"He actually did it. That wretch actually did it to his own elder brother."
The words left Dex's throat choked, rough, and mixed with a terrifying disbelief that swiftly transformed into pure, dark fury. The rage began as a small spark in his Solar Heart, then started to boil in his gut and rise like volcanic lava searching for an outlet.
Dex stepped back from the bed and clenched both fists until the knuckles of his fingers went white and his nails nearly drove into his palms. Without any conscious intent, because the intense emotional turbulence had interacted with his unstable mana core, a celestial blue flame began slipping beyond his total control. The fire started dancing around his fingers like small furious spirits, seeping through his skin's pores and producing a faint hiss that devoured the cold air around him.
"Sylvester did not simply poison him to kill him and dispose of him as a political obstacle," Dex spoke in a voice trembling from the force of his anger, directing his words to himself and to Lumia simultaneously, as though binding the threads of the conspiracy he had read about with the hideous reality he now saw. "If he had merely wanted to kill him to seize the duchy's rule, he would have done it with a single concentrated dose of poison in his cup, and he would have died in silence like any ordinary assassination victim."
Dex lifted his gaze from his father's body and studied the vast circular hall, the dead gray crystals hanging from the walls, the slowly pulsing medical mana instruments.
"No. This is a sadistic arrangement, planned with extraordinary care. He placed him here specifically, in the Chamber of Stillness, in this secret sanctuary originally created to amplify the perception of mana and assist with focus and healing. He used this sacred place to ensure my father lived as long as possible in a state of pure agony. These enormous crystals are not healing him at all, they are only keeping him alive to suffer, prolonging his existence second by second within the hell. Sylvester wanted to ensure that the great Lion of the West, the elder brother who had overshadowed him his entire life, would die in humiliation, slowly, piece by piece, while the vault drained his energy and Beelzebub's Tear converted it into physical pain."
The scene explained every cryptic hint he had read in the novel. Sylvester was not merely ambitious for power and the throne, he had carried a buried, complex, and pathological hatred toward his brilliant and superior elder brother. This kind of slow torture, planned in cold blood, could only emanate from someone psychologically damaged who needed to prove his warped superiority by breaking the victim's spirit and degrading them before destroying their body.
Dex felt a savage, overwhelming desire to scream at the top of his lungs, to destroy the repulsive gray crystals, to unleash the phoenix fire and burn the cursed palace with every traitor and killer inside it, to cleanse this place of Sylvester's filth. His mana began to surge violently, and the temperature in the cold room climbed suddenly by several degrees. The air grew dry and suffocating, and the blue flames around his hands began to expand, forming a burning aura around his body that cast dancing, terrifying shadows on the stone walls.
"Dex!"
Lumia's voice, calm, clear, and firm as a cosmic law that brooked no argument, pierced through the red haze of his fury and pulled his consciousness back from the edge of madness.
Lumia did not stand at a distance. She stepped forward with courage into the blazing heat emanating from him. She placed her slender hand, cold-skinned and luminous, directly on his broad, fire-wreathed shoulder. The instant she touched him, Dex felt a deep, cold shock course through his veins. She had transferred a small portion of her void mana into him. The cold of infinite cosmic space was seeping into his body, colliding with his raging fires, not extinguishing them but containing them and returning them to his core, achieving a painful but necessary equilibrium.
"Control yourself, Dex, now," Lumia said, her silver eyes looking directly into his rage-burning ones. "If you surrender to this emotional chaos, your fury and your uncontrolled flames will incinerate every oxygen molecule in this sealed room within seconds. You will not save him that way, you will kill him faster than the poison, and you will destroy the instruments monitoring the last glimmer of his life."
Lumia released his shoulder and stepped back, gesturing with her hand toward the marble bed. "Your calm and your mental coldness are your strongest, and only, weapons right now. Fury is a luxury we cannot afford in this place. Look at him. Look at him through the eye of a neutral analyst who knows the hidden truth behind the magic, not through the eyes of a son blinded by his own emotions."
Dex drew a deep, trembling breath, filling his lungs with air saturated with the smell of ozone and death, and tried with desperate force to reclaim his composure and regain control of the Solar Heart, which was pumping mana at full intensity. He tightened the muscles of his abdomen and forced the blue flames to contract and recede slowly to the tips of his fingers, then smothered them completely within his core, leaving behind the scent of burnt ozone in the air.
He wiped the cold sweat that had mixed with tears of fury from his brow. Lumia's words were harsh, but they were true and necessary. He had not come here to weep over the ruins of a fallen hero, nor to blow up the palace and die with it. He had come here to shatter the fate written in the novel.
Dex forced his eyes, which still carried a faint blue glimmer, to focus once more. This time, he did not look at the disfigured exterior of his father's body, nor at the repulsive black veins. He looked at what lay beneath them. He began to study, with intense concentration and glacial composure, the flow of corrupted mana between the prostrate body and the gray crystals surrounding it.