Laia shifted slightly in her seat under that steady, assessing gaze. A prickle of unease crawled up her spine. She could feel him weighing her, studying her, and she could not fathom why. She was nobody. A penniless third-rank orphan with a broken D-rank kingdom. What could a God Monarch possibly find worth staring at?
Her intuition was not wrong.
Valerion Voss had been watching her from the moment he had stepped into the room. He was Lyra's elder cousin, and word had reached the family estate that their quiet, reserved youngest daughter—who rarely deigned to speak to anyone outside the clan—had made a friend at the academy. He had pulled strings to take over this class the very same day, curious to see who had caught Lyra's attention.
At first glance, there was nothing remarkable about the girl. Dark hair, steady features, a calm, guarded set to her shoulders. When Valerion had reached out with his senses to dig deeper, though, he had found only fog.
That in itself was strange. The academy's warding arrays hid every student's core resonance, divine essence, and rule-force from casual inspection. He knew that. But he was a God Monarch. He wielded the Authority of Verity. He should have been able to pierce every veil below the rank of God King with barely a thought. He should have seen the shape of her kingdom, the weight of her power, the echo of her bloodline.
He saw nothing.
With the other students, it was easy. Some kingdoms felt like thick, unyielding stone walls—strong, well-fortified, expensive. Others felt like thin-shelled eggs, fragile and ready to crack at the first hard knock.
When he looked at Laia, it was like staring at a soap bubble. Thin, insubstantial, shimmering faintly with something strange and unplaceable. It did not feel like a ward. It did not feel like a hidden artifact. It felt like… nothing at all.
Fascinating, he thought. Some new kind of concealment relic? Something old enough to evade his sight?
If she had access to treasures that could fool a God Monarch's perception, her background was anything but ordinary.
If only he knew, Laia thought dryly to herself, unaware of the man's internal turmoil.
It's not a barrier. It's just that my kingdom walls are so thin you can't even tell they're there.
Valerion's lips tugged into a faint, polite smile, and he turned his attention back to the room at large.
"Very well. To begin today's lesson, I will need a basic survey of your kingdoms. Nothing detailed—just a few quick metrics for my records."
He waved a hand, and thin, enchanted parchment scrolls drifted down to every desk, each wrapped in a layer of privacy warding. The students picked them up at once, quills scratching quietly across the pages.
The questions were simple, harmless on their face: total territory size, approximate subject population, current divine rank.
Laia read through the scroll twice, turning it over in her hands. There was nothing here that could give away her secret. No questions about race, no questions about faith levels, no questions about barrier quality.
She glanced inward, brushing her awareness across her kingdom.
One hundred and fifty thousand subjects, give or take, and climbing fast. Twenty thousand square kilometers of territory. Third Rank, early stage.
She wrote the numbers down in neat, sharp script, rolled the scroll closed, and passed it forward to the front of the room.
Valerion collected the stack of scrolls and set them on the lectern. He did not need to read them to know most of the answers. But when he reached Laia's scroll, he paused.
He could not break the academy's oath-oracle bindings. No one could—not even a God Emperor, so the saying went. The privacy of a student's kingdom was sacred, enforced by the highest divine contracts.
But with his Authority of Verity, he could tell one thing for certain: every number on that scroll was true.
Twenty thousand square kilometers.
One hundred and fifty thousand subjects.
Third Rank.
His brows rose, just slightly.
Interesting.
The clan's background check had turned up only one Laia of no family name: an orphan from the fringe districts, penniless, no notable bloodline, no recorded patron. A nobody. She should have had a tiny, struggling kingdom, if she had even managed to awaken one at all.
These numbers did not add up.
A Third Rank kingdom required at least five thousand Third Rank subjects and no fewer than ten thousand Second Rank subjects to anchor it. For fast-breeding races like goblins or hive insects, the numbers ran exponentially higher. Raising that many high-tier subjects cost a fortune in resources—far more than the academy's standard starter packs could provide. Far more than a street orphan could ever afford.
After class, Valerion retired to his office and pulled up the official supply manifests for every student in the section. He skipped past the others and went straight to Laia's record.
What he found was almost absurd.
Standard academy resource cards. Basic everyday supplies. Cheap void-coach fare. That was it.
No kingdom reinforcement cards. No fertility boons. No weather shaping rites. No talent awakening rituals. No faith-amplification arrays. Nothing. Not a single advanced consumable of any kind, dating all the way back to her enrollment.
Valerion leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers.
And not a single record of divine warfare.
She was registered for the official inter-academy war league. Everyone was. But she had never fought a single match.
Everyone knew you needed divine resonance to rank up. Everyone knew you harvested that resonance from void tides or from tearing pieces out of rival kingdoms. A student who had never fought a war, who had never bought a single advanced resource, should still be languishing in the First Rank.
She was in the Third.
He laughed, low and dry.
These records were fake. Obviously fake. Painstakingly, meticulously fake—down to the brand of cheap toilet paper she supposedly bought every month. It was all too perfect, too ordinary, too carefully constructed to look like nothing.
Whoever was backing her had covered their tracks well. This was a warning, as much as anything: you can look, but you will find nothing.
He would call off the deeper inquiries. There was no point in pushing harder, not when the trail had been wiped this clean. Not when it was clearly a deliberate message.
He tapped a finger against the desk, his gaze distant.
He would have believed she was just another ordinary student, if not for the Third Rank sitting plain as day in front of him, and that strange, unreadable bubble of a kingdom he had sensed in class.
No ordinary student had that kind of concealment. No ordinary student advanced that fast without fighting, without spending a single crystal on upgrades.
He would need another angle.
Divine warfare records were public, once matches were fought. If he could get her to enter the league, he would see exactly what her kingdom was made of.
And he would find out who, exactly, he was dealing with.
His jaw tightened faintly.
Lyra was growing far too close to this girl. If Laia was some hidden scion of a shadow clan, if she was tangled up in whatever power struggles were stirring beneath the surface of the empire… the Voss clan could get dragged into something very ugly. The Abyssal incursions were worsening by the month. The borders were shifting. The Voss family could not afford to stumble into a fight they had not chosen.
Whatever it took, he would uncover the truth.
Slowly, carefully, and without making an enemy of whoever was hiding her.