Chapter : 749

The next twenty-four hours were a masterclass in patience for Lloyd. He returned to his clinic and to the quiet, unassuming life of Doctor Zayn. He treated his patients with his usual serene compassion, his hands steady, his voice a soothing balm. He and Sumaiya worked in their now-familiar, comfortable rhythm, their shared purpose a silent, solid thing between them.

To an outside observer, he was a simple healer, wholly absorbed in his noble work. But beneath the calm surface, his mind was a coiled spring of anticipation. Every footstep outside the clinic door, every new patient who entered, he wondered if it was Ken, returning with the intelligence that would either launch or scuttle his entire operation.

Sumaiya noticed the subtle shift in him. He was present, but a part of him was elsewhere. There was a new, razor-sharp edge to his focus, a contained energy that hummed just beneath his skin. She didn’t comment on it. She had learned that the doctor had his own currents, his own deep, hidden tides, and it was not her place to question them. She simply continued her work, her quiet, competent presence a grounding force in the charged atmosphere.

The day bled into night. The last patient shuffled away. They cleaned the clinic, the familiar, mundane tasks a welcome distraction from the tension that filled the air. They shared their simple meal in silence, the unspoken questions hanging between them.

Finally, Sumaiya bid him good night and left, her departure leaving a void in the small room that felt larger than her physical presence. Lloyd was alone again, left with his thoughts and the ticking of the city’s great clock tower, each chime a hammer blow against his patience.

He waited. One hour. Two.

Just as he was beginning to wonder if Ken had failed, if the security around House Qadir was truly impenetrable, there was a faint, almost imperceptible scratch at the clinic’s back door, the one that opened onto a dark, refuse-strewn alley. It was their pre-arranged signal.

Lloyd moved to the door, his heart a steady, slow drum. He unlatched it, and Ken Park slipped inside, a shadow detaching itself from the deeper darkness of the alley. He was as immaculate and composed as ever, but Lloyd could see the faint signs of exhaustion around his eyes. He had been working, and working hard.

Without a word, Ken handed him a thin, cheap-looking ledger, the kind a common merchant might use to track his inventory. Lloyd took it and opened it on his desk under the lamplight.

The ledger was not filled with numbers. It was filled with Ken’s neat, precise script. It was the intelligence report. And it was a masterpiece.

Lloyd’s eyes scanned the pages, his mind absorbing the information with a terrifying speed. Ken’s fledgling network, which consisted of a handful of carefully recruited and generously paid dockworkers, laundresses, and stable-hands who serviced the noble estates, had performed a miracle of espionage.

The report confirmed everything. The Qadir heir, a ten-year-old boy named Tariq, was dying. It had started two months ago, a slow, inexorable decline that had baffled the finest healers in Zakaria. The report listed them by name: five Royal Physicians, two master alchemists, and even a high priest from the central temple. All had failed.

The symptoms were detailed with a clinical precision that made Lloyd’s skin crawl. A persistent low-grade fever, extreme lethargy, muscle wasting, and most alarmingly, a slow, creeping paralysis that had started in his legs and was now spreading to his upper body. The boy was trapped in his own failing body, his mind still sharp and aware. It was a unique and horrifying form of torture.

The report also detailed the family’s desperate, frantic attempts to find a cure. Lord Qadir had spent a fortune, secretly sending envoys to neighboring kingdoms, seeking any healer, any mystic, any charlatan who offered a sliver of hope. He had bankrupted two minor noble families buying fake relics and useless potions.

The final pages of the report were the most critical. Ken’s sources within the Qadir household staff had confirmed the emotional state of the family. Lady Qadir was a ghost, a wraith of grief who never left her son’s bedside. And Lord Timur Qadir, the iron-willed Master of the Royal Armories, the man who commanded armies and built war machines, was a broken man. He was a father watching his only child, the future of his entire lineage, being stolen from him, and he was utterly, completely powerless.

