Chapter 376: Evelyn’s Choice [I / Bonus - ]

Chapter 376: Evelyn’s Choice [I / Bonus Chapter]

’Telekinesis,’ Silas thought in surprise, reading the energetic flow. ’She definitely possesses a Lord Core... but she doesn’t have a territory.’

As a Lord himself, there was just a feeling she gave off... or rather a lack of the feeling, Silas was able to tell that she didn’t have a Territory anymore even though he couldn’t explain it.

Which meant she was an Adventurer.

"Well, I’ll be damned," Ryan muttered, watching his life’s work float out the door. "That saves me twenty minutes of unplugging cables."

Claire guided the floating workstation out into the alleyway, pausing at the threshold to look back at the empty room.

"Mr. Ryan," Claire asked politely. "What of your personal effects? Your clothing, your bed, and your remaining furniture?"

Ryan snorted, waving his hand dismissively.

"Didn’t you look at this place? It’s completely bare. I already pawned all my furniture and clothes on the black market two days ago. I was planning to stage an escape before my Dad caught me anyway."

Evelyn tilted her Kitsune mask, raising an eyebrow. "And what about your landlord? Did you settle your lease?"

Ryan cackled loudly, stepping out into the alley. "What landlord? I put a bullet in the back of the guy’s head three weeks ago when he tried to double my rent. I’ve been squatting here for free!"

Evelyn let out a long exhausted sigh, slowly shifting her footing to stand closer to Silas.

"There are really far too many insane people in this district," Evelyn muttered under her breath.

"You’re the one who hired him," Silas reminded her dryly.

Parked in the narrow alleyway was an enormous high-end armored transport vehicle... a sleek black luxury SUV featuring reinforced ballistic plating, tinted one-way glass, and heavy anti-grav dampeners.

Claire snapped her fingers once more.

The massive levitating workstation smoothly drifted into the vehicle’s expansive rear cargo bay.

CLUNK!

The automated hydraulic trunk sealed shut with a pressurized lock.

"Cargo secured," Claire reported, bowing slightly before moving toward the driver’s side. "Please enter the vehicle."

"I call shotgun!" Ryan yelled, sprinting forward and instantly diving into the front passenger seat before anyone could argue.

Silas and Evelyn walked to the rear passenger door.

Silas opened it, allowing Evelyn to slide into the plush heated leather interior before stepping in and pulling the heavy armored door shut behind him.

’I’m still surprised this stingy woman has a vehicle like this.’

VROOOOOM!

The luxury transport hummed to life, its high-performance magnetic engine purring with power.

Claire smoothly shifted gears, pulling out of the narrow alleyway and accelerating down the damp cracked streets of the lower slums.

The vehicle rapidly wove through the dark neon-lit labyrinth of Shogitown, bypassing the shaded checkpoints, the syndicate patrols, and the decaying industrial sectors.

Within ten minutes, the transport broke through and merged onto the wide multi-tiered expressways leading out of the undercity and climbing toward the surface.

Behind the tinted rear window, the glowing remnants of the underground festival slowly shrank in the distance.

Evelyn leaned her head back against the soft leather headrest, letting out a slow quiet breath.

She reached up with both hands and unlatched the side clasps of her porcelain Kitsune mask, pulling the heavy disguise off her face.

Her striking beautiful features emerged into the soft ambient light of the cabin with her dark hair tumbling loosely over her shoulders.

Beside her, Silas reached up and unsealed the locking bolts of his silver Oni mask.

PSSH-T!

The mask broke with a soft hiss, he had used mana to put a lot of pressure on it to prevent it from being hit off his face.

Silas pulled the heavy metal faceplate away, tossing it onto the middle seat as he ran a heavy black-gloved hand through his damp dark hair, wiping the accumulated sweat and grime of the fights from his forehead with the edge of his sleeve.

Evelyn turned her head slightly, her dark eyes resting quietly on Silas’s exposed profile.

She watched the steady rise and fall of his chest, remembering the terrifying sight of him standing completely untouched amidst a hailstorm of supersonic machine-gun fire.

A soft uncharacteristic warmth flickered in her chest.

’Next time...’ Evelyn thought to herself with her lips parting slightly as she looked out the window at the passing neon skyline. ’Maybe... if you actually want to... we could come back to a festival like that together. Just... to walk through the lights. Only if you want to, Silas.’

