10x God-Tier Stealing System: Pumping S-Rank SuperHeroines Daily!-Chapter 160- CRUXIUS!!

And with that blunt statement, the fragile silence shattered.

"What? You knew?"

There was a genuine, awkward pause between them. The older man seemed genuinely confused that his elaborate facade had been seen through so easily.

He sighed deeply.

Shedding the weak persona, he straightened his broad back and took his seat with proper posture.

At that precise moment, he looked exactly like the man who truly ruled an empire—not the degraded, shaking version Cruxius had watched a second ago.

Cruxius just shook his head in mild disappointment.

He casually pulled up a chair and took the seat across from him, resting his elbows on his thighs. He observed his father return to his usual, imposing self. There wasn’t even a hint of embarrassment on the old man’s face for putting on such a cringe-worthy display.

"Yes... and stop being so dramatic. Just tell me everything, Dad."

Cruxius gave a firm, demanding glance. He reached across the desk, grabbing his father’s hand in a tight, unyielding grip. He looked directly into the man’s eyes, demanding the vital answers he had desperately needed—but couldn’t acquire—in his last life.

In that previous timeline, the old man had died clutching that exact same stubbornness, stubbornly refusing to tell him a damn thing.

And Cruxius already knew the score. If he triggered a regression to return to the past—which he inevitably would to bring Ermond back to life—this proud man would reset and still refuse to speak.

It was far better to wring the truth out of him right now.

"Your mother is not dead, son."

The head of the family stated it with immense gravity. He dropped the words as if revealing a universe-shattering secret, lacing the sentence with so much dramatic intensity that he clearly expected his son to jump up and slam his fists on the table in shock.

But that was only in his own imagination.

Cruxius just sat there, looking at him blankly, his bare shoulders relaxed. He didn’t give off a single spark of the explosive reaction his father had anticipated.

"I know. Next?" 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Cruxius sighed, sounding almost bored.

It was the main reason he hadn’t acted with blind aggression in this life. In the past, he had done massive, irreparable damage to the royal vampire families, only to eventually uncover this exact secret.

His mother was alive.

And it was her own twisted, manipulative plot to disguise her brutal death as some kind of dark motivation to push him forward.

There were moments in a man’s life when raw fuel pushed him forward. Sometimes, he had to burn far more than just that fuel, especially when the driving force was a potent, emotional stimulant like pure revenge.

Naturally, after realizing where his true talents lay, his initial crosshairs had locked onto the superheroes. Or, at the very least, the sprawling Hero Association.

The brutal attack on Spain by Ryken had awakened him to his own latent abilities, painting a massive target on the Association’s back.

But once he pushed them to the absolute verge of collapse, his motives pivoted. He turned his dark ambitions toward the ancient royal families, fully intending to tear them down from the inside out.

He had nearly succeeded. He made it at least halfway there.

After successfully seducing a Vampire Queen, tangling her in his sheets and his lies, he had gained a suffocating grip over one of the strongest heads of the top thirteen archaic lineages.

But the second he unearthed the bitter secret behind his mother’s grand intentions—that she merely used her own staged death as a twisted catalyst to send him on a suicidal crusade against the royals—he dropped the entire scheme.

He took a cold step back.

Every bloody step he had taken felt manufactured. He was walking a path meticulously paved by his mother, dancing on her strings like a foolish, violent puppet.

So, he withdrew.

Not out of fear, or a sudden change of heart regarding his chosen path. He simply hit a solid, unbreakable wall. A temporal limit where, regardless of which route he took, he was met with a gruesome death every single time.

He was trapped in a suffocating, endless loop.

It forced him to withdraw several months into the past, erasing all his hard-earned progress. He lost everything he had built in those sweaty, blood-soaked months simply because, without acquiring genuine power, he was physically unable to move forward.

"You... you seem remarkably confident."

The aging head of the family was clearly taken aback. He hadn’t expected his young son to be fully aware of the dark secret he thought he had buried so well, especially considering the boy was merely eight years old at the time.

Holding onto such a vivid memory should have been linked to the raw trauma of the event, rather than this cold, calculating detachment Cruxius was displaying now.

"Because I know you’re lying, old man," Cruxius scoffed. He felt zero obligation to explain himself after the pathetic theatrical display his father had just attempted.

In his past life, the old man had taken his stubbornness to the grave. He died of his wasting disease without ever telling Cruxius the real reason for his mother’s dramatic, theatrical exit. She could have simply walked out the door without staging a brutal execution that scarred her own son.

"Ahem, so that’s how it is." The patriarch coughed awkwardly.

He stared forward, nervously tapping a manicured finger against his desk. He observed Cruxius’s unreadable face for a long moment before finally caving.

"Your mother instructed me to banish you from the main family the moment you reached your twenty-second year."

"....What the?" Cruxius narrowed his dark eyes. It was an unbelievable revelation, yet it carried a ring of twisted truth he couldn’t outright reject.

He had indeed been banished from the estate in his previous life, but the timeline was completely skewed. He had been twenty-five or twenty-six when they finally kicked him to the curb.

Or, at the very least, the catalyst for his banishment had occurred a full five years after the first time he dragged Thalia into his bed.

"You see, that is exactly what your mother demanded when you were hospitalized after her supposed death."

The old man grimaced, recalling the surreal night. His ’dead’ wife had secretly visited him while their eight-year-old boy lay in a hospital bed, reeling from the trauma.

She had been flanked by strange, imposing men in dark robes. Operatives from the Order, the archaic organization that ruled over vampire jurisdiction, standing by while she coolly dictated the boy’s future.

"Ah, so that’s how it is," Cruxius nodded slowly.

The bitter realization washed over him. He had been thoroughly played. Fooled by the very woman who gave him life, cooking up some convoluted, master plot in her head that he was still blind to.

He let out a harsh sigh, moving straight to the next demand. "So where is she hiding right now?"

"I honestly don’t know," the patriarch replied, offering a helpless shrug. It was a weak gesture that only earned him a flat, deeply doubtful stare from his son.

"I see." Cruxius gave a single nod.

Without a flicker of hesitation, he drew the heavy black handgun from his waistband, brought the cold steel right up to his own temple, and shocked the old man to his core.

"CRUXIUS!"