Chapter 68: A Turning Tide

Meanwhile, the crowd’s admiration for Helia showed no sign of slowing, and Lucian felt the weight of it settle deeper with every passing second.

He’d already signed a private, sealed agreement regarding the Pocket Orb’s rights, the terms clear: in exchange for the Relic’s true origin staying buried, Lucian would be the one officially recorded as ending the engagement.

That arrangement felt considerably shakier now, standing here watching the crowd’s reaction unfold. Reasserting his own image publicly as the one who’d ended things, even if Helia herself confirmed it outright, would likely find few believers now regardless.

Worse, doing so risked painting him as someone actively trying to tarnish Helia’s reputation, especially now that she’d been formally named a throne contender, a woman who might very well sit the imperial throne herself one day.

But Lucian wasn’t the only one feeling cornered by tonight’s turn of events, either.

Retave, still reeling from his own miscalculation, churned through every option available to him, searching for some angle that might still salvage his standing in front of the room.

Relief arrived for him almost immediately, and from an unlikely direction. One of his attendants, dressed in a crisp, tailored suit, approached quietly and leaned in to murmur something against his ear, a folded letter pressed discreetly into his hand.

Whatever the attendant whispered was enough to widen Retave’s eyes on the spot. He unfolded the letter slowly, reading it while the rest of the hall stayed fixed on Helia, no one sparing him a second glance.

"Are you certain this letter’s claims are accurate?" Retave murmured back to his attendant, scanning the paper’s authenticity marks as he spoke.

"Yes, my lord. I’ve already verified the agreement described in it is genuine. Unfortunately, I couldn’t trace where the letter itself actually came from."

"Do you know who sent this?"

Retave pressed further, hunting for whoever had chosen this exact moment to deliver something this useful into his hands.

"It couldn’t possibly be that blind boy who wrote this and sent it to me, could it?"

"I don’t believe so, my lord. From what I understand, even he never expected the rumors to circle back and land on him this hard, despite having already signed away his claim."

Given his background as a businessman, Retave carried an instinctive wariness toward anything he couldn’t personally verify, rarely trusting information he hadn’t traced to its source himself.

But weighing every strange detail of the situation against what the letter actually offered, he’d apparently already made his decision, choosing to trust it, since the information it laid out about the Pocket Orb was detailed enough to be difficult to fake. Still, he intended to use it carefully, cross-checking its authenticity even as he acted on it.

Retave opened the ornate box holding the Pocket Orb itself, studying its contents with sharp, deliberate attention.

The Relic took the shape of a heavy brass bowl, roughly two and a half to three inches in diameter, built from three separately rotating layers. Embedded across its surface sat three rings of mana stone, each etched with a precise, deliberate pattern Lucian himself had carved by hand.

Each layer, when rotated, triggered a distinct mechanism.

The first layer projected a real-time visual map of the surrounding area, terrain, obstacles, even the movement of living creatures, all rendered as fine, glowing lines within a radius of roughly a third of a mile.

Retave confirmed it himself the moment he tested the first rotation, watching the layout of the Sarnel estate resolve across the Orb’s glass surface in sharp detail, down to a single guard walking a patrol route well beyond the estate’s outer wall.

Reading through the mechanism’s full function, Retave immediately grasped just how valuable a Relic like this could be, scouting unfamiliar territory, or reading a battlefield in real time.

But the letter described more than that, and his admiration hadn’t peaked yet.

He rotated the Orb again, following the letter’s instructions to test the second layer.

This one carried its own distinct function: the ability to transmit sound directly to another Pocket Orb with its second layer active at the same time, up to roughly six-tenths of a mile in its current, early iteration.

Fine horizontal grooves etched into the mana stone generated a stable static frequency capable of carrying the human voice across that distance without drawing on a single drop of mana.

Retave wasn’t finished. He rotated the mechanism a final time, engaging the third layer, a combination setting that merged both the visual and audio functions into a single simultaneous stream.

That combination came with a tradeoff. Visual range dropped to roughly thirty percent of its original reach, and audio transmission shrank down similarly, to under a third of its standalone distance.

Even with that reduction, though, a Relic like this, properly deployed, carried real strategic weight.

Under ordinary combat conditions, only a genuinely high-tier practitioner could sense living presence across several hundred meters, and even then, only someone at that same elevated tier could actually perceive it clearly.

The Pocket Orb rendered all of that irrelevant. No mana required. No elite Core. No specialized element. Anyone could wield it.

"Ingenious," Retave murmured, almost to himself.

"Find out everything you can about whoever sent this, and get me more on that blind boy while you’re at it."

He folded the letter away into an inner pocket, dispatching his attendant to dig deeper, then turned his attention back toward the hall, where he should have felt nothing but rising panic watching Helia accept congratulations from yet another Seven Pillar family.

Instead, something had shifted in him.

"Helia, you’ve been playing with fire around me quite a bit lately. I suppose it’s only fair I make that fire burn a little brighter, exactly the way you seem to want."

The letter had settled something in him, restoring a measure of calm now that he had, at last, something concrete he could use to turn tonight back in his own favor. A faint smile touched his mouth.

His gaze flicked briefly toward Varka, seated to his right. A quiet suspicion crossed his mind, whether his own father might have been the one behind that mysterious letter, engineering the whole exchange just to sharpen the political theater around the succession.

He had no proof of that either way. But the absence of proof didn’t make the suspicion any less plausible.

Weighing whether to act on his plan now or hold back, Retave finally decided, stepping forward, the ornate box carrying the Pocket Orb held firmly at his side, approaching Helia directly as she continued chatting warmly with a representative from one of the Seven Pillar families, the pegasus crest stitched clearly into the deep, aged yellow of their formal attire.

That crest and color belonged to House Austur, the Pillar family whose territory sat in Bravenheart’s southern reaches.

"I don’t believe I’ve properly congratulated my little sister yet, not for two such historic achievements tonight."

Retave spoke without hesitation, cutting smoothly into the middle of Helia’s conversation.

Both the Sarnel and Austur representatives turned at once, registering Retave’s sudden presence beside them, and offered him a quick, unified greeting.

Helia’s expression, bright and warm only a moment earlier, gray eyes and cream-colored hair catching the light as she smiled, dimmed slightly at the sight of her brother approaching. She understood immediately that something calculated sat behind this.

Ever composed, though, she folded that recognition away behind practiced grace, accepting the moment as though it were nothing more than genuine praise.

"Thank you so much, Brother. Though there’s really no need to make such a fuss over it. Simply having you come congratulate me yourself is already more than enough of an honor."

She offered him a small, gracious bow as she said it.

"Nonsense, little sister. As your own brother, it’s only right I give you a gift worthy of the occasion."