She didn’t say the words out loud. Evelyn just kept the thought locked safely in her heart, turning back to watch the road ahead.

By the time the armored transport finally crossed the grand suspension bridges into the pristine towering metropolis of Valoria City, the morning sun had fully crested the horizon.

It was exactly 9:00 AM.

The golden morning light reflected brilliantly off the crystalline glass skyscrapers, illuminating the clean tree-lined boulevards and the gleaming corporate spires of the upper district.

HISS!

Claire smoothly brought the heavy transport to a stop inside the private, underground parking garage of an ultra-luxurious high-security high-rise residential complex.

Claire shifted the car into park and glanced into the rearview mirror.

In the back seat, Evelyn was completely out cold.

Her head was resting heavily against Silas’s broad left shoulder with her breathing slow and a tiny trail of drool visibly pooling at the very corner of her parted lips.

Silas was sitting completely rigid with his head tilted sideways, giving the sleeping Lord on his shoulder a perplexed unimpressed look.

Claire cleared her throat with a polite smile.

"Master Evelyn."

Evelyn snapped awake instantly, her eyes flying open as she violently jerked her head upright off Silas’s shoulder, wiping her chin with the back of her sleeve in a frantic blur.

"I wasn’t sleeping!" Evelyn declared loudly, her face instantly flaring bright red. "I was conducting a deep-state assessment of our route!"

Claire maintained a completely neutral expression. "Uh-huh. Of course, Master."

Claire turned her gaze to the front passenger seat.

Ryan was completely slouched against the window, snoring loudly with his mouth wide open with a thick puddle of drool coating the glass.

Tap-tap!

Claire reached over and firmly tapped the hacker’s shoulder.

"Mr. Ryan. We have arrived."

Ryan snorted, violently jerking awake. "Gah! I didn’t fuck he—... oh. We’re here."

The four of them stepped out of the vehicle into the cool, immaculate air of the private garage.

Claire led them toward the private elevator landing, explaining the layout of the complex in her smooth professional tone.

"This is the Apex Heights residence," Claire explained, pressing the call button. "Master Evelyn has leased a fully renovated high-security two-bedroom executive suite on the seventy-fourth floor. It features independent encrypted power grids, dedicated satellite links, and top-tier computational hardware pre-installed in the secondary office for Mr. Ryan’s immediate use."

Claire snapped her fingers, using her purple telekinesis to smoothly float the massive custom-built server rig out of the vehicle’s trunk, guiding the floating hardware behind her.

"Before we can begin forging the new World Council registry," Claire noted, leading the way toward the elevator doors, "we must first transfer and synchronize Mr. Ryan’s existing data caches with the secure local mainframe."

"Oh, baby, a dedicated satellite uplink?!" Ryan cheered, his eyes glittering with excitement as he jogged alongside his floating servers. "Come on, big guy! Let’s get up there and start crafting your fake identity before the World Council auditors finish their morning coffee!"

Silas took a step forward to follow them toward the elevator, but paused, glancing back over his shoulder.

Standing beside the rear bumper of the SUV, Evelyn was holding her glowing smartphone in both hands.

Her brow was furrowed in deep visible anxiety with her thumbs trembling slightly as she stared down at an incoming encrypted caller ID flashing on the screen.

Silas frowned, taking half a step back toward her.

"Evelyn?" Silas called out, his voice calm and grounded. "You coming up?"

Evelyn blinked, startled out of her trance.

She quickly locked the phone screen, slipping it into her coat pocket, and looked up at him with a strained hurried smile that didn’t quite reach her dark eyes.

"Don’t worry about me, Silas," Evelyn said softly, waving her hand dismissively. "Go ahead up with Ryan. I just have... an exceptionally important call to make."

...

The sound of the lecture hall’s climate control did little to ease the mounting tension behind Matt’s temples.

He sat in the third row of the steeply tiered auditorium with the synthetic leather of the desk chair squeaking faintly under his shifting weight as he reached up with his index finger to nudge his thin-rimmed glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

Around him, fifty other second-year students at the Valoria Imperial Institute of Alchemical Technologies sat in varying states of focus.

