Chương 31: A Capital Gripped by Knight Fever

Solaris's Sun Avenue, paved in pristine white marble, was so packed with people right now that a sparrow would have struggled to find room to land. But what made Lucian's temples twitch wasn't the crowd density. It was the color of the street. Every balcony, every magic streetlamp, every high-end shopfront was draped floor to sky with black banners embroidered with the empty circle ⭕.

Down on the road, thousands of young nobles walked around in formal wear layered under tattered black cloaks, carrying black-painted wooden swords, chins tilted skyward, wearing expressions of brooding, dignified suffering. Clusters of students huddled around fountains, loudly debating whether the protagonist's triple midair flip in Chapter Fourteen represented "the inner conflict of a man wrestling with fate" or "a great leap transcending the limits of mortality."

Lucian hurriedly yanked the carriage curtain shut, sank back into the velvet cushion, and pressed two fingers to his ears. Lucian peeked through the narrow gap in the curtain again. Black cloaks. Everywhere. At this point, using any technique that resembled the Nameless Knight's fictional fighting style in public was becoming a legitimate identification risk.

The capital — supposedly the greatest city on the continent — had somehow transformed itself into one enormous cosplay convention for the garbage novel he'd written at six years old.

"Uncle Boris," Lucian rapped his knuckles against the divider.

"Drive straight into the family hotel's underground garage. I don't want to see one more black cloak." Knock knock. Before the carriage could pick up speed, a knock rattled the window beside him. A young noble, maybe fifteen, wearing a black cloak trimmed in silver thread, a broken-sword crest pinned to his chest, reached in through the window gap and dropped in a brightly printed flyer. He spoke in a loud, evangelical tone.

"Brother in the carriage! Receive the light of truth from the 'Society of the Ashen Knight's Devoted'! Cast off the luxury of silk and step into the darkness with us to protect the dawn!" Lucian frowned, picked up the flyer, and was about to crumple it into a ball. But the instant his eyes caught the bold header at the top of the page, his pupils contracted sharply. Printed on the vellum, the book's famous line had been rendered as:'The strong wlaks in darness to sevre the eturnal light...'

A missing letter in "walks."

"Darkness" spelled without its k. And worst of all, the phrase "eternal light" rendered in High Elvish had its verb tense wrong — past perfect conjugated into a passive voice by mistake. One crude typo. Two elementary grammatical errors. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. The instincts of an author-slash-former-finance-employee who'd combed through hundreds of reports for typos flared to violent life.

Lucian felt a sharp stab in his chest, like someone had just driven a knife through it. He forgot all about hiding. He yanked Sylvia's red-ink quill straight out of her coat pocket, bent over the flyer, crossed out every error with sharp strokes, and rewrote each High Elvish character with flawless precision, down to the exact angle of every stroke. Then he rolled down the window and shoved the corrected flyer back into the young man's face.

"Go tell whoever printed this to relearn third-grade spelling before you hand out flyers again! Getting the character's — I mean, the author's — own grammar wrong on your own propaganda, have you no shame?!" The window slammed shut. The armored carriage immediately picked up speed. Inside, Sylvia, watching the whole scene unfold from across the carriage, tilted her head and spoke softly.

"Master, you needn't concern yourself with people like that. Your erudition will only make those children feel inadequate." Lucian irritably tucked the red quill back into its case.

"I don't care that they started a fan club. What I can't stand is a bunch of people spending my family's money on printing and letting three spelling errors slip through on a single page!" Behind them, the young noble stood frozen at the intersection, hands trembling as he held the returned flyer. The red ink marks on the page weren't ordinary scribbled corrections. They were elegant, razor-sharp, flawless High Elvish calligraphy — each stroke seeming to radiate a faint, magical glow.

A dozen or so club members rushed over, eyes bulging at the page. One young noble stammered, his voice cracking with sheer terror.

"That handwriting... that tone of correction... the inverted High Elvish grammar, perfect down to the millimeter..."

"Gods above!" The group's leader dropped to his knees on the marble street, holding the paper above his head with both hands like a sacred relic.

"This is unmistakably the personal handwriting of the Nameless Great Apostle himself, descended to correct our faith! Quick... quick, frame this in gold and glass, and place it on the main altar of the club headquarters at once!" A dozen young men dropped to their knees on the avenue at once, bowing reverently into the dust the Vance carriage had just kicked up.

Ten minutes later, the carriage rolled into the underground lobby of the Vance House of Grand Knowledge Hotel — the most opulent tower in the capital's center. Lucian walked into the VIP lounge on the top floor and sank into a plush leather armchair. Sylvia quickly spread a thick intelligence dossier across the table.

"Master, this is the full list of factions and notable competitors for the Imperial Youth Selection, opening tomorrow morning." Lucian flipped through page after page of the dossier. First: the Sanctum Faction. Led by the Holy Knight Order of First Princess Eleanor Sophia de Solaris (Combat Power: 24. 8 million). Carries the Holy Light bloodline, backed absolutely by the church. Second: the Traditional Great Noble Faction. Led by young Lord Julian von Valois (Combat Power: 6. 5 million) — eldest son of Duke Valois.

This house controls the armored legions and holds a burning hatred for House Vance's collection of feudal debts. Third: the Royal Academy of Magic Faction. A collection of arrogant young mages wielding classical elemental forbidden arts.

"All full of themselves," Lucian said, flipping to the last page, scanning the tournament bracket.

"Our goal's simple enough: beat down anyone standing in our way, collect the full five hundred thousand gold in clean prize money, and grab that Access Pass to the Royal Archive." At that same moment, a few streets from the hotel. On the top floor of the sun-drenched Summer Palace, Princess Eleanor stood at an arched window.

She wore an elegant silver-white knight's uniform, a magic spyglass in hand, quietly watching the gold-plated armored convoy of House Vance pull into the parking garage of the hotel across the way. Eleanor lowered the spyglass, her blue eyes shining with curiosity and unshakable resolve. She lightly touched the copy of Elegy of the Nameless Knight tucked at her hip and murmured to herself in the empty room.

"Lucian Vance... let's see how you plan to hide His sword on the arena floor tomorrow."