The intelligence was perfect. It was a complete psychological and medical profile of his target. The desperation of House Qadir was not just a rumor; it was a raw, gaping wound.

Chapter : 750

Lloyd closed the ledger, a cold, grim finality settling over him. The target was confirmed. The path was clear. His gambit was no longer a matter of chance; it was a matter of timing.

“Excellent work, Ken,” he said, his voice a low murmur of sincere appreciation. “This is more than I could have hoped for.”

“The network is loyal and efficient,” Ken replied simply. “Your investment was sound.”

“Now, for the next phase,” Lloyd said, his gaze turning to the map of the city he had tacked to the wall. “The story of the weaver’s son, the boy I cured of the ‘wasting sickness.’ I want that story to spread. Not in the slums. I want it to travel upwards. I want it to be a whisper in the kitchens of the noble estates. I want a laundress who works for a lady-in-waiting to hear it from her cousin who sells fish in the lower market. I want the story to feel like an authentic piece of folk magic, a rumor of a miracle worker in the Coil. It cannot be traced back to us. It must feel organic.”

Ken nodded, understanding the delicate art of a targeted information campaign. “It will be a story told over wine and mended clothes. It will reach the right ears within three days.”

“Good,” Lloyd said. “Then we wait. We have baited the hook. Now we simply wait for the great fish to bite.”

He looked at Ken, and for a moment, the cold commander was gone, replaced by the man. “Get some rest, Ken. You have earned it.”

Ken gave a rare, almost imperceptible bow of his head and slipped back out into the night, leaving Lloyd alone with his perfect, terrible plan. The hunt for the Lilith Stones had led him down a dark and winding path, but he was closer than ever to his true goal. He was no longer just reacting to fate; he was actively weaving it, and the tapestry he was creating was one of grand, beautiful, and ruthless ambition.

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The tavern known as ‘The Drowned Rat’ was a festering boil on the armpit of Zakaria’s merchant district. It was a place that existed in a perpetual state of twilight, the grimy, leaded-glass windows so thick with filth that they treated the midday sun as a vague, unwelcome suggestion. The air inside was a physical entity, a thick, choking fog of cheap pipe smoke, stale ale, unwashed bodies, and the simmering, greasy smell of a stew that had likely been on the cookfire since the last king’s coronation.

The patrons were a motley collection of humanity’s dregs: off-duty mercenaries with dead eyes and scarred knuckles, twitchy informants selling secrets for the price of their next drink, and grizzled sailors whose faces were maps of a hundred dangerous voyages. It was a place where a knife in the ribs was a common form of literary criticism and a man’s life was worth less than the coins in his purse.

In the darkest, most secluded corner of this wretched hive, at a table sticky with the ghosts of a thousand spilled drinks, sat the two assassins, Jager and Kael. They had been in Zakaria for over a week, and the city’s vibrant, chaotic energy was starting to grate on their nerves. Their hunt, which had begun with such arrogant certainty, had stalled. Their target, the young Lord Lloyd Ferrum, had vanished as if he had been a ghost all along.

Kael, the larger of the two, was a monument to impatient frustration. He was a mountain of muscle packed into studded leather armor, his face a brutish landscape of a flattened nose and a thick, bristly beard. He radiated an aura of barely contained violence. He sat hunched over the table, the very picture of boredom, meticulously sharpening a long, thin dagger with a whetstone. The rhythmic shhhlick, shhhlick, shhhlick of steel on stone was a grating, monotonous sound that perfectly matched his mood.

“Another night wasted,” he grumbled, his voice a low, gravelly rumble like rocks tumbling down a hillside. He tested the edge of the blade with his thumb, a thin line of red welling up instantly. Satisfied, he continued his sharpening. “We sit in this cesspool, drinking this swill that tastes like goblin piss, and for what? Nothing. No whispers of a young Ferrum lord causing trouble. No sign of his monstrous bodyguard. He’s a ghost. The trail is colder than a witch’s heart in winter.”