Chapter 746
Hroth was quiet for a moment after that, then turned his head slightly toward Ludger.
“So,” he said, “how do you plan to proceed?”
His tone was steady now, stripped of most of its earlier sarcasm.
“I don’t mind giving you a hand,” he added. “Even if this is technically an Empire problem… and I am technically a spy.”
Ludger glanced at him.
“That ‘technically’ is doing a lot of work.”
Hroth snorted once. “I like to stay flexible.”
Ludger let that pass and turned his eyes back toward the city. His thoughts were already moving ahead, arranging the next steps with the same cold efficiency he used when approaching a battlefield.
“I’ll investigate outside the capital,” he said. “The older trail is less likely to be here. If the fire from twenty years ago matters, then there may still be remnants elsewhere. Local records. old logs. church or healer reports. People who remember fragments even if they don’t understand what they remember.”
Hroth nodded slowly.
“That makes sense.”
Ludger continued without pause.
“You stay here. Keep your eyes on the family you work for. Find out more about their business interests.” His voice lowered slightly. “Not just broad categories. I want specifics. Which apothecaries they invested in. Who they were negotiating with. Which shipments mattered. Which partnerships were being discussed before the previous head fell sick.”
Hroth’s expression sharpened as he listened.
“If there were unusual meetings, sudden cancellations, changes in contracts, or names that kept coming up, I want those too,” Ludger said. “And if the old man really intended to pour a large amount of money into that family, then I want to know why. People do not move that much coin on instinct alone.”
Hroth folded his arms and gave a small nod.
“That, I can do.”
Ludger inclined his head slightly.
“Eventually, I’ll return. Then we’ll trade information again.”
The wind shifted across the rooftop, carrying a colder bite now that the night had settled deeper over the capital. For a few seconds, neither of them spoke.
Then Hroth asked, “And until when are you going to keep following this trail?”
Ludger answered without hesitation.
“Until the mystery is solved.”
There was no drama in the words. No grand oath. Just flat certainty. Hroth looked at him for a moment, then let out a quiet breath through his nose, almost like a laugh that had lost interest in becoming one.
“Right,” he said. “Of course.”
Because that was the sort of answer only Ludger would give so casually. Not until it became inconvenient. Not until the trail went cold. Not until something more urgent came up. Until it was solved.
Simple. Stubborn. Dangerous. Ludger turned away slightly, already treating the conversation as finished in his mind.
“Then do your part,” he said.
Hroth smirked faintly. “You do realize you say things like that as if you’re giving orders.”
Ludger didn’t even look back.
“And you still listen.”
That actually drew a low chuckle out of Hroth.
For the first time since the conversation had turned personal, some of the tension on the rooftop eased, though only slightly. The weight of what they had uncovered was still there, pressing behind every word.
Two separate trails now stretched out before them. One buried in the capital’s quiet dealings, among investments, apothecaries, and noble finances. The other buried in the past, beneath ash, missing records, and a fire that had happened nearly twenty years ago.
And Ludger intended to dig through both.
Ludger ran through the underground tunnels with long, steady strides, the packed earth and carved stone rushing past in dim stretches around him. It was faster than taking the runic carriage through safer routes, even if it cost him more stamina and mana since he was also using Stone Surfing. The constant pressure of movement, the uneven terrain, the stale air, the need to stay alert inside confined passages, it all made the journey more tiring.
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Still, faster was faster. And right now, he had too much in his head to tolerate a slower pace. As he moved, Ludger kept turning over the same question. How should he proceed now?
The most obvious answer was also the most dangerous one. Ask his father directly.
Arslan should know better than anyone what his own parents had been working on before they died. Not rumors. Not half-buried gossip from guards or scattered notes from capital investigators. If anyone still carried the shape of that old truth in his memory, it would be him.
That was the cleanest path. Which was exactly why Ludger distrusted it. His jaw tightened slightly as he leapt over a rough section of broken stone and kept going.
Because asking Arslan would not be like questioning a guild contact or digging through old ledgers. This was family. Old family. The kind buried under years of silence and grief and survival. Pulling at that thread might give Ludger answers, but it might also tear open something that had only stayed shut because no one had forced it open.
And he was not sure if he wanted to be the one to do that. Not without thinking first.
For the ten years Ludger had known Arslan, his father had never looked like a man crushed by the past. Not truly. He had been stubborn, tired, reckless at times, blunt almost all the time, but not broken. Not the sort of man who wandered around with old sorrow hanging visibly from his shoulders.
