【Key Coordinate · Established】

  【Upgrade Task 6 · Complete】

  【Truth Manifestation Level · Upgraded】

  【Truth Manifestation · LV7?】

  ——

  【Ability: Truth Manifestation】

  【Level: LV7】

  【Description: All sentient perceptions in this world become the wielder’s perceptions. Any fantasy, legend, myth, or concept held by any sentient being in this world can be temporarily brought into reality. Duration: one thousand years. The specific effect cannot exceed the controller’s current Grade.】

  ——

  This upgrade stretched the manifestation duration to an unprecedented span—rising from just one year at its initial stage to a full millennium—edging ever closer to a permanent effect.

  The Firenze Empire’s civilization now coursed backward along the river of time, embedding itself into the ancient myths of the Lucerne period three thousand years past, poised to reshape the world’s future course.

  Apokolips, 1860.

  With the rapid march of technology, the world’s very landscape was undergoing a seismic shift. The Industrial Revolution had ignited an eruption of advancement, each breakthrough fueling the next in an unstoppable cascade.

  Society transformed almost daily.

  Steam engines, internal combustion engines, generators—one after another, these epoch-making inventions ushered humankind into the electric age.

  Productivity soared, and the world’s population surged. Sweeping social reforms surged alongside the industrial boom.

  War and order now walked hand in hand.

  Steam-powered armored warships prowled the oceans like steel leviathans, driving the wooden sailing vessels of old to the ocean floor. Locomotives howled into stations, venting clouds of steam.

  Gas lamps and streetlights lit the roads each night, banishing the darkness. Automobiles shared the streets with horse-drawn carriages, weaving between wandering pedestrians.

  Every morning, newsboys bellowed scandalous headlines to passersby.

  A new order was germinating—but the era itself was not yet fully ready. The old and the new clashed and intertwined, forming a fragile, shifting balance.

  Twisted histories and legends, woven into the cultural fabric for nearly two centuries, now ran deep through nearly every nation’s collective consciousness.

  Compared to two hundred years prior, the supernatural had buried itself even deeper. Human romanticism continued to weave myths and fairy tales—yet they were no longer truly believed.

  Nova Federation, Goliath City.

  Second only to the United Kingdom of Westland in global influence, the Nova Federation commanded vast territories, a massive population, and formidable national strength.

  When the Industrial Revolution arrived, Nova was among the first to seize it. Within decades, its industries soared, its economy roared ahead at breakneck speed.

  It was, beyond dispute, the second most powerful nation in the world—though Westland still held the crown. Yet Westland’s colonial ambitions were starting to sour; the once-great returns of expansionism now yielded diminishing gains, even turning into liabilities.

  In the long game, Nova Federation’s rise over Westland was inevitable.

  A nation steeped in poetry and sentiment, Nova’s capital—Goliath City—stood as its cultural and political heart, home to five million souls.

  179 Downing Street.

  A four-story detached apartment. Its exterior bore the marks of age, but the open windows revealed an interior both spacious and tastefully appointed.

  Fabian had fallen for it at first sight. Within days, he had moved in, drawn to its elegance and atmosphere. The landlord’s refined taste stood worlds apart from the gaudy vulgarity of the surrounding nine streets.

  Only one flaw: the landlord was too clever for Fabian’s liking.

  Fabian prided himself on appreciating intelligence—but there was such a thing as too much. Such people, he avoided by instinct.

  Second floor.

  A young man with black hair and blue eyes lounged in a chair, his polished shoes propped unapologetically on the table. Dressed in a black suit, he radiated an air of precision and decisiveness.

  Despite his elite education, Fabian had always preferred independence—and was not above keeping a few uncivil habits.

  His eyes scanned the morning paper. Goliath’s crime rate was low for its size, but with millions crammed into the city, daily incidents were inevitable.

  Even grisly murders were not rare. He had no fondness for detective work, yet such cases caught his interest—he relished dissecting their truths.

  It was, in part, a game—proof of his superiority over the masses.

  The door swung open. Mei stepped inside without preamble, pouring herself a cup of tea before speaking in a calm tone:

  “Murder in the southern suburbs. Witnesses say the killer might be a vampire.”

  “Boring.”

  Fabian didn’t look up, still flipping pages in search of more curious stories. “Just another lunatic with a taste for theatrics. If vampires existed, I’d jump out this window for you.”

  He believed only in facts—and his own deductions. Evidence could be fabricated, facts could be false. But his conclusions? Infallible.

  Any proof that contradicted his reasoning, he deemed flawed by default.

  Such was his arrogance.

  Fabian was always right.

  Mei’s calm voice carried words sharper than any blade: “Your rent from last month is overdue. If you can’t pay this month, I’ll throw you out on the street.”

  “...”

  He had no comeback for that.

  Fabian had a taste for elegance and refinement—but he was flat broke, eking out a living as a private detective, chasing down cheating spouses for pocket change.

  He also had a weakness for gambling. Once, brimming with confidence, he’d coaxed Mei into a bet: if he won, a month’s rent would be free. He lost—twenty times in a row.

  He had nearly signed away his freedom in a deed of indenture.

  That had been the darkest day of his life.

  Fabian still couldn’t figure out how Mei had pulled it off—winning twenty straight rounds “by luck” was absurd. No one would believe it, and before that day, he’d considered himself a master at the game.

  The second time, he’d boasted about his fighting skills and challenged Mei to a spar. She had beaten him senseless, breaking several bones in the process.

  He’d barely lived to tell the tale.

  So, yes—the apartment’s decor was exquisite, the landlord’s taste unmatched. But as far as Fabian was concerned, the landlord herself was the problem.

  Being utterly crushed on every front was a feeling he could do without.

  Mei knew Fabian’s distaste for casework. She pulled a notebook from her pocket, flipped through a few pages, and stopped. “What about this one? The pay’s decent. A lowlife in the East District claims there’s a suspected immortal there. Find him, and you get the bounty.”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “An immortal?”

  Fabian shot her a look, his tone dripping with mockery. “Why do idiots keep believing this nonsense—and paying a fortune for it?”

  “That’s their problem. You just need to find the guy.”

  “Fine.”

  Fabian grabbed his coat and headed out. He had no idea where Mei got her intel, but her information was always disturbingly accurate.

  ...

  Goliath was an old city, rich in history. Its industries thrived, pulsing with life—but it also carried the weight of centuries.

  The East District was working-class and poor, many of its buildings dating back decades—or even centuries.

  On the main streets, decay sat alongside antiquity; step into the alleys, and the stench of mildew hit like a wall.

  Here, a drunk street punk had been telling anyone who’d listen that he’d met an immortal—claiming he’d watched the man take over a dozen stab wounds, then stand up as if nothing had happened.

  Fabian figured the kid was just plastered, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that some fool actually believed him—and wanted to hire someone to find this “immortal.”

  Finding people?

  That was Fabian’s specialty.

  He’d been born with senses far sharper than any ordinary human: smell, hearing, taste, and an uncanny awareness all beyond the normal range.

  His nose was keener than a bloodhound’s.

  And his mind worked fast—razor sharp, arrogant enough to dismiss everyone except his landlord. Given even the thinnest thread of a connection, he could follow it back to its source.

  Straight to the truth.

  Sometimes, his ability went beyond logic, into something more primal. He called it intuition—just part of who he was.

  To everyone else, it was freakish.

  Night fell.

  A cold wind swept through the dim alleys. Fabian tightened his overcoat against the chill. Rent was rent—this job had to be wrapped quickly.

  The moon hung faintly above, shaped like a cake with a perfect square cut from it.

  He’d been asking about that since he was a boy, but no one could explain it. Two centuries ago, the moon had been whole—books from that time even described a full, round moon. But since then, the full moon had become myth.

  It wasn’t as if someone had literally sliced a piece out of it...

  He shook the thought away.

  Fabian stopped. Under the pale moonlight, he spotted faint bloodstains on the cobblestones—dark, dried, almost invisible.

  “Must be here.”

  He’d already spoken to the client, tracked down the drunk who claimed to have seen the immortal, and pinpointed this spot. At the very least, a fight had definitely happened here.

  The drunk’s description was simple: a man in his twenties, about 1.7 meters, lean build—either new to the area or just passing through for fun.

  The scent lingered here, laced with a strong tang of blood. Like a hound, Fabian could follow that trail straight to its owner.

  “No challenge at all,” he muttered with disappointment.

  Half an hour later, Fabian stood before a cheap rental in the East District. The trail ended here. The door was unlocked, the key still in the keyhole, beaded with night mist.

  He pushed it open.

  In the corner, slumped against the wall, sat a corpse—eyes wide, head tilted back, staring blankly at the ceiling.

  Fabian pulled back the bloodied shirt. The man’s abdomen was a ruin of knife wounds.

  With a grim smirk, Fabian muttered: “The immortal’s dead.”

  Then,

  Fabian pulled a small glass tube from the corpse’s pocket—a vial of crimson liquid, thick like blood, yet faintly laced with a golden shimmer. It looked medicinal… or perhaps something far stranger.

  Fabian had never been a stickler for rules. In this age, the idea of “preserving evidence” didn’t even exist. Taking valuable finds for oneself was as normal as breathing.

  In his mind, he was always right.

  Only this time, he was wrong.

  When he rose and turned, a shadowed figure was standing there—silent, still—as if it had been present since the moment he entered. A chill spidered down his spine.

  “Br…”

  Bang!

  Fabian’s nerves snapped taut. His fingers slid toward the dagger hidden in his sleeve, but the shadow moved with inhuman speed. A fist struck his gut, and the world went black.

  Rumble…

  The ground trembled as it sank, seawater roaring in to devour all.

  A knight in gleaming armor, eyes sharp as steel, leveled his blade.

  “Hegram—why did you betray the Empress? Why betray the Empire?”

  The accused knelt before him, battle-axe in hand, his body wrecked with wounds. His hair hung wild, his breath shallow, his expression—haunted. For a long moment, he said nothing. Finally, his voice was low, raw.

  “I never thought… it would end like this.”

  Rage flared in the sword knight’s eyes. In one brutal stroke, he severed Hegram’s head.

  The icy burn of steel at his neck, the raw terror of dying—too vivid to be a dream. Fabian’s eyes flew open.

  He was back in his own home.

  Mei stood there, as if she’d known the exact moment he’d wake.

  “You’re lucky,” she said flatly. “If they’d meant you harm, you’d be dead.”

  “Maybe,” Fabian muttered. He shook his head, baffled by the bizarre dream. He didn’t care for historical legends—names like Julius or Hegram meant nothing to him.

  He cared about his payment.

  “I found the guy. My reward—full amount.”

  Mei’s tone was mild, but her words cut. “Too bad. Sounds like you were dreaming.”

  “Huh?”

  Fabian bolted upright. That’s right—he’d been dumped on the sofa and slept for a full day. “A corpse that big, and nobody saw it? Is everyone blind?”

  “There was no corpse.”

  “What?”

  “You were alone in that house,” Mei said, disinterested. “Don’t care to hear the details. This job’s a bust.”

  Fabian’s brows knit. The body was gone… and so was the crimson vial. None of it made sense.

  “There was no immortal either,” Mei added. “Wherever he went, he was already very dead when I found him.”

  Somewhere else—

  An immortal knelt respectfully before a towering figure, offering a familiar vial of crimson-gold liquid.

  “Progenitor… here it is.”

  The Progenitor of Immortals.

  Gaunt took the vial in his hand. He knew at once—this was no ordinary medicine. It was blood, pulsing with immense, ancient power.

  “What do they call it?”

  His subordinate’s voice was hushed.

  “They call it the Blood of God. A divine substance with a terrifying power to suppress our kind.”

  【History of the Firenze Empire · Hegram】

  【Excerpt: Hegram, the Empire’s Second Knight, rivaled even Julius in strength. Legend says wolves carried him away as an infant, raising him on their milk. Eccentric and rebellious, he was a hero in the Empire’s early campaigns, yet also the architect of its fall…】

  As time passed, Rosinante dreamed of the Empire more and more often—and always from the same vantage point.

  At first, he saw the Twelve Knights’ civil war, watching the Empire tear itself apart. Gradually, the dreams moved backward: to the war’s beginning, then the years before, then the Empire’s golden age… until he saw its very founding.

  The visions were too real to dismiss. Rosinante sought the true history, the version uncorrupted by the Hermitage Society’s revisions.

  It matched his dreams—almost perfectly—as if he’d lived it himself. Memories surfaced with startling clarity.

  In them, Julius and Camelo confronted Hegram again and again.

  Why start this war? Why betray the Empress? Why betray the Empire?

  In the official histories, those questions were never answered.

  And in the dreams… Hegram still refused to speak.

