Mystical Journey

The Black Fire Palace in the Kingdom.

Garen sat on his Palace Master’s throne, carefully playing with the Green Vine Sphere in his hand.

This little thing was like a small animal, crawling from his left hand to his left shoulder. After he caught it and put it on the back of his hand, it began to crawl towards his left shoulder tirelessly again.

Garen kept bringing it down, and watching as it kept crawling up.

Ivycius stood behind the throne, holding a sword with both arms as he leaned on a round black pillar. Watching Garen play with the Green Vine Sphere out of boredom.

"The second Nobility Conference is about to start, aren’t you going?"

Garen smiled.

"How was the first one like? I wasn’t there, but I heard some fun things happened."

Ivycius closed his eyes and rested.

"Just some trivial things."

Garen felt the Green Vine Sphere carefully, saying casually, "All sorts of people joined this Nobility Conference, any middle-level nobles or above can join. Too many cooks spoil the broth, so how could they possibly come up with any good ideas?"

Of all the nobles, most of them were middle-level nobles, these people were all the pillars of the various departments and units, and they tended to make up most of the levels among the nobles too, since they liked to suck up and compare, prioritized their pride and reputation, throwing themselves at the higher powers. At such a time as this, they were probably mostly arguing about how to divide the land in the Kingdom."

Garen could easily imagine what kind of scene that would be.

"It’s different this time, we’re deciding the true state of the Kingdom." Ivycius said calmly.

"We’ve taken over the Palace, who dares to say anything else?" Garen said lazily, "Forget it, might as well make a trip there, and see what those old fogies have to say."

He had gotten enough materials, and the Royal Treasury was still under his control, his people endlessly bringing out large amounts of weapons, supplies and treasures from it.

But he didn’t see the most important item. The Precious Heirloom!

Garen was suspicious because they hadn’t found a single Heirloom in the entire Royal Treasury. That was illogical.

The only possibility was that the royal family surely had another secret treasury. That was where they really kept the Heirloom.

"I won’t go then, I’m currently at a pivotal moment." Ivycius said from behind him.

Garen didn’t bother him either, although Ivycius had been modified into a Dragon Demon, but if he simply force-controlled Ivycius all the time, Ivycius might lose his potential to level up.

Walking out of the palace hall, on the way to the conference hall, many Black Fire Guards walked out of the surrounding corners in the Black Fire Palace.

Some of these guards seemed to walk straight out of the dense foliage, out of the shadows.

Garen walked towards the garden and the flowers, and suddenly countless green plants grew madly, twisting and twining, rapidly forming a silhouette that quickly grew a suit of heavy black armor as though growing fruits.

Within several minutes, the plants in the garden grew into a brand new Black Fire Palace guard, who followed closely behind Garen.

Holding the Green Vine Sphere in his hand, he had already completely understood how the Black Fire Guards were formed.

In other words, the Green Vine Sphere gathered plants to form a body. They needed a plant called varde flowers, and would rapidly hasten the plants’ roots to create the Black Fire Palace Guards.

The Black Fire Guard was completely covered by the suit of armor, and the insides couldn’t be seen, so nobody knew that there weren’t any humans inside their armor, but a congregation of plants instead.

The Green Vine Spheres could only make two hundred Black Fire Guards at any one time, four of them Form Three, also known as the Four Guards, while rest were all Form Two. Their weakness was that they were individually rather weak, but their strength was that they were never afraid of death at any time, and their self-destruct ability was powerful.

Garen had almost used up all the varde flowers in the Black Fire Palace, before he managed to scrape out the numbers for the Black Fire Guards again.

At the same time, he needed to have his servants plant more varde flowers, stimulating them with a special method, a single varde flower only needed two months to bloom, spreading their vines everywhere. And he only needed ten flowers to form one Black Fire Guard.

Other than the Black Fire Guards he sent out, Garen had recreated more than a hundred Black Fire Guards here in the Black Fire Palace, sending them to all parts of the palace, to amp up defense together with the Silver Palace Guards.

The Silver Palace’s Royal Guard wasn’t the same royal guard as they told others outside, but were instead the true inner guard made fully of totem users.

Royal Guards like Big Sister Hathaway were only the outer members, and had no right to interfere in the really important matters.

**************

The Kingdom’s Trading District

Royal Theatre

This huge black building was as large as a football court, standing in the east wing of the palace, it was shaped like a huge ship, and had Kovistan’s black-red flag in front of it.

The Royal Theatre’s square was already filled to the brim with people.

Out of the entire crowd, three groups were particularly eye-catching.

Three groups of people dressed in fighting clothes stood together respectively, their military uniforms being white, black, and dark blue each. They were the Empire’s Three Armies, the Hawks of Dawn, the Third Heavy Armor Regiment, and the last one, the Navy Flag.

These Three Armies were the main forces defending the West Farm. And now their people had all returned to the Kingdom, which meant something intriguing.

The rest of the empty spaces were filled with the major and minor nobles from all areas.

The carriages kept arriving, and occasionally there were totem beasts like colossal birds slowly descending onto the square.

By the time Garen arrived with the Black Fire Guard, it was already afternoon, and the sky was growing dim.

