Chapter : 1125

The journey to Ashworth had been a silent, grim affair. Lord Kyle Ferrum rode at the head of a small, elite column of twenty men, each one a veteran of the border skirmishes, each one handpicked for their resilience and unwavering loyalty. The mission, as dictated by the Arch Duke, was simple on paper: infiltrate, observe, and report. Rubel had refused the summons to the war council, an act of silent, screaming treason. They were to be the Arch Duke’s eyes and ears, to gauge the extent of the rot that had taken root in the Viscount’s domain.

Kyle had expected defiance. He had prepared for a fortress with sealed gates, for hostile patrols, for a conventional standoff. He was a soldier, and he understood the brutal grammar of war.

He was not prepared for the silence.

They were still five miles from the city walls when the world began to feel wrong. The usual sounds of the countryside—the chirping of insects, the call of birds, the rustle of wind through the long grass—had been systematically erased. An oppressive, unnatural quiet had descended, a vacuum of sound that felt heavy and suffocating. His men felt it too. The easy chatter of the road had died, replaced by the rhythmic, grim clinking of their armor and the thud of their horses’ hooves on the dirt road.

As the grey, formidable walls of Ashworth rose on the horizon, the wrongness intensified. There were no sentries on the battlements. No banners snapping in the non-existent breeze. The great iron-banded gates of the city, which should have been a bustling hub of commerce and travel, were wide open, a dark, yawning maw that seemed to be inviting them into the abyss.

Kyle raised a gauntleted hand, bringing the column to a halt. His second-in-command, a grizzled veteran named Boris with a scar that bisected his left eyebrow, rode up beside him.

“My lord,” Boris murmured, his voice a low rumble of unease. “This feels… wrong. It smells like a trap.”

“Every city is a trap,” Kyle replied, his gaze fixed on the open gate. “But this… this is something else.” His own senses, honed by decades of training and amplified by his King-Level power, were screaming at him. It wasn't the sharp, clean scent of an ambush. It was the slow, creeping stench of a disease, a spiritual plague that had already claimed its victim.

“Orders, my lord?”

Kyle’s jaw tightened. The mission was to observe. Retreating now would be a failure. “We proceed. Cautiously. Two-man teams, staggered formation. Keep your eyes open and your mouths shut. We are ghosts.”

They rode into the city, and it was like entering a perfectly preserved tomb. The streets were not empty. People were there, going about the motions of a normal day. A baker stood outside his shop, his hands covered in flour, staring blankly at the sky. A group of children were gathered in a circle in a small square, but they were not playing; they were standing perfectly still, their gazes fixed on something only they could see. A woman was sweeping her doorstep with slow, rhythmic, and utterly mindless strokes, her eyes holding a disturbing, vacant look.

It was the eyes that were the most terrifying. They were not the eyes of the living. They were milky, unfocused, and seemed to be staring into a distant, private hell. It was as if their souls had been scooped out, leaving only the hollow, functioning shells behind. They moved like automatons, puppets whose strings were being pulled by an unseen master.

Kyle’s men were visibly shaken, their hands gripping their sword hilts with a tension that bordered on panic. The silence was punctuated only by the scrape of the woman’s broom and the soft, shuffling footsteps of the city’s hollowed-out inhabitants. This was not a city under military occupation; it was a city that had been spiritually lobotomized.

Kyle dismounted, his movements slow and deliberate. He approached a man who was methodically polishing a brass doorknob, his motions smooth and repetitive.

“Good sir,” Kyle said, his voice quiet but firm. “I am Lord Kyle Ferrum. I am here to see the Viscount.”

The man did not stop his polishing. He did not even turn his head. His vacant gaze remained fixed on the brass. After a long, unnerving silence, his lips moved, and a voice emerged, but it was not his own. It was a low, monotone whisper, a sound that seemed to come from a thousand throats at once, a dry rustle of dead leaves.

“He is the Lord of the Unholy Palace.”

Chapter : 1126

The words, simple and direct, were a physical blow. A chill, colder than any winter wind, snaked down Kyle’s spine. Every man in his unit felt it. The name was a blasphemy, a declaration. It was a place that did not exist on any map, a title that had never been spoken. It was the sound of a new, unholy gospel, and its scripture was being written in the empty eyes of this entire city.

Kyle stepped back from the man, a profound dread solidifying in his gut. He had come here looking for a traitor. He had found a prophet. And he was standing in the middle of his new, unholy church. The rot was not in the roots; it had consumed the entire forest.

The name hung in the cold, dead air, a monument to a new and terrible reality. The Unholy Palace. It was a name that carried the weight of absolute heresy. It wasn't just a claim of sovereignty; it was a rebranding of reality itself, a declaration that Rubel no longer considered himself a mere Viscount of the Ferrum Duchy, but the master of a new, darker kingdom.

Lord Kyle Ferrum felt the stares of his twenty men on his back. They were looking to him for answers, for leadership, for a way to make sense of the creeping, supernatural horror that surrounded them. Their mission had been to perform reconnaissance on a traitor’s fortress. But the city was the fortress. The people were the walls. And the enemy was not a man with an army, but an idea, a spiritual contagion that had hollowed out a city of thousands and turned them into a silent, shuffling congregation.

His military mind, a finely honed instrument of logic and strategy, struggled to process the new data. A conventional siege was useless. An assassination was impossible when every citizen was a potential sensor for their new god. His orders were to observe and report, and every instinct screamed at him to pull his men out, to ride back to the Arch Duke with this horrifying intelligence and plan a true war.

But another, deeper instinct held him fast. He was a Ferrum. The head of the Ironwood branch, the newly appointed primary cadet family. His duty was not just to the Arch Duke, but to the very name he carried. To retreat in the face of such a profound and blasphemous threat felt like a form of surrender, a concession that this unholy power was beyond their ability to confront. He could not, would not, allow that.

“My lord, we should fall back,” Boris whispered, his voice tight with a fear that was bordering on panic. “There is nothing for us here but death. This is a city of ghosts.”

“No,” Kyle said, his voice a low, hard command that cut through the fear. “The mission has changed. We are no longer scouts. We are exorcists. We will go to the heart of this rot. We will go to the fortress.”

He remounted his warhorse, his posture a ramrod of unyielding resolve. His decision was a spark of defiance in the oppressive atmosphere of despair. His men, seeing his unshakeable will, felt their own courage begin to return. They were soldiers of House Ferrum. They had faced down barbarian hordes and rogue mages. They would not be broken by silent streets and empty eyes.

They rode through the city, a small, grim island of steel and purpose in an ocean of placid insanity. The journey to Rubel’s fortress, a path Kyle had ridden a hundred times in his life, was now a pilgrimage through a foreign and hostile land. The architecture itself seemed to have been corrupted. As they neared the city’s center, the clean, strong lines of the stonework began to warp. Black, vein-like cracks snaked across the facades of buildings, pulsing with a faint, sickly purple light that seemed to beat in time with a slow, unheard heart. The air grew colder, heavier, and carried a sharp, coppery tang that Kyle recognized with a jolt of horror: the scent of corrupted spiritual energy, the smell of a soul being bled dry.

Rubel’s fortress, once a proud and formidable symbol of the Ashworth branch’s power, now looked like a cancerous growth at the city’s heart. The same black veins pulsed across its high walls, and a thin, greasy mist of shadow clung to its battlements like a shroud. The great, carved lion heads that flanked the main gate, once symbols of Ferrum pride, now seemed to weep black, viscous tears.