Genetic Ascension

Chapter 2055: Traitor

There were a lot of ways Sylas thought this could go. This, however, wasn't on his list.

It was almost amusing.

Honestly, if Nobel was insistent, the only thing he could do was leave. There wasn't much he could do about an A- tier Legend who insisted on imprisoning him.

He was already sharp enough to know that Fanelei would be able to stop things from progressing for long enough for him to do this. But honestly, he had been growing bored of staying home for so long, and that was about the last thing he wanted to have to do.

It was odd. He had spent so long as a normal professor, not doing much of anything but a monotonous daily drone. He had done that for years without issue.

But now he wanted more.

It was addicting to face challenges that took a little bit more of him to clear every time.

"What are you expecting out of this?" Nobel asked. "If you don't kill me, I promise I'll spend the rest of my life making yours a living hell."

Malikhi chuckled. "With what you know about me, do you think I arrived here unprepared?"

Nobel's expression stiffened.

"You see, the Lubon have been a bit prickly with our Analei Clan for a long while, and I've honestly wondered why."

If Nobel's expression stiffened first, then it was his entire body this time. It looked like he had been dipped into a frying pan.

"But then I thought, that's right, our Lubon Clan is quite good at information gathering. Their senses are second to none. Maybe instead of trying to figure out why on my own, I should just ask them myself."

"That's enough." Nobel said coldly.

"Is it? For you, maybe. But I'm not quite done yet."

"Malikhi-."

"Now imagine a situation where a Founding Ancestor forms a conspiracy against their own family."

"Malikhi." Nobel's voice was only growing more frosty.

"Oh? Should I stop?" Malikhi asked. "This scandal really is a problem. After all, if it's exposed, the entire family would be destabilized. I'd imagine that's why the Lubon would not disseminate this matter. But how could they foolishly allow a snake to exist in their midst?

"Unless, of course, this snake, in order to save his own scaly hide, decided to take it upon himself to lead the Analei down a slow path of decline so that the Lubon might rest assured."

At this point, even Akshat had grown stiff.

Malikhi smiled and looked toward him. "Not bad, coward. I thought that you might be involved in this matter, but it's good to know that the only fool of our Analei is this old man who thinks himself greater than he is."

Fanelei was trembling with fury, her fists clenched.

Now that she thought about it, the path of Gluttony wasn't casually opened up to her in the past. It seemed like she had stumbled onto it randomly, but was that actually what had happened?

The more she turned those matters over in her mind, the more holes there were, and every single one of those holes led back to Nobel.

Could it be that he had led her to Gluttony on purpose, expecting her to fail?

No... did he have a hand in her failing when she had gotten much closer to success than he could have ever expected?

When she thought even further, the Lubon were always hostile to her. Back when she tried to help block things during Sylas' trials, it was a Lubon that had appeared to block and harass her.

She had always thought of them as terrible for as long as she could remember. But what if in their minds, she was the horrible one?

Nobel had just let them keep thinking the entire Analei Clan was part of a conspiracy. But he had to.

Only by making the Lubon think that the entire Analei Race were traitors would the Lubon believe that too much to expose them.

Then Nobel had gone on to systematically ruin the geniuses of one generation after another...

Including Malikhi.

I would cost

This was the real reason Malikhi had started on this crusade. Everything in his last life had been going smoothly, and then he just abruptly died at the B-tier.

There was no proof that Nobel had done anything directly, but Malikhi was too confident in himself to believe that it was entirely his fault.

In the end, he was proven correct.

"Tell me, Nobel. Is betraying your entire family for a little bit of power worth it? What was it? Couldn't handle the fact you would never reach the S-tier?"

Malikhi sneered. He was speaking as though he didn't already know the answer, when he most certainly did.

This was exactly why. Nobel had been stuck at Legend longer than any of them with no signs of improvement. He had worked to make a move years ago to claim more of the Weaver Guild's overall Karma in hopes that would give him the boost he needed, but in order to do that, it would require at least two or three of their Clans being wiped out.

In fact, the largest part of this conspiracy was the fact that Nobel's chosen method of doing this was kick-starting the greatest rivalry in the history of the Weaver Guild... The Seeing Eye Guild.

He had wanted to trigger a war of Karma on a scale even larger than what Sylas had triggered.

In the end, he successfully made the Seeing Eye Guild their enemy, but the Lubon Clan sniffed out the conspiracy before any large casualties were suffered and pulled the Guild back from the sheer cliff.

The irony was that because they now had an enemy as powerful as the Seeing Eye Guild, if they weathered the internal strife that would be necessary to punish the Analei, they wouldn't have the strength left to fight them.

So, a new deal was struck instead and in exchange for survival, Nobel was tasked with weakening the Analei.