Chapter 201 - 140 : Awakened

Chapter 201: Chapter 140 : Awakened

As the years carried Lucian beyond his mid-sixties, age began making its demands more insistently.

His body remained stronger than that of an ordinary man of the same years. Martial cultivation had preserved much of his endurance, and the experience accumulated over a lifetime still guided his decisions. Yet the decline in his blood and physical strength could no longer be ignored.

A younger Blood Tempering martial artist could now force him to fight seriously. Lucian’s experience might allow him to overcome such an opponent, but it would take more from him than it once had. His recovery was slower, and the exhaustion of a difficult encounter lingered long after the battle had ended.

He could no longer assume that his skill would compensate for every loss in strength.

Gradually, he withdrew from the tasks that required him to be constantly present. He entrusted more military duties to Gabriel and allowed Trevor to oversee matters of administration that he would once have insisted on inspecting himself. He continued to review important decisions, and he remained Count in every meaningful sense, but he no longer tried to place himself at the centre of everything.

It was not an easy change. For decades, the condition of House Veymont had been his responsibility, and there was still much he wished to repair. Yet the people he had trained were ready to assume the burdens he could no longer carry alone.

That, too, was part of what he had spent his life building.

Lucy remained beside him through these years. She was younger than her husband by roughly a decade, and age had touched her differently, but she was no longer the woman she had been when they first began their life together. Silver had begun to appear among her hair, and the work of years could be seen in the fine lines around her eyes.

Still, she continued helping him with the affairs of the household and estate. She knew which officials could be relied upon, which accounts required another look, and when Lucian needed to be reminded that he could leave a task until morning. Their partnership had endured long enough that much of what passed between them no longer required explanation.

The Countess did not try to persuade Lucian that he was still the man he had been in his youth. She helped him live with the man he had become.

By the time Lucian reached seventy, he relied increasingly on a walking stick. His was made from dark, polished wood, its surface decorated with intricate carved motifs and its fittings plated in gold. It was an extravagant object for a man who had spent years telling his officials to watch their expenses, but it had been made to suit him, and he used it without embarrassment.

He remained alert and clear-minded. He still took an interest in the territory’s affairs, and there were days when his old vigour returned strongly enough to make visitors forget his age. But the distance he could walk, the time he could spend standing, and the strain he could endure had all diminished.

He was no longer able to visit every mine or road that concerned him. He had to trust the reports brought by his officials and the judgments of the men he had trained.

The castle had changed with him. It was no longer the place he had inherited, but neither was it the broken household that had followed the war. Its soldiers had been rebuilt into a more substantial force, its operations were organized, and the treasury, though still short of its former reserves, was slowly recovering. The five major mines remained part of Veymont’s wealth, even if their returns were uneven and some workings had not regained their former output.

House Veymont was still trying to recover its former strength. It had simply learned to do so with fewer people from the old generation and a different generation carrying the burden.

One evening, as the light faded over the castle, Lucian found himself thinking again of the sealed chamber beneath it.

He had not forgotten Ethan. How could he?

The pressure surrounding that place had never felt like the presence of an ordinary martial artist. Even now, after so many years, the memory of it remained distinct in his mind. Whenever he passed the hidden route leading underground, he found himself wondering what had become of the figure sleeping beneath his family’s home.

Occasionally, when the castle was quiet and his duties were finished, Lucian would take his walking stick and approach the sealed passage. He never went far. He no longer had any desire to test himself against the invisible pressure, and there was little reason to disturb a place that had remained beyond his reach for half a century.

Yet the same strange feeling returned whenever he stood there.

Ethan had not changed in any way Lucian could detect. The pressure still lingered, as constant and unfamiliar as it had been when Lucian was a young man. If anything, the years had made the contrast between them more unsettling.

Lucian had grown old. His father had died. The retainers who had once stood at the height of Veymont’s martial strength were gone. Even the Duke whose pearless talent and authority had overshadowed a generation and a region for so long had passed away, and another man now held his title.

Above the sealed chamber, families aged, people died, and power passed from one generation to the next.

But beneath it, Ethan remained in slumber through it all.

Lucian could not explain why the thought didn’t trouble him, nor why it carried something that felt almost like hope. He had never been able to understand what Ethan was, what had happened to him, or what would become of him when he finally awakened. The only thing Lucian knew was that the figure beneath the castle seemed untouched by the ordinary passage of time.

Sometimes he wondered whether he would live long enough to see those eyes open.

Sometimes he feared that he would not.

But the thought that lingered longest was stranger still: that the years might pass, the kingdom might change, and even the houses that now ruled the land might someday become names in old records, while Ethan remained as he was, an immortal in the truest of terms.

Lucian did not know whether that feeling was his delusion, imagination, or simply the consequence of growing old beside a mystery he had never solved.

He only knew that he had never been able to think of Ethan as an ordinary opportunity that had slipped through his hands. A part of him continued to insist that the day Ethan awakened might present a great opportunity for both his family and him in ways he could not yet comprehend.

And so the years continued.

Trevor’s responsibilities grew, and the future of his own household began to take shape. Sabian’s work reached beyond Veymont’s lands. Gabriel continued along the martial path with a determination that gave his father both pride and cause for concern. The youngest daughter remained close to her gardens, surrounded by a family that had never asked her to become someone other than herself.

Elisa’s letters still arrived from distant places. In her latest report, she spoke of another physician she hoped to visit and a journey that would take her toward the border of Enwitra. She had no intention of abandoning her work. But the report reached Lucian at a time when he had begun to think more seriously about the limited years left to him.

He sent word to all his children, asking them to return to the City of Vermont.

He did not frame the summons as a command meant to interrupt their lives forever. He simply wished to see them together again while he was still able to sit at the family table and hear their voices beneath the same roof. There were matters to discuss, memories to share, and years of distance that could no longer be recovered once they were gone.

To his children and everyone his request sounded like the last wish of a dying man.

Trevor and Sabian began making their arrangements. Gabriel’s duties could be entrusted to other capable men for a time. Elisa, whose travels had taken her beyond Enwitra’s border, received the message before she went deeper in a neighbouring kingdom she had just entered. She sent word that she would turn back toward home.

By the end of the forty-eighth year, the family had begun gathering within Veymont territory. Elisa was still on her return trip back, she was already within the kingdom of Enwitra and close to the veymont territory with the castle a week away.

Lucian was seventy-three.

Lucy was still beside him. His children were grown, each following a different path, and the old Count had finally reached the point where he could no longer pretend that time would wait for him.

The house around him remained alive. Its people worked, its soldiers trained, its officials managed the estate, and the treasury continued its slow recovery. Veymont was diminished in some ways and stronger in others. It had not returned to the height of Lucian’s youth, but it had survived the war, endured the years of hardship, and retained enough of its strength to remain a respected house.

For the moment, that was enough.

Far beneath the castle, in the sealed chamber, the blood pool remained undisturbed. For nearly half a century, nothing had changed. The surface had remained still, and the strange pressure filling the chamber had endured without a single break.

Then, the pressure flickered.

It was brief, barely more than a momentary disturbance, but the stillness that had lasted for so many years was finally broken. A ripple spread across the surface of the blood pool.

Deep within it, Ethan’s fingers twitched.

One after another, they moved, followed by a faint movement in his hand. Then, beneath the dark surface, his eyelids slowly parted.

A crimson glow flickered in his eyes, briefly illuminating the blood around him.

Ethan had awakened.