Chapter117

room having saved my daughter, it is only natural to gauge his foundation. I wanted to learn exactly what kind of person managed to achieve something my own knights could not."
Standing a few paces away, the Patriarch remained completely silent. 
His earlier petty annoyance was gone, replaced seamlessly by the cold, calculating mindset that kept his family in ultimate power. When the King pressured the boy, the Patriarch had subtly activated his own mana vision to observe the physical reaction. 
He expected to see nothing but the empty core of a talentless failure. Instead, he saw a dense, sharp mana signature actively circulating through the boy's body. 
The Patriarch's eyes narrowed as he recognized that specific density immediately. It matched the exact mana signature that once belonged to the boy's mother. 
'It is circulating flawlessly,' the Patriarch observed, keeping his physical expression entirely neutral while analyzing the tactical shift. 'The core isn't fractured anymore. It can't be... did throwing him to the edge of death in the slums actually force him to awaken the bloodline?'
A dormant bloodline waking up completely changed the variables. The boy wasn't just a forgotten stain on the family name anymore, he was a living political vulnerability.
While the Patriarch was busy recalculating his entire strategy, a small blue window popped up in the corner of Hajin's vision. 
[ashley donated: 500 credits]
[ashley: that pressure was genuinely terrifying even through the screen. the king certainly lives up to his title.]
He barely stopped himself from reacting to it in front of everyone. 
'Not now, Ashley,' he thought, dismissing the donation notification before anyone noticed him staring at nothing. 
But before the window closed, a second panel flickered open underneath it, the system giving him a quick status update he hadn't checked in a while. 
[ Stream Status: Active ]