Chapter 76
Most of the members of the Golden Merchant Guild were injured, but to varying degrees.
As soon as this incident occurred, other chambers of commerce that had been suppressed for a long time immediately pounced on it like wolves.
Veris didn't quite remember how many people Hilda had under her command, and he was taken aback when Hilda reported back while rubbing her hands together.
"You sent...more than fifty people?"
It wasn't five people.
There are more than fifty people.
Hilda nodded vigorously: "I will certainly not let His Holiness the Pope down. I will definitely keep all the merchants under my control. It's just a pity that I can't trust the remaining students too much." As she spoke, her tone was full of regret.
Veris: "..."
How many students did Hill actually take in?
He took a slight breath, told Hilda to continue with her work, and after she left, he continued to look down at the documents on the table.
After watching for only a short while, someone else came in without knocking. Veris raised his eyes and saw that it was Sylvain.
“Didn’t you go to write your graduation summary?” Veris asked, looking at him.
Sylvain replied frankly, "I can't."
Veris choked, looking at Sylvain with an indescribable expression. The man walked in openly and stood on the other side of the desk.
He wanted to ask if those people at the Royal Academy hadn't taught it, but then he suddenly remembered that this was the responsibility of the direct tutor, and Sylvain's direct tutor was... him.
That is indeed his problem.
Veris: "Didn't you already start writing? The college provides case studies from past graduates; you should have seen them."
His former students also copied other people's work, and he approved of their graduation anyway.
It's one thing to let them run wild normally, but if he prevents them from graduating, then he's a complete scoundrel.
Upon hearing his words, Sylvain lowered his gaze, his dark green eyes reflecting his face, and the corners of his mouth were noticeably drooping. Verish immediately sensed something was wrong.
"If you don't want to teach me, then forget it."
Veris immediately stood up and pulled him to her side: "I was just kidding, how could I not want to? I'd love to."
Thinking of the graduation summary that would be tens of thousands of words long, Veris took a deep breath, let Sylvain sit in his seat, and then turned around and teleported back to his bedroom—he needed to find some materials from who-knows-how-many years ago.
Veris kept his personal belongings only in his bedroom, while other items suitable for public use were stored in the storeroom or library.
He looked at his pile of organized belongings and knew without a doubt that it was Sylvain who had done it. Sylvain used to be very serious, and the organized items were categorized by year. If he didn't know the year, he would send a letter back to Albion to ask him.
But some things are better stored together, such as the graduation summaries that his past students handed him.
Veris thought for a moment, then rummaged through several boxes before finally finding a thick stack of documents wrapped in a brown leather bag.
He simply knelt on the carpet and opened the leather bags one by one. The one in his hand was just something he grabbed at random. Veris pulled out a stack of papers from inside, paused for a moment, and then looked at the names marked on the leather bags.
...Garcia Lotheran.
Did this guy just give him fifty nonsensical talismans back then?!
He glanced at the densely packed paper without looking closely, set it aside, and then stamped his personal seal on the certificate that Garcia had brought.
Veris stared at the crumpled paper in his hand and fell silent.
[Student Garcia entered the Royal Capital Academy in xxx year and was fortunate enough to become a disciple of Lord Orlando, studying under him... [May 7th, xxx year] This morning I ate fifteen meat patties and two bottles of milk, but I'm still very hungry...]
Garcia meticulously recorded his wonderful day, with no gaps between the lines, making it look densely packed.
Veris silently took out a second copy, this time with the name Uther on it.
Upon opening it, there was a stack of paper of excellent quality for the time. Uther had been very careful when writing on it. The handwriting on the paper was neat. He began by introducing himself and praising his mentor, followed by his research achievements and competition results at the Royal Academy over the past four years.
For example, it won first place in the Royal Capital Academy's competition for four consecutive years.
He's a decent person.
Veris was finally somewhat relieved.
However, he quickly put Uther's aside and moved on to the next bag.
If Sylvain saw that it was Uther's graduation summary, he'd probably be unhappy again.
