Elden: Ring of Calamity

Chapter 549 Complete Plan
Lucia felt the tension and trembling of the delicate body in his arms. He gently wrapped one arm around the Queen's knees and placed the other hand behind her shoulder, patting her trembling shoulder softly, as if soothing a frightened little rabbit.

Sherry was very sensible. Seeing that the two fox-scaring enclosures had been removed, she jumped off her master's shoulder early on and hid behind a pile of stones to peek out and keep an eye on the wind, suppressing her breathing as much as possible.

After a while, the rain stopped and the wind died down. My clothes were warm to the touch, and I could still hear the occasional rustling of dew on the leaves.

"I didn't really want to lie to you." She snuggled gently against him, her slightly hoarse voice trembling as she spoke softly.

"I see."

"But I'm afraid that if I tell you everything, I won't be able to leave."

"Afraid I'll stop you?" Lucia's eyebrows curved slightly, and she smiled.

The Queen shook her head and buried her head even deeper. "Let me tell you, even if you disagree with my approach, I will definitely come up with a more comprehensive idea. I'm afraid that from the moment I tell you this, I will lose the courage to complete the plan."

"Actually, even if you didn't say it, I had already guessed some of it."

"Hmm?" The Queen paused for a moment, then quickly realized what she meant and sighed, "Indeed, since this reunion, I've been full of flaws. I think you should have noticed this at the latest, back when I mastered Death Flash. The way I acted in front of you was probably a bit too eager."

“I understand,” Lucia, who had noticed the Queen’s sensitive thoughts early on, said gently before the Queen could explain herself. “It’s not that Your Majesty is not reserved enough, but that you feel that you will never see her again after this trip, so you want to give me some advice in the last few days so that I can avoid some detours.”

"Hehe, you're smart."

"But what I don't understand is, we've already done so much, and the situation is improving day by day—why must we make this choice?"

Around the two of them, thousands upon thousands of ley line crystals were stacked in a special arrangement by Katpela. Even though Lucia's skill in magic arrays was still somewhat inferior to hers, it was clear that this was a super-large-scale destructive magic array that reached deep into the ley lines.

Judging from the trajectory of the runes flowing beneath the altar, the magic circle's effect points far to the southeast, extending along the path of the earth's vein corridor from two thousand years ago. One can guess that its target is the royal city of Rodel, built at the foot of the golden tree.

After a moment of silence, the Queen raised her head, her dark, night-like eyes looking directly into Lucia's eyes, and said softly, "I am not a villain."

Perhaps out of pride, she refused to ask him if he believed her, but he didn't need to ask. He simply looked back into her eyes and said, "I believe you."

There's no need to recount everything she'd done for him; just this moment, feeling each other's hearts pounding with a mix of nervousness and undisguised fragility, many answers are already understood without words. "I said I'd tell you everything after the deal was done," the Queen said, lowering her eyes slightly and pursing her lips. "But since you caught me, I'll tell you everything now; it's not a complete breach of contract."

"This magic circle has only one purpose: to use all the ley lines in the Northern Territory as a guide, following the ancient path where Hethenes blocked the ley lines of the Furnace, and borrowing the immense divine power that built the two-thousand-year foundation of the Giant Dynasty—to detonate the Golden Tree."

Lucia's pupils dilated, and in an instant, many details of the war in the North flashed through his mind.

The infiltration of the Northern Territory by the cultists predated that of the Fire Giants; the Black Flame Seed within the Fourth Giant Legion, capable of forcibly suppressing the Giant's Fire Seed at any moment; and the leyline runes that, despite being enough to support Katapella's return to his peak, were used to create a lethal array.
If a unified answer must be found, the Queen of Death's target can only be Rodel, the Eternal Queen with whom she has been entangled in fate for thousands of years, and the golden tree behind the Eternal Queen that has been parasitizing the giant furnace tree and sucking the marrow from the borderlands for three thousand years!
"By now, you should have figured it out long ago. Before the chaos broke out in the North, the high-ranking officials of the Golden Dynasty, including Radagan, had no idea that this turmoil would occur."

"Over the years, the old party has become increasingly isolated and powerless under Marika's constant avoidance. Some of the high-ranking members in power have long since begun to protect themselves and stay out of politics. The new party, backed by secret agents, has no powerful enemies to oppress it from the outside and no political rivals to counter it from the inside. Over the past ten years, it has long since become a group of arrogant fools."

"These people always take it for granted that things will develop as smoothly as they fantasize behind closed doors in the Hall of the Sun. So after Kaven Duoris quelled the last Northern Rebellion, they naturally assumed that the far north was no longer dangerous. With the threats of giant remnants, hybrids, demi-humans, and bandits eliminated, the minerals and medicinal herbs of the snowfields were the most coveted treasures—hence the battle festival four years ago. Of course, Duoris himself was quite foolish. Because you discovered the Dragon Feast, the New Party nobles took advantage of your anger to completely drive the Duoris family out of the power circle and put Osalion Ofnir, who was better able to balance the interests of all parties and was easier to control, into the position of the Northern Guardian."

"After the War King was banished, the Ophniel family also declined. Osarion, lacking a strong foundation, was naturally more satisfactory to the New Party families than Calvin in this position. However, they simply couldn't understand that a family that was once far more glorious than them suddenly had the opportunity to govern a territory, and not just any territory, but a remote and potentially huge country within a country like the North. How quickly would their ambition, which had long been extinguished by the times, reignite?"

“Therefore, the Ophniel family was the earliest collaborator of the Giants’ Court, besides Yuno,” Lucia said.

"Indeed, the so-called 'driving one tiger to devour another' strategy of your Northern Expeditionary Army and the Giants' Court to suffer heavy losses, and their 'far-sighted' plan to calmly clean up the situation after defeating the Ancient Dragon Temple, was originally just an excuse to cover up their incompetence. But coincidentally, another incompetent piece of trash, just like them, also panicked after two things got out of control in succession."

The Queen nuzzled his chin with the top of her head, squinted her eyes, and said, "Guess what it is?"

“It is Alpha, and the will of order that He represents—” Lucia closed his eyes and exhaled, “He overestimated the destruction that Esther could bring, and underestimated Marika’s resistance to Him.”

"You're so clever. I don't want to hear that woman's name come out of your mouth, but that's really the case."

“Estelle should have been ‘sealed’ again by the demigods after destroying half of Gelid, so that our supreme will could come out and cause trouble again when it needed someone to take the blame. Maybe if that were the case, you would still be the ‘noble god with a noble bloodline, the descendant of the great Dragon King and Dragon God, and the most outstanding successor of the next era of the Golden Order’ in His words.”

"Of course, strictly speaking, without those mimicry spells, those disgusting fingers don't even have mouths."

(End of this chapter)