Chapter 221: The mastermind

A blade was protruding out of Kenji’s chest. It had entered from the his back and exited from the front just besides the heart.

Kenji looked down at it.

His expression was not that of pain. It was something closer to disbelief and bewilderment.

His fingers unclenched.

The Orb in his right palm — the second one, warm with that ancient patient light — rolled free from his grip and fell.

A hand caught it before it reached the floor.

The blade withdrew cleanly. Not a drop was left on the blade’s edge and streams of blood flowed from the open wound.

Kenji’s knees folded. He went down slowly, and came to rest on the golden floor of the ruined throne room with one hand beneath him and one extended outward, the fingers still curved in the shape of the Orb that was no longer there.

Behind him, Yuki’s brother. Renji stood without any expression on his serene face.

His pink eyes were observing the orb without showing any signs that he was holding an extraordinary object in his hand.

His pink hair caught the light of this room and reflected it back. Even after remaining in this hellish place for so long… his hair were smooth as silk.

Holding a normal looking sword in one hand and the orb in the other he stepped forward and stopped in between Ishiki and Kenji.

Then, he looked down at the human bleeding badly at his legs and kicked him in the face. Kenji’s body slumped on the ground in a pool of his own blood.

He dismissed the blade and turned around to look at Ishiki, before smiling. A smile that looked more like a cold grin.

Then he raised his hand that was holding the sword and then suddenly another orb appeared in his palm. Both of the orb’s looked ancient and warm. Pulsing slowly in rhythm.

“What?!” Ishiki’s eyes went wide the moment he looked at both the orbs in Renji’s hands.

How could it be? He was holding one of them.

“But—” Kenji’s voice came from the ground. Wet and strained. he was still conscious. “But he had it. Ishiki had the other Orb in his hand. I saw it. What just— what—”

Renji looked down at him without particular emotion. The pink eyes moved over him the way they moved over everything.

“Look at his hand,” Renji said.

Ishiki and Kenji both looked at Ishiki’s hand as he opened his palm and between his fingers, was a smooth river stone. Rounded at the edges. The kind that existed in riverbeds everywhere in the world and meant absolutely nothing.

The stone fell from his open fingers and hit the floor with a small, entirely ordinary sound.

’Wha… what just happened? How could it be?’

Ishiki held up his open palm. Empty. The stone on the floor beside him.

Kenji stared at it for a long moment.

Something in his face… the last structure that had been holding, the final architecture of a person who had believed himself to be the most prepared person in any given room — came apart.

“When,” Kenji said. It came out barely above a breath.

“For some time… almost a week.” Renji said that as he continued studying the orb’s in his hand.

Ishiki at that moment was entirely flabbergasted. He had learned too much in such short amount of time.

Kenji had always been lying about the person who stabbed the God’s heart being Renji, when in reality it was him and he had one of the orbs all along.

“How? How do you have that orb? Then what did the Dragon had?” Ishiki blurted out in shock.

The pink haired, Renji looked at Ishiki and sized him up. Then he slowly clapped and said. “You two had been pretty good actors.”

At that moment, Ishiki felt as if he had finally woken up from a dream. It felt as through a very thick fog had been lifted from his mind.

Suddenly he was able to see things he had not been able to before. Across to him, just at the side of another pillar in a corner there were two corpses.

They were the corpses of the two men that had first joined the dragon. They were his men and they were dead.

The unidentified blood that Ishiki had found during his battle with the dragon belonged to them.

’Screw it! Screw it! ’

He finally understood that he was fighting while being in an illusion all this time!

He suddenly heard the cold, commanding voice of Renji. “You want to know when I had taken that orb,” He said. “I took it the day dragon arrived in this castle. The day he proclaimed himself to be the Emperor.”

Ishiki’s mind reeled back to his battle and he now found the answer to several of his questions.

The dragon was not holding back… in reality. It no longer had the powers of the Orb and could not heal himself even if he wanted to. The dragon was a human and an awakened as well.

His draconic form must have been the result of some skill or his title. The orb provided him extra strength and healing ability.

“He died fighting you for an empty throne,” Renji said. “I thought that was fitting.”

“You planned all of this?” Ishiki asked, half expecting it to be false.

“Indeed… I planned all of it. I manipulated Kenji from the moment he stepped inside the Inner Ring… I made him see those things about bringing people back to life. I wanted him to bring me the Second orb… I did not care how he did it. But the dragon presented itself to me.”

“I already warned you Ishiki. He has been Corrupted and there is no coming back… Even God’s couldn’t resist the Corruption. So he is no longer a human… just a beast consumed by his desires.”

Ishiki’s mind was still processing the earlier information when it all hit him like a truck.

All this time… he had been a puppet. A puppet to someone else’s plans.

Suddenly, Ishiki saw Renji bringing both the orbs together… they merged without sound. Two spheres of ancient golden light flowing into each other like two drops of water touching, each surrendering its boundary.

The combined radiance expanded outward as a tide and then it moved into Renji.

From his palms inward. Through the skin, through the tissue, through the bone. The golden threads became faintly visible beneath the skin of his hands and forearms, tracing his veins, dispersing through his whole body.

At that moment, time seemed to have stopped.

A single notification flickered in front of everyone’s eyes.

[The New Emperor of Aethelburg has been Chosen – Renji Koyo]

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep