Chapter 138: Elora’s Second Proposition [II]
Chapter 138: Elora’s Second Proposition [II]
He didn’t bother explaining what they were for or what materials.
’She doesn’t even need to know...’
He wasn’t going to tell a scion that he was building a massive high-tier magical library to keep his infantry girls entertained on their days off.
It would make him look too soft.
’I’m guessing that she thinks I’m getting raw materials for a runic artillery battery.’ Silas thought, but he couldn’t be sure about that.
That was the scary part... you could never know what was on the woman’s mind.
"Understood," Elora nodded.
She adjusted her grip on the yokes.
The mana-engine behind them whined as she seamlessly accelerated, crossing two lanes of traffic and merging onto the elevated mag-highway that cut directly through the center of the city.
Silas watched the neon lights of the skyscrapers blur past the hydrophobic windows.
The speed was incredible, far surpassing anything available in the lower wards.
’I’m not trying to sound poor or anything but this might actually be my first time in a car that’s not a taxi.’ Silas thought, that sounded quite poor.
He turned his gaze back to Elora’s profile.
"Alright, Verinda. Let’s cut the small talk," Silas said seriously. "You didn’t drive a multi million-credit supercar into a residential zone just to play taxi driver... Why did you exactly call me over he—"
Before he could even finish the sentence, Elora reached out and flicked a dial on the center console.
Smooth produced music flooded the soundproof cabin.
It was a slow Earth love song, characterized by deep bass and a echoing vocal track.
I see the shadows you cast in the dark...
I feel the weight of your hands on my heart...
Don’t try to run, don’t try to hide...
I’ll pull you close, keep you inside...
Silas paused with his sentence completely derailed by the sudden influx of R&B romance music.
He stared at the dashboard, then slowly looked over at Elora.
She was staring straight ahead with her expression completely unreadable as her jaw was set in a tight professional line.
Silas leaned back in his bucket seat, letting out a dry amused exhale.
"I have to say," Silas commented. "Your taste in music is incredible for a business meeting. It really sets the mood for corporate negotiations."
"Thank you," Elora replied evenly, not missing a single beat.
She didn’t look at him, but Silas could see the almost imperceptible twitch of a smirk pulling at the corner of her lips. "I find that a bassline prevents external directional microphones from picking up the vibrations of the cabin glass. It’s a standard anti-espionage protocol if you will..."
"Right. Anti-espionage. Obviously," Silas nodded slowly, playing along with the absurd justification.
Lia, still sitting on his lap, looked back and forth between the two of them, completely lost by the sudden shift in tension.
She decided to just rest her head against Silas’s chest and listen to the music, watching the glowing city lights streak by.
The supercar glided down the off-ramp of the mag-highway, entering the densely packed affluent central commercial district of Valoria City.
The traffic immediately multiplied.
Armored corporate transports, luxury sedans, and Association patrol vehicles clogged the glowing streets.
Elora brought the black car to a smooth, hovering halt at a massive multi-lane intersection.
The red holographic traffic barriers hummed in the air ahead of them.
’Right, one can tell that she’s getting used to this driving thing.’ Silas thought, everybody even hin knew that you weren’t supposed to pass here unless you wanted to get stuck in traffic.
The rain drummed against the roof of the car with the rhythmic sound blending seamlessly with the slow bass of the love song still playing softly through the speakers.
Elora kept her hands on the control yokes.
She didn’t turn her head, but her icy blue eyes flicked over to look at Silas in the reflection of the dark rain-streaked window.
The sarcastic banter was now gone.
"The reason I called you here, Silas Graves," Elora said with her voice cutting cleanly through the music, carrying the uncompromising weight of the City Lord’s administration. "Was for you to come join me in a Secret Realm Expedition... Do you accept?"
Silas froze.
He knew exactly what a Secret Realm was and that was what made him so shocked about this...
Why the hell...
Why the hell was he being invited to a Secret Realm?! When he wasn’t even close to being a noble?!
Silas blinked, staring at the side of Elora’s face as the red traffic barrier ahead of them flipped to a glowing, vibrant green.
"Secret Realm?" Silas muttered, his voice completely hollow. "What the fuck?"
The heavy bass of the Earth love song continued to pulse through the soundproof cabin of the black supercar, creating a bizarre surreal backdrop to the words that had just left Elora Verinda’s mouth.
Silas sat frozen in the bucket seat.
Elora’s hands smoothly shifted the glowing control yokes, accelerating the supercar through the intersection.
"Language, Graves. There is a child sitting right on your lap."
"That’s what I said..."
Silas didn’t even look down at Lia, who was currently peering over the dashboard with wide eyes.
His mind was consumed by the weight of what Elora had just proposed.
Every Awakened Lord knew the difference between a standard dungeon and a Secret Realm.
It was the first thing they taught you in the advanced seminars at the Academy, right before they told you that ninety percent of the people in the room would never live long enough to see one.
Standard dungeons were predictable within the range of territories.
They were essentially containment zones.
The Association and the corporate guilds mapped them out, calculated the respawn rates of the monsters inside, and farmed them like slaughterhouses.
You walked in, killed a set number of low-tier beasts, extracted their elemental cores, and went home.
It was dangerous, but it was a known regulated danger... however a Secret Realm was different.
It was a fractured piece of the Sovereign Realm’s actual history.
