true. He'd actually done all that himself.
That put him in an entirely different league from smooth-talking scoundrels who had nothing but empty promises to offer.
Maybe, exactly as Ambrose had once said himself, sincerity really was the ultimate technique.
Ambrose finished summarizing the current situation and brought up the matter of the young emperor, but Black Rose seemed to have already anticipated it. "That emperor is almost certainly done for."
"Done for? What do you mean?"
Ambrose knew Black Rose maintained sources of intelligence within Lyon, but this claim struck him as unusually strange.
"It's only speculation on my part, but here's one thing I'm fairly confident about. Ever since he first donned the Draconic Armaments, he hasn't taken the artifact off once. You understand what that implies, surely."
"The dragonblood curse in the Lyon bloodline! Has the Dragon Tyrant finally succeeded?"
Back when the Dragon Tyrant had offered himself up as a sacrifice, he'd unleashed his single most vicious curse, embedding it permanently within the blood of every Lyon royal.
That power was precisely what allowed them to control the Draconic Armaments in the first place, but the same power steadily corroded their souls in turn, exactly as it had with Arthur Lyon himself. Even Arthur Lyon had ultimately failed to withstand it, and died at last at the old elven king's hand.
The dragonblood curse and the Draconic Armaments were almost certainly deeply intertwined. If this young emperor truly hadn't removed the armaments even once, there was a real possibility he'd already fallen under the dragon soul's control entirely.
"Wait, something's off here." Ambrose paused as he thought things through. "If the dragonblood curse has actually succeeded this time, doesn't that mean the long-standing wager between the Lord of Dawn and the dragon gods has finally reached a conclusion? However they ultimately judge the outcome, once the wager itself concludes, the rule keeping the gods from directly intervening with each other becomes void."
Ambrose tensed up. He rubbed his hands together. "If the wager really has ended, that means these gods are about to move into an entirely new phase. Whoever lost is either already planning a comeback, or getting ready to flip the whole table over!"