Chapter 838 — Transfer

"As long as you understand," Daniel said mildly. Then he braced a hand on the table and slowly rose from the sofa. "Rest early tonight. We have experiments to do tomorrow."

He left the round table, his stooped body bent forward as he slowly made his way toward the nearby stairs, strand after strand of artificial nerve cord hanging quietly behind him. These products of bio-augmentation had once filled Mary with dread, but now they seemed like so many lifeless burdens, weighing heavily on the old mage's back.

"Master," Mary suddenly could not help calling out, but once she had spoken she did not know what to say next. It felt as though her head was full of things she wanted to say, yet when the moment came to speak, only vast blankness remained. After a few seconds of awkward, tense silence, she finally managed to piece together a sentence: "Master, do you... regret it?"

The moment the words left her mouth she could not help biting her lip, her heart thumping traitorously. She realized she had been too rash—the question was not only bold but could fairly be called presumptuous. It was not something an apprentice should say to her master, especially on an occasion like this.

Yet the old mage did not fly into a rage as he once would have, nor did he even turn his head. He merely paused briefly, then continued slowly toward the stairs.

Only when he set foot on the first step did he speak, in a low, slow voice, as if talking to himself: "To hear the Way at dawn..."

Mary stood there blankly.

Her master had said a strange phrase, coined from a combination of several words, but she could understand it—and she knew that the phrase had been spoken by that great "master," that near-divine "master" who had once used it in discussing scholarship with her own master, to describe one who seeks knowledge. And her master had always been fond of it.

But what did her master mean by answering with it now?

Mary wanted to ask more, but when she looked up, her master had already vanished onto the steps leading to the second floor.

...

"Your Majesty, that is all I know." Lord Beaumère sat in the chair, his hands nervously clutching the hem of his garment. The long speech had left his mouth dry, yet at this moment he did not dare ask Miss Dylan for another glass of iced wine to wet his throat. He knew how much of what he had just said was enough to cost him his head, and so, having poured everything out, he sat where he was like a prisoner awaiting sentence, waiting for Luoyan Augustus to pronounce judgment upon him.

But an emperor, at such a moment, clearly had no taste for prosecuting the crimes of a petty lord.

"All these years... hiding in Olandell, beneath the ruins of the Great Collapse..." Luo Yan Augustus had regained his composure, sitting quietly in the high-backed chair, his right hand resting easily on the armrest, his left laid over his right arm. "The Sleepers... Augustus and they owe each other nothing now."

Lord Beaumère's mind was in some confusion, but he still caught certain words in His Majesty's speech with immediate keenness. After a brief moment of blank astonishment, he realized he had likely heard something that must never leave this room, and so he quickly lowered his eyes and pretended he had heard nothing at all.

"Your Majesty, we must set about eradicating this cult at once," Windsor Maple's voice came from beside him, a sound like heaven's own, rescuing Lord Beaumère's pounding heart. "That they have grown to such a scale in secret... this is no longer any small matter."

"Indeed," Luo Yan nodded. "They have probably already begun a full withdrawal and are scrubbing away the traces they left in every region—but an organization this vast cannot simply vanish completely and silently in a short time."

As he spoke, the Typhon sovereign gave a faint laugh. "What concerns me more, however, is that Gao Yang Cecil... a pack of cultists, reverently naming him 'the Wanderer Beyond the World,' believing him to be a 'god-class' being who invaded the mortal realm from outside the world—that is something I never imagined."

"Your Majesty, the cultists act in madness, but we must still take this intelligence seriously," Windsor Maple said at once. "At the very least we can be certain that Gao Yang Cecil has, by some means, infiltrated and seized control of the Sleepers within the Empire—an undoubtedly terrifying hidden danger. He has in effect planted countless eyes and ears throughout the Empire... this must be dealt with swiftly and in secret, at once."

Luo Yan gave a slight nod, his expression grave, and at the same time Windsor Maple continued: "Also, the term 'Wanderer Beyond the World' must be taken seriously as well. An ancient hero dead seven hundred years, suddenly resurrected—the matter itself has been bizarre from the very start. I think... we truly cannot rule out that some 'thing' other than human has taken possession of Gao Yang Cecil's shell, working this miraculous resurrection..."

Luo Yan listened to Windsor Maple's words, then suddenly shook his head and gave a soft laugh.

"Your Majesty?"

"I do not care who is in that body. Perhaps when he first climbed out of his coffin he truly was 'Gao Yang Cecil,' but from the moment he began to push his new order, who he once was ceased to matter," Luo Yan Augustus said in a deep voice. "A noble spirit, a wicked wraith, even the incarnation of some god—it makes no difference. The only identity that holds any meaning for us is 'Emperor Cecil'—our neighbor.

"Still... the name 'Wanderer Beyond the World'... that is genuinely interesting..."