Epic Of The Demonic Sage

Having learned of the material used for the arrow tips and the peculiarities associated with them, Lucius thought that it was time to send the helpers away for the time being.

"Thank you for your help, Blacksmith Milo and also you two, Brian and Elmer." Lucius said with a smile.

"The pleasure is all ours, lord Asher. If it were not for you, we would have never gotten justice and now we get to live a better life as well." Milo stated.

"Indeed, had it not been for Lord Asher perhaps I would have still been drowning my sorrows in alcohol." Brian stated while Elmer nodded in agreement.

The three of them then left the lab and went upstairs, while Kiana locked the door behind them. She then saw Lucius, who was sitting with a complex expression on his face while thinking of something.

"What should we do now?" Kiana questioned.

"Hmm… that is hard to decide without more information. The one thing we do know now is that father is in danger and that there will be more assassins coming after him. For now, they decided to stay low-key and target him from afar.

But what if they decide it's enough and attack him directly. We will need to keep an eye out. Though our other enemies might also get wary and wonder what happened to make the count act like this and perhaps take advantage of it.

In short, we are surrounded by egg shells and need to tread carefully, lest someone decides to take advantage." Lucius answered.

Kiana nodded her head and thought of what she could do for now.

"Though… there is a way we can reduce the numbers of egg shells we are surrounded by." Lucius spoke after thinking for a bit.

"And how's that?" Kiana questioned.

"Well, we simply reduce the number of enemies we have. Culling them should reduce our trouble and perhaps even end it completely." Lucius answered.

Hearing this, Kiana's eyes went wide, as this was a rather drastic solution.

"Will it work, though? Won't it cause problems if we rush it?" Kiana asked.

"It can… but we will find ways to mitigate it. For now though, we will need to deal with the trouble that is closest to us… The arbitrator. If everything goes well, we will be able to get rid of Viscount Drew as well." Lucius replied.

Kiana could only keep a straight face and nod her head in response. Making deep plans and understanding them was slightly beyond her and even with all the education and skills she had gained over the years, this was complex.

Even if Kiana had grown up in difficulty in a fallen noble family, it was nothing compared to Lucius, who was born as a servant child in the Great Barrom clan. Perhaps her problems multiplied a hundred times wouldn't be enough to compare with the danger Lucius had borne through in his past life.

With all that done, Lucius sat down and wrote some things down, clearing out the points in his mind. While he was reminded of the chances of failure. So far, he had been able to get through by planning and it had worked out.

But it was not like it would always be like that and Lucius knew he needed to have backup plans in case something problematic happened that was not according to what he wanted.

There were many wild cards that could be thrown to him, and he preferred to have backups for as many of them as possible.

With this in mind, Lucius began to plan what to do in case of a failure. He spent the rest of the day doing this and eventually returned to the mansion in the end.

Another four days passed while Lucius worked more on the pipeline of things to come. He didn't make any more Lost though as it would have only led to some difficulties such as storage. 

Three of them were easy to hide, but if he went to say… ten, it would become quite difficult. Lucius quickly realized he may need another place to keep all the lost and it would also have to be a place from where he could easily gather them up.

So in a way he just needed a barracks for the Lost. Then there was also the fact that he would need to let the other followers of his learn about the lost. Not as in how they were made, but that they existed.

Lucius didn't do that right away, though. Instead of that, he chose to put marks of obedience on more people. In the past five days, he managed to put them on ten people, which meant two of them in a day.

With his increased Hell energy capacity, it was easier for him and the more he did, the easier was for him to remake the spell matrix. But the seventh time he did that, the spell matrix barely took him three hours to reconstruct, which was a shocking pace of improvement.

It was now that Lucius realized making spell matrices was far easier for him in this world than it was in his past world. He didn't understand this at first as he didn't have a large enough sample size, but now he had a clear and defined data for it that he had seen himself.

Lucius didn't know how much of this was due to the world's unique factors such as Aether, gifts or even the gods themselves, but he knew that there were certainly major differences in how the hell energy was operating here.

Lucius also wanted to learn more about the Rune crystal he had gotten from the spy and wanted to know if humans could also make rune crystals but couldn't really do much. For now, he only ended up asking Master Kain for more books on rune crystals and the theory behind them.

Lucius had already read all the books in the library of the Inanis family about it and even the ones that were previously given by master Kain were quickly finished. He now needed new information and waited for it to arrive since even Master Kain needed to apply for those books if he were to borrow it from the artificers guild.

The Count had also been informed of a threat to life, and the man simply laughed at it. Gabriel said that this was not the first time this had happened, and that it happened almost every year several times.

Only when Lucius told him of the kind of an assassin that had been hired this time, did Gabriel became more serious. They changed up his schedule, making sure that it didn't cause too many waves in the noble circle.

On the military end, the soldiers were shuffled around in a 'routine' change and made to undergo some training programs that Lucius had suggested they do. These were not any combat programs, but rather ones that could be used in the case of evacuation and attack.

Even Lucius knew that if he gave combat programs to the soldiers there's was a great chance, they would not take him seriously. 

But when it was the sixth day after the discovery of the spy arrived, Lucius and everyone got the news that the Arbitrator had finally entered the city. This alerted them all, and they got to work.

The streets were patrolled regularly by now and the number of crimes had fallen to less than ten percent than a month ago. Plus with the many new criminals being caught before, the guards had a steady stream of intel about more criminals.

Lucius and the rest of the Inanis family were now sitting in the meeting hall of the mansion, waiting for the arrival of the arbitrator.

"Is everything done?" Gabriel questioned John who was also sitting along with them.

"Yes, my lord. There have been no reports of any crime since yesterday and we have even increased the current number of guards patrolling by twenty percent. And with the informant plan, young lord Asher enacted the other criminal are scared of getting sold out by their own companions." John answered.

"Good! Hopefully, this will ensure that the Arbitrator doesn't prod us for things like that. Though in the best case, we get an arbitrator who only does what he was asked to do and goes back swiftly." Gabriel replied.

"That seems unlikely. It has been over twenty days since we got the news about the arbitrator. If he really was someone who stuck to his assigned task, he would have arrived here over a week ago, considering the distance and time required to travel." Lucius spoke in a straight tone.

Gabriel stroked his beard and nodded his head. 

"That is indeed true. Hopefully, he was delayed because of other factors and not because of the usuals actions of a priest of Duran." Gabriel spoke.

But just as he said this, a servant arrived and announced.

"The Arbitrator from the church of Duran has arrived."