Veris tore open half of the dozens of bags before finding a decent, fairly standard graduation summary. The student had long since passed away; he remembered him as a diligent and hardworking mage who, unfortunately, never reached the threshold of a ninth-tier mage in his entire life.
He stood up, looked at the papers scattered all over the floor, and hesitated for a moment.
Never mind, I'll clean it up when I get back.
He quickly put the messy floor out of his mind, picked up the leather bag, and returned to his study.
Sylvain was still there, but there were other people in the study.
The two stood facing each other, looking somewhat tense. Uther's thick bangs covered the upper half of his face, making it impossible to see what emotion was in his eyes, but his tightly pursed lips revealed his displeasure.
Uther was holding a stack of bound books. Veris came in from outside. He had chosen a slightly off-center teleportation point, right outside the door, but it was still close enough. When he came in, he glanced at the books in Uther's hand. They were a summary of the Execution Division's cases for the month.
Upon seeing Veris, the coldness in Sylvain's eyes vanished instantly, while Uther was also taken aback, reverting to his usual docile, mushroom-like demeanor.
"What's wrong?" Veris walked over, carrying the somewhat worn leather bag, past Uther, and placed the bag on the desk.
He glanced at Uther, as if only then realizing what this man had come for, and nodded: "Put it on my desk, I'll take a look."
Uther silently placed the booklet on the table, then greeted Veris in a low voice. There was nothing more to say, and he quietly left.
Only Veris and Sylvain remained in the study. The Pope glanced at the door, and it closed automatically.
Sylvain's eyes lit up.
Then he watched as Veris pushed the leather bag in front of him and said, "Take this and study it. I need to get back to work."
Sylvain looked down. He didn't recognize the name on the bag, and it was from a long time ago. He pursed his lips, silently picked up the bag, and walked to the other side, to the small desk that Veris had specially set up in his early years.
Veris: "..."
What exactly is this person disappointed about?
He closed the door simply because he didn't like it open.
Veris laughed in exasperation, turning to look at Sylvain sitting down over there: "What were you doing just now, like you were about to fight?"
Sylvain looked up, but his eyes were still down: "I told him to put his things on the table, and he asked me why I was sitting in your seat."
In Uther's view, no matter how much Veris doted on Sylvain, Sylvain should not be allowed to sit in a position that does not belong to him; this would be a desecration of the Pope.
As for Sylvain... he did it purely on purpose.
They usually keep a low profile, but once they get a chance, they'll show off like crazy.
Did Veris know? Of course he knew, but he didn't stop him. After all, it wasn't something that couldn't be said. Let others think what they want. If he wanted to save face, he could just say that Sylvain was his holy son and that it was okay to pamper him.
He is a close friend, an adopted son, a holy son, an heir, and a lover.
Oh, still a student.
His thoughts drifted for a moment, and in the end he didn't say anything, only saying, "You shouldn't keep provoking Uther, he's an honest kid."
"……oh."
After giving Sylvain a perfunctory rebuke, Veris lowered his head and began flipping through the booklet. The Execution Division was of great importance, and he had reviewed the monthly case summaries since its establishment, even during his time in Albion.
The capital of Lortheran has two prisons: the Royal Prison and the Execution Chamber.
The Executioners had special privileges, generally handling cases related to the Church, but they also had the power to deal with the royal family.
It also served as a constraint on the royal family, greatly reducing their misconduct. In fact, the initial establishment of the Execution Chamber by Veris was also intended to limit the royal family.
Later, we also dealt with cases related to the church, such as pastors and priests breaking the law, or ordinary believers harming pastors and priests. These were all normal cases.
Some of the unusual cases came in all shapes and sizes.
Veris vividly remembers a major case that landed on his desk. Instead of being summarized monthly, it was sent to his small town at the time via express courier.
A cardinal in a certain district had an affair with another man's wife, and they even had a child, who has now grown up.
That wasn't all; the child then fell in love with the wife's child from her first marriage, and the two young people wanted to get married.
The child was born deformed and twisted, and the couple realized something was wrong.
