Florescentia Kingdom.
A land that called itself holy—where incense burned thicker than reason, where stone spires clawed toward the heavens as if daring the gods to look away.
Bells tolled not for time, but for obedience.
Every street carried scripture etched into its bones. Every face wore belief like armor.
This was where Lenmi was.
She stood at the kingdom's outer gate, unmoving, a quiet stain of black against marble white.
Her body had changed.
Not enough to be obvious to strangers—but enough that the air around her no longer mistook her for a child. Her frame had softened, lines subtly curved where once they had been straight.
Growth that had crept in silently, without permission. Without guidance.
She wore a ruffled dress of absolute black—fabric so deep it swallowed light rather than reflected it.
No shimmer. No ornament. As if it had been dyed in shadow itself. A veil of black netting draped over her face, fine enough to breathe through, dense enough to deny curiosity.
It hid her expression, her eyes—everything Florescentia would have tried to claim as its own.
Her long brown hair spilled beneath the veil, loose and unbound. And beneath it all, behind the mesh and silence, her golden-yellow eyes watched the world with the same stillness they always had.
Unblinking. Waiting.
Beside her stood a woman in white.
The contrast was violent.
Where Lenmi absorbed light, the woman reflected it—white fabric flowing cleanly over a body built not for prayer, but for motion. Her long black hair cascaded freely down her back, glossy and unrestrained, slicing against the purity of her dress like ink spilled on parchment.
She did not belong in Florescentia.
She was Fah.
It had started in blood.
After cutting down the guards efficiently, almost carelessly—Fah had wandered the kingdom with no map and no restraint.
She followed curiosity the way predators followed scent.
Temples. Archives. Backstreets. Places where screams were swallowed before they reached the bells.
Eventually, curiosity led her beneath the city.
The Forbidden Market.
A place Florescentia pretended did not exist, yet fed from relentlessly.
Stone corridors slick with old moisture and older guilt. Cages stacked like furniture. Chains clinking softly—not loud enough to disrupt worship above.
The slave market.
Fah did not hesitate.
Steel sang. Bodies fell. Merchants, guards, buyers—cut down with the same cheerful efficiency.
Even the captives were not spared. Those too broken to flee. Those whose eyes no longer held will.
Mercy, to Fah, was stupidity.
Blood soaked the stone.
And then—
She stopped.
In the middle of the carnage, amid the copper stench and fading cries, Fah saw her.
A small figure standing untouched, as if the violence had bent itself around her.
Black dress. Black veil. Stillness so complete it felt deliberate.
Lenmi.
Fah tilted her head, her smile slowly draining—not into anger, but into focus.
She stepped closer, boots crunching softly.
Then she lowered herself, just enough to meet the child's height.
"Hey, kiddo," Fah said lightly, voice warm despite the corpses cooling behind her. "Do I know you?"
Lenmi's mind froze.
Shock. Fear. Confusion—layered so tightly she couldn't separate them.
Her throat locked. Her hands trembled beneath the veil.
Her world had already shattered once—waking without Wolf, dragged into chains, passed from hand to hand like an object.
Now this woman stood before her, drenched in death yet smiling as if they'd met at a festival.
Words wouldn't come.
So her mind reached for the one constant it had left.
"Ah…" Her voice cracked."Master…"
Fah's eyes narrowed.
"…Wolf."
The name landed like a blade.
Fah's pupils dilated. Her breath caught—just for a fraction of a second.
Then she moved.
In one swift motion, Fah grabbed Lenmi by the waist and lifted her clean off the ground.
The sudden motion tore a gasp from Lenmi's chest. Their faces were inches apart now—veil fluttering from Fah's breath.
"Wolf?" Fah demanded, her voice low, sharp, alive. "Tell me about Wolf."
Her grip wasn't crushing—but it was absolute.
Lenmi's heart pounded violently. Her body screamed danger.
She felt exposed, cornered, small.
And yet—
Something else stirred beneath the panic.
A familiarity she couldn't explain.
The presence before her wasn't warm.
It wasn't gentle. But it carried weight—the same kind of weight that Wolf did.
The kind that bent reality around it.
The kind that moved forward no matter what stood in the way.
Her hands clenched in the fabric of Fah's sleeves.
Slowly, hesitantly, Lenmi spoke.
She told her everything she could.
Wolf's appearance.
Wolf's voice.
The way he looked at the world.
How he taught.
How he watched.
How he never lied to her, yet never told her everything.
