Lord of the Truth

Chapter 2440 How the Syndicate operates

"...Don't you know how the Syndicate operates, Glatheon?" Blokan gave his companion a long sidelong glance, as though he found it difficult to believe that Glatheon could still be asking such a question after everything he had experienced. "You maintained your position as the ruler of a Millennial Empire for a very long time and remained at the top of such a major power throughout all those years... Don't tell me they never tried it with you."

"...." Glatheon slowly lowered his gaze toward the ground, his expression changing slightly as he understood exactly what Blokan was referring to. "You know?"

"I wasn't born yesterday." Blokan replied simply before turning his gaze away again, clearly showing that his knowledge of the matter wasn't something Glatheon should find particularly surprising.

"Am I supposed to understand that all the Directors of the Star Academies know what the Syndicate does with the leaders of the great empires?!" Glatheon swallowed hard as the implications of Blokan's words immediately crossed his mind.

"Of course not." Blokan chuckled at Glatheon's conclusion and shook his head slightly. "I didn't obtain this knowledge from some private lesson given to me by the Council of Thrones. I learned about it through my own investigation and digging because I realized long ago that there was something fundamentally wrong with the strange power standing behind the Syndicate, so I kept digging deeper and deeper into it until I found what I was looking for... I don't know how many others besides me have done the same thing and uncovered what lies behind them, but whoever they are, they're silent just as I am, and they'll most likely remain silent about it forever."

Then Blokan gritted his teeth as another matter clearly came to mind. "I also discovered, in my own way, how that Qarun obtained his power in the first place, how he obtained his Laws... Ever since the day I learned about that, I've wanted nothing more than to free myself from this entire system, but I kept my tongue in my mouth, said nothing about what I knew, and continued performing my work normally while waiting for the right opportunity, an opportunity that would finally allow me to escape both the Syndicate's influence and Qarun's vileness..." Then he gave a displeased snort as he remembered where that opportunity had ultimately brought him. "I didn't expect that when the opportunity finally came to me, I'd somehow find myself trapped between the two of them all over again."

"How did that person obtain his power? You mean Qarun?" Glatheon's expression immediately filled with surprise, his attention shifting toward this unexpected piece of information. "How?"

"...You don't need to know." Blokan muttered in a low voice, obviously having no intention of explaining that matter any further, then turned his gaze back toward Glatheon and returned to the subject they had actually been discussing. "What's important right now is that you understand the true motives behind those powers that appear to be blindly following all these rumors."

"I know..." Glatheon nodded slowly while swallowing hard, clearly understanding what Blokan meant even if he didn't like the conclusion. "I just... never thought they would actually use that card now."

In truth... the universe was far darker beneath the surface than it ever appeared to those looking at it from the outside.

And the rulers who supposedly governed it weren't truly rulers in the complete sense of the word.

In the beginning, the Syndicate had managed to carve out a place for itself among the powers of the universe thanks primarily to Sevar's overwhelming strength, followed afterward by Marlik, the rest of Sevar's disciples, and eventually even the disciples of those disciples. However, all that personal strength had merely helped establish the Syndicate as a new and formidable power in the universe that commanded its own measure of respect and couldn't simply be ignored... It wasn't the true reason behind how the Syndicate had managed to spread across the universe to such an astonishing extent or how it had eventually attained such an enormous degree of influence.

What the ordinary public didn't know, and what even most members of the universe's upper class remained completely unaware of, was what the highest-ranking members of the Syndicate had been doing behind the scenes with the leaders who governed the universe's greatest powers.

In order to obtain enormous influence quickly and ensure the Syndicate could spread powerfully from the very beginning, Sevar had used his fifth-degree Law of Causality to identify a number of weak-willed leaders among the Millennial Empires, carefully selecting those whose weaknesses could be exploited, and then sent his followers to approach them. Every one of those followers had his own particular method of dealing with the person assigned to him, and every one of them came carrying his own particular contract.

Some of those leaders had found themselves trapped in dangerous situations because of internal struggles and conflicts within their own powers, so Sevar's followers offered to help them eliminate their internal competition by assisting them in carrying out a series of assassinations, but those assassinations had to be performed in very specific ways according to the instructions they were given... such as requiring a son to kill his own father through meticulous torture, or ordering someone to set his own younger siblings on fire... and once those acts were completed and the obstacles before them disappeared, they were finally able to sit comfortably upon the throne they had wanted.

Others among those selected leaders had been suffering from severe poverty because of the constant spread of wars around them, so instead of being offered direct wealth, they were advised to destroy a number of their own planets in certain specific ways and create literal rivers of blood in other locations exactly as instructed. Afterward, enormous quantities of resources gradually began revealing themselves to those leaders, resources sufficient to pull them and their powers out of the poverty that had previously trapped them.

One of those leaders had struggled for a long period with severe soul injuries and had already been steadily approaching death because of them, so he was instructed to cut off the heads of a million children and place those severed heads upon pieces of wood. Sure enough, after carrying out what had been demanded of him, he eventually received a treatment suitable for his particular condition, and that treatment succeeded in extending his lifespan all the way to the present day.

