Chapter 386: Madness And Genius

After descending another flight of stairs around the north wing of the castle, crossing a beautiful balcony overlooking the Great Keep below and so many golden statues there...

I realized we were heading toward my aunt’s personal chambers.

To fill the silence, I began bombarding her with some pressing questions that had been gnawing at my mind all this time.

Starting with the most basic one:

how much time had passed since we were whisked away to the

Noctveil Wilds

?

"Hmm," she tapped her chin a few times, thoughtful. "On Earth, it should be the second of November today. So you were gone for about four months."

Four months...

Obviously, we hadn’t spent a hundred and twenty days in that hellish jungle. And thank heavens for that.

But four entire months had still passed on Earth.

That was because, as I’ve mentioned before, the flow of time between Earth and the Spirit Realm varied depending on where you were in either of those two worlds.

The reason for that was that the Spirit Realm was a dimension stitched together from the fragments of countless worlds conquered by the

Unholy One

— the Spirit King.

Basically, it was a patchwork of realities.

Time there wasn’t linear. It was elastic and erratic and deeply confusing.

What felt like months of struggle, near-death skirmishes, and endless chaos might amount to only a few days on Earth. Or, in some cases, it could stretch into years.

The

Night Sanctuary

and the

Golden Sanctuary

both had negligible time dilation, where one day spent there roughly translated to either a day or a day and a half on humanity’s home planet.

But the deepest regions of the

Noctveil Wilds

were different. One day there was probably equal to two to four days on Earth.

Hold on for a second, though, because it gets even more confusing.

The

Lake of Grief

and the

Valley of the Forgotten

both had their own temporal quirks, many of which ticked in the opposite direction.

Meaning in some of those places, time moved backward relative to Earth.

Especially while we were sailing through the

Lake

.

There, what we experienced as days of suffering might have corresponded to mere seconds back home. Conversely, in other spots where it felt like hours, it actually spanned multiple days on Earth.

Like I said, it was all

incredibly

confusing.

There’s no way to measure

exactly

how much time we had spent in that jungle and on that lake.

Regardless, the discrepancy definitely added on to the traumatic toll the entire journey had taken on our mental health.

It took me a moment to process everything.

Then, the second most important question I raised was focused on my family’s politics and our mindset about the approaching conflicts.

Specifically:

what was the relic my father was so desperate and so downright obsessed to get his hands on?

Aunt Morgan looked uncomfortable for a few seconds before finally answering. "I can’t tell you, Sam. Not right now."

"But why?" I pressed, leaning into her.

She could only offer me a helpless shrug. "Arthur has asked us not to utter a single word to anyone yet. Even the Elders don’t know what it is."

...What?

That couldn’t be right...

Right?

"You’re kidding." I didn’t even realize when my voice had dropped into a conspiratorial whisper. "Then why are they supporting his decision? Why aren’t they asking him to back down from

Iron Height

?"

Aunt Morgan had no need to be vocal in her reply. The look on her face was answer enough.

Apparently, the Elders

had

tried to persuade my father.

They just failed.

So, essentially, my father was waging two wars — one of which was without the consensus of the Elders.

It was a daring move... and an equally foolish one.

It meant that if we lost, they would have a clear cause to call for a vote of no confidence against my father’s rule.

The vassal families could also shift their support. The loyalists might turn against him, and discord would be sown throughout the family.

Of course, the chances of any of that actually happening were close to zero.

Realistically, my father was beyond strong.

He was, in his own words, absolute.

On top of it, none of his siblings even wanted his throne.

But all that aside, no Duke would ever openly disregard his Elders as my father had. It was a blatant show of disrespect to the pillars of the family.

I suppressed half a scoff. "Okay, but what about our fleets? We’re strong on land and in the sky... but since we’d be waging war against the Coalition at the same time we’re trying to conquer

Iron Height

, do we even have enough warships on hand?"

"Oh, don’t worry about that, sweetheart," Aunt Morgan said, shaking her head. "See, we won’t be setting sail for the South to attack the Coalition. In fact, we won’t be going to Earth at all."

I frowned. "Then what?"

My aunt’s reply left me speechless. "We’ll just open Gates throughout the territories governed by the Southern Tribes."

I won’t lie...

It was at that point that I remembered just how truly crazy my family was. If you don’t understand the full implications of what she just said, let me explain.

A Gate (or a Portal) was what happened when a high-level Spirit Beast exerted its Spiritual Pressure onto the fabric of reality and punched a hole through it, creating a doorway connecting the Spirit Realm and Earth.

My aunt was proposing to do exactly that.

They intended to travel to a location in the Spirit Realm where they could rip open Portals directly onto Earth — specifically into the Southern Safe-Zone — surrounding the Coalition’s territories from all sides.

They would basically be pouring monsters onto their lands until the tribes had no choice but to enter the Spirit Realm to fight my family’s full force.

Because [

SS-rank

] or higher Hunters couldn’t participate in a war on Earth, my father was simply going to bring the war to himself instead.

"Stop for a moment," I said, my frown deepening as I tried to make sense of the logistics. "How would you even do it? Have you... found the coordinates?"

The issue with what my aunt was proposing was that it wasn’t nearly as easy as she made it sound.

The Spirit Realm is vast. It was a dimension that existed parallel to our home world, but at the same time, it was leagues larger than our planet.

To punch open a Gate to a specific location on Earth, you needed exact dimensional coordinates, and acquiring them was a nightmare.

Rulers guarded the coordinates of their territories more fiercely than their own lives.

Entire intelligence networks were built around obscuring, scrambling, or outright falsifying them.

Because if someone got their hands on those coordinates, they could do exactly what my aunt just suggested.

That was also why factions establish footholds on the specific spots in the Spirit Realm that align with their Safe-Zones on Earth.

For example, Luxara on Earth was parallel to the

Golden Sanctuary

in the Spirit Realm.

As such, there were only two ways to enter Luxara from this side: go through the

Golden Sanctuary

or use an Anchor Card.

An Anchor Card was a high-grade

Spell

Card capable of creating a stable portal link between two preset locations.

Now, I doubted the Southern Tribes had an Anchor Card, and they certainly wouldn’t know their own dimensional coordinates since they had no foothold in the Spirit Realm to begin with.

So, how was my family going to do what they were going to do?

My aunt smiled faintly. "There is a lead."