Holographic styluses clicked rapidly against polished glass tablets, casting a strobe of pale blue across the darkened room.

At the front of the hall, pacing behind a massive slate-black workbench, stood Professor Elmi.

The man was a veteran of the industrial sector... his brown hair clipped ruthlessly short and his lab coat immaculately pressed while the cybernetic prosthetic that served as his left arm hummed with a dull low-frequency vibration whenever he moved.

"Pay attention to the class," Elmi’s gravelly voice projected effortlessly across the room, amplified by the micro-transceiver clipped to his high collar. "Most of you here were born without a Lord Core... You failed the awakening trials. You will never step through a gateway to a Secret Realm, you will never plant a flag in the soil of the Sovereign Realm, and you will certainly never command an army of summoned entities."

A collective quiet grimace rippled through the rows of students.

It was the harsh inescapable truth that governed modern human society.

Lords conquered dimensions and commanded reality while the unawakened engineered the scrap left behind.

"However," Elmi continued, slamming a scarred palm against the slate workbench, "that does not make you useless... Humanity does not survive on divine intervention alone. We survive on infrastructure. And infrastructure requires craftsmen... Awakened Scientists who can forge, stabilize, and mass-produce the gear that keeps our frontlines from crumbling."

Elmi turned, nodding toward the heavy double doors at the side of the stage.

"Bring it in, Daniel."

His teaching aide, a nervous-looking graduate student wearing heavy insulated leather gloves, pushed a wheeled stainless-steel cart out onto the platform.

Resting atop the reinforced surface was a complex mechanical assembly roughly the size of a suitcase.

Its chassis was forged from a black titanium alloy, intricately etched with spiraling conduits that terminated in a central circular vacuum-sealed chamber.

Mounted along its flanks were four articulated mechanical calipers, each tipped with finely polished quartz focusing crystals.

Matt leaned forward with his amber eyes scanning the instrument set through his lenses.

His fingers tightened around his digital stylus as this was the core foundation of his major... the Type-4 Ambient Mana Condenser and Imbuement Array.

"As commoners," Elmi explained, gesturing to the machine, "your bodies cannot naturally store, cycle, or release mana without suffering fatal cellular necrosis. You try to channel a raw current through your veins, and you will turn your central nervous system into burnt ash before you can cast a single spark. To circumvent our biological limitations, we utilize external mechanical manifolds."

Elmi reached out, flipping a heavy toggle switch on the side of the apparatus.

CLACK!

The mechanical calipers hissed softly as valves engaged.

The quartz crystals at the tips flared with a blinding incandescent azure light.

Within seconds, the air inside the lecture hall grew noticeably thinner as a metallic tang resembling ozone and petrichor began prickling the back of Matt’s throat.

Above the central chamber, a visible vortex of glowing blue vapor began to swirl, drawn forcefully from the atmosphere of the room.

The glowing particles condensed into a tight shimmering sphere of liquid mana that hovered steadily between the magnetic stabilizers.

"This is unrefined mana," Elmi stated, watching the blue light reflect off the faces of his students. "Drawn directly from the planetary atmospheric bleed of the Sovereign rifts... With this array’s runic board, an unawakened technician can guide this current with micrometer precision, cleanly imbuing raw metals, textiles, and core components without suffering magical backlash... Later this afternoon, we will proceed down to the underground foundry to initiate your first practical imbuement trials on tempered steel ingots."

Elmi paused, his sharp gaze sweeping over the tiered seating.

"I trust every single one of you has already submitted your requisitions to the bursar’s office to acquire your personal workstation kits. If you do not have your own array by the midterm practicals, you will fail the class. Am I understood?"

"Yes, Professor," the room chorused in unison.

Matt chimed in with the rest, though a confident smirk touched the corner of his lips.

He didn’t need to worry about the requisition fees.

The Valoria Imperial Institute was the most prestigious alchemical academy in the entire metropolitan district, boasting a guaranteed one-hundred percent placement rate within high-ranking guild laboratories upon graduation.

Its tuition was astronomical, a figure so absurd that normal families would have to mortgage three generations of labor just to afford a single semester.

Yet, Matt had never had to worry about a single credit.

His tuition, his lab fees, his dormitory rent, and his lavish monthly living stipends were handled automatically.