Ethan spent his first night in the Holy City.

He slept soundly, but the patrol units of the Holy City and the upper ranks of the Council endured a sleepless night. Just before dawn, a detachment of the Holy City Navy found the unconscious Second Seat in an alley one block away from the Council building. When they rushed him to the hospital, the doctors brought them bad news.

—The implant in the Second Seat’s brain had melted down. This was the main reason for his coma, and even if there was a chance he might wake up in the future, there was still a high probability he would lose all his memories.

For the family, this was nothing short of a devastating blow.

The Second Seat, in a sense, represented the family’s interests within the Origin Society. In the eyes of most family members, the First Seat was an inhuman lunatic; no one knew what she was thinking about each day. Someone like that could never possibly put the family’s interests first.

Fortunately, the First Seat was always obsessed with her research, to the point that the Second Seat instead became the executor of most of the Society’s major decisions.

Immortality technology, the Holy City Navy Act, and the construction of the Paradise facilities—these technologies, which they could use for their own pleasure and to maintain the stability of the Edge World, could be safely entrusted to the Second Seat to push forward. In this way, they could continue their decadent lives like hands‑off landlords.

And now, their "old butler" had actually been attacked right under their noses. Even more bizarre was that the Lord of the Holy City had allowed the attacker to walk free. In the eyes of the family members, this was simply inconceivable. Yet with the Second Seat’s assault, they also lost their bridge for peeking into the Lord of the Holy City’s thoughts.

Another disturbing piece of news was quietly spreading among the families.

On that same night, a patrol squad claimed to have spotted a humanoid monster with four arms and limbs in a certain district. When they rushed over, they saw the four‑armed monster dragging a victim in a lab uniform into a pitch‑black fissure.

When the Ministry of Justice conducted its investigation, they discovered that the missing victim was a minor project supervisor in the Fourth Seat’s research department. The previous night, he had just arrived in the First Special District via a warp device to report an important task to the Fourth Seat.

According to the investigators from the Ministry of Justice, the project this supervisor handled had been progressing slowly, and during his report he was subjected to extreme humiliation by the Fourth Seat—though this was nothing new within the Origin Society. Even so, the investigator had ample reason to believe that on his way back from the hotel to his lodgings, the little supervisor had been in a state of extreme dejection.

A brief wavering of his faith in the Lord of the Holy City became the main reason he was attacked.

Under the pressing questions of the High-tier Council members, the Speaker had no choice but to disclose to everyone the existence of the "Grotesque Demon."

A monster capable of freely shuttling between Node Space and reality, feeding off intense negative emotions; anyone who released negative emotions might be targeted by it.

Thus another argument began.

Fear and anger quietly spread through the crowd. The strategic meeting on the Expeditionary Army was postponed indefinitely; until the High-tier Council had argued out who was to blame, any agenda related to the expedition to the Magic Realm would be put on hold.

Clearly, someone had violated the navigation coordinate protocol, causing a creature from Node Space to appear in the real world.

Next came the stage where politicians hurled accusations at each other. No one was willing to bear such a serious charge, because the pirates—invited to the First District as the vanguard of the Expeditionary Army—became the prime suspects. After all, they had been the ones who, at yesterday’s meeting, proposed violating the navigation coordinate ban. Who knew whether they had already tried something like that?

Before the Expeditionary Army could even cohere, a rift had opened among them because of the appearance of a single Grotesque Demon.

This made the situation in the First Special District even more tense. Yesterday, the pirate leaders had first been derided as monkeys by scholars of the Origin Society, and later one of them had his brain implant forcibly shut down. They had already been seething with rage, and today there were even rumors spreading that they should be held responsible for the Second Seat’s attack and the appearance of the Grotesque Demon.

Although many of them were indeed thrilled by the incident involving the Second Seat, the baseless accusations once again confirmed for them the attitude of the Holy City Council toward them.

All that talk of loyalty and honor was a lie; these pampered dignitaries merely wanted a batch of cannon fodder before the Holy City Navy took action.

And to think they had believed they could use this opportunity to obtain some legitimate titles from the authorities and claim a share of the spoils from that distant and mysterious world.

The meeting between the Ministry of Justice and the pirates ended in acrimony. Faced with suspicion, the pirates not only cursed them out and refused to cooperate with the investigation, some even drew their guns in the conference hall.

If the High-tier Council continued to treat them with such a hardline and contemptuous attitude, they might well end up fighting a tug‑of‑war with the Holy City Navy before the expedition even began.

The pirates held a devout reverence for the Lord of the Holy City, but in their eyes, the High-tier Council and the Holy City Navy were indeed a pack of scoundrels—glittering on the surface, yet more rotten and depraved behind the scenes than pirates themselves. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

It was not until the Council’s senior advisors, in light of the Grotesque Demon’s traits, proposed that everyone should stop quarreling and suspecting one another that things took a turn. They argued that a grand banquet should be held immediately, and that the Sanctuary of Logic should extol the glory of the Lord of the Holy City in every district. With steadfast faith, they were certain they could get through this catastrophe.