It was never wise, given this poisoned political climate, for Dex and Lumia to make their way to the lavish inns or elegant taverns scattered through the center of Seiron, the places where the nobility and wealthy merchants typically congregated. Those bright establishments, which had once represented the pulse of the duchy's refined life, were now swarming with Sylvester's eyes and his covert informants. Every unfamiliar face that entered those halls was scrutinized without mercy, and every gold coin spent was immediately recorded in the ledgers of spies who had sold their loyalty for money.
Instead, Dex led his companion through a labyrinthine network of narrow, winding, mud-clogged alleys, keeping well away from the main streets lit by blazing mana lamps. They headed toward the old quarters on the city's southern fringes, neighborhoods that time had forgotten and the new rulers had ignored, where the smell of poverty mingled with the smell of despair.
Lumia walked beside him in silence. As a being of the mythical Celestial lineage, her very nature was in sharp conflict with the filth of this material human world. Her steps did not genuinely touch the muddy ground, she used a subtle manipulation of spatial magic to create a microscopic gap of void between her shoes and the earth, keeping herself entirely clean. She observed the dark alleys with calm silver eyes that reflected dimensions ordinary humans could not perceive.
They chose a modest inn, modest to the point of inspiring pity, called the Horse's Hoof. It sat at the end of a dim, dreary side alley, yet it looked directly onto the large stone plaza leading to Williams Palace. The wooden building leaned slightly, as though exhausted from standing for centuries, and its wooden sign bearing a faded illustration of a horseshoe groaned and swayed with an irritating creak at every gust of cold northern wind.
Dex paid the old innkeeper, who was half-blind, reeked of cheap alcohol, and asked no questions as long as copper coins touched his rough palm, two nights' rent in advance. They climbed a spiral wooden staircase that screamed beneath their footsteps as though warning of imminent collapse. The room assigned to them on the upper floor beneath the roof was extremely cramped, with a slanted ceiling that forced one to stoop, and cracked walls through which the night air seeped. The smell of the room was a suffocating blend of rotting oak wood, cheap tobacco smoke accumulated in the walls over decades, and the smell of cold cabbage soup drifting up from the kitchen below. It was no place befitting the heir to a duchy, let alone a celestial being embodying purity, yet this wretched room possessed one priceless strategic advantage: a small, dusty circular window set high in the wall, concealed behind the junction of the slanted ceiling, that looked directly down at a perfect elevated angle over the main gate and the front battlements of the palace-like fortress below.
Dex dropped his few belongings on the wooden floor and ignored the dilapidated bed entirely. He moved directly toward the window like a magnet. He drew aside the corner of the moth-eaten, tattered velvet curtain with extreme care so as not to disturb the dust, and stood in the dense shadow to observe.
Williams Palace stood with the imposing solidity of a mountain of black granite in the center of the city, dominating the skyline. Yet today it did not appear as the palace of a ruler who embraced his people, it appeared as a metal beast coiled to spring.
"The place is fortified as though preparing for a full military siege from a hostile empire, not for repelling a handful of thieves or local rebels," Dex said quietly as he analyzed the guard deployment.
Dex narrowed his eyes as he swept the towering walls. "Look there, Lumia, along the eastern and western battlements. Those faint gleams in the darkness are not ordinary torches. They are mage-snipers. They wear camouflage cloaks. And down below, in the wide front courtyard, there are foot patrols whose paths intersect at exactly ten-minute intervals, forming a surveillance net with no gaps. Not a single blind spot in the entire formation."
Lumia sat slowly on the edge of the wooden bed, which let out an indignant creak, and dropped her hood to reveal her silver hair, which caught the pale moonlight filtering through the window's cracks and glowed with a faint starlike brilliance. She was watching Dex with close attention.
"That number of guards is abnormal for a city in peacetime," Lumia said in her melodious voice that carried the echo of open space, her analytical logic working quickly. "Do you think we could enter through the main gate if I used my Space Folding? I could manipulate the courtyard's dimensions, fold the distance between the gate and the interior passage in a fraction of a second, and bypass them as though we had never crossed the courtyard at all."
"Impossible," Dex replied with flat finality without turning toward her, his eyes still fixed on the enormous iron gate below. "Entering through that gate means clear-cut suicide. Your celestial magic is superior and terrifying, Lumia, and your spatial techniques surpass their comprehension, but the problem is not the soldiers themselves. The main gate of Williams Palace contains geological detection stones buried beneath the ground. These stones don't detect visual enchantments, they react to any distortion in the fabric of reality or any unfamiliar mana fluctuation. Space Folding would create a small spatial tear, which would cause those stones to light up like a midday sun and trigger an alarm that would shatter eardrums."
Dex drew a deep breath and continued: "Sylvester has replaced the loyal guard staff in their entirety, he has substituted the family's faithful soldiers with these mercenaries."
Dex studied the posture of the guards below with a bitter, contemptuous smile. "Look at how they stand. It is disorganized, devoid of the rigid discipline taught to students at the Imperial Academy. These are street rabble, criminals and hired killers gathered from the worst taverns on the continent and the slums of the underworld, men who recognize no loyalty except the gleam of gold and the color of blood. If we attempt to slip through the gate and are discovered, all our plans will be destroyed before they have even begun."
Dex lowered the curtain with extreme care and turned to face the center of the room. He approached a scratched and dirty wooden table that sat in the middle of the space. He dipped his finger in a cup of stagnant water and began drawing on the table's dusty surface a complex, detailed floor plan of the palace, every tower, every major corridor, every wing. The details flowed from his finger with astonishing geometric precision, not from any childhood memories, for he possessed none, but from the detailed knowledge of the novel he carried within him.
"Sylvester is a clever man, as cunning as a fox, but in the end, he is a predictable, formulaic villain who moves according to the instincts of paranoia," Dex said as he sketched with concentration, his voice carrying a tone of contempt, as though reading from an open book. "He knows someone may try to reach my ailing father the Duke, or at the very least smuggle in neutral physicians to verify the true nature of his illness. Therefore, he will not have kept my sick father in his usual chambers in the upper floors. Those apartments are exposed, their windows are wide, and any person who possesses a light flight enchantment could reach them easily. And any remaining loyal servant might try to make contact with him there."
Dex closed his eyes forcefully, calling up the novel's text from the archive of his mind. He recalled the chapters that covered the history of the Williams duchy. "In all likelihood, no, with certainty, he has moved him to the Chamber of Stillness."
Lumia opened her silver eyes with curiosity. "The Chamber of Stillness?"
"Because it is not a place celebrated in poems or drawn on ordinary maps," Dex answered, opening his eyes and pointing to the center of the water-drawn plan, pressing his finger firmly deep beneath the drawing of the main palace structure. "It is an ancient, dark magical vault located beneath the very foundations of the palace itself, deep in the heart of the mountain's rock. My great-great-grandfather designed it during the ancient wars to serve as the family's last refuge for protecting its members during catastrophic magical disasters or in the event of a total siege."
Dex looked at Lumia with gravity: "The walls there are not built from the ordinary granite available in Seiron. They are constructed from pure black Manalit Stone extracted from the shadow trenches. This stone absorbs mana like a greedy sponge, it blocks any enchantment from entering from outside, and prevents any magical signal from leaving from within, making it a complete blind spot even for spatial sensing. Even the air in there is sterilized and circulated through ancient mechanical and magical ventilation systems that prevent the infiltration of gaseous poisons. If my father is being held there, he is effectively in a living grave, a prison that sees no sunlight and hears no screaming."
Lumia asked with complete seriousness, grasping the scale of the challenge before them: "If the Manalit stone forms a black hole that swallows magical signals and warps the spatial fabric around it, how will we confirm he is actually there before risking an assault on a vault that could be a lethal trap? Even I cannot sense what lies inside an absolute void of that kind."
Dex smiled a confident smile that nonetheless never reached his eyes, which were laden with the weight of worlds. "Ordinary magic, and even spatial manipulation, cannot penetrate Manalit, that is true. But I will use the Fire Sensing technique at wide range, powered by the Solar Heart mana."
Dex sat down on the dilapidated wooden floor in a cross-legged meditation posture and took a deep, slow breath. He asked Lumia to maintain complete silence and to diminish her spatial vibrations to avoid interfering with his focus. He closed his eyes and began concentrating his energy on the blazing magical core in his chest. He did not generate offensive destructive power as he had in Falus Forest when he had burned through armies, instead, he thinned the phoenix mana, rendering it transparent and gentle as a summer breeze, and began sending extremely fine, invisible-to-the-naked-eye waves outward from his body.
These waves functioned as a precise thermal and spiritual sensing radar that read the fundamental life signatures of living beings. The transparent crimson waves passed through the inn's wooden walls with complete ease and crossed the cold stone plaza outside. They struck the palace's outer walls, and Dex felt in his mind the rough, agitated thermal signatures of the scattered mercenaries. He sensed the slow, dull pulses of their heartbeats, the warmth of their breath, even the cold metal of their weapons.
Then he drove his consciousness downward with firm intent, deeper, past the palace's lavish marble floors, down through the lower layers, toward the granite foundations, down, down, to where all heat vanished and the ancient chill of the deep earth held absolute dominion.
There, his consciousness struck something, a solid, extremely cold mass. The Manalit. The stone was hungrily attempting to absorb his waves and smother his fire, but the phoenix mana blazing from the Solar Heart carried a sovereign, fluid quality that refused total absorption. It was the fire of creation that no stone could extinguish. Impossibly thin threads of his consciousness seeped through the microscopic ventilation fissures and the joints between the enormous Manalit blocks.
And there, in the deepest, darkest point beneath the palace, amid the killing cold of isolation and the complete void, he sensed something. He felt an extremely faint glow, like a candle dying in the path of a hurricane. A weak, slow, erratic pulse of mana described with precision in the novel, mana carrying the warmth and might of the Golden Lion. That mana which had once filled the palace with its overwhelming and reassuring presence had become nothing more than a pale blue ember dying under a pile of betrayal's ash.
The pulse was fighting for survival with ferocity, resisting a slow and incomprehensible poison that coursed through its veins and consumed its essence with a terrifying, relentless slowness.
Dex's eyes flew open suddenly and he gasped deeply, as though he had just broken the surface of water after his breath had run out. Cold sweat poured down his brow, his chest heaved rapidly, and his muscles trembled from the mental effort of imposing his will upon the Manalit.
"Dex! Are you all right?" Lumia asked, rushing toward him and gripping his shoulder to steady him.
Dex seized the edge of the scratched table to pull himself upright, his eyes blazing with a mixture of deep grief and searing fury. "He is there. I found him. And the pulse, the pulse is very weak, Lumia. Far weaker than I anticipated or calculated for in my timeline inside the forest. The poison is consuming his magical essence from within and destroying his mana arteries. If we wait even a few more days according to my original plan, we will find nothing but a body to bury."
Dex looked toward the closed, dusty window and tightened his fist until his knuckles went white and the cracking of his knuckles could be heard. "We no longer have the luxury of time to gather allies in secret or to plan a careful, gradual political counter-coup. There is no time for encrypted messages. We must move tonight, and storm the heart of the darkness."