Chapter 645 --645

Chapter 645: Chapter-645

"Yeah, yeah, let him in," the grandmother waved her hand casually, picking up her tea again.

Samuel blinked. Youngest master? Now?

He turned his head toward the entrance of the hall, fully expecting to see a small child waddling through the doors, or perhaps a nervous, newly adopted teenager holding a servant’s hand. He mentally prepared himself to look like a welcoming, fatherly figure.

Instead, the heavy wooden doors were pushed open, and a tall, fully grown, thirty-year-old man walked into the room.

The man was dressed in the pristine, conservative robes of a senior scholar. He had a fully grown beard, a mature face, and faint stress lines already forming around his eyes from years of studying for the grueling imperial exams. He was literally eight years older than Heena.

The thirty-year-old man walked directly to the center of the room. He completely ignored Samuel. He faced the front of the hall, dropped heavily to his knees, and bowed his head all the way to the floor in a perfect, flawless display of submissive filial piety.

Samuel completely froze.

The absolute genius of the capital, the man who could dismantle entire government factions without breaking a sweat, just sat in his chair and stared. His golden eyes were wide, his breathing stopped, and his brain simply ceased to function.

The thirty-year-old scholar did not stand up. Instead, he smoothly pivoted on his knees, turning his body to face Samuel. A maidservant hurriedly stepped forward, offering a silver tray holding a single, steaming porcelain cup of morning tea.

The man took the cup with both hands, raised it respectfully above his head, and looked Samuel directly in the eye with absolute, unwavering sincerity.

"Father," the thirty-year-old man said, his voice entirely serious and laced with profound filial piety. "Please accept your eldest son’s morning tea."

Samuel stared. He looked at the man’s fully grown beard. He looked at the faint gray hairs starting to show at the man’s temples. He looked at the heavy stress wrinkles framing the man’s eyes.

For the first time in his life, Samuel’s terrifying, world-class intellect rapidly cycled through the five stages of grief in record time:

’ ’’Denial:’’ This is a hallucination caused by the sleeping herbs his wife had drugged him with.

’ ’’Anger:’’ The civil court is playing another suicidal prank and he needs to grab his broadsword.

’ ’’Bargaining:’’ If he simply murders this man right now, they can just adopt an actual toddler by noon.

’ ’’Depression:’’ He was now a father to a man who had been paying taxes for a decade.

’ ’’Acceptance:’’ His wife was a complete, unhinged lunatic.

"Father," Samuel repeated, the word sounding completely hollow as it left his lips.

From the front of the hall, the old Marquis couldn’t hold it in anymore. He let out a loud, booming snort, aggressively covering his mouth with his sleeve as his broad shoulders shook with violently suppressed laughter. The grandmother didn’t even try to hide it; she simply brought her fan up to cover her deeply amused smirk.

Before Samuel could physically punt his new "son" out of the courtyard, the heavy wooden doors swung open again.

Heena strolled into the room, dressed in crisp, dark Vanguard court robes. She looked exhausted, but she carried an air of absolute, terrifying victory, having just legally forced the Emperor to accept her sociopathic paperwork. She paused, taking in the bizarre tableau: her paralyzed husband, her kneeling thirty-year-old son, and her dying-of-laughter grandfather.

"Ah, good," Heena nodded approvingly, crossing her arms. "I see you have formally met our firstborn."

Samuel slowly turned his head to look at her. The dark, possessive scholar from the night before was completely gone, replaced by a man hanging onto his sanity by a single thread.

"Wife," Samuel stated, his voice entirely devoid of all human emotion. "Why is there a thirty-year-old man with a beard calling me ’Father’?"

Heena casually walked over, patted the kneeling man on the shoulder, and looked at Samuel with a completely deadpan expression. "Because, Mr. Son-in-law, raising infants is exhausting, teenagers are rebellious, and this one perfectly invalidates the empire’s conscription laws. Congratulations, you are a patriarch now."

Samuel stared up at her from his chair, his hands gripping the mahogany armrests so hard the wood groaned in protest.

"Wife," Samuel gritted out, his voice vibrating with absolute, uncharacteristic desperation. "I can take care of toddlers very well. I will teach them the classics myself."

"They cry a lot," Heena replied instantly, waving her hand dismissively. "The noise is terrible for my headache."

"I can take care of a teenager," Samuel countered, his golden eyes flashing with an intense, pedagogical threat. "I will beat them. I will drill military tactics and civil law into their heads. I will do whatever it takes to perfectly straighten them out."

"But they argue so much," Heena sighed, shaking her head like a weary mother. "Too much teenage angst. It ruins the estate’s feng shui."

Samuel abruptly stood up, his towering frame completely abandoning its scholarly elegance as he pointed a trembling finger at the fully bearded man still holding the teacup on the floor.

"Wife," Samuel said, his voice dropping into a dangerous, breathless whisper. "He is literally older than us! He has stress wrinkles!"

"Oh, come on, don’t be so dramatic," Heena rolled her eyes, completely unfazed by her husband’s mental breakdown. "He is our precious son now."

’

Heena walked over to the kneeling thirty-year-old man, entirely ignoring the fact that he was taller than her even while sitting on the floor. She reached out and patted the top of his head with an affectionate, deeply condescending motherly touch.

"Dear child," Heena announced cheerfully. "I went to the palace and got your brand-new Vanguard registry name!"

With a sharp flick of her wrist, she unrolled the heavy yellow silk of the Imperial Edict for the entire hall to see.

"See?" Heena declared, pointing to the freshly dried ink. "From now on, you are no longer a common scholar. Your name is officially ’’Saura Chijen’’."

The entire main hall completely short-circuited.

The grandfather dropped his sunflower seeds. The grandmother choked slightly on her morning tea. Even the thirty-year-old man, who had maintained a flawless mask of submissive filial piety this entire time, felt his right eye violently twitch.

"What?" Samuel whispered, staring at the imperial document as if it were written in a demonic language.

"Saura Chijen," Heena repeated proudly, completely oblivious to the collective horror in the room.

Hovering near the ceiling rafters, the System slowly floated down, its digital face twisted in sheer, unadulterated disgust. ’"Host,"’ the System deadpanned. ’"Do you even know how to name human beings? That sounds like a misspelling of a fungal infection."’

’’I am the absolute best person at naming others,’’ Heena shot back defensively in her mind.

"What... what exactly is the profound meaning behind the name ’Saura’?" the thirty-year-old man asked, his voice trembling slightly as he realized he was legally bound to this absurdity for the rest of his natural life.

Heena crossed her arms, looking immensely satisfied with her own genius. "Um... I just really like it. It is the name of my absolute favorite tea."