So a commotion broke out, and the investigation went back to many years ago.
However, the cardinal also had his own difficulties. Back then, he and his wife were deeply in love, but he was just a lowly priest at the time. His wife was forced by her family to marry a local nobleman, and the two were forcibly separated. In reality, however, they remained connected, and the cardinal willingly became his wife's lover.
Then he denounced his wife's first wife, the nobleman, who had murdered his father.
The nobleman demanded the execution of the cardinal, and the two children cried and begged the Pope to grant them a healthy child. The lady, with tears in her eyes, stabbed the nobleman to death one night, willing to bear all the punishment.
The cardinal was devastated. After leaving the church, he and his wife committed suicide as ordinary citizens.
After reading the case, Veris was bewildered for a long time. So why did the Execution Department send this case, in which almost no one survived, to him by express urgency?
What's the point of a judgment? Everyone's dead, just distribute the assets.
Turning to the next page, Veris fell silent.
The two survivors hope that the Pope can grant them a healthy child.
The archbishop who was in charge of the execution chamber at the time looked distressed in his words, saying that the two young men had almost cried their eyes out and were truly pitiful.
Veris: "..."
He really wanted to know where he could get a healthy child.
He had initially wondered why the chances of a child born from a half-sibling being deformed were not high, but upon further investigation, he discovered that the nobleman and the cardinal were cousins.
In the end, Veris replied, telling the two young men to take care of their household affairs and to go to church to pray every day. He said that if the God of Love appreciated their sincerity, he might grant them a healthy child.
At this point, Veris still thought the matter was over.
More than two years later, the archbishop in charge of the penal court sent him a letter from the unfortunate couple, full of gratitude, saying that the Pope had taken pity on them and had actually given them a healthy child.
Veris didn't think he was that great; he was just trying to comfort the two young men.
Was it just good luck?
The couple said that after having this child, they would not have any more children.
Veris had a strange feeling and had people keep a close eye on the child's development. Every year, reports were presented to him; the child was healthy and possessed astonishing magical talent.
He had a vague feeling that something was wrong, so he went through the case file again and read it more than a dozen times. The more he read it, the more familiar it felt.
Finally, he understood where this familiar feeling came from.
When he was a child, his mother goddess loved to tell him these strange and wonderful stories.
And the god of love himself also loved these stories very much, and was even deeply moved.
Veris roughly understood something, and he was greatly shocked. For a long time afterward, he frantically searched for any trace of the Mother Goddess's existence, but to no avail.
The child whom the Pope specifically ordered to be examined was born into a loving family, but the child developed an eccentric personality, becoming gloomy and inarticulate.
Nevertheless, his parents didn't think much of it; their son was healthy and even possessed legendary magical talent, which already made them extremely grateful.
When the child reached the appropriate age, he entered the local church and began taking magic lessons.
After entering the Royal Academy, Veris, with a strange feeling, accepted the archbishop's request to take this future ninth-tier archmage as his student.
At that time, he had been planning Sylvain's reincarnation for a long time.
But if we really look into it, what prompted him to make up his mind was the sudden appearance of the will of the god of love, even if it was fleeting.
The child's name was Uther. He was silent and gloomy, with impeccable talent. After completing his studies at the Royal Academy, he entered the High Papacy. He first studied under the Archbishop who had suggested that Veris take Uther as a student, and then served as the Archbishop. As time passed, Uther's magic rating broke through to the ninth rank. When he did not make much progress in researching reconstruction magic and revising magic books, Veris allowed him to begin to get involved in the affairs of the Execution Division.
Meanwhile, Veris was already in Albion, happily indulging in raising his best friend's teenage version of the game.
Veris finished reading the booklet in his hand, picked up a piece of paper, quickly wrote dozens of lines, then tucked the paper into the booklet and set it aside.
He glanced at Sylvain at the small desk, who was intently studying the graduation summaries, but had divided them into two piles beside him.
Veris walked over, looked at them for a while, and said speechlessly, "Why are you only looking at these few?"
