Chapter 118: The List

Chapter 118: Chapter 118: The List

To purify the curse for Sylas, she once again resorted to forbidden arts, forcibly pulling it onto her own body.

Her wounds, inherently not fully healed, immediately burst open. She collapsed right in the middle of the room, falling straight into a coma.

The Divine Temple was also out of options. They were forced to take her away from the western territory, relocating to a divine ruin in another country for recovery.

At that time, the empire and the major regions were reeling from monsters pouring out from the Wasteland along with the Demon race’s harassment. The beasts hungering for the piece of cake named the Valmont Duke’s mansion also surfaced one after another.

If the fact that she was severely injured and comatose, with an undetermined time to wake up, was exposed, the consequences required no thought to know.

Therefore, that trip to recover in a foreign country was classified as top secret.

Outwardly, it was only announced that the Duchess was recuperating outside. Sylas alone was briefly informed of the situation by the Divine Temple’s people.

At that time, she firmly believed that after she fell, Elwyn would quickly conclude the border war and return to the West to take over everything.

But five years later, when her wounds healed and she opened her eyes, everything that hit her face had deviated from its trajectory.

Half a year after she left, Sylas was kidnapped by a cult.

The eldest son, who had just passed his fourteenth birthday, rushed to save his younger brother, engaged in battle with a group of assassins on the cliff, and fell into the bottomless abyss.

Missing for an entire year. It wasn’t until the Divine Temple’s search party groped to the bottom of the abyss that the body was finally pulled up. His heart still beat, his breath still faint, but his soul had been almost completely swept away; only exactly one fragment remained clinging to his chest like a rotting thread. They then announced to the outside that the eldest young master Valmont was missing and yet to be found, and secretly took Jeremy back to the Divine Temple.

As for her husband, his injuries were too severe, the curse relapsed, and he also collapsed into a coma. Up until the day she woke up, he was still lying undergoing treatment in the Magic Tower.

Waiting until she dragged herself back to the Duke’s mansion from the foreign country, Sylas’s personality had been completely whitewashed. All the hidden guards assigned to protect him had died bizarrely.

She immediately smelled something abnormal and began investigating from the roots.

And discovered that the interior of the Duke’s mansion had rotted from the inside out.

Upon grasping the news of Elwyn’s coma, a few branch families harboring wolfish ambitions seized that power vacuum to completely replace the mansion’s personnel, planting their people in every position.

Embezzlement, usurping power, murdering the innocent — not a single crime was missing. The hidden guards watching over Sylas also perished in that very covert purge.

Before crushing every single one of those ants, she had intended to cast a soul-searching spell to dig out everything that had happened over those years. But the ones most deeply involved simultaneously chose to commit suicide using a method that scattered their souls, not leaving behind even a fragment of memory.

The ringleader Count even detonated his own magic core, mutually perishing, blowing away the entire mansion in just the blink of an eye.

All clues were completely severed from there.

As for Sylas, he didn’t want to get close to her anymore. Even less did he want to proactively utter half a word about what he had experienced.

Everything had to be shelved.

After Elwyn recovered and returned, it took the two of them nearly three years to wash away the rebel factions and handle the mountain of work piled up over several years.

During those three years, they still secretly sent people to protect the child. Every time, they were chased straight away.

Past the age of fourteen, Sylas moved entirely to the capital to live alone, simultaneously erecting a wall letting no one cross.

She had always believed that the twist in the child’s personality stemmed from the years his parents were absent, resulting from being suppressed by those dead, pulverized fools.

Unexpectedly, besides the predecessor butler and the spy maids planted by that Count, there was another name.

A name still living leisurely in the royal palace to this day.

Amber.

"Hmph..."

A cold laugh slithered out of her throat.

Atalai closed the notebook. Her complexion was gloomy to the point of losing control, her voice squeezed through a thick layer of suppression:

"Noah’s intention is to take revenge for his younger brother, right."

That wasn’t a question. It was the self-muttering of a person who had just had a bucket of cold water poured straight to the face.

Jeremy captured their reactions entirely in his eyes. The previous doubt had its answer.

He followed that sentence and replied: "Naturally."

Then he added fuel to the fire:

"During the time I was inside that body, I saw his memories. Not just the years you were outside. Even in recent years while studying at the Empire’s Preliminary Academy, he was ganged up on and beaten by a segment of students, while the teachers turned their faces away. It could be said that the humiliations and tortures he swallowed down, what’s recorded in that notebook isn’t even one-tenth."

That sentence dragged the room’s temperature straight down to the freezing point. The atmosphere thickened, suffocating to the point of making it hard to breathe.

Afraid of affecting the person lying motionless on the bed, Atalai directly ignored the Duke mansion’s magic restriction barrier, raising her hand to forcibly cast a short-distance teleportation spell.

A few seconds later, the three of them were standing in the middle of the living room.

Jeremy looked over at Elwyn — who had remained silent since earlier: "What do you think, Father?"

Elwyn lifted half an eyelid to look at him. He didn’t answer, but asked back: "What does Noah want to do?"

"Regardless of what I want to do, you both will cooperate, right?"

The two replied almost simultaneously: "You just speak."

Looking at that reaction, Jeremy knew his plan was neatly in the palm of his hand. He wouldn’t even need to bother Raphael anymore.

Under the gaze of both of them, he calmly laid his sole objective on the table:

"I want Amber and all those who once had a hand in that bullying game to die without a burial place."

In Sylas’s memories, this couple was not the unforgivably cruel type. Materially, they had never let the child lack anything.

But the only thing Sylas craved when he was young — presence and a little bit of care — was always absent.

The child’s personality after age five, eroded by long years of physical pain plus all sorts of mental torture, was indeed twisted and fragile to the point of being unsalvageable.

Even if they didn’t know what the child had to endure, it was still a lack of responsibility.

He was not Sylas. He had no right to forgive anything on the child’s behalf, nor did he have the right to blame anyone for him.

It was just that standing from the perspective of someone half-in, half-out of the picture, he felt that child had too bitter a fate.

Having the chance to claim back many times over what he had to bear, he would naturally exhaust his strength to grasp it.

Elwyn seemed very satisfied with that answer. A hint of a smile flashed in his eyes, causing his voice to soften a bit as well:

"Everything will be as you wish."

On the other side, Atalai had already started writing a list.

The name at the very top was Amber.

...As for what kind of list it was, there was no need to say to understand.

Out of curiosity, Jeremy still asked the reason they neglected Sylas all those years.

But the answer he received deviated completely from what resided in the child’s memories.

Both sides looked at the same chain of events from two opposite ends. This person didn’t know what that person was thinking; each side had their own unspeakable hardships swallowed inside.

There was no absolute right or wrong. Only different standpoints.

Regarding this matter, Jeremy could only respond with silence.