They were isolated volatile pocket dimensions that had broken off from the main reality centuries before the cataclysm.
They didn’t have respawning monsters and they didn’t have predictable layouts.
They were packed with extinct Tier 4-5 horrors, ancient pre-collapse architectural blueprints, and raw untouched mythic alloys that hadn’t seen the light of day in a thousand years.
Because they were completely unmapped and finite, the major corporate guilds routinely slaughtered each other in the mud to monopolize whatever was inside them.
Silas let out a slow breath, reigning in his initial shock.
He leaned his head back against the leather headrest with his golden-ringed blue eyes narrowing as he studied the City Lord’s daughter.
"Secret Realms are incredibly hard to find," Silas stated. "The Association locks down the spatial coordinates the second a deep-sector scanner picks up the anomaly... The only people who get access are elite guild strike teams."
"Yes, they are," Elora agreed smoothly, not taking her eyes off the rain-slicked road. "It requires an immense amount of capital and political leverage to secure an entry token."
"Which brings me to my question," Silas said coldly. "Why the hell are you inviting me?"
Elora kept her expression perfectly blank and her jaw was still set in a tight line, but internally, her mind was moving at a thousand miles an hour.
’Isn’t it obvious?’ Elora thought with her icy blue eyes briefly flicking toward the rearview mirror to analyze the man sitting in her passenger seat.
It was a known documented fact across the Awakened society that the Novice Trial fundamentally changed a person.
When a mortal survived the descent and successfully integrated a Lord’s Core into their chest, their biology adapted to handle the strain of channeling Sovereign mana.
People got taller and their senses sharpened but what Silas Graves had undergone wasn’t a standard adaptation.
It was a complete rewrite of his own biology.
Elora remembered how he used to look sitting in the back of the Academy lecture halls.
Silas had always been quite fit.
He worked grueling manual labor jobs in the slums, and he had the kind of sharp handsome features that naturally drew attention.
It was exactly why girls like Maya had been crushing on him from a distance for years, giggling behind their notebooks whenever he walked past.
But the man sitting next to her right now was on a whole new level...
He didn’t just look fit anymore.
He looked like a handsome predator masquerading in civilian clothes.
He was massive with his shoulders broad enough to easily fill the heavy dark coat he had brought with him.
Even sitting completely still, there was a suffocating pressure radiating off his skin.
On the official Association registry, Silas Graves awakened and was listed as an Excellent-Grade Blue Core.
Elora didn’t believe that for a single second.
She had seen standard Blue Cores.
They were strong, but they didn’t bleed this kind of pressure.
She was certain that the verification crystal at the LAB had either malfunctioned, or Silas had deliberately suppressed his signature.
He was hiding a Purple Core. Or maybe... maybe even a Gold Core.
Her father, the City Lord, had spent the last three days pacing his office, furiously analyzing the regional leaderboards.
The entire upper echelon of Valoria City’s elite was currently in a state of absolute panic over a mysterious unidentified territory named the Blessed Land.
An unknown Lord had shattered every historical record, claiming the number one spot and securing SSS-Rank evaluations in the first week...
Elora wasn’t the kind of woman who believed in coincidences.
A slum rat vanishes into the Novice Trial, comes back radiating the physical presence of a warlord and simultaneously, an unknown territory rises to the peak of the Sovereign Realm?
There was a very real and very dangerous chance that Silas Graves was the Lord of the Blessed Land.
...And Elora Verinda needed to know for sure.
That was exactly why she was inviting him to the Secret Realm.
The laws of the upcoming raid mandated that a Lord could only bring a single summoned hero or companion with them.
If Silas accepted the invitation, he would be forced to deploy his primary combat asset.
As long as she saw him bring a highly exceptional reality-breaking hero that boasted the kind of power necessary to conquer a top-tier territory, her suspicions would be confirmed.
Once she had that confirmation, she would execute her strategy.
If he was the Lord of the Blessed Land, she would either use her political leverage and wealth to recruit him directly under her own banner... securing her place as the undisputed heir to the city or, if he refused, she would take out Silas Graves before his territory could progress any further.
She wanted to be Number One and she didn’t care who she had to step on to get there.
Elora cleared her throat, seamlessly masking her ruthless internal calculations behind a cool diplomatic facade.
"I am inviting you because I am assembling a highly competent cohort for the Secret Realm expedition." Elora said smoothly, navigating a sharp turn onto a quieter guarded commercial avenue. "Are you going to come regardless of my personal motives? I am also inviting Jaxon and Maya... You wouldn’t be the only familiar face."
Silas frowned, his fingers drumming lightly against his knee.
"You want me to sign on as corporate muscle?" Silas guessed.
"I am not asking you to sign a government contract for this one," Elora countered immediately, shutting down his primary objection. "The City Lord’s office has secured the entry tokens, but the expedition itself is independent. You keep whatever you claim inside the realm and as you well know, Graves, Secret Realms always boast items that will significantly increase a Lord’s personal power, as well as the defensive rank of his territory."
The traffic ahead of them thinned out, and Elora smoothly pressed the accelerator.
The mana-engine whined with the supercar surging forward down the rain-slicked street at an increased pace.
Silas fell silent, staring out the passenger window.
The mention of territory upgrades hit exactly where she intended it to.
’Fucking hell...’
He was a sucker for good rewards!