Sylvain: "Those aren't anything to see."
The few sheets he held in his hand were all related to Veris, clearly showing that this student greatly admired Veris. At that time, Veris was still very active, so there were many more things recorded there than later. Sylvain was engrossed in reading them.
As for those matters that only concerned the students themselves, Sylvain glanced at them and set them aside.
“What’s so interesting about these?” Veris muttered. “You might as well just ask me.”
Sylvain put down the old paper in his hand, looked up at the person standing beside him, and said softly, "I'm afraid you'll find me annoying."
How could he not want to know? His Veris had lived alone in this world for three hundred years, three hundred years in which he was not involved. Every day, every second, he wanted to know what Veris had done and what he had thought.
However, three hundred years is too long; even for gods, three hundred years is not a small amount of time.
Sylvain could only desperately search through the countless books in the Grand Papal Library to capture the figure he cherished in those magnificent historical events.
He couldn't bear to give it up, he couldn't look away.
History books don't record everything. They record thrilling or glorious events in serious writing, but they don't leave a single word about the Pope's thoughts.
All the information will eventually be exhausted. After Sylvain regained his memory, he spent his time either by Veris's side or in the library, where he handled official business and, in his spare time, he would peruse the books that recorded Veris's life.
Sylvain was always a man of few words, ever since the first day Veris met him.
He was silent and reserved, like the tower that Veris had seen in Hell, standing silently for thousands of years. Even when his lover did not look back at him, he still quietly watched over his lover.
Beneath his silent exterior, his soul still surged.
Veris gently took his hand, looked down at him, and for a moment didn't know what to say.
He opened his lips, but only managed to utter one sentence: "It's all in the past."
Whether good or bad, it's all just history being rewritten, and for Veris, looking back is meaningless.
However, he quickly added, "Those days without you are meaningless to recall."
It wasn't that he didn't want to talk about it, but he genuinely felt that those times were unremarkable.
One by one, his contemporaries died, and this land went through several upheavals. Those who worked with him became his companions' sons, grandsons, great-grandsons... By the time it became unknown how many generations later, they were filled with fear and trepidation, and had lost all trace of their ancestors' qualities. Even their features had been worn away by the long passage of time, making them completely unlike their ancestors.
Let's make him happy now.
Thinking of this, Veris relaxed his brows and said, "Just write whatever you want. Anyway, my students' graduation summaries are not made public. Once you hand them in to me, I'll keep them safe and won't report them to the academy."
"I only discovered that Garcia was writing it all in his diary."
That being said, Sylvain was not so willing to be perfunctory, but he was different from others. He had only been at the Royal Academy for a little over a year and didn't have much to write about.
Veris watched as he frowned and listed a list of competition honors and research achievements, similar to those of other students—but not many. Sylvain had only participated in one year-end assessment and one graduation assessment, winning first place without any suspense. As for the rest of his research achievements, he was somewhat at a loss.
Magic is as easy as drinking water for a demon. He is a god who controls the elements of magic, and like Veris, he can tear through space with a wave of his hand to develop research projects such as the Royal Academy.
However, it wasn't so easy for Sylvain in the past.
This little bit of stuff was written in no time.
Sylvain was inevitably somewhat frustrated.
Veris chuckled and said, "You've hardly ever spent any time at the Royal Academy. Aside from attending classes, you've been going to the Grand Vatican and then using the teleportation array to run back to Albion."
"Your spatial magic wasn't fully developed back then, was it? Even though I gave you a lot of notes, why did you always end up in Albion?" Veris had warned him many times back then, but Sylvain would just nod and continue running towards Albion.
"Won't it teleport you to another place?" Although he had set up a spatial teleportation node in the attic, which was much easier than spatial teleportation without a node, it was still relatively easy.
Sylvain blinked: "Yes, many times, I teleported back myself after my magic was restored."
Sylvain's visits to Albion were very unpredictable at that time. Sometimes Veris was performing in the tavern, sometimes he was writing new poems in the attic, and sometimes he was sleeping.