When she finished, Fah released her.
Lenmi's feet touched the ground again, knees weak. She staggered back a step.
Fah, meanwhile, stared upward.
At the sky.
Then she laughed.
It burst out of her—bright, unrestrained, joyous. A laugh so alive it felt obscene in Florescentia.
"Hahahahaha!"
"So it is you, my dear partner!"
She spread her arms wide, spinning once as if greeting an old world.
"We will meet again in time," she called to the heavens. "Wait for me, my partner!"
Her laughter echoed through the alleyways, startling Lenmi into a flinch.
Then Fah stopped.
And looked down.
Their gazes met—gold through black mesh, sharp amusement through dark lashes.
Her tone shifted instantly—smooth, playful, disarmingly gentle.
"Little girl," Fah said, smiling, "come with me. Your master is my friend."
She turned, already walking.
"Let's move," she added lightly. "We'll get to know each other on the way."
Lenmi struggled to respond.
"Ah—uh…"
Fah didn't wait.
She reached back, grasped Lenmi's arm, and led her forward—pulling her into motion, into uncertainty, into a path Lenmi had not chosen.
And Lenmi followed.
Florescentia Kingdom—land of the holy.
Sunlight filtered through stained-glass arches, breaking into colors that painted the corridors in false warmth.
Solina stood alone near a tall window, documents fanned between her fingers.
Her amber eyes wavered as she read the same lines again and again, the parchment trembling ever so slightly in her grip.
No… no…
Her thoughts raced, colliding and unraveling in sharp succession.
Where did Wolf come from?
She had already cut away the obvious answers.
Axion Kingdom—discarded. His mannerisms didn't match their rigid martial upbringing.
Quinthall Kingdom—unlikely. No reason for them to gamble with a spy so conspicuous.
Valgard Empire—impossible. They were under constant watch. No one from Valgard could slip through unnoticed, let alone possess information about her.
Florescentia itself—absurd. This kingdom had not meddled beyond its borders for centuries. Faith, not conquest, defined them.
Her jaw tightened.
Arteria Kingdom?
No. Their people were already secured in safehouses. They had no need for theatrics like this.
That left only one name.
Ventilogia Empire.
The most plausible and dangerous.
Ventilogia was infamous for its labyrinthine schemes, their agents hidden beneath layers of masks—political, physical, cultural.
It would make sense if Wolf's current appearance was nothing more than an elaborate disguise.
And yet—
Solina's fingers curled slowly around the parchment.
Despite the logic aligning so neatly, unease gnawed at her.
This isn't it.
Her instincts—honed through betrayal, survival, and blood—whispered insistently that no matter how reasonable the conclusion appeared, it was wrong.
She exhaled silently.
Every time she looked at Wolf, he was there—clear in form, precise in presence. And yet everything that came from him felt obscured, wrapped in black fog. His words. His actions. His intentions.
Unreadable.
More unsettling than that—
How did he know about Moritz? About his deep, unspoken connection to her mother.
Solina's lips pressed into a thin line.
Even she, as her daughter, had never known of such a bond.
That single fact pushed Wolf farther and farther away in her mind, turning him into something distant, almost unreachable.
What Solina did not know—
Was that Wolf himself had been just as uncertain.
When Moritz had addressed her as "that little girl from the past," the phrase had struck Wolf as sharply out of place. It was not coincidence to him.
It was familiarity.
That single slip, combined with the subtle shift Wolf observed in Moritz's posture—his tone, his restraint—had raised the probability high enough.
High enough for Wolf to gamble.
If he was wrong, he would have looked like a fool.
An impostor grasping at ghosts.
And yet—he had chosen to step forward anyway.
Moritz had felt the same weight.
In another wing of the house, Moritz sat alone in his workplace.
The room was dimmer than the halls outside, lit by oil lamps and filtered daylight.
Shelves heavy with records and ledgers surrounded him, the smell of ink and aged parchment thick in the air.
He stared down at his desk—but saw none of it.
Wolf's presence lingered in his thoughts, heavy and inescapable.
With it came a realization he had tried to ignore for years.
A transition of generations.
Moritz leaned back slowly, the chair creaking beneath him.
His mind drifted—unbidden—to an old prophecy.
Saint Valen's words.
When the time comes, the humans chosen by the gods shall appear and they shall lead this world into progress. Thus shall begin the Endless Golden Age.
Saint Valen—the founder of Florescentia Kingdom.