The only times Ludger had seen something close to that were tied to more recent wounds, when Arslan had been trying to fix his mistakes with Elaine, with Ludger himself, with the family he had almost failed through absence, or sheer stupidity. That regret had been real. Heavy enough to show.
But the older grief? Arslan wore none of it openly. That should have been reassuring.
It suggested strength. The kind of mental strength Ludger respected. The ability to lose everything and still keep moving. To rebuild. To become something more than a man defined by tragedy.
And yet that same thought made this harder. Because being strong did not mean being untouched. It did not mean those memories had no weight. It only meant Arslan had carried them without letting them bend his spine.
Ludger’s pace never faltered, but his thoughts darkened.
If this trail truly led back to his father’s family, if that fire had not been random, if those deaths had not been simple misfortune, if Arslan’s past was tied to the same rot now touching capital nobles and old apothecary lines, then the information hidden in that truth could change everything.
Not just for the investigation. For his father. For his mother. For the way their family understood its own history. It could turn the world they stood on upside down.
Because some truths did not stay neatly in the past once uncovered. They spread. They redefined things. They reached into old choices, old losses, and old silences, and suddenly nothing looked quite the same anymore.
Ludger exhaled slowly through his nose as he ran, eyes fixed forward through the dark tunnel. He still needed answers. That had not changed. But now the path to those answers no longer felt like a straight line through enemies and obstacles. It felt like a blade laid across the center of his own house.
And sooner or later, he would have to decide whether to step on it.
Eventually, Ludger found himself once again standing inside Torvares’s office in Meronia City.
The room felt almost strangely familiar after everything that had happened over the last few days. The quiet pressure that always seemed to cling to places where too many decisions were made. It should have been grounding.
Instead, Ludger felt like he had walked into the room carrying a storm no one else could see. Torvares looked up from his desk the moment Ludger entered, and whatever he saw on the boy’s face was enough to make him set his work aside without comment.
“Well,” the old lord said after a moment, studying him carefully, “that expression does not suggest a peaceful trip.”
Ludger ignored the attempt at levity and got straight to the point.
He explained how the search for the illusionist had gone so far. The clue left in the form of the tree drawing. The trip to the capital. Meeting Hroth. Learning what that tree actually meant. The old labyrinth sickness tied to burials. The suspicious noble deaths. Varik’s notes. The rumors about breakthroughs just before the victims fell ill. The apothecary family. Their dead rivals. The fire from nearly twenty years ago.
And finally, the part that mattered most. The surviving son. The adventurer. The story that sounded far too much like Arslan’s past to be dismissed. Torvares listened without interrupting, but by the end of it, even he looked completely baffled.
Not shaken easily. Not confused in the simple sense. Just genuinely caught off guard by the speed and direction of the trail Ludger had followed.
For a while, the old lord said nothing. Then he leaned back slowly in his chair and let out a measured breath.
“You learned a great deal in only a few days,” he said.
Ludger remained standing. Torvares’s brows were drawn together now, his gaze distant as he tried to fit the pieces into something coherent.
“But…” he continued carefully, “it is also possible you uncovered clues to a mystery entirely separate from the illusionist.”
That made Ludger’s eyes narrow slightly, though he did not argue. Torvares rested one arm on the desk, fingers tapping once against the polished wood.
“I can imagine many things about a man who teaches through riddles,” he said. “Arrogance. secrecy. a fondness for making others dance in circles before granting answers.” His mouth tightened faintly. “But I find it difficult to believe someone like that would want you to dig up this kind of buried matter from the past. Not unless he is connected to it in some way I cannot yet see.”
Ludger’s face stayed cold.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Torvares looked at him fully then. Ludger’s voice remained calm, but there was no room in it for redirection anymore.
“I want to know everything you know about my father’s past.”
That left the room silent. Torvares did not answer immediately. He just looked at Ludger, and for the first time since the conversation began, the old lord seemed less like a strategist and more like a man weighing the cost of truth.
Because this was not some minor political detail. Not some embarrassing family scandal that could be handled with careful wording and a glass of wine.
This was Arslan’s past. And Arslan’s past could not be taken lightly. Not now.
Not given what Arslan had become to this family. Not given that he was the father of Torvares’s granddaughter’s. Not given that his blood was tied to Ludger, and through Ludger to everything that had been built since.
Torvares went silent, genuinely thinking about what he should say. And Ludger, standing before the desk with that same hard stillness he carried into battle, waited.