Chapter 224-The Manga Pariah's Guide to Self-Salvation
"The Empire has no choice but to cooperate."
The Emperor's golden eyes gleamed with a commanding intensity, his gaze pressing down on Ye Zheng. Her own eyes met his without flinching.
"You seem to know a great deal about the disaster the Empire is about to face — but I don't know the first thing about it."
"If it's only at Sykes's level, a few more of them would pose no real threat to me."
The implication was clear: Ye Zheng saw no reason to cooperate.
The Emperor let out a short laugh. The gaze he had fixed on Ye Zheng suddenly grew distant, as though drifting into memory.
"Sykes… compared to his true mother, he was far inferior — Marcy, you and I are the only ones still alive who remember what happened back then. Why don't you tell this young Pope whether you want people to live through that hell again?"
Ye Zheng suddenly pressed a hand to her chest as it grew warm. Deep within her consciousness, she heard a faint, almost imperceptible cold laugh.
"It seems Marcy has no desire to speak with you. Just tell me directly — why are you so certain the demon dragon crisis will repeat itself within half a year?"
"Because Sykes is dead."
The Emperor said coldly.
"…What exactly do you mean?"
Ye Zheng's voice dropped entirely.
The Emperor was silent for a moment, as though finally making up his mind, and then slowly began to speak — revealing a shocking truth.
"Sykes's true purpose was not to serve as my next 'vessel.' I did not deceive Qin Tian — Sykes truly was 'Hope,' the hope of preventing the true demon dragon from descending upon the world."
"The demon dragon never truly died. She will be reborn five hundred years later, awakening within a woman. At her summoning, the demon dragon's skeletal remains will stir back to life, and the world-ending catastrophe of five hundred years ago will return."
"So I buried the demon dragon's remains in scattered locations across the Empire, sealed within the hardest Heterogeneous Stone. Through repeated experimentation, I created Sykes — using his body to imprison her bones. With the scattered remains unable to reunite, even if she were reborn, her power would be drastically diminished."
Ye Zheng cut him off. "How did you know the demon dragon would be reborn?"
Marcy had delivered the prophecy of the apocalypse — told to her by an unknown deity. But the deity had given her no detailed explanation of the cause.
Aston XIV knew far too much detail. The more Ye Zheng heard, the more she suspected that in those days, he had played a role beyond simply being the Emperor who led his people through the crisis.
"Because the demon dragon — Margaret — was my wife. When she died, I was there."
The Emperor looked out the window. "Ye Zheng, you need not doubt me. Only I know what happened back then. Even if you are suspicious, there is no one else who can give you any answers."
No — if Aston XIV had been present at the moment the demon dragon was slain, then there was one other person who must also have been there, who knew what had happened before the demon dragon's death —
The God of Hope. That village girl with extraordinary power who had been elevated to the status of a deity — Hope.
In the widely circulated legend of the God of Hope, after the demon dragon vanished, the God of Hope also disappeared without a trace. The Divine Revelation recorded that the deity had returned to her divine realm.
"Your Eminence, are you feeling unwell?" the Emperor suddenly asked.
Ye Zheng looked up at him, and only then noticed that her five fingers had been pressing tightly against her chest. It wasn't her body that was warm — it was the fragment of bone tucked inside her clothing that was burning hot.
Ye Zheng gave a composed nod. "Mm, I'm feeling a little under the weather today."
"In that case, let us leave it here for today. I have told you everything I know. I trust you will make the right choice, Your Eminence."
The Emperor's tone had returned to its measured calm, even carrying a faint note of concern for a younger generation.
The man's voice drifted lightly past her ear. Ye Zheng's pupils contracted almost imperceptibly, her attention fixed on his face. The fine lines at the corners of his eyes were trembling faintly, and his blinking had grown more frequent.
He was suppressing laughter.
Beneath the handsome, composed exterior of a middle-aged man, that five-hundred-year-old monster was laughing.
Realizing this, a chill shot up her spine. Ye Zheng's thoughts were thrown into momentary disarray — she could no longer make an accurate judgment about what Aston XIV had just told her.
Which parts were true? Which were false?
Or had he been playing her the entire time?
Ye Zheng left the attic.
She rested a hand on the banister and descended the stairs slowly, sorting through every new clue she had just gathered.
According to the Emperor, the demon dragon would reassemble all the Dragon Bones and descend upon the Empire once more. Sykes had existed to imprison the fragment of bone now resting against her clothing — to prevent Margaret's rebirth.
But Ye Zheng could not trust his account, even if he was the only surviving witness.
Because the other witness who knew the truth of the demon dragon's death — the God of Hope, the girl named Hope — had in all likelihood been killed by him.
That was the only explanation for the God of Hope's mysterious disappearance. If the God of Hope had truly been murdered by him, then the probability that he had just lied was very high.
The most important reason Ye Zheng found it impossible to believe him was simply that the Emperor was far too strange.
His very existence was already deeply unsettling — but the personality he let slip through the cracks was genuinely bizarre.
"Aston XIV — celebrated as a prodigy from childhood, crowned at thirteen, led the Empire's resistance against the demon dragon at eighteen, and from that day forward, his name was written into history forever."
Marcy's voice rose from somewhere deep in her consciousness.
"At first, I revered him like any ordinary person would. But as I climbed higher and came to know him better, I found that he… occasionally seemed like a child."
When she said "like a child," Marcy — who had spent her life as a teacher — showed not a trace of fondness. Her tone carried a subtle, unmistakable distaste.
Ye Zheng murmured in agreement. "Now that you mention it, I felt it too."
That sly amusement he tried to hide yet couldn't quite contain — it was exactly like a child who had pulled off a prank, ducking behind an adult and flashing a gleeful grin at their victim.
Ye Zheng rubbed her arm. She was practically getting goosebumps.
In the past, facing enemies like Wen Jian who loved wearing masks, Ye Zheng had always been perfectly at ease — who in the world of power and privilege didn't put on a performance? But the Emperor was the first one to make her feel genuinely sick.
He didn't seem to wear his masks for any particular purpose. He reveled in every identity, every false face — he took genuine, wholehearted pleasure in making a fool of the prey before him.
"Marcy, what else do you know about the God of Hope's whereabouts?"
Marcy sighed. "Though I gave her a beautiful fate in the Divine Revelation, at the time she disappeared, I was still just a healer with some standing in the lower districts."
A faint shadow of frustration crossed Ye Zheng's brow. Marcy had only risen to prominence after the demon dragon's disappearance — by the time she had founded the Church and uncovered the hidden truth of the demon dragon disaster from those years, Aston XIV had already destroyed most of the evidence and erased nearly every trace.
Was it truly as he said — that only he knew the truth of what had happened back then?
Her heavy footsteps suddenly stopped. Ye Zheng stood in the middle of the staircase and looked back up toward the top.
If he was the only one who knew the truth — then she would just have to use whatever means necessary to make him tell her everything.
The remains of that demon dragon queen were still burning hot against her chest, like a cry of unresolved resentment and rage.
[Mother of All Things] could strip away his decorative skin, pull out his hollow bones, and churn his mind to pieces — letting the sunken truth rise back to the surface.
Ye Zheng turned and walked back, and as she stepped over the final stair, she sensed something and looked back — glancing down toward the base of the staircase.
Below, Bai Yi was ascending the steps with Bai Muqing and Bai Mulin.
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