Noah followed two steps behind Daisy, matching her pace without being told to.

She didn’t look back for the first minute. Then, without breaking stride, she spoke over her shoulder.

“During the investigation, you will remain silent unless directly addressed. You will not act unless I give the order. Is that understood?”

“Yes,” Noah said flatly.

In his head, he turned the instruction over and found it very agreeable.

If someone put a knife to her throat, he would wait for the order before even trying to save her.

If something knocked her off her feet, he would stand and watch until she told him otherwise.

He found himself almost hoping the merchant quarter had something worth meeting, something fast and decisive and sufficiently motivated.

If she survived, the fault would be placed on her for giving him an absolute order that he couldn’t disobey due to the absolute compulsion.

And if she died, that was even more good news.

He kept his face perfectly blank, even though he was grinning inwardly.

They descended through a back corridor, which he noticed that the number of people they passed by gradually decreased as they moved away from the palace’s main passageways, until they came out through a narrow rear entrance into a small courtyard where a carriage waited.

It was enchanted and unremarkable in appearance, with no horse at the front and no driver on the board.

Daisy climbed in, and Noah followed.

The door closed, and without any obvious instruction from anyone, the carriage moved.

The exit they used was narrow and set into the outer wall of the palace at an angle that made it easy to miss if you didn’t know it was there.

The traffic moving through it was unhurried but moved with purpose.

They were mostly kitchen staff carrying empty crates back from the morning market and laundry workers with bundles balanced on their shoulders.

Nobody looked at the unmarked carriage twice. It seemed like the guards stationed here were already in the know, and Daisy’s status wasn’t ordinary.

Noah watched the wall pass by the window of the carriage and felt the moment they cleared it.

It wasn’t as dramatic as one would expect. There was no sound and no visible change in the air, but the pressure that had been sitting at the edge of his awareness since he’d first regained access to his mana simply lifted, like a hand removing itself from the back of his neck.

He kept his face blank, preventing the smile he was feeling from forming.

Of course, he knew what had just happened.

He could leave.

Right now, if he chose to, he could teleport away and begin building his strength for what he needed.

He glanced up at Daisy who was seating opposite him. She was reading the document again, her eyes moving line by line with the focused expression of someone building a picture from details.

He turned back to the window.

Not yet.

He still didn’t know enough. He knew Edric’s immediate assignment, which told him where he was being pointed, but not the wider shape of what Edric was building.

If he left now, blind, he would be moving through a capital city that was clearly in the middle of something significant without understanding what it was or how it connected to the people he intended to settle accounts with eventually.

That was the kind of ignorance that got you killed or outmaneuvered, and he had been outmaneuvered enough times already.

He would learn what he needed. Then he would go.

The carriage moved through the streets and Noah watched the city through the window.

The people were wrong.

Not obviously, not in a way that would have registered from a distance.

They were dressed normally, conducting their business, moving between stalls and doorways and side streets the way people in any city did.

But the way they moved had changed. Eyes that should have been tracking goods and faces were darting sideways instead, checking the person beside them, the person across the street, and especially the stranger standing at the corner who had been there a little too long.

Nobody held eye contact, and nobody lingered anywhere. More tellingly, there were no kids playing on the streets.

The city felt like a room in which everyone was waiting for someone else to move first.

Noah breathed in slowly and felt it more directly than he could see it.

For every ordinary person he sensed, there was another carrying something else beneath the surface. Abyssal energy.

Somebody had skyrocketed the population of hybrids in the capital city. Lady in Dark.

He immediately understood what most didn’t know. What they’d ignored while focused on the present danger.

All mages carried negligible abyssal energy. The beasts bonded to them existed in diluted form, their essence distributed through a human framework that contained it.

Thousands of mages in a city changed nothing about the barrier between reality and the abyss.

But hybrids were different. Demons were different. They carried the full weight of abyssal energy in forms that reality was not designed to hold indefinitely.

Enough of them in one place, enough of that energy saturating the same stretch of the physical world, and the lining between what was here and what was beneath would begin to thin.

And when the lining consistently wore out, it would tear. And abyssal creatures would begin to pour into reality without the use of a monolith.

Noah leaned back from the window.

He didn’t care about Camelot. He couldn’t care less if it was destroyed. He’d made his peace with that a long time ago.

But Lady in Dark had made these hybrids, which made them her tools, and he had a thorough and well-established hatred of Lady in Dark and everything connected to her.

Whatever the cost, he would dismantle what she had built. Every piece of it.

He blinked.

The carriage had turned.

He checked the street outside and recognized the architecture.

This wasn’t the merchant quarter. This was the residential quarter.

He thought about it for a moment, then understood. Daisy wasn’t starting her investigation with the scene of the disappearances.

She was starting with the people left behind, the families, the households, the ones who had last seen the missing merchants before they vanished.

She wanted context before she wanted evidence.

His lips twitched in amusement.

‘That’s interesting.’

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep