novelno Chapter 152 : Chapter 152
Chapter 152 : Chapter 152
Chapter 152. The Story
Logaris expressionlessly put it away into his Spatial Ring.
“Very good. Excellent awareness.” Logaris nodded in satisfaction. “Then leave tonight. And remember, make the story sound as convincing as possible. Put the emphasis on ‘personal grudges’ and the ‘Court of Equilibrium.’”
“Understood! Understood!” Rossi was so relieved it felt like he had just been pardoned. Scrambling to his feet, he bowed deeply to Logaris and Sylvia, then stumbled out of the study.
As the door closed, the room fell silent once more.
Sylvia looked at Cassido, who was sprawled on the floor like a puddle of mud, then turned to Logaris beside her.
“The West family...” she said softly. “This is the first time I’ve heard you mention them.”
Most of Sylvia’s memories of Logaris began from the time she was twelve. Before that, nearly everything she knew about him had come from his own retellings.
“I only found out recently myself.” Logaris’s tone was flat. He walked to the window and looked out at the banquet in the manor grounds, still blazing with light. “It was just a tiny family that had long since been forgotten. Nothing worth mentioning.”
Sylvia studied his profile. The light reflected off his lenses with a cold gleam. She suddenly realized that even after knowing this man for ten years, this man who could even be called the one closest to her, she still understood far too little about him.
The thought made her want to laugh a little.
Just moments ago, she had been stunned by his meticulous and ruthless plan. Now she had started caring about this sort of gossip instead.
“So...” Sylvia walked to his side and looked out the window the way he was doing, asking half-jokingly and half-seriously, “this time, after turning Whiteport upside down, were you acting in the line of duty, or... settling a personal grudge under the cover of official business?”
She had expected Logaris to dodge the question as usual, with some caustic joke or some academic theory.
But this time, he did not.
Logaris pushed up the glasses on the bridge of his nose and remained silent for a moment.
He looked at the nobles dancing gracefully outside to the music, yet it was as if his gaze passed straight through the luxurious manor and saw the figures struggling in mud and despair down in the lower district.
In the end, his eyes settled on the glass window, which reflected his own face, its expression impossible to make out.
“I don’t know.”
He spoke softly.
“Maybe it was both.”
...
Whiteport before dawn was so quiet it felt like a city of the dead.
Dozens of people were sprawled all over the great hall of Tarassa Manor.
These lords, young masters, and young ladies, who normally strutted around with their noses in the air, were now sleeping like pigs trussed up for slaughter. They had all been caught by Logaris’s Mass Sleep Spell.
Logaris crouched in front of a gaudily dressed noblewoman, holding a small cluster of mana that gave off a faint blue glow.
Spellwork: Mass Silence.
An invisible ripple swept across the entire hall.
The fat men who had been snoring with their mouths wide open suddenly made no sound at all. Their bellies still rose and fell, and their throats still trembled, but not a single bit of noise came out.
The world became peaceful.
“That’s a nice trick.” Sylvia raised a brow. “Could you use it during council meetings in the future too? Those old men are far too noisy.”
“Not a bad suggestion.”
Logaris clapped his hands and rose to his feet. Looking at the floor full of “mutes,” he nodded in satisfaction.
Immediately afterward, dozens of specially made anti-magic ropes shot out like living snakes, binding the lot of them up like bundles of dumplings. The knots were incredibly professional. Not only did they restrict movement, they also cinched tight around several key circulation points, ensuring that even after waking up, none of them would be able to move so much as a finger.
“And now comes the main event.”
Logaris pulled out a stack of notices that had not even dried yet from his Spatial Ring and handed them to the Shadow Guards waiting outside the door.
“Go. Paste these all over Whiteport’s streets and alleys. And remember, make sure that number stands out.”
Sylvia glanced over the notice.
It did not mention “treason” a single time, nor did it say anything about “Tyrenia.”
The charge was simple and brutally direct: the Tarassa family had abused its official position over a long period to evade taxes owed to the Northern Territory, accumulating a total of thirty million Golden Lion Coins, and had violently resisted taxation, treating the new law like worthless scrap paper.
“Thirty million?” Sylvia’s mouth twitched. “Wasn’t the ledger last night only at fifteen million?”
“Inflation,” Logaris said with a straight face. “Add in emotional damages and penalty interest, and thirty million is perfectly reasonable. Besides, if you go to those penniless fishermen and tell them ‘treason,’ they may not even understand what that means. But tell them these bastards stole money that belonged to everyone, and just watch how fast they get angry.”
Hatred of the rich had always been the most efficient fuel for stirring up the emotions of the lower classes.
...
At first light, Whiteport exploded.
Workers who had merely been heading to the docks for another day of backbreaking labor were stunned to find that the tax office building, usually untouchable and overbearing, had been sealed off.
Hundreds of notices had been plastered across the city walls.
Every line read aloud by someone literate made the eyes of the surrounding crowd redden a little more.
“Thirty million Golden Lion Coins?! How much black bread would that buy?!”
“So that’s why life’s been so hard this year. Those vampires swallowed it all!”
“Damn that Tarassa lot! I slave away fishing all year and can’t even save a single copper, while they haul mountains of gold and silver into their own homes!”
Anger spread like a plague.
No one even needed to fan the flames on purpose. The townsfolk, who had long been oppressed into swallowing their rage, began surging toward the square of their own accord. They carried rotten eggs, spoiled vegetables, and even leftover fish bones from the night before.
At the same time, a few men who looked exactly like street thugs slipped through the crowd, whispering mysteriously into the ears of the people around them.
“Hey, did you hear? That Lord Logaris leading this raid seems to have some history with the Tarassa family.”
“What do you mean?”
“I heard he’s the child of the Baron West family, the one Tarassa crushed twenty years ago! This time he’s probably here for revenge.”
“Seriously?”
“Absolutely true! My great-uncle’s neighbor works at the manor and heard it with his own ears! The moment that lord stepped through the door, he said one thing: ‘Twenty years. It’s time to settle this debt.’ Tsk, tsk, that’s a blood-deep grudge.”
“No wonder he was so ruthless. He didn’t even spare the dogs!”
“The Tarassa family had it coming! That’s called evil meeting its due reward!”
Rumors like that, once seasoned with a bit of aristocratic scandal and revenge drama, spread faster than a forbidden spell.
In less than two hours, the version of events known as “the new high official settling a personal vendetta and cutting down his enemy by hand” had already evolved into seventeen or eighteen different forms. Some said Logaris had returned to reclaim his family’s ancestral treasure. Others claimed he had come to take back a childhood sweetheart who had been stolen from him.
In the end, no one cared about the truth.
All they cared about was that Count Tarassa, the man who had spent years shitting on their heads, was about to suffer a spectacular downfall today.