  However,

  Rosinante knew the truth—Hegram’s rebellion was not born of cold ambition, but of a desperate, childish hunger for recognition. Like a boy pulling at his parents’ sleeves, he had made trouble not out of hatred, but in the naive hope of earning their attention.

  As he had once confessed to Julius, he never imagined the conflict would spiral beyond control, until it became a wound from which the Firenze Empire would never recover.

  The cruelest truth?

  Hegram had been the one to set the fire that consumed the Twelve Knights. He had been the reason Julius took his own life before the throne, broken by remorse.

  And yet—

  Hegram’s proudest moment had been swearing his sword to the Empire, standing among the Twelve beneath the shadow of the throne.

  His desire had been painfully simple:

  One word of praise from the Empress.

  One word of recognition.

  Even one word of reproach would have been enough.

  But there was nothing.

  He had never even looked upon the Empress’s face. His youth had been too brash, too hot-blooded, too quick to defy. And in the absence of approval, he had chosen provocation.

  What he never realized was that the other knights each carried their own hidden grudges. He had been only the first stone, kicked loose from the mountaintop—And the avalanche had been unstoppable.

  It had crushed the Empire.

  Rosinante’s hands trembled violently. The visions in his dreams bled into waking reality until there was no longer a border between the two. His breath hitched as the truth set in:

  He was Hegram.

  And he did not know why Julius had spared him that day. Death beneath that sword would have been the most merciful end.

  Now, there was no mercy left.

  At the Hermitage Society’s vault of sacred relics, Rosinante knelt before the long-abandoned Firenze throne. His gaze was hollow; his tears were sharp with centuries of regret.

  “Your Majesty,” he whispered hoarsely,

  “It was all my fault.”

  “I should have died by Julius’s hand a thousand years ago. Perhaps this—this endless wandering—is your punishment.”

  “I have no right to ask for forgiveness. But let me die in the Empire. Let me die beneath Julius’s sword.”

  The throne gave him no answer—just as it hadn’t a thousand years before.

  And the silence cut deeper than steel.

  The age he had known was gone. The glory of the Empire, the chivalry of its knights, the dreams they had fought for—all were dust. If fate would grant him even one chance to return, he would give anything.

  He needed only one thing:

  To die in Firenze.

  Rosinante’s heart ached for salvation.

  Time dragged on.

  The throne remained silent.

  What twisted the knife deeper was knowing he had erased the Empire twice—once in the flesh, and once in history itself. He had hurled the Incantation of Lore at the throne again and again, but it yielded nothing.

  Perhaps the magic had worked. Perhaps the Queen simply chose not to answer.

  Perhaps her silence meant she was too disappointed to speak his name.

  Either way, the pain was the same.

  Twice.

  He had buried the Empire he had once sworn to protect—twice.

  In that moment, he wished he could tear himself into a thousand pieces. He had entombed Firenze forever in the past, leaving himself to rot in the present.

  When at last he rose, his steps were those of a man whose soul had turned to ash.

  “Your Majesty... at least let me die in Firenze...”

  From that day forward, Rosinante moved through the world like an empty shell.

  Samuel noticed the change. He asked more than once what troubled him, but Rosinante never answered—

  Until the day he saw a newspaper headline:

  Genius or Madman? The Time-Travel Machine is About to Be Born!

  A spark flared in his deadened eyes. He devoured the article, every word feeding a fever in his chest.

  The Hermitage Society noticed, too.

  “A time machine?” Samuel muttered, rubbing his temple. “This had better be a hoax. If it’s real, we’re going to be very busy.” Without hesitation, he set out for Goliath City.

  Goliath City

  Fabian stared at the front page of the same paper, a slow grin spreading across his face. “A time machine? We’ve come that far already?”

  Mei, of course, scoffed.

  “You don’t believe in vampires or immortals, but you think this era’s tech can build a time machine?”

  “It’s different,” Fabian shot back, giving her a look that said you wouldn’t understand. “This is science. Not drunken tavern tales or mystical nonsense. If it’s real, it’ll be the greatest invention of the century.”

  “Not going to join the frenzy?”

  “Not when rent’s due.”

  He threw on his coat and stepped into the street. Easy money was always preferable, and finding people was easy for him. He had other methods too—less conventional, more profitable.

  As he hurried along, a young girl brushed past. Fabian’s steps faltered.

  It wasn’t her face that caught him—it was the necklace she wore: a teardrop-shaped gemstone that looked worth a small fortune.