Another leader was required to eat living human flesh in order to obtain a better version of his Law, one that would finally allow him to achieve the breakthrough he desperately needed, and naturally, everything surrounding that act and the other acts like it was carefully monitored, recorded, and stored away before eventually being brought back out and used to confront those same people later.

What none of those leaders had realized at the time was that throughout the entire process they had been secretly recorded both visually and spiritually, whether while they were personally issuing the orders that led to those horrific acts or while directly committing those acts with their own hands. They had also been recorded while dealing with members of the Syndicate itself, while even the signatures they had placed upon the contracts between the two sides using their own soul imprints had been carefully preserved as undeniable evidence of those dealings.

Immediately after that preparatory period finally came to an end and everything required had been put into place, the Syndicate's true emergence throughout those sectors began... and the powers whose leaders had already been caught in its grasp found themselves forced to protect the Syndicate's followers whenever necessary and refrain from acting against them.

It began with the protection those powers provided across twenty or thirty different sectors, where Sevar's followers started recruiting random criminals directly from the streets and giving them established headquarters that were plainly visible to everyone, places they didn't even need to conceal and from which they could openly carry out practically every imaginable kind of criminal activity. From within those headquarters, they accepted missions involving racial extermination, spread lethal drugs among populations, carried out missions of rape and terror, or even accepted assignments aimed at overthrowing entire ruling regimes and replacing the existing order.

Anything whatsoever was possible through them as long as you were willing and able to pay the required price.

The general public couldn't understand how something like this could possibly receive protection while operating openly in broad daylight, right before everyone's eyes, and even to this day they still don't truly understand why it was allowed to happen... But as the years passed and the same sight continued repeating itself, their eyes gradually became accustomed to the Syndicate's presence, their hearts became accustomed to the destruction and chaos its people caused around them, and their minds eventually became accustomed to the idea that it was somehow perfectly normal for their own leaders to submit to that relatively small group of saboteurs and allow them to continue doing whatever they pleased.

And of course, the Syndicate beginning its expansion in this manner was merely the first step toward what would eventually become cosmic domination... The same methods and actions were gradually repeated with several different powers inside every sector they reached, except that by this stage, Sevar himself no longer needed to personally intervene every time in order for the process to succeed.

Millennial Empires, Centennial Empires, or even multi-planetary empires... Any emperor or prince who possessed some dark opening in his life or circumstances that could be exploited would find the Syndicate entering through that opening and approaching him with exactly the kind of assistance he needed. They would help him in exchange for performing those rituals according to their demands, record him while he carried them out, and obtain his soul imprint upon their agreement as undeniable evidence, after which they would proceed to fulfill whatever it was he wanted from them.

Within a surprisingly short period of time, Sevar and his followers, that relatively small group of people who had started everything... had effectively become the hidden masters of the entire universe, exercising their influence from within the darkness while collecting enormous quantities of resources and money from people every single day in broad daylight. Everyone could see what they were doing and knew perfectly well that they were criminals and sinners, yet no one understood why their sectors were never cleansed of them or why those openly operating criminals continued to exist untouched.

No one understood why those money-loving ghouls were allowed to move openly among ordinary people in broad daylight without bothering to hide themselves, while the leaders who were supposed to rule and protect those same places simply stood by and watched everything happen... or, even more incomprehensibly, actively supported them!!

But the leaders of the universe themselves knew the reason behind what was happening... most of them, at least, knew enough to understand why the Syndicate could operate in such an open manner.

A full quarter of those leaders had already fallen completely at the Syndicate's mercy after accepting what had been offered to them. They had personally performed those rituals, allowed the evidence to be gathered against them, and consequently placed their own necks directly into the Syndicate's hands, leaving themselves with no real way to escape afterward, and that was effectively the end of the matter for them.

Another quarter knew exactly what was happening behind the scenes because they, too, had been approached by the Syndicate and offered enormous benefits and things of tremendous value, but unlike the first group, they had managed to evade the trap and refused to proceed. In their eyes, whatever they desired or whatever problems they wanted solved simply weren't valuable enough to justify doing the things the Syndicate had demanded from them in exchange... and Glatheon himself had been one of those people.

However, even those who refused had been explicitly threatened into remaining completely silent regarding those agreements, the offers they had received, and everything surrounding them, because if they ever decided to reveal the truth, the Syndicate wouldn't even need to personally mobilize its own forces in order to eliminate them; their neighboring powers would be more than enough to take care of that task on its behalf.

As for the final group, and these people alone made up a full half of all those leaders, they had never been placed in that situation in the first place and had never received such an offer from the Syndicate. They were either weak, marginalized figures from whom there was simply little benefit to be gained, such as Renara back when she was merely the ruler of the Nine Paths Empire... or they were figures who were simply too powerful and possessed firm principles that would be extremely difficult to bend, meaning there was little reason to even attempt the same method with them in the first place, such as Hedrick during his time as the Emperor of the Marginalized Dreams Millennial Empire.

With these people, the Syndicate simply dealt through its visible public face, interacting with them as what it openly appeared to be before the universe: a genuine Great Power possessing Dominators, immense influence, and seemingly countless resources, a formidable force that no sensible ruler should casually provoke or trifle with... And so this final half of the universe's leaders simply accepted the reality that had formed before them, adapted to the Syndicate's existence as an established fact, and watched everything happening around them as well.