Chapter 931 — Reminder

After hearing the report from Dailan, the head maid, the grim, somber expression on Luo Yan's face seemed to darken even further than usual, but he said nothing—only replied mildly, "Understood. Thank you for your trouble. You may go."

Dailan nodded, gracefully retreating half a step, and her figure gradually dissolved into a field of refracted light.

"Father," Matilda could not help looking at her father, "the intelligence Dailan mentioned… is it all reliable?"

"Dailan does not make mistakes in matters like this—unless the War God's Church has woven a net wide enough to blind every eye of the royal house and deceive the wanderers as well," Luo Yan said in an even tone.

"…So the War God's Church really has run into serious trouble, and Malm Dunitt is deliberately keeping us in the dark…" Matilda's voice carried a complicated note, and her disheartenment was plain to hear. "The entire Great Cathedral is keeping us in the dark…"

"Before Malm was your elder and my friend, he was first the Pope of the War God. So before he was loyal to the royal house or loyal to a friend, he was first loyal to his own deity," Luo Yan said, still speaking calmly, as though he had foreseen all of this long ago. "Any devout believer would do the same… When divine authority and royal authority coexist and their interests diverge, this is the inevitable outcome."

Matilda sensed a deeper meaning in her father's words, but before she could ask, she heard him suddenly bring up something else: "You haven't shown your face at the council yet, have you?"

"Not yet," Matilda said, the day's remaining schedule surfacing in her mind, along with the several bills awaiting her presence at the council. She nodded. "I was just about to head over."

"Go early—reserve is the dignity of the royal house; lateness is not."

Matilda glanced at her father, said nothing, and merely bowed and stepped back. "…Yes, Father."

The garden fell quiet again. Matilda's presence receded into the distance, and beneath the orchid pines only Luo Yan Augustus remained, standing in silence. The Typhon ruler lowered his head and looked at the flowerbed before him—it was not thriving. Though the rare and precious plants were doing all they could to spread their branches and blossoms, the signs of poor growth were still plainly visible upon them.

"Dailan," Luo Yan said suddenly to the empty air beside him, "what do you make of Matilda, this child of mine?"

Amid a faint fluctuation of magic, the figure of the black-haired maid Dailan emerged without a sound. She had not gone far at all—only some consummate mastery of presence control had made it seem she had left the garden, deceiving even the keen senses of Matilda.

The head maid lowered her head slightly and said with deference, "It is not my place to comment on Your Majesty's offspring."

"How did you come to learn that human hypocrisy too?" Luo Yan raised an eyebrow slightly, a half-smile on his face. "This is no public occasion, and you watched Matilda grow up with your own eyes."

The black-haired maid was silent for less than two seconds before she spoke. "…As a human, Matilda is exceptionally gifted, brilliant of mind, with a sharpness beyond her years, and she takes readily to the novelties that have appeared in recent years. Her influence among the empire's lower and middle nobility and the newly risen magnates is considerable as well—but she has not kept the conservatives firmly in hand. In that respect, she is plainly not your equal in finesse."

"The common failing of the young—she is not good at hiding her inclinations," Luo Yan nodded. "The fault is partly mine. I devoted too much attention to governing the realm and building my own order that I failed to raise Matilda and Hadrien well enough. If not for the diligence of the two children themselves, their precious gifts would have gone to waste."

"'Raising' does not bring a human to full maturity. Where experience is concerned, the individual must draw the lessons and grasp them alone," Dailan said bluntly. "You had not received adequate training either before you became emperor, and yet the facts prove you far surpass those carefully 'manufactured' heirs."

Luo Yan fell silent a moment, then shook his head with a smile. "Only you dare say such things outright."

"It is the answer that best accords with the facts and best serves the interests of the realm," Dailan replied, in a tone soft yet with little emotional fluctuation. "That is precisely why I do not understand the choices made back then by Prince Malik and by Dukes Fabro and Colmanroni."

"Because humans are not machines. We are always full of variables; to keep humans forever rational is itself a vain hope," Luo Yan said with a slight shake of his head. Then he suddenly fixed his gaze on the black-haired maid beside him, his expression turning rather grave. "You will still serve the next sovereign of Typhon, will you not?"

"So long as I am still able to provide service," Dailan said meticulously. "It is the contract set down after the ancestors of the Augustus family took me in and provided the necessary repairs."

"I trust that contract. In this respect you are far more reliable than humans," Luo Yan said with a faint smile, then waved a hand. "Let us set this aside. Tell me the rumors going around the city lately—is there anything worth noting?"

"There is nothing noteworthy among the common folk, but since two days ago some unusual reports have come out of the Mages' Association," the black-haired maid said. "The mages say that something has gone wrong when they pray to the Goddess of Magic—their prayers receive no response, as though the Goddess of Magic's last sliver of attention upon the mortal world has vanished as well."

"The Goddess of Magic?" Luo Yan could not help frowning. "Now even the Goddess of Magic is having problems…"

Then he glanced at Dailan. "And what is Lady Windsor Mabel doing?"

"She is gathering the mages' reports and organizing people to run tests—since the mages have never formed a religious body, it is hard to determine who should investigate the anomaly concerning the Goddess of Magic, so in the end she will likely come to you to report the situation."

Luo Yan's expression was grim and grave, and he had already sunk into thought when Dailan's voice trailed off. It was at that moment that yet another new presence stepped into the royal garden.

Dailan looked toward the direction the life-signature had come from, and moments later a senior attendant in a dark blue tunic appeared at the end of the cobblestone path.

"Your Majesty," the senior attendant bowed to Luo Yan Augustus, "a 'dedicated-line dispatch' from the Cecil Empire, bearing the royal seal."

"Dedicated-line dispatch?" Luo Yan's expression turned serious at once. "Bring me the letter."

The dedicated-line dispatch was a new thing that had emerged only after Matilda completed her diplomatic mission to Cecil and the two nations established closer diplomatic ties, built upon modern communications technology. Unlike the old "state letters," which required long transmission and complicated diplomatic formalities to pass between the rulers of two nations—sometimes such "delivery" could take as long as several months—the dedicated-line dispatch was a "letter" transmitted swiftly by means of the Cecil Empire's arcane-net communications and the Typhon Empire's relay tower network.

A "letter" of this kind, sent from its source, was automatically forwarded through layer upon layer of arcane-net nodes or relay tower nodes, requiring only minimal human intervention to reach its destination swiftly. Counting the necessary manual forwarding time in between and the time for transcription and delivery at the far end, the whole process took less than an hour—an almost conceptual leap in efficiency compared with the communications of old.