At first, it took many attempts to successfully teleport to Albion.
However, Sylvain gradually became more skilled and no longer needed to teleport to some remote mountain forest and then wait for his magic to recover before teleporting again.
Veris was silent for a moment, then hissed softly, "Why don't you say a word to me?"
He could have easily commissioned a special teleportation scroll for Sylvain, so that Sylvain wouldn't have to stand in the desolate wilderness dressed in his magnificent holy robes, which seemed rather pathetic.
Sylvain pointed to his temple: "He's not very bright."
"He" refers, of course, to the reincarnated Sylvain who has no memory of the past.
"Sometimes I feel that, apart from not liking to talk, you guys are really different."
Sylvain paused for a moment before saying, "It's the same."
The reincarnation simply means that he hasn't learned to completely hide his emotions yet, and some of the negative aspects of his personality have been amplified: jealousy, meanness, cold-bloodedness, indifference, and paranoia. Even if he is dressed in a holy white robe, the decay within him is indelible.
Veris wanted him to be a holy son revered by all, so he would naturally become compassionate and merciful.
After all, no matter what he thinks, he hasn't done anything wrong, so who can criticize him?
Veris glanced at him and silently thought to himself: This guy is just awkward.
However, seeing that he seemed both awkward and happy, Veris just let him be.
Just as he was about to reply, a pale gold outline of a paper appeared in front of him. Veris frowned slightly as he watched the paper quickly solidify, and the writing on it became clearly visible.
[In the northern Demon King's Forest, demons have invaded and moved south, harassing the Daventry border. Phoenix County is in rebellion, and neighboring Angar County is mobilizing its guards. The situation is unclear.]
To the north of the Kingdom of Lortheran lies two counties, to the west is Salem County, and to the east is Angar County. Angar is a small territory. Further east is Daventry, which borders most of the eastern border of the Kingdom of Lortheran, and together with Salem, it surrounds Angar.
The narrowest point in Angar County is only the distance from the north gate to the south gate of the capital city of Lortheran.
Angara's northern edge borders Phoenix County entirely, unlike Daventry which borders the Demon Forest.
The events involving the Lortheran royal family, which lasted for nearly two months, finally reached the northern counties with the first part of the news.
Upon hearing that the king was going to die, these people immediately rose up in excitement and started an army.
Their spies rushed to the capital, only telling them that the king was dying, that the royal family was killing each other, and that the royal court was in turmoil, but not that a new king was about to ascend the throne and was currently purging the court officials.
Almost as soon as Phoenix County raised its flag, the church there used its highest authority to send a message directly to Veris.
However, after reading it, Veris didn't say anything. He just took a piece of paper from Sylvain's table. Sylvain handed him a pen and watched him quickly write down the message. Then he turned the paper over and sketched out the teleportation array.
The spatial teleportation array is complex in structure, and many of the incantations are obscure and unheard of by modern magicians.
However, the magic circle inscribed by Veris was quite simple, consisting of only a dozen or so incantations.
It wasn't that he didn't want to teach it to other magicians; it was a special incantation used by the gods back then, and without a massive amount of magical power, the magic circle simply couldn't be activated.
The paper was quickly engulfed by a pale golden light.
"The demons are causing chaos... Has Vesper gone mad?"
Veris pondered for a moment, then muttered to himself.
The demon king Vesper has appeared in the poems sung by Veris many times over the years, portraying himself as a tyrant who loves but cannot have and then forcibly takes what he desires.
—Extraordinarily popular.
For hundreds of years, it has alternated between being sealed away and causing chaos. Every time it comes out to cause trouble, it is to pave the way for the hero's success.
However, the first time he was sealed away was because he was severely beaten by Lortheran.
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Author's note: This Sylvain is so cute! [hugs]
I'm not feeling well today, getting really nauseous from my period, so that's all I wrote. I'll see if I can add another 2k tonight, otherwise see you all tomorrow [shy].
Second update: 2k has been added, so those who have already purchased don't need to buy again.
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