Four extremely tall monsters with really long legs appeared in front of the theatre, carrying four bright fire basins on their backs.

These four monsters looked like black buffaloes, it was just that compared to the regular buffaloes, their legs were too tall and long. They were over ten meters tall, and looked unnaturally strange.

"Whose totem beasts are those?" Garen curiously asked the white-haired noble lady leading the way.

"Palace Master, they are the ornamental Aberrated beasts belonging to the theatre’s original owner, Earl Eli. They’re not totems." The young white-haired woman replied quietly.

"Oh? Aberrated beasts?" Garen felt as though Aberration was influencing life in this whole world more and more.

They walked onto the square, and the nobles who had been chatting now fell silent, glancing over at them.

Some of them bowed while the others looked wary, others curious. But they all opened up a path for him.

Garen walked past the crowd, followed by four Black Fire Guards, the black cape on the Black Fire Palace Master’s billowing in the wind, flapping loudly.

In front of the theatre’s large arching white door, Veska and the other two Grand Dukes were chatting.

"The Black Fire Palace Master is here!"

The herald roared loudly.

The three of them hurriedly stopped talking, and looked towards Garen’s direction.

Veska was expressionless, the slightly plump Grand Duke Cody looked calm, and just nodded at Garen.

Of them all, only Grand Duke Benoc, the tall and skinny white-haired old man gave Garen a friendly smile.

Garen smiled back.

There weren’t any guards around the three of them, so they made a small empty space.

When Garen walked over with the Black Fire Guard, his steps stopped suddenly.

An immensely powerful force was pouncing at him, full-frontal. This force was extremely powerful, until even Garen’s Nine-Headed Dragon strength paused slightly.

His expression surprised, he looked around him.

Nobody was within thirty meters of them, as though an invisible and terrible power was bordering off a certain area around the three of them.

The noble leading Garen had stopped respectfully, and stood at their right, lowering her head.

"The area ahead isn’t for us to enter, Palace Master, kindly enter yourself."

"Interesting."

Garen licked his lips. The glowing red dragon shadow flashed past his face.

Bam!

He forced his hand to step out, as though forcefully embedding his leg into the force field the three of them had gathered in.

The three dots on his brow became a darker blood-red.

Garen took two consecutive steps, as though he wasn’t under any obstruction as well, walking straight towards the three of them.

The force field around him instantly scattered, as though admitting that he was powerful enough to deserve entrance into their circle.

The four Black Fire Guards couldn’t enter, and could only wait quietly outside.

"Welcome." As the Kingdom’s strongest fighter by name, mysterious and unpredictable, Benoc began by expressing a friendly attitude towards Garen.

"Grand Duke Benoc, I have long heard of your reputation from Prynne, nice to meet you, I’m Garen, Garen Trejons." Garen pressed one hand to his chest, and bowed as a junior to a senior.

"Not bad, not bad!" Benoc laughed and nodded. "Let me introduce you. This is Cody, Grand Duke Cody." He patted the short and plump old man beside him, it seemed that the two of them were closer, which was why he was so casual with him.

"As for Veska over there, I believe you’ve met a long time ago."

"Naturally." Garen looked at Veska. The latter nodded calmly, and didn’t express anything more.

"Since everyone is here, let us begin." Benoc clapped his hands, and said a few words to the herald beside him. "Come, let’s all go in."

He was the first to walk into the theatre.

"The Second Nobility Conference, has officially begun!!"

With the herald’s loud declaration, Garen and the three of them walked into the theatre, followed by the normal high-level nobles, sixteen in total, half of them were the two Grand Duke’s relatives. The rest were some of representatives of the Kingdom’s academies, and the ministers of some important department, such as the minister of military, the minister of finance and so on. These people had some speaking rights when Avic was alive, but at a critical moment like this, since they didn’t have sufficient power, they could only be one step lower than Garen and the others in the hierarchy.

And then there were the tides and tides of middle-level nobles, these people represented the many different families of all sizes. Some of them took advantage of the chaos to conquer certain territories and benefits, and needed the conference to acknowledge them. Once they succeeded, these properties would then really belong to their families.

Some of the others were victims, who needed the conference’s power to obtain justice.

Yet others were observers, here to decide their direction and camp from here on out. The remaining ones had their own plans.

When the middle-level nobles walked in, the empty theatre filled up quickly and became a lot noisier, buzzing like so many flies in the sky.

Above the theatre, there had already been a row of chairs arranged by others. There were eight seats in total. They faced the several hundred seats below, from high up above. Guards in dark golden armor surrounded them.

But right now Garen’s attention was elsewhere.

In the four corners of the theatre’s black ceiling, there were four pitch-black bat statue gargoyles.

The four gargoyles had blood-red eyes, curled quietly in the corners, looking like normal ornamental statues, but in truth there was a hint of a strange force in the air.

Garen pulled back his gaze, and just happened to see Grand Duke Benoc smiled at him slightly.

This tall and thin old man had pale skin, a tall nose, a cross-shaped scar on his forehead, and a slightly grotesque smile.

He had evidently realized that Garen had noticed the set-up here.

He had suggested this conference, so this set-up was naturally his doing as well.