The man whose shadow still loomed over history.
In the beginning, there had only been two kingdoms: Florescentia and Arteria.
Axion and Valgard had risen later.
Ventilogia after that.
Quinthall—the youngest—had emerged barely a century after Ventilogia.
More than three thousand years had passed since those origins.
And yet—
People still looked up to Saint Valen.
Even those far beyond Florescentia's borders.
Moritz was one of them.
His fingers curled slowly, knuckles whitening.
Both his instincts and his heart whispered the same conclusion.
Wolf is one of them.
One of the humans chosen by the gods.
Moritz stopped working.
He brought both hands up to his face, covering his eyes, shoulders sinking as the weight of memory pressed down on him.
The past surfaced—uninvited, unforgiving.
And as it did, he could not help but feel ashamed of what had happened.
The private study room was silent.
Not the peaceful kind of silence—but the kind that pressed inward, heavy with thought.
Wolf sat alone at the long oak table, its surface scarred by age and old ink stains.
A single lamp burned beside him, flame steady, casting elongated shadows that crawled across shelves filled with sealed documents and bound ledgers. Dust motes drifted lazily through the air, visible only when they crossed the thin cone of light.
Varsh was gone.
The door had closed without ceremony, leaving Wolf with nothing but time—and his own mind.
He leaned back slowly, fingers interlaced, elbows resting on the armrests of the chair.
His gaze tilted upward, unfocused, fixed somewhere between the ceiling beams and memory.
House Armani's return…
The words echoed like a struck bell.
It wouldn't take long.
The news would spread the way blood spreads through water—slow at first, then suddenly everywhere.
Merchants would whisper. Nobles would pretend ignorance while listening intently.
The poor would repeat distorted versions in alleyways, each retelling sharpening the blade.
Solina and I will be dragged into the spotlight eventually.
Wolf exhaled quietly through his nose.
The shallots were already dipped in oil.
Once heated, there would be no way to stop them from burning.
"At best… two weeks," he murmured to the empty room, his voice low, even.
In that window, he would begin releasing fragments of truth—carefully measured, deliberately incomplete.
A failed experiment. An accident .Tragedy without malice.
Enough to stir sympathy. Enough to fracture certainty.
The rest—
He would leave to the rebels,terrorists,infiltrators.
Chaos was more convincing when it didn't wear your face.
Wolf rose from the chair and began pacing slowly across the study, boots soundless against the rug. His fingers brushed the spines of books as he passed.
"There are things beyond my control," he thought calmly. "And pretending otherwise is how men die early."
Waiting too long would be dangerous.
Safety lay not in caution—but in momentum.
The plan was still his.
Every thread had been tied by his hands.
And yet—
He felt it.
The shift.
Inertia was bound to outweigh willpower.
He had seen it before—countless times, across eras and worlds.
Once events began to move, they gained mass.
Speed. Gravity.
Even the most meticulous architect could no longer halt them—only redirect.
Which meant—
He would have to adjust daily continuously and relentlessly.
Wolf stopped near the window, looking out at the distant city lights flickering beyond the glass.
"If a city burns," he thought evenly, "I'll use the flames to intimidate my enemies."
If internal war erupted—
He would weaponize the deaths.
Out of cruelty and necessity.
Corpses made excellent leverage.
This conflict could not be allowed to drag on.
Three months.
That was the limit.
Beyond that, instability would crystallize into belief.
And when conflict hardened into ideology—
Negotiation ceased to exist.
Ideologies did not compromise. They erased.
One house would have to fall.
A sacrifice.
A demonstration.
The world needed to see that even giants could bleed—could collapse—could die. Only then would public trust in the old system fracture enough to make space for something new.
For Solina.
For House Armani restored—not as a relic, but as a reality.
Wolf's reflection stared back at him in the darkened windowpane.
Calm. Focused. Unforgiving.
"In the final phase," he acknowledged silently, "I won't be able to control every variable."
But that had never been required.
Direction was enough.
He closed his eyes briefly.
And there it was—
The only weakness he could not eliminate.
An insider.
Someone who could see the entire board the same way he did.
Not a pawn. Not a knight but another player.
An insider could redirect the flow against him.
Wolf inhaled deeply, chest rising, then released the breath slowly, deliberately.
The weight remained—but it no longer slowed him.
He turned from the window and straightened. Now that he had secured everything he could—
It was time to move forward.
A sly smile curved across his lips.
"I have my role to play," he murmured softly.