Chapter 64: 64

Hiding in the Imperial Palace, Michelle was surprised when Cold Flame contacted her, saying that the delegation split into thirteen parts, and that only one was heading into the palace. The others spread out around the palace. Part of the delegation which was going into the palace was the old man and Garric. So Michelle quickly went to Mare and Snow and made a quick adjustment to her plans.

Snow and Mare would leave the palace and each track a group left behind while Michelle remained by the little Emperor’s side using the identity of Michael Grayson. Mare and Snow left, and after quickly changing her clothes and putting on her disguise mask, Michelle went to prepare the little Emperor for the visit. David Elether also seemed to be aware of the visit as he didn’t ask anything and just went into the throne room. He wasn’t worried that the delegation from the lower realm would recognize him.

Michelle also summoned a few Spirit Clones and spread them out to watch the remaining nine groups which didn’t have anyone to watch them just yet. With Michelle’s cultivation being just below the Spirit rank, she could keep the clones around for over two days.

Just as Michelle sent her clones away, a maid entered. “Your Majesty, some guests requested audience,” she bowed her head down low as she spoke.

The little Emperor glanced at Michelle, a bit surprised that she was right when she told him that someone would come. “Lead them in!” he told the maid, and she quickly left. A moment later, she reappeared with Garric and the group from the lower realm behind her.

Garric bowed his head, and the group followed to keep up some courtesy, but even the little Emperor could see their hypocrisy and arrogance. It was clear they disregarded him. The Emperor of the only empire in the Land of Exile was nothing in their eyes. They were so respectful and kept up basic courtesy because their cultivation was suppressed, and because they didn’t know the origins of Michael Grayson, the little Emperor’s teacher, whom they guessed to be from the middle realm.

Michelle could see right through them, and she smiled a bit. Since the moment they entered, she noticed that Garric’s back was straight. That meant he gave the Soul Seeking Pendants to someone. And no one from the group in front of her seemed like he had it, so it had to be with the people stationed outside the palace.

The old man started speaking with the little Emperor, but Michelle didn’t pay much attention as it was clear that the old man was just trying to distract the little Emperor, David and her, so they wouldn’t notice what was going on outside.

Constantly, Michelle received news from her Spirit Clones and her three beasts about the movements of the groups, and when she put it together in her head, the groups were surrounding the castle. Five groups surrounded the palace walls, five infiltrated the palace and formed a circle in gardens surrounding the palace, and the last two groups blocked the two main gates. The smaller gates were left alone. So it seemed they weren’t planning on blocking off the palace. It was more like a formation.

As the old man was talking, Michelle suddenly interrupted him. “Sir, with your age you should be quite knowledgeable about some things… Do you know the meaning of a pentagram in a pentagram with two poles?” she asked with a smile, her purple eyes narrowing coldly.

At first, the old man got angry that he was interrupted, and being called old wasn’t really comfortable too, but when he heard Michelle’s words, he froze and his face went pale. Michael Grayson was clearly standing there the whole time, so how could he know about the formation his subordinates were setting up in and around the palace? “Young Lord, I’ve never studied pentagrams, so I can’t help you,” the old man finally said after a while of silence.

Hearing that, Michelle wanted to smile, but instead, she sighed. “I see… I was hoping you would know about it something more. You see, a friend of mine went into a fight with his subordinates and he stationed them in groups like that, and I just couldn’t understand why he did it…” When her words fell, the old man felt like his stomach was being squeezed. Did Michael Grayson know about the twelve Soul Seeking Pendants?

But the old man wasn’t the only one who was surprised. David Elether glanced at Michelle briefly. He was well aware of the Sloan family’s corruption and their cooperation with the lower realm’s Sloan family, but he didn’t know anything about the formation Michelle was asking the old man about. His subordinates probably discovered it already, but as he was in the palace, they couldn’t inform him about him. But unlike Michelle, he knew who the people from the lower realm were and what they were planning to do with the Soul Seeking pendants.

The Land of Exile was, like the name suggested, a place in the lower realm where families’ outcasts were sent as punishment, so if a family name existed in the Land of Exile, it would exist in the lower realm too unless the family wasn’t annihilated. The people in the Land of Exile would have their families there and if a family was in the Land of Exile for generations, they would basically be a clan. A case like that was the Beltrez family. They had many branches and their members were up to hundreds.

The Sloan family was a family which was exiled just recently. The one who got sent there was Malrik Sloan, and he got married there and had a child, Garric. So unlike the Beltrez family, the Sloan family in the Land of Exile was small. But. The Beltrez family didn’t even remember the people who exiled them while the Sloan family was somehow in contact with them. Which was proof that Malrik Sloan wasn’t really exiled but sent down to the Land of Exile to prepare for when the others from the Sloan family came to finish their plans. And what the Sloan family was planning was nasty.

Malrik Sloan was a rare cultivation trash in the lower realm, so when he was still there, he was tasked with filling up the Soul Seeking Pendants with souls of weak cultivators who had barely broken through the Spirit Rank. Whenhe had enough souls, he was sent down and slowly, in small groups, the bodies of the people whose souls were trapped in the pendants were brought down to Malrik and Garric’s mansions. For a while, they acted as servants while Garric took over his father’s work and started preparing the Soul Seeking Pentants.

He hid them in the artificial lake which had more spirit energy than other places and left them there for a few years. He was planning to leave them for three more years, but when Michelle, as Michael Grayson, appeared in his office, he got scared that the plans could get messed up, so he contacted the lower realm, and they sent down enough people to make the formation and start it.

But for that, they needed to distract the ruler of the empire, the little Emperor and his Prince Regent. But the little Emperor’s teacher seemed to be aware of everything happening around the whole palace, even though he was with them the whole time.

The old man stared at Michelle warily, wondering how much she knew. It was clear she wasn’t planning on letting him succeed, but the old man also wasn’t willing to give up the years of hard work he had put into preparing the formation. He was greedy, and the vision of the power he could gain through the formation blinded his mind.

For a while more, the old man stayed with his group in the palace before he left with a triumphant smile, thinking that all was well, and that the formation was in place already. He thought so because after asking the one question about a pentagram in pentagram with two poles, Michale Grayson didn’t say a word. The old man thought that Michael Grayson didn’t really know what was going on, and the question was just a shot in the dark. Maybe the little Emperor’s teacher knew a part about their formation, but not much, so he didn’t try to stop them.

But the old man’s guess couldn’t be more wrong. Michelle knew exactly what was going on once she realized the shape of the formation. She knew here and there about arrays and formations, and she didn’t need anyone to explain to her that a formation with two pentagrams was a sacrificial array, and that a formation with two poles was a large scale array. So a formation with two pentagrams and two poles was a large scale sacrificial array. That made her smile.

Twelve pendants, twelve groups and twelve thousand souls. All that together made a perfect sacrificial array to gain power. Power in exchange for souls and those living in the palace and around it. A nasty array which basically already took twelve thousand lives and would take at least a few thousand more. All the servants, knights and officials going in and out of the palace, and all the richer common folk which lived surrounding the palace. If the array was activated, they would